Read an extract from Bright Objects by Ruby Todd.
Barely an hour before my first death on a warm night in January 1995—when I blacked out in a crumpled Toyota south of a town called Jericho—a bright object was sighted somewhere in the constellation of Virgo, the sign of the maiden, not far from a star named Porrima, after the Roman goddess of prophecy.
When I died for the second time, in August 1997, inside the floral bedroom of a country house as Chopin’s Nocturnes played, the same object, visible to the world for months by then—the talk of backyard barbecues and press junkets in both hemispheres—had reached its maximum apparent magnitude of minus three, the moment of its greatest brightness as viewed from Earth, before it began to retreat from our inner solar system and slowly disappear.
What happened in between is the story I will tell, a story that took place under the eye of a comet, the last great comet of that millennium: the Comet St John.
When I close my eyes and peer as dreamers do into the mind’s darkness, I can still see it—a streak of light suspended in motion, brighter than Sirius, brighter even than Jupiter. It was forty-four light-seconds from our planet on the night of my second death, when I found myself being borne out of the house, the voices of paramedics in my ears like insects chirring, the blue-red headlights bruising the dark. It was the last thing I saw, there above the ghost gumtrees before the van door shut and, with it, my brain: a torch-star with tails, white and blue-green; a winged creature in flight.
I wonder sometimes about the last time it was seen, appearing much the same to the eyes of the Pharaohs and Assyrians as it had to mine—gorgeous and strange, a question. What other lives were altered by its course? What events understood only in the shadow of its passing?
It was not until the end that I saw St John for what it was, a sign of destruction and strange rebirth, and then all that had occurred seemed obvious somehow; inevitable as the looping line of its course. But the truth it would reveal within my own small life was there from the start, when we were all blind, when the comet still hid in the dark skies above our heads—a nucleus of white fire, streaming its tails of dust and ion, and sodium-blue, those compounds we all came from.
Bright Objects
by Ruby Todd
A young woman grapples with the arrival of a once-in-a-lifetime comet and its tumultuous consequences in a debut novel that blends mystery, astronomy and romance.
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