Star Jelly

Star Jelly

Stella Gelata

Star Jellies appear on calm, quiet, and light-filled nights in opposition to the moon. Against the usual backdrop of meteorites, aurora borealis, airplanes, and the common traffic of the night, a star jelly may easily be mistaken for a slow moving satellite.

What sets them apart from satellites is that instead of moving in a singular purposeful orbit, star jellies tend to wander, twist, and play in small dances that encompass light years, leaving them somehow in exactly the same location where they were first spotted. At the end of the display, you might not be sure if they ever moved at all.

If you see a light in the sky you suspect to be a star jelly, fix your gaze upon it and don’t move a muscle, don’t even blink, as the slightest movement or sound will startle them, causing them to retract completely back into their bright shells.

As your eyes adjust to the deep vale of space, they can be identified first by the conical skirt of dim light they trail behind themselves, and second by the long phantasmic tendrils they use to push themselves through the cosmos. These tendrils usually appear in small groups of two or three, but there doesn’t appear to be any upper limit to their number. On exceedingly clear nights, a dim bubble can be seen around the bright light of the star jelly. Scientists call this bubble magnetism, and the creature generates this bubble to protect itself from its natural predator. On the rare occasions where its whole body can be seen, a star jelly closely resembles a deadly Portuguese Man-of-War Jellyfish, hence its name.

The star jelly is a star with nothing to do. Naturally curious and covetous beings, stars grab hold of anything that passes close enough to them with their long arms and use these celestial objects to decorate their already spectacular bodies. Whether these objects are planets, asteroids, or even other stars, anything that can be captured will be captured. A star that has captured nothing is both free from adornment and responsibilities, and is thus free to flick its immense body wherever it desires as long as it returns to its post before sunrise. 

Sometimes these silly creatures play dead and explode dramatically in unfathomable bursts of energy for absolutely no reason at all before putting themselves back together atom by atom and rekindling their fire all by themselves.

See! I was just playing. I tricked you!

However, since this particular trick takes at least a million of our years, any audience quickly grows impatient and turns their attention elsewhere. The star jelly cares not, having entertained itself.

Other stars, ancient and bored, deeming that there is nothing else left for them to accomplish as stars, having grown red and large, burst in finality, deciding to play a new game as a planet perhaps, or a nebula, or as several billion human people. It is not yet known if these scattered stars can rekindle themselves again in the same way.

Fear not, our star will never drop our Earth, as stars are naturally vain creatures and give up everything to be lucky enough for someone to behold them. The sun is just as grateful to have us as we are to have it, perhaps even more so.

Swarms of star jellies are often observed in the desert sky above the Eastern Washington Desert during the summer months, a place chosen by those who colonized it as, ironically, it was uninhabited due to its inhospitable climate. Such a place was the perfect location to research and construct the first atomic weapons, as any catastrophic accident would only kill the workers and their families and any wildlife within a radius of twenty-five miles, a perfectly acceptable sacrifice. Coincidentally, such an accident would be a result of these brilliant scientists having successfully replicated a single heartbeat of a star jelly.

 My father is the descendant of one of these scientists, and he had chosen this location to raise a family for the financial opportunity afforded by the quickly expanding silicon prairie. This lack of light pollution in combination with the temperament of the desert sky are the perfect conditions for stargazing.

I would be awoken without apparent cause late in the night, usually between the hours of two and three AM, to a buzzing of energy that filled my mind and my blood, demanding I go out in the cool summer air. Vaulting over the balcony barrier on the second floor onto the roof gave me the perfect vantage from which to lay back and watch the stars dance, twinkling their light/heart/eye at me and saying in their own language,

We are here.

“I am here”, I would respond.

You are here, they’d confirm, and writhe delightfully at their own joke, which cannot be properly expressed in a medium as dull as writing.

Now the nights are bright and loud, as people sleep and dream less and less, and the noise drives the star jellies away. Every now and then I’ll awake to that same energy, somewhat muted, and see one or a pair dancing with each other or by themselves. “I am still here! I am still watching”, I want to shout, but they already know and do not appreciate such outbursts. Sometimes years go by between these encounters, an amount of time so inconsequential that the stars don’t consider it to have passed at all.