“What would it be like to step into the waters of somewhere beyond the stars?” asks one character from Chloe N. Clark’s Patterns of Orbit. Meshing genre elements from speculative, horror, and science fiction, the twenty-five stories in the collection repeatedly pose this question, exploring what it means to be uncertain, what it means to be afraid, what it means to be human. 

Interestingly, some of the characters are not human, and yet, through prose that is careful, lyrical, and surprisingly intimate, Clark is able to make such characters—an artificial intelligence narrator, for instance—relatable. As these characters explore new worlds, Clark explores familiar fears. In “Even the Night Sky Can Learn to Be a Fist,” the narrator speaks of one such fear:

The sun will expand before it collapses, I told a doctor. It’ll engulf everything and then fall back into itself. Don’t you think we might be like the sun? The doctor frowned and added another note. I imagined being crushed under the weight of everything the world contained. Some days I couldn’t take deep breaths; they sunk into my lungs so deep that I couldn’t pull them up. Imagine that weight, I thought.

Because many of these stories are set in uncanny worlds that are rapidly changing as exploration of outer space and distant galaxies becomes commonplace, Clark is able to explore fears of uncertainty while crafting characters whose thoughts and expressions are reminiscent of familiar social and cultural anxieties.

Memory is a central concern throughout. Repeated references to memory and frequent uses of flashback create a compelling conflict between that which is already known, experienced, and in the past, and that which is not. In “This Skin You Call Your Own,” a narrator who steals others’ memories during sexual encounters explains this allure of knowing. While hooking up with an unnamed male character, the narrator states: “Everyone carried so many tiny fears. They cascaded into me, every part of me was so filled with him. There was so much power in knowing every darkest corner, every monster under the bed.” Here, readers are invited to consider how knowing often helps lessen anxieties related to not knowing. Elsewhere—as in “Out in the Dark”—not knowing becomes the scariest thing anywhere, in the world or in outer space. “What’s going to happen?” Clark’s narrator asks. “What’s going to happen?” she asks again, to no avail. “What’s happening?” the narrator begs to know, in a move that unsettles readers who must (somewhat ironically) turn the page to find out. 

Clark’s prose is both unsettling and oddly comforting. Her characters are connected by similar longings: a longing to understand the darkness, even if that’s impossible; to share in being uncertain, if only for a moment. Reflecting on the collection in her acknowledgments, Clark writes: “I realized one of the biggest, my biggest, preoccupations in [these stories] is the orbit of people who surround the protagonists. Who do we love and how do they help us? What do we owe to one another and how do we honor those who surround us? In life, we all have our own galaxies.” As Clark explores fears about uncertainty, so too does she depict how we might find connection in the shared experience of simply not knowing.  

In one of the collection’s last stories, “We Are Still,” the narrator’s voice feels more optimistic about such uncertainties. The story is brief, like many of Clark’s others, yet effective in its atmospheric portrayal of a burning barn lighting up an otherwise quiet night. From their car on the highway, the narrator and their lover watch the flames for a while—contemplating fragility and impermanence alongside the reader—and then:

We left before the barn fell in, before the aftermath. Inevitability has never been as beautiful as the possibility of something not happening. It might not come to pass. You might never not feel this way. The world might not end. In the car, we hold hands for a second and then drive on. We sing a song we both know the lyrics to. The sound bounces around us. The road is empty. We make noise to fill it, our own happiness an out-of-key duet, in the silence from all sides.

The collection fittingly ends by speculating “years and years and years” into the future. Just as the narrator tells readers that children will gaze up at the sky thinking that travelers are only shooting stars, Clark reminds us that being uncertain is inevitable—as human a condition as any. 

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Chloe N. Clark is the author of the short story collection Collective Gravities, an NPR pick for Best Books of 2020, as well as the poetry collections Escaping the Body, Your Strange Fortune, and more. She is a founding co-editor-in-chief of the literary journal Cotton Xenomorph.

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Court Ludwick is a writer, teacher, and doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at USD. These Strange Bodies, her debut hybrid nonfiction collection, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in September 2024. Her poetry, essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Jet Fuel Review, Oxford Magazine, Cheat River Review, Necessary Fiction, Watershed Review, Eclectica Magazine, Mid-Heaven Magazine, Milk Carton Press, and elsewhere. You can connect with Court on Instagram @courtlud, Twitter @courtludwick, and on www.courtlud.com.