Rob Vagle’s “After the Sky Fell” is set in a small bar in Carman, Minnesota run by Marv, who is in love with one of his waitresses, Rose. Rose works in the bar in between trips to explore the variety of places on earth: Alaska, South America, anywhere that isn’t the small town in which she and Marv live. Fortunately for Marv, Rose reciprocates his love, even if she has more of a sense of adventure than he has and can’t be contained in the world he knows.

Reflecting on their relationship, Marv realizes that he needs to move outside his comfort zone and considers selling the bar in order to travel with Rose to wherever she wants to go rather than trying to corral her in the familiar and safe confines of his bar. For Marv, the bar is a comfortable place, his home. He knows his regulars, he enjoys serving the college students who play pool, but he also realizes that he must change and push his own comfort levels if we wants to maintain and expand his relationship with Rose.

Things change when Tiffany, another one of Marv’s employees, informs Marv that there are blue rain drops falling outside.  Going outside, Marv, Rose, and the rest of his customers see a world in which the firmament has fallen to earth, appearing like a large skyblue lake stretching across the bar’s parking lot.  While the falling sky is incredible and eye catching, when they looked up, they could see the mechanism of the universe, clockwork gears, moving in their inexorable motion.

The phrase “the sky fell” can mean multiple things.  In the story of Chicken Little, the phrase “The sky is falling” refers to an hysterical belief that disaster is imminent. To say the sky fell on someone indicates a disaster has befallen a person. In “After the Sky Fell,” Vagle offers a literal meaning for the phrase, but at the same time, the falling sky has an impact on everyone who witnesses it, but notably for Marv and Rose.

Returning inside the bar after the sky resumed its proper position, Marv realizes that he has been living in a provincial world. The revealed mechanism of the universe has opened his eyes and now he is eager to sell the bar and join Rose on her adventures into the unknown. For Rose, however, the revelation turns out to be more sinister. She was able to explore the world when she knew she would see different places, but also understood the rules by which the universe was governed. The gears and springs that she saw didn’t open new doors for her, but rather indicated the world was more unknown and therefore more dangerous than she had previously understood.

A brief story, Vagle accomplishes a lot in just a few pages. He offers a completely mundane, but well drawn setting, a complex relationship between Marv and Rose that will undergo a sea change and the characters attitudes are impacted by what they see, support characters who seem real, and a life altering, fantastic change that may not have an explanation, but opens the eyes of the characters in a way the impacts every aspect of their existence.

Only the third story published by Vagle when it appeared in issue five of Deborah Layne and Jay Lake’s Polyphony, the story appeared to be available in an ebook published by Vagle.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference six times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.