Excerpt

If you've ever watched the night sky you know that all sorts of things hurtle through it, burning and spinning from one edge of nowhere to another. You also know that sometimes one of those celestial wanderers loses its way and lands in our laps, its arrival unexpected and mysterious, full of wonder and a threat so vague we barely care to call it a threat. Thus it was with the glob that crashed through the ceiling of King High School on the day of our town's centennial celebration.

We'd been preparing for the centennial for nine months and, by the time of its arrival, believed that we'd birthed an event of such vast historical magnitude and cultural import that we convinced our local public school board to declare a formal holiday for all students, faculty, and staff. The carnival, the parade, the speeches by town council members and elderly denizens: it was all deemed sufficiently educational to fit through a loophole in our state's policy on attendance. So when the glob exploded into King High School and obliterated Ms. Mahfouz's social studies classroom, blowing out walls and blasting shrapnel hundreds of meters from the building, we lost not a single member of our town to its deadly concussive wave.

At the time, we counted ourselves lucky and thanked the stars for smiling upon us with so much favor. But now, nearly a year later, with half our population missing and the other half descended into a state akin to madness, one might contend that the stars did not smile that day. Instead, perhaps they whispered a word to us, a word we are far too simple to comprehend and far too weak to retain for our own vocabularies, a word that has consumed us, a word we can only loosely translate as "jelly."