The thing in the sky was called the Halo by the people who lived near it and couldn't sleep because of it.

Earl Hargrove called it nothing. He called his truck nothing. He called his ex-wife nothing. He called the bottle in his passenger seat the only thing that had a name worth using.

He was sitting in the parking lot of a Mobil station outside Amarillo, watching the Halo hang in the daytime sky like a pale scar across the blue. It had been there eight months. He'd noticed it the first day, couldn't miss it, really, when something that wide shows up in your sky, but by the second month he'd stopped looking. By the fourth he'd stopped caring.

A guy in a pickup pulled in. Young, maybe twenty-five, clean shirt, hair done right. Not from around here.

Excuse me, the kid said, leaning through Earl's window. What's that? He pointed at the sky.

Earl looked at the Halo. He looked at the kid. That's nothing, he said.

The kid waited, expecting a punch line or a name or something. When neither came, he frowned. It's a -- I mean, is it a satellite? NASA did something, right?

Could be. Earl took a sip from the bottle. Could be nothing. Doesn't matter.

The kid stood there confused, the way you get when someone refuses to play the game of making meaning out of everything you see. Eventually he said thanks and went inside to buy a soda. Earl watched him through the window of the Mobil station, watching him at the counter asking the clerk. Watching the clerk shrug.

The Halo didn't care about Amarillo. It was doing what it had always done -- consuming hydrogen, molecule by molecule, at a rate calculated to the precision of atomic theory. The people who built it, if there were people who built it, were probably a million light-years away, or a hundred thousand years in the past, or both. They had built it for reasons that had nothing to do with Texas or gas stations or men named Earl who couldn't keep a marriage together.

Earl's truck was making a noise. He'd been meaning to fix it for six months. The noise was like a cough -- rhythmic, persistent, not immediately fatal but unlikely to improve. He'd been meaning to fix it since before the Halo showed up. The Halo didn't change anything. It just added another thing to the list: truck needs fixing, back hurts, son hasn't called in four months, Halo in the sky.

He drove home through the flat brown landscape. The Halo was visible from the roof of his mobile home, if you wanted to look. Earl didn't. He made himself a sandwich and sat in his recliner and watched a baseball game on TV and listened to his truck cough in the parking lot.

A week later, a news crew came to Amarillo. They set up cameras in the Mobil parking lot and interviewed people about the Halo. The kid gave an interview. So did the clerk. Earl drove past them in his truck and didn't slow down.

That night, his ex-wife called. She never called. He let it go to voicemail. The news is on, she said. They're talking about the Halo. Everyone's talking about it. Must be, Earl said. Earl, are you okay? He looked around the mobile home. The television was on but he wasn't watching it. The bottle was on the table. The walls were the color of old teeth. I'm fine, he said. You always say that. I'm fine, Martha. The Halo's in the sky. My truck's making a noise. I'm alive. What more do you want?

She didn't have an answer.

When the Halo finally descended, slowly, inevitably, the way things do when they've been coming for a very long time and have no reason to hurry, Earl was sitting in his recliner, the bottle on the table, the truck coughing outside.

He looked out the window. He saw the Halo filling the sky, pale and vast and indifferent.

That's a lot of sky, he said.

Then he went to the kitchen, made another sandwich, and sat back down.

---

OBJECTIVE TENSOR CODES (OTMES v2):

[Code] V-04 | Nobody's Nobody | Dirty Realism TI: 85.1 (T1 Despair) | theta: 180 degrees M: [9.0, 0.3, 4.0, 2.0, 2.0, 1.0, 3.0, 4.0, 1.0, 3.0] N: [0.20, 0.80] | K: [0.80, 0.20] V:0.50 I:1.00 C:1.00 S:0.50 R:0.00 OTMES-v2.0 code: V04-NNN-Amarillo-T1 Simil. class: Indifference / Small Life / Cosmic Scale