The Impossibility of Fall Prevention by Pauline Barmby
1000 words, ~5 minutes reading time
Issue 10 (Spring 2026)
Bearing witness to catastrophe begins with twenty minutes in the make-up chair. Predictions issued and evacuation warnings proclaimed, the most useful thing I can do now is explain the satellite cascade on TV. After I finally get the earpiece to stay put, I sit next to the anchor and answer the same questions every ten minutes while we wait for the Fall.
It’s a relief when it begins, not only because the initial stages defy our predictions: a strong jet stream forces the debris further north and mostly offshore. East coast ports will see damage, but more like a nor’easter winter storm than the Halifax explosion. As I improvise an explanation, my phone vibrates. I flinch and suppress the instinctive grab. Off camera, the anchor rolls her eyes—she’s seen this a million times—before lobbing a softball question to let me compose myself. I answer, the producer switches to a remote videographer, and I peek at the caller ID. It’s Dad, no doubt calling to highlight his wisdom in staying put. I grip the phone hard and turn it off.
The farmhouse kitchen, and Dad’s stubbornness, are at least as unchanging as the gravitational constant.
“Dad, you have to leave. It doesn’t have to be forever, just until after the Fall.”
He snorts. “After the Fall. Sounds like a song.” He rotates his chipped and stained coffee cup on the dented wooden table. “You keep telling me how big the universe is. What are the chances any of it will end up here?”
“Pretty good, Dad. I am kind of the expert on this.” I grasp my cup with both hands, imagine squeezing it hard enough to shatter, imagine Dad’s bones shattering as he falls off the ladder he isn’t supposed to climb. He sports new bruises every time I visit, and yet I can’t get him to acknowledge that an occasional dizzy spell is more than ‘just a nuisance’.
“If something happens, I’ll deal with it,” he says. “But I’m not leaving. Fred Macklin, over on Fifteenth Line, his daughter talked him into going to the old folks’ home ‘just for the winter’. He never came back. His kids sold the farm last week.”
“Falling space junk is different from a snowstorm, Dad. The pieces hit a lot harder.” I wince at the picture on the kitchen wall, showing him and Mom at their fiftieth anniversary party. Stars and comets adorn the golden banner hanging behind them. She would have convinced him to leave. I can barely convince him to tell me whether he’s taken his blood pressure meds.
“I’m not leaving. End of discussion.”
I stand, thumping my cup on the table harder than I intended. “I’ll be going, then.”
With a shaky hand, Dad scratches his stubbly chin. When had he stopped shaving every day? “I thought you could help clean the gutters.”
“I’ve got a lot of work to do, Dad. Get someone else.” The screen door slams behind me.
It seems like I’m always leaving.
I grew up mesmerized by satellite trains crossing the sky, strings of sparkling lights outshining the stars. As I got older, moving away to study astrodynamics was inevitable. Even before Mom died, work became inescapable; leaving Dad alone afterward was agonizing and unavoidable.
Our research group was the first to predict the Fall’s timing and location. It was a tricky analysis, with all kinds of assumptions about satellite construction, atmospheric density profiles, wind vectors, even the solar magnetic field. Other groups confirmed our findings, including the 95% probability that the Fall would hit the vicinity of my childhood home.
When the debris cascade begins to accelerate I realize that our predictions are wrong again, albeit in a different way from the initial stages. We got the second wave wrong by underestimating the amount of space junk in the most vulnerable orbits: our models used Defense Department data that I suspect was incomplete, manipulated, or both. Not that I can say that on TV. I try not to clench my teeth while watching footage of towns flattened like they’d been hit by mile-wide tornadoes. A poorly-maintained dam takes an unlucky impact and fails, flooding the valley below. Another direct impact is to a nuclear plant that survives; many attendees at the nearby tent revival meeting, whose organizers had ignored the evacuation orders, do not. Only the numbness spreading from the pit of my stomach holds me down in the plastic chair, as I continue to explain kiloton equivalents and landing ellipses in the calmest voice I can muster.
After the second wave tapers off and the studio coverage changes to a new team, a frazzled intern hands me a small pink note.
The Fall leaves the farm untouched, just as Dad had insisted it would. The empty paddocks are surrounded by fences no more dilapidated than they were two months ago. The barn still needs a new roof. A dented aluminum ladder rests next to my second-floor bedroom window, the one with faded star stickers on the inside.
Annie Macklin, who stayed in town and runs the funeral home, meets me at the top of the gravel driveway. We haven’t seen each other in years. She hugs me like we’re still in sixth grade; my tears soak the shoulder of her professionally-appropriate dark coat.
“The EMT said it looked like a stroke. Probably gone before he fell. He didn’t suffer,” she says.
“He wouldn’t have suffered at all if—” I begin. If what? If I’d answered his phone call? If I’d insisted he take his meds? If I’d seen this coming? Prediction doesn’t change the inevitable result of gravity, the weight of who we are.
We walk slowly toward the house, a dark shape in the deepening twilight. Will the next time I leave be the last?
I wipe my eyes and look up at the sky: no satellites, only stars, twinkle overhead.
