The Meteors

Dolores inspected the sky. It was blue, unremarkable. She put on her polarized glasses. No daytime stars, no obvious points of light. So she went down into the bunker to gather her things.

For the first month, of course, she hadn't even left her house. Neither had her neighbors. After all, the first one had come down only fifty miles to the east. When it had hit, she had felt the impact and the next day she had gone with Ruthie King to look at the crater. They had found hundreds of other people, from all over the state, lining the crater's edge, taking pictures.

A week later, six more hit. One struck Europe. Another Australia. The rest had gone into the ocean.

Three days after that, there had been impacts everyday, multiple times a day. And it hadn't stopped since.

Dolores paused at the hatch of the bunker and made her personal inventory. Purse, keys, make-up, emergency whistle, county alert system pager, polarized glasses. She lifted herself out of the hatch and spun the steel handle to secure the door.

At the road-side diner where she worked as a waitress, she wore her polarized glasses constantly. So did all of the diners, mostly truckers and old farmers on their way into town. As they sat at the tables sipping coffee and eating eggs, their heads constantly shifted, up to the windows to inspect the sky, back down to their food and papers.

She poured Fred some coffee. "Them scientists say we have definitely entered an interstellar debris field." He jabbed his finger down onto the article.

"More eggs?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"But I thought they said there weren't any debris field much larger than our own system, and that if we were passing through one, it would be over quickly?"

"Well, that's what they reckoned for a while," Fred agreed, "but Dr. Horowitz has concluded we ain't passing through another system, but converging." He drove his hands together in an upward-V to show her.

"And that's why they're hitting kinda slow," Dolores concluded.

Fred smiled and nodded. "Yes, that accounts for their low impact speed." He went back to reading his paper and she went to get him his eggs, stopping along the way to refill other coffee cups.

Converging with a bunch of space rocks, Dolores thought morosely. Great. So who knows how long this will last. She looked out the window, to the highway and then the field and orchards and the low, sloping hills beyond. And it's been eight months already. But what could you do? Starve to death in your bunker? No, life had to go on.

"Thirty thousand people a year used to die in this country in car crashes," her boss Mr. Figolini had once told her. "Now, fifty thousand people a year die in meteor strikes. What's the difference?"

She supposed he was right. But he didn't feel right. It felt wrong- unnatural. Too terrible.

And then, when she was coming back from the kitchen with Fred's eggs, a flash of light to the east. A second later the diner began to gently rumble. Plates tentatively skittered across tables. Everyone in the diner looked up from their food and papers and turned and looked out the window.

"Another one," somebody commented. They all nodded and grunted and said "mm-hmm" in agreement. Then they were silent for a while, just watching.

"Wonder if it hit anybody?"

"Hit a hill," someone else said."You can see the plume, over there. No, there's nobody there. That's just scrub land. No farms or houses."

"Hm." Everybody seemed satisfied and then they all went back to reading their papers and eating their food. Dolores laid Fred's eggs across from him on the table and he looked up from his paper.

"Another low impact event," he told her, smiling. "That blast wave was little more than a gentle breeze."

"Maybe pretty soon they'll just settle down real slow," Dolores said to him seriously, "and we'll see them coming and just kinda mosey out of the way."

Fred snorted. "That's a thought." He flicked his paper back up, Dolores sat down at an empty booth to rest her feet and everybody went back about their business.