Owner of a Lonely Heart

Posted on 16 Jun 2026 @ 3:16am by Captain Sabrina Corbin

2,707 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Time After Time
Location: Sherman Oaks, CA
Timeline: Local Evening

The evening had become an event.

That was new.

When Aster had first selected the neighborhood, evening had been transitional. People moved through it without noticing. Cars returned. Garage doors opened. Televisions turned on. Families separated and reassembled in small, predictable patterns. It had structure and completion. One state became another, and no one seemed to question that it happened.

Now people were watching it.

The sun remained where he had left it, suspended low above the western rooftops, turning the tops of the palms bronze and stretching shadows across the street until they reached impossible lengths. Sherman Oaks sat in permanent golden hour, warm enough to remain outside, bright enough to delay lamps and bedtimes, still enough that even the sprinklers sounded too loud.

The adjustment should have worked.

Instead, the neighborhood had drifted into something he did not understand.

Nobody had gone inside.

The folding chairs remained in driveways, but fewer people sat in them now. Coolers stayed open. Paper plates softened in the heat. A bowl of potato chips had been abandoned on the hood of a station wagon, and flies moved across it in little black stitches. The smell of cut grass and charcoal stayed in the air longer than it should have, trapped beneath a sky that refused to deepen.

Children had stopped playing in the easy way they had before.

Bicycles lay sideways in driveways and on lawns. A yellow banana-seat bike with mostly missing streamers had been dropped near the curb, its front wheel still turned as if waiting for someone to remember it. A basketball rolled slowly from one side of the street to the other, touched by the shallow slope of the cul-de-sac, and no one chased it.

People had started checking.

Not dramatically.

Not all at once.

Someone looked at a wristwatch. Someone else shaded their eyes. Another turned toward the west, then toward the opposite houses, then down to the pavement where their shadow reached too far and remained too sharp. Aster had observed a pattern in humans. They often checked one thing before allowing themselves to believe another.

One man had gone into his house three separate times and come back out with three different clocks.

That seemed inefficient.

Aster stood at the edge of a driveway beside a green station wagon with wood panel siding. One hand rested lightly against the roof. No one had asked why he was there.

They looked at him occasionally.

Then looked away.

Adults appeared to assume relationships where none had been stated.

Children accepted presence more easily.

That had remained consistent.

His clothing matched reasonably well. White canvas shoes. Straight jeans. Windbreaker. Nothing notable.

He had intended not to be notable.

Across the street, somebody turned the radio on again.

The same announcer returned.

The same weather.

The same joke.

The same transition into the same song.

This time, the adults reacted differently.

Nobody laughed.

A woman crossed the driveway in two quick steps and switched it off in the middle of a sentence.

For a few seconds, there was no sound except the sprinklers, a dog barking somewhere beyond the houses, and the thin electric hum of a bug zapper hanging from a porch.

Then a man said, “Turn it back on.”

The woman looked at him. “Why?”

“Because I want to hear if it does it again.”

“I don’t want to hear it again.”

“Then go inside.”

She stared at him as though he had said something cruel.

He looked away first.

Aster observed the exchange carefully.

Distress increased in both parties.

The radio remained silent.

A little girl sitting cross-legged on a driveway looked upward and asked her mother, with complete sincerity, “Is tomorrow still coming?”

Her mother opened her mouth.

Stopped.

Then smiled in the manner adults used when they were attempting to produce calm without possessing any themselves.

“Of course it is.”

But she checked her watch before she said it.

Aster reviewed conditions.

Light state: stable.

Temperature: stable.

Atmospheric movement: stable.

Local time perception: unstable.

Social cohesion: degrading.

Distress: increasing.

That was not correct.

His notes had predicted reduction. Environmental threat had not increased. Immediate danger had not increased. The people had expressed preference for the condition he had maintained, and he had maintained it precisely. No structural collapse. No thermal extremes. No injury. No dark. No cold. No storm.

And yet they were worse.

A woman near the citronella candles wrapped her arms around herself and said, “I don’t like this.”

A man beside her replied, “Nobody likes it, Carol.”

“No. I mean I really don’t like this. The air feels wrong.”

“The air is fine.”

“Then why is everything wrong?”

No one answered her.

Another voice, older and sharp with fear badly disguised as anger, called from farther down the cul-de-sac, “Make it move.”

Aster turned his head.

The words had not been addressed to anyone specific.

Several people looked toward the sun, as if the command might be enough.

“Come on,” the older woman said again, louder now. “Just move.”

Aster understood then.

Not emotionally.

Only as fact.

He had caused this.

The request had been imprecise. The group had not desired continuation. They had expressed appreciation for a condition while still expecting the condition to end. Humans, it appeared, frequently enjoyed a thing because it was temporary.

That was inefficient too.

His hand shifted on the roof of the station wagon.

The metal dimpled beneath his fingers.

He looked down at it.

The dent smoothed itself out at once.

No one noticed.

His breathing had changed, which was unnecessary because he did not require it in the way they did. Still, his chosen form had begun to imitate distress markers around him. His chest lifted more quickly. His hands grew cold. His skin prickled beneath the jacket he had made for himself.

He corrected the response.

It returned.

A bicycle wheel hissed across damp pavement.

One of the boys had been circling the cul-de-sac for a long time. Longer than children normally sustained interest in circular movement. He cut sharply through one of the sprinkler arcs, the front tire slipped sideways beneath him, and the bicycle dropped.

He hit knee first.

The sound was ordinary.

Sharp.

Embarrassing.

The kind that usually produced a moment of silence before adults decided whether they needed to move.

The boy looked down.

Skin opened.

Blood appeared.

His face changed.

He inhaled, and began crying.

People responded immediately.

His mother crossed the street quickly.

Someone stood.

Someone else called his name.

Normal.

Contained.

Predictable.

Aster watched for several seconds.

This was a solvable condition.

His people adjusted. They corrected outcomes all the time. A structure cracked, so they uncracked it. A line frayed, so they smoothed it. A window slipped, so they closed it. Pain was an alert, not a purpose. Once the alert had been acknowledged,
there was no reason for the damage to remain.

He stepped forward.

The mother looked up when she realized someone else had reached him first.

She gave him a distracted smile. “Sweetheart, can you just give us some room?”

Aster crouched.

He looked at the injury.

He did not touch the boy.

He touched the pavement beside him.

The adjustment was very small.

The skin returned.

Blood withdrew.

The scrape disappeared.

The boy stopped crying so suddenly that the silence became worse than the cry had been.

For several seconds nobody moved.

The boy looked down.

Touched his knee.

Touched it again.

His mother stared.

Someone laughed once. Too quickly. Too high.

“…how did you do that?”

Aster stood.

He looked at them.

The answer was simple.

“It wasn’t necessary anymore.”

No one answered.

The mother slowly pulled her son behind her.

Not quickly.

Not violently.

Just closer.

Several people looked at Aster properly.

Not the way people looked at children.

The way people looked at unexpected things.

The woman who had switched off the radio whispered, “Whose kid is that?”

A man in a Dodgers shirt frowned. “I thought he was with the Millers.”

“We don’t know him,” Mrs. Miller said from her lawn.

Aster turned toward her.

Mrs. Miller stepped back so quickly her heel struck the leg of a folding chair.

That increased distress further.

He did not understand why.

His jacket had changed.

He realized it because several people looked at his sleeves.

The faded blue windbreaker with pale cream panels was no longer the same style. It had become sharper at the shoulders, darker, with a high collar and a pattern of thin, silver seams that belonged to no local fashion archive he had studied. It was still a jacket, but no longer a believable one. The material caught the frozen sunlight and returned it with a faint metallic shimmer.

Aster looked down.

That was incorrect.

He corrected it.

For a moment the jacket became the windbreaker again.

Then it flickered.

Blue.

Silver.

Cream.

Something like black glass.

Blue again.

The children noticed first.

Children always noticed the wrong details first.

One of the younger boys pointed at him. “His coat’s doing something.”

“No it isn’t,” an adult said immediately.

But everyone was looking.

Aster attempted to hold the form stable. That should have been easy. It had been easy all day. The body, the clothes, the face, the voice, the relative age. All of it had been selected from local averages and softened at the edges, enough to avoid attention. He had not made himself memorable.

Now attention caught on him and stayed.

His skin felt too tight.

His hands flexed.

The air trembled around his fingers.

The sprinkler nearest him stopped mid-sweep, water hanging for a fraction of a second in a curved glass ribbon before it crashed all at once into the grass.

Someone screamed.

Not loudly.

A small sound, involuntary and quickly covered by a hand.

Aster looked up.

The sky pulled at him.

Not the local sky.

Not Sherman Oaks.

Elsewhere.

One of his other assignments.

A window had opened.

His attention shifted upward in the Meridian way, not with eyes alone, but through the layered places between what was and what had been separated for safety. He had left the other windows stable. He had checked them before this observation. They had been fixed, nested, contained.

One was no longer contained.

He became very still.

People followed his gaze.

At first they only noticed the stars.

Too early.

Wrong.

The sunset still burned low in the west, but overhead, stars appeared through the gold-blue sky like pinholes punched through painted paper. They were not the familiar stars of Los Angeles. Not dimmed by haze, not hidden by suburban light, not arranged in any pattern these people knew.

They were hard and bright and close.

A child gasped. “Cool.”

Another whispered, “Are those fireworks?”

“No,” said an adult.

The word traveled.

No.

No.

No.

Then movement.

Two points of light crossed the false evening sky.

At first they looked like planes, and that helped. People wanted planes. Planes belonged to a list of things that could be named, and named things were less frightening.

But they moved too quickly.

They grew too fast.

They did not blink.

Aster reached for the window.

It resisted.

His distress increased.

Not like the humans. Not hot and noisy and chemical. His distress opened inside him like an expanding geometry, angles multiplying too quickly to count. He had made an error. He had made several errors. He had attempted a comfort intervention during an observation assignment, failed to isolate a local emotional response, and allowed attention drift across linked windows.

Unscheduled interaction.

Assignment contamination.

Containment bleed.

The two lights became shapes.

Children craned their necks.

Adults began stepping backward.

One of the objects dropped through the visible sky at an impossible angle, its green hull scarred and burning along one swept wing. The other followed in brutal pursuit, angular and old, its shape dark against the wrong stars. They were not airplanes. They were not rockets. They were not anything Sherman Oaks could make sense of.

The first flash of weapons fire cut across the sky.

The entire cul-de-sac erupted.

People shouted at once. Someone grabbed a child by the arm hard enough to make the child cry out. A man stumbled backward over a garden hose. A lawn chair folded under someone’s weight with a metallic snap. The dog that had been barking began to howl.

The boy whose knee had been healed screamed now, not from pain, but because everyone else was screaming.

“Inside!” someone yelled. “Get inside!”

“What is that?”

“Jesus Christ, what is that?”

“Run!”

Aster lifted his hand.

The ships stopped.

For one second, everything held.

The damaged green vessel hung above the frozen neighborhood, fire suspended from its hull in orange beads that did not fall. The pursuing ship remained angled behind it, weapon flare caught in formation like a storm trapped in glass. The screams below stretched into silence as sound itself thinned.

Aster had the window.

He could close it.

He could repair this.

Then his control slipped.

The ships moved again.

Not from where they had been.

The green vessel jumped several lengths sideways, as if a strip of sky had been removed and reattached incorrectly. The pursuing ship lurched forward into its previous path, weapons fire streaking through empty air. The plasma burst that should have struck hull instead crossed the sky above the cul-de-sac and vanished at the boundary with a sound like wet paper tearing.

Reality stuttered.

For a blink, the houses on the north side of the street were not the houses on the north side of the street. They were taller. Darker. Burned. Then they were normal again. A station wagon became a sleek vehicle of unfamiliar metal, then wood paneling returned. A woman’s floral blouse became a grey uniform, then cotton again. Aster saw too many possible arrangements at once, all of them trying to be true.

The humans saw enough.

Panic broke loose completely.

Helen had been standing at the end of her driveway with one hand pressed to her throat. She was older than most of the others, small and sharp-eyed, with the sort of posture that made her seem taller when she was frightened. She had watched the sun, watched the boy’s knee, watched Aster’s jacket shift from one impossible thing to another.

But the ships did what the rest had not.

They made her move.

She turned abruptly and went back into her house.

Not running.

Walking quickly.

Like people did when they had decided they were still in control.

Aster watched her disappear through the front door, past the hanging beads in the entryway and into the dim interior beyond. He could have followed the motion through walls if he wished. He did not wish. His attention fractured between the sky, the window, the distress below, and the unstable points where Sherman Oaks no longer knew which reality it belonged to.

Inside the house, Helen picked up a telephone.

Her fingers shook so badly she misdialed once.

Then again.

On the third try, the line clicked.

Static filled it first.

Then a distant ring.

“Martha,” Helen said the moment the call connected, her voice thin and sharp and breaking despite her effort to keep it steady. “Martha, it’s Helen. Don’t hang up. Don’t you dare hang up.”

Aster looked upward again.

The two ships crossed the wrong stars, still fighting, still unaware of the neighborhood beneath them.

The sun remained fixed where he had left it.

The people below were no longer asking for it to move.

They were screaming for it to end.

Helen’s voice carried from the open kitchen window, raised now, frantic.

“Martha, listen to me. Something is happening over here. No, not the power. Not the phones. I’m telling you, there are things in the sky. Ships, Martha. Not planes. Ships.”

Aster tried to breathe.

The body did it badly.

He had wanted to reduce distress.

Instead, he had taught them to see him.

He had opened the sky.

And for the first time, Aster did not immediately know how to fix it.

Aster
Juvenile Stage Four of the Meridian

 

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