There’s Nothing Special About SN 1987A

Sheldon Lee Compton

Daniel Olah

Forget the stars. They have abandoned you into mystery. There are more cosmic godheads than these neutron stars. There are more supernovas, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your host galaxies.

But even supernovas cannot matter in this cavity of endless imaginings. A star collapsing is only a reflect-mist of vapor disappearing at the exact rate it’s appearing. One casts off the other until we are all left wondering if anything happened at all. Was the light that reached the earth following the collapse really light at all or the sun moving from behind a cloud in the shape of an explosion?

No one disagrees. Most anything could spark within the blinding white bellies of nuclear fires. The impossibly rapid event would only be found ribboned along the hip of the universe moving inward in pursuit of the heart, in pursuit of the most profound elucidation.

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Sheldon Lee Compton is a writer from Kentucky and the author of eight books of fiction and poetry. His first nonfiction book, The Orchard Is Full of Sound, about his connection with author Breece D’J Pancake, will be published by West Virginia University Press in 2022. Cowboy Jamboree Press will publish his Collected Stories in the fall of 2021.