The gas pump clicked off and Ray put the nozzle back and the Ford did not start and he knew immediately that it was not the carburetor this time and he was tired of carburetors and Fords and everything that had an engine and needed something to make it go.

"Leave it," Nancy said from the doorway of the convenience store. She was fifty-two and had breast cancer that had come back the way winter comes—predictably, indifferently, like it had an appointment with you that you did not schedule. "I will call my son. He knows cars."

"My son knows cars too," Ray said. "My son lives in Detroit and works at a Walmart and knows cars in the way that people know cars when they change their own oil on a Sunday morning with a socket set from Sears and a beer."

"Your son sounds nice."

"My son is nineteen and he thinks college is for people who are not us."

Nancy nodded. She had a son too, or she had had one, before the chemo made him stop coming, which was not the same as stopping but felt the same.

The television inside the store was playing the news, and the news was talking about the comet, and Ray had heard about the comet three weeks ago when a guy in a pickup truck had pulled in for diesel and asked if Ray had seen the star with the tail, and Ray had said I have seen plenty of stars with tails, buddy, I have seen tail lights on the I-96 at five in the afternoon, and the guy had laughed and bought his diesel and left.

Since then the comet had been on the news every day, and the news people had gotten more excited, which Ray understood because excitement pays better than boredom, and the scientists had said things like "passing at a safe distance" and "no expected impact" and "the tail may produce beautiful aurora displays," which sounded like something you would pay twenty dollars to see if you were the kind of person who lived in a house with a mortgage and a lawn and a boat.

Ray lived in a house with a mortgage he could not afford and a lawn that was mostly dirt and did not own a boat.

"Think it will really hit?" Nancy asked, and Ray looked at her and saw that she was not joking and he understood that some people are not joking about apocalyptic events and some people are, and Nancy was in the not-joking category, which was interesting because Nancy was the kind of woman who laughed when her cat fell off the counter and who had survived three rounds of chemo and still came to work at the gas station every day like the world was not a place that eats people and does not notice.

"Doesn't matter," Ray said. "We'd be dead before we knew it. No point worrying."

But he worried. He worried about the mortgage. He worried about the止痛药 that cost eighteen dollars a bottle at this station because there is a twenty percent markup on medicine at gas stations in the middle of nowhere Michigan, which is a detail that Ray noticed and filed away in the part of his brain that notices things and does not do anything about them.

The comet was twenty-one days from its closest approach. The news said twenty-one. Ray did not know if that was exact or rounded, and he did not care enough to ask.

People around town started doing strange things. Old man Weaver at the supermarket bought three cases of canned beans and a hand crank radio and started talking about how the government was going to lock people in shelters and ration food and he had seen it in movies. A woman on Maple Street nailed boards across her windows, which made no sense because boards on the inside of windows would help against a comet, and Ray saw her doing it and did not say anything because the woman's husband had left her six months ago and taken the good furniture and she was doing what she could.

Ray did nothing. He came to work. He pumped gas. He counted the register at closing. He went home to a house that was too quiet because his ex-wife had the boy on weekends and the boy was nineteen and spent his weekends at the Walmart playing video games and ignoring his father, which was fair.

"Comet's going to miss us," Ray told his reflection in the bathroom mirror one morning. He said it out loud, which he did not usually do, because talking to yourself is something you do when nobody else is listening, and in this house, nobody else was.

It missed the point. The point was not whether the comet would miss them. The point was that saying it out loud made him feel like he was convincing himself, and convincing yourself is the same as being unsure, and being unsure about a comet is being unsure about everything, and Ray did not have the energy to be unsure about everything.

Billy came to the station on a Thursday. He was wearing a Walmart vest and he looked like he had not slept, which was normal for Billy, who was nineteen and lived in a world that had no place for him and knew it and was not angry about it, which was worse.

"I'm not going to Texas," Billy said, standing at the pump like he was going to refuel the conversation as well as the car.

"What?"

"I was going to. Mrs. Henderson's cousin lives in Amarillo and she said I could stay and there are jobs at the plant. But I'm not going."

"Why not?"

Billy looked at the sky. The comet was visible in the daytime now, a pale smear that you could see if you knew where to look, which most people did not. "What's the point?" he said. "Amarillo has a plant. This town had a plant. The plant closed. Amarillo's plant will close too. I'm not driving eighteen hundred miles to stand in a line that's going to get shorter."

Ray wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that Texas was bigger and hotter and had more opportunities, that eighteen hundred miles was a meaningful distance in a country that was eighteen hundred miles wide from ocean to ocean. But Ray had lived in this town his whole life and the plant had closed and the line had gotten shorter and Billy was not wrong, he was just young about it.

"Okay," Ray said. "Okay, Billy. Stay."

Billy nodded and got in his car and drove away, and Ray watched him go and felt something that was not sadness and not hope and not resignation but a combination of all three that he did not have a name for.

Nancy came to work the next day looking worse. The chemo was doing its work, which is to say it was killing things, and it could not always tell the difference between the bad things and the good things and sometimes the good things lost.

"We're going to have an storm," Nancy said, standing in the doorway, and Ray looked at the sky and saw what she saw—a darkening that was not the comet and not the evening but something in between, the kind of sky that exists only in the middle of autumn in the Midwest, when the world is neither warm nor cold but somewhere in the uncomfortable space between.

The storm hit at midnight. It was not a comet storm. It was a regular Michigan storm—wind and rain and thunder that sounded like someone dropping a toolbox down a flight of stairs. The power went out at the station, which meant the pumps stopped, which meant no one could buy gas, which meant Ray was standing in a darkness that was absolute, the kind of darkness that exists only in places where the streetlights are the first thing the city stops paying for.

Nancy was there, in the doorway of the store, and she had found two glasses and a bottle of something that was whiskey in the same way that tap water is wine—same basic ingredient, very different experience.

They sat on the loading dock behind the station, which is not a romantic place to sit, and Ray poured the whiskey into the glasses, and the whiskey was warm because the store was warm because the backup generator was keeping the refrigerators running and everything else was just surviving, and they drank.

"My wife used to sit with me like this," Ray said. It was the most he had said about her in two years. "Before. She'd sit on the porch and smoke and talk about her mother and I'd listen and pretend I cared. I did care. I just didn't know how to show it."

Nancy nodded. "My husband died in '09. Heart attack. One minute he was watching the game, the next he was not. I sat on this same dock the week after and drank whiskey and talked to his ghost, and he didn't answer, which was fair."

They sat in the dark and listened to the storm and drank the warm whiskey and did not talk for a long time, and in that silence Ray understood something that he would not have been able to articulate if someone had put a gun to his head: the comet was not the scary part. The scary part was this—the dark, the broken pump, the woman with cancer next to him who had lost her husband and her son and her hair and was still showing up to work at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, the boy who was not going to Texas because the point had gotten out of the question, the mortgage that would not pay itself, the止痛药 that cost eighteen dollars, the life that was not bad enough to end and not good enough to continue and somewhere in that uncomfortable middle was where all of them were going to stay until they died.

The comet could come or go. It would not matter. The storm was already here. The storm was always here. The comet was just weather.

The storm passed. The comet passed. The power came back on at the station on a Tuesday, and Ray opened for the day, and the pumps worked, and a Ford pulled in and needed gas, and Ray pumped it, and the Ford drove away, and the day was exactly like the day before and the day before that and the day before that, which is what days are—copies of copies of copies of a photograph of a day that never actually existed.

Nancy went back to chemo. Billy stayed in town and started fixing cars in a garage that was not a plant but was close. Old man Weaver ate his canned beans and watched his hand crank radio. The woman on Maple Street took the boards off her windows because they were sagging and she did not have the money to replace them.

The comet was gone. The sky was normal. The world continued with the same indifferent precision it had always had, which is not comforting and is not terrifying. It simply is.

OTMES-v2-HXW-04-1A5E89-E0661-M1-TT58-0F73 E_total: 6.61 | Dominant Mode: M1 (Tragedy) | Variant: V-04 (Dirty Realism) | TI: ~65.0 (T2) | Theta: 180°