One More Episode

SUMMER 2025, SHORT STORY, 4700 WORDS

I still remember the first time Soleil came down to watch TV with my mother. It was three months after the world started ending, though we didn’t know it was ending then. Just thought it was another bad year in a string of bad years, like how people used to say every decade was the hottest on record until they stopped keeping records altogether.

Mom had been dead for twenty-six years by then, but that didn’t stop her from showing up one autumn evening, materializing on our old brown corduroy couch with a Virginia Slim between her fingers and a gin and tonic sweating on the coffee table. She looked exactly as she had in ’97, down to the oversized cream sweater she’d bought at Macy’s during their Christmas sale and the slight smudge of coral lipstick at the corner of her mouth that she’d never quite mastered fixing.

I stood in the doorway of my apartment, keys still dangling from my hand, grocery bags forgotten at my feet as a half-gallon of milk slowly warmed to room temperature. The TV clicked on by itself, the screen warming up with that old cathode tube glow, even though I hadn’t owned a tube TV since college.

“Shh,” Mom said, though I hadn’t spoken. “It’s starting.”

The familiar bass line of the Seinfeld theme filled the room. I remained frozen, wondering if the stress had finally broken my mind, when there was a flash of golden light that made my retinas spark and dance. Suddenly, there was someone—something—sitting next to my long-dead mother on my couch.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. The sun. Not the burning sphere from the sky—though looking out the window, I could see it was indeed missing from its usual place, leaving the evening oddly dim and colorless—but a woman made of gentle light, her edges soft and shifting like a candle flame. She wore what looked like a vintage nineties power suit, but made of condensed sunbeams, and her hair moved like solar flares in zero gravity.

“Hope you don’t mind me dropping in,” she said, her voice carrying the warmth of a perfect spring morning. “I’m Soleil.” She kicked off her shoes (strappy sandals that seemed to be made of dawn light) and tucked her feet under herself. The couch cushion compressed beneath her as if she had actual weight and mass, though I could see the fabric of the couch through her slightly translucent form.

Mom offered her the cigarette pack with the casual familiarity of old friends, but Soleil declined with a graceful wave of her luminous hand. “I don’t smoke,” she said. “Bad for the complexion. Gives me sunspots!” Her laughter was like summer afternoon heat rippling off asphalt, and where her feet had been, I noticed the carpet had begun to fade slightly as if from years of sun exposure.

“Your mother’s told me so much about you,” Soleil said, turning to face me. Her eyes were like twin eclipses—bright rings of fire around perfect darkness. “I hope you don’t mind me joining your little viewing party. It gets lonely up there sometimes, especially these days.” She gestured vaguely at the window, where the empty sky was turning an unsettling shade of green.

I meant to say something rational, something like “You can’t be here” or “This isn’t possible” or even “Would either of you like some milk before it goes bad?” Instead, what came out was: “You watch Seinfeld?”

“Oh, honey,” Mom said, taking a long drag of her cigarette. The smoke curled up toward the ceiling in impossible spirals, forming tiny gray question marks that hung in the air like punctuation marks in search of sentences. “Everyone watches Seinfeld.”

“Even stars?” I managed to ask.

“Especially stars,” Soleil replied. “You think it’s a coincidence they called it ‘Must-See TV’? We literally had to see it. Cosmic law.” She winked at me, and for a brief moment, my apartment was filled with the kind of light you usually only see in desert summers.

That’s how it started. They became regular viewing partners after that, meeting every evening at 7:30 sharp for reruns. Soleil never missed an episode, except during autumn when she’d sometimes sleep in or call out sick.

“Seasonal depression,” Mom explained with a knowing look, though I wasn’t sure if stars could get depressed. “Even the sun needs a mental health day sometimes,” she added, and Soleil had nodded gratefully, her light dimming to a soft autumn sunset glow.

Living with a celestial body takes some adjustment. The first week, all my houseplants grew wild, stretching their leaves toward Soleil whenever she sat on the couch. The spider plant that had barely survived my erratic watering schedule sprouted dozens of babies, sending green tendrils cascading down the bookshelf. My sad grocery store orchid burst into ridiculous bloom, its flowers an impossible shade of purple I’d never seen before.

“Sorry about that,” Soleil said, noticing me stare at the jungle my living room was becoming. “I can try to tone it down.” She dimmed herself slightly, though the plants still swayed toward her like sunflowers tracking the sky.

“Don’t you dare,” Mom said, tapping a fresh cigarette out of her pack. “This place could use some life.” She had opinions about my decorating choices, or lack thereof. “Remember our old house? All those window boxes your father built?”

I did remember. Mom had grown geraniums and marigolds, bright splashes of color against the white siding. After she died, Dad had let them wither. I’d helped him pull out the rotted boxes the following spring, neither of us mentioning the real reason they needed to go.

Soleil and Mom quickly developed their own viewing rhythm. Mom always sat on the left side of the couch, Soleil on the right. They had favorite episodes—Mom loved anything with George’s parents, while Soleil had a soft spot for Kramer’s entrepreneurial schemes. “Reminds me of Mercury,” she said once. “Always cooking up some wild plan or another. You should see what he’s been up to lately.” She paused. “Actually, maybe better if you don’t.”

They developed in-jokes I didn’t quite understand, references to episodes mixed with what I assumed were cosmic events I’d never heard of. Sometimes they’d finish each other’s sentences or burst out laughing at the same moment, even before the punchline landed.

“It’s about timing,” Soleil explained when I asked. “Your mother gets it. Comedy, orbital mechanics—it’s all about timing.”

I learned to make three cups of tea every evening, though I had to buy special heat-resistant cups for Soleil after she melted through two of my regular mugs. “Earl Grey for your mother, chamomile for me,” she’d say. “I’m trying to cut back on caffeine. Did you know there’s a nebula in Carina that’s basically pure coffee? Keeps the whole spiral arm up at night.”

The apartment developed strange quirks. The shadows never fell quite right when Soleil was there, and sometimes small objects would orbit slowly around her head when she got particularly excited about a scene. The wall behind her favorite spot on the couch began to show signs of subtle radiation damage, the paint taking on a peculiar iridescent quality that reminded me of soap bubbles.

Mom’s cigarette smoke continued to form impossible shapes—not just question marks now, but entire scenes from whatever episode they were watching, miniature gray versions of Jerry’s apartment or Monk’s Café hanging in the air like memorial sketches. They never dissipated completely; I’d find them later, tucked into corners or hiding behind picture frames, little pieces of preserved laughter.

One evening, during the episode where Jerry’s girlfriend looks either stunning or hideous depending on the lighting, I caught Mom watching Soleil instead of the TV. There was something soft in her expression, something I remembered from long ago.

“You remind me of someone,” she said during a commercial break. “Someone I used to know. Same kind of…brightness.”

Soleil’s light flickered briefly, like a candle catching a breeze. “Your son’s father?”

Mom nodded. “He had that quality. Like he was lit from within.” She took a long drag of her cigarette, the smoke forming a delicate spiral galaxy above her head. “After I left—after I died, I mean—I used to worry about him. About both of them. Sitting in the dark.”

I wanted to tell her we’d been fine, that we’d learned to navigate the darkness, but the words stuck in my throat. Besides, we all knew it wasn’t entirely true.

“Well,” Soleil said, her voice as warm as noon, “good thing I’m here now.” She reached over and patted Mom’s hand. Where they touched, Mom’s form became briefly translucent, suffused with golden light, and for a moment I could see through both of them to the worn fabric of the couch beyond.

The next episode started playing, and they turned their attention back to the screen. But something had shifted, settled. The room felt warmer, and not just because of Soleil’s presence.

Willow joined them about a week later. She’d been gone four years by then, my oversized basset hound who’d never quite fit the breed standard but had captured every heart she encountered. The American Kennel Club might have sniffed at her excessive height—she’d stood well above their precious thirty-two-inch limit at the withers—but she’d been pure basset where it counted: in the droopy eyes, the velvet ears, and most importantly, the soul.

She didn’t fade in gradually like Mom had, or arrive in a flash of light like Soleil. One moment the couch held just my two regular viewing companions, and the next Willow was there, padding across the room as if she’d just been out for one of her leisurely neighborhood patrols. Her silky brown fur caught Soleil’s light and transformed it into a halo, making her look like a stained glass window’s interpretation of a dog.

“Well, hello there,” Soleil said as Willow approached the couch. My heart caught in my throat—Willow had always been nervous around strangers in life, especially unusual ones, and I couldn’t imagine anyone more unusual than an anthropomorphized star.

I needn’t have worried. Willow gave Soleil a single sniff, apparently decided that a celestial body was nothing to be concerned about, and heaved herself up onto the couch between them. She turned around three times (her signature move, perfected over years of couch-napping), flopped down with her head on Soleil’s lap, and promptly began to snore.

“Oh my,” Soleil said, looking delighted as little puffs of steam rose where Willow’s drool evaporated against her luminous form. The steam clouds drifted upward, forming tiny cumulus formations near the ceiling that occasionally sprinkled warm drops back down, thankfully missing the couch. “She’s perfect.”

Mom reached over to scratch behind Willow’s ears, her incorporeal fingers somehow managing to find that sweet spot that always made Willow’s back leg twitch. “She’s a proper basset hound,” she declared, with the same tone she’d used to defend my career choices to judgmental relatives. “Never mind what those show dog people say.”

“What do they say?” Soleil asked, genuinely curious.

“Oh, something about her being too tall.” Mom waved her cigarette dismissively. “Bunch of nonsense. Look at those eyes. Look at those ears. She’s as basset as they come.”

As if to prove Mom’s point, Willow let out a snore that would have done any basset proud, followed by a sleep-woof that made both Mom and Soleil jump, then giggle like schoolgirls.

“What’s she dreaming about?” Soleil wondered, as Willow’s legs began to twitch.

“Bears,” I said automatically, remembering how she used to wake herself up barking at dream-bears, then look around confused when she couldn’t find them. “She always dreams about bears.”

“Bears?” Soleil’s light flickered with amusement. “Why bears?”

“Well,” Mom said, settling back into the couch, “there was this one time at the park…”

And so Willow joined our nightly routine. She added her own rhythm to our viewing sessions—snoring through the cold opens, waking up for any scene with food (especially if it involved Jerry’s kitchen), and occasionally sleep-woofing at crucial plot points. Her dream-bears became more elaborate, perhaps influenced by Soleil’s presence. Sometimes now, tiny ursine constellations would appear in the steam clouds above her head, acting out whatever ursine adventures she was experiencing in her sleep.

She also proved to be an excellent mediator on the rare occasions when Mom and Soleil disagreed about episodes. It’s hard to maintain an argument about whether “The Contest” or “The Soup Nazi” is the better episode when you have a snoring basset hound draped across both your laps, occasionally kicking in her sleep as she chases imaginary bears through her dreamscape.

“She’s getting bear drool on my photons,” Soleil complained once, but she was grinning as she said it, her light pulsing with barely contained affection.

“Some of my best particles,” Mom agreed solemnly, before they both dissolved into laughter that made the windows rattle slightly.

The only time Willow ever showed any sign of distress was when the sounds from outside would grow particularly loud—the wailing sirens, the distant explosions, the strange humming that sometimes made the air itself vibrate. Then she would whimper softly in her sleep, and Soleil would shine a little brighter, creating a bubble of warm light that seemed to push the darkness and noise back, just a little bit further, just a little bit longer.

I first noticed the world was really ending one Tuesday evening during “The Chinese Restaurant.” Mom was explaining to Soleil why waiting for a table was such a quintessentially human experience (“Stars probably don’t have to wait for anything, do they, honey?”) when I glanced out the window and saw that the moon had turned green.

Not a subtle sage or a gentle mint, but the violent green of copper oxidation, of nuclear warning signs, of things that really shouldn’t be that color. It hung in the sky like a broken traffic light, casting sickly shadows across the city.

“Ah,” Soleil said, following my gaze. “I was wondering when you’d notice that.” She shifted uncomfortably, causing Willow to grumble in her sleep. “Luna’s been having a rough time lately. We all have, up there.”

“Is that why you started coming down?” I asked.

She was quiet for a moment, her light dimming to the soft glow of a winter afternoon. “Partly. It’s…complicated. The kind of complicated that doesn’t translate well into any earthly language.” She gestured vaguely at the ceiling. “Things are changing. The old laws—orbital mechanics, gravitational constants, the really fundamental stuff—they’re getting wobbly. Like a top that’s running out of spin.”

“Is there anything that can be done?” The question felt inadequate even as I asked it.

“Oh, honey,” Mom said, in the same tone she’d used when I’d asked her if the doctors could make her better. She took a long drag of her cigarette, the smoke forming a double helix that slowly unraveled into chaos.

Outside, the sirens had become a constant background noise, like crickets in summer. The city’s emergency alert system had been cycling through the same messages for weeks: Stay indoors. Avoid looking directly at the moon. Report any unusual geometric shapes appearing in your home. If you hear singing from the walls, do not attempt to harmonize.

During commercial breaks, I’d sometimes go up to the roof of my apartment building. The city looked different every time—buildings that had been there for decades would vanish overnight, replaced by structures that seemed to follow non-Euclidean architectural principles. The downtown skyline had developed a habit of rearranging itself when no one was looking, like a child’s blocks being shuffled by an unseen hand.

Time started behaving strangely too. Episodes that should have been thirty minutes would sometimes last for hours, or pass in what felt like seconds. Once, we watched the same scene of George explaining his “jerk store” comeback for what seemed like days, the dialogue looping and fragmenting until the words lost all meaning. None of us mentioned it afterward.

More and more often, I’d catch Soleil staring out the window with an expression that made my chest hurt. Her light would flicker and dim, like a candle struggling against the wind. During these moments, Mom would reach over Willow and take Soleil’s hand, and for a brief instant, their combined glow would push back the darkness that seemed to be seeping in through the walls.

The plants in my apartment continued to grow, but now they produced flowers in colors I had no names for, their petals arranging themselves into impossible fractals. The spider plant babies began to orbit their mother plant like tiny green moons. My rescued orchid developed a consciousness and started humming show tunes.

“Jerry would love this,” Mom said one evening, as we watched a group of people outside trying to catch what looked like geometric shapes that had escaped from a mathematics textbook. “It’s like that time he dated the woman who looked different in every lighting. Remember that episode, Soleil?”

“That was months ago,” I said.

“Was it?” Mom frowned. “Time is so strange now. Even stranger than it was when I was…away.” She never used the word “dead,” as if speaking it might break whatever spell allowed her to be here.

“Time was always strange,” Soleil said softly. “You humans just noticed it less when it behaved itself. Like gravity. Or bears,” she added, as Willow let out a particularly emphatic sleep-woof.

The TV itself had started showing signs of temporal distortion. Sometimes the laugh track would play before the jokes, or we’d catch glimpses of episodes that hadn’t been filmed yet—couldn’t have been filmed yet, with the original actors now decades older. Once, we saw an episode where Jerry was played by a shifting cubist sculpture, while Kramer had become a sequence of prime numbers in human form.

“Don’t worry about it,” Soleil said when she noticed me staring. “Reality’s just getting a bit…experimental these days. Think of it as a director trying some new things with an established format.”

But I caught the worried glance she exchanged with Mom, and the way they both looked down at Willow, still peacefully sleeping between them, blissfully unaware that the laws of physics were unraveling around her dreams of bears.

Despite everything—the green moon, the geometric shapes eating downtown, the way time had become more suggestion than law—we kept to our schedule. Every evening at 7:30, or what the clocks claimed was 7:30, we’d gather on the couch. Mom would light her cigarette (she’d been smoking the same pack for months now, never running out), Soleil would kick off her light-spun shoes, and Willow would claim her spot between them.

I developed my own rituals. Three cups of tea, carefully prepared: Earl Grey for Mom in her old ceramic mug with the chip on the handle, chamomile in the special heat-resistant quantum cup for Soleil (ordered from a website that only existed on Thursdays), and an empty bowl near Willow that somehow always ended up full of dream-bear drool by the end of each episode.

“You know what I miss about being alive?” Mom asked one evening, during an episode where Jerry’s girlfriend couldn’t believe he’d never seen Schindler’s List. “Food. Real food. Not that I don’t appreciate the tea, honey,” she added quickly, taking a sip from her eternally full cup. “But I miss the taste of things. Remember those Sunday breakfasts we used to make?”

“Blueberry pancakes,” I said. “And that turkey bacon Dad always burned.”

“He claimed he liked it extra crispy,” Mom laughed, her cigarette smoke forming tiny dancing pancakes that floated up to join the constellation of bear-shapes near the ceiling.

“I miss different things,” Soleil mused. “Supernovas. The dance of solar flares. The way planets feel when they spin past.” She paused. “Though I have to admit, these episodes are better than most celestial entertainment. Mercury tries to organize game nights, but it’s mostly charades, and you try playing charades with gas giants. Jupiter always cheats.”

“How does Jupiter cheat at charades?” I asked.

“Extra moons,” Mom and Soleil said in unison, then burst out laughing.

The world outside continued its descent into chaos. The laws of physics became more like physics suggestions. Gravity started taking weekends off. Color escaped the visible spectrum and had to be herded back by teams of specialized scientists. Time began flowing in multiple directions at once, leading to awkward encounters between people’s past and future selves at grocery stores.

But in our apartment, we had our constants. The familiar bass line of the theme song. Kramer’s entrance. George’s latest scheme. Elaine’s shove. Jerry’s raised eyebrow. The laugh track that somehow kept playing even after the studio audience had evolved into pure energy and ascended to a higher plane of existence.

We developed in-jokes about the apocalypse. When the episode about Jerry’s “evil twin” played, Mom pointed out that most people now had at least three quantum superpositioned versions of themselves walking around. During “The Soup Nazi,” Soleil mentioned that his soup was nothing compared to the liquid singularities being served at the new café down the street—“Talk about no soup for you. One sip and you literally cease to exist!”

Willow slept through most of it, occasionally twitching or woofing at her dream-bears, which had evolved along with everything else. Sometimes now they wore suits and carried briefcases, conducting important bear business in her dreams. Other times they merged into a single ur-bear, a platonic ideal of bearness that even Soleil found impressive.

“That’s some quality immortal archetype work there,” she said admiringly one evening, as a particularly elaborate bear constellation performed a waltz above Willow’s sleeping form. “Most humans have to study for years to manifest something that stable.”

“She’s always been an overachiever,” Mom said proudly, reaching down to scratch Willow’s ears. “Remember when she learned to open the fridge?”

“That was less impressive and more expensive,” I reminded her, thinking of all the lunch meat I’d had to replace.

“Details,” Mom waved her hand dismissively. “The point is, she had initiative.”

The TV followed its own increasingly abstract rules. Characters began switching roles mid-scene. Props gained sentience and went on strike. Once, every laugh track was replaced by the sound of distant waves breaking on shores that no longer existed. Through it all, we kept watching, kept commenting, kept finding things to laugh about.

Even as the walls of my apartment began to occasionally phase out of existence, revealing glimpses of other dimensions where history had taken different turns, we maintained our little bubble of normalcy. When multicolored rain started falling upward past my windows, we just pulled the curtains and turned up the volume. When time loops caused the same scene to repeat seventeen times, we treated it like a recap episode.

But I couldn’t help noticing that Soleil’s light was growing dimmer, requiring more and more effort to maintain her human-like form. Sometimes, during particularly chaotic moments outside, she would flicker like a candle in a storm, her edges blurring into pure energy before she pulled herself back together. Mom would pretend not to notice, but I caught her watching Soleil with the same expression she’d worn in her final days at the hospital—a mixture of concern, love, and helpless frustration at forces beyond her control.

The end began during “The Finale.” Fitting, I suppose, though it wasn’t the actual series finale we were watching—just a regular episode that happened to be about endings. The green moon had split into three pieces, each one rotating in a different dimension. The city outside had mostly transformed into a series of abstract mathematical concepts connected by streets made of pure probability.

Soleil was having trouble maintaining her coherent form. Her light flickered and pulsed, sometimes bright enough to cast multiple shadows from the same object, sometimes so dim I could barely see her outline on the couch. Mom’s cigarette smoke had stopped forming shapes and just hung in the air like frozen tears.

“You know we can’t stay much longer,” Mom said during a commercial break that kept cycling through advertisements for products that had never existed. Her voice was soft, but it carried the weight of inevitability. “Things are…shifting. Even here.”

She was right. The walls of our sanctuary were beginning to blur at the edges. The TV signal increasingly picked up broadcasts from parallel universes where Seinfeld was a tragedy about the heat death of the universe, or a documentary about sentient soup, or just nine seasons of silent cosmic horror.

“I know,” Soleil said. Her voice sounded distant, like starlight reaching Earth long after its source had died. “The fundamental forces are unraveling faster than we expected. I need to go back up, try to hold things together as long as I can. Though between you and me”—she leaned forward conspiratorially, trailing stardust across the couch—“I think the universe is ready for a rerun.”

Willow snorted in her sleep, perhaps sensing the tension in the room. In her dreams, the bears had gathered for what looked like a formal goodbye party, wearing top hats and carrying tiny ursine briefcases.

“One more episode?” I asked, my voice cracking slightly. It was what I’d said to Mom that last night in the hospital, though then it had been about reading one more chapter of the book we’d been sharing.

Mom and Soleil exchanged looks. Outside, another piece of the moon crumbled into abstract expressionism.

“One more episode,” Mom agreed, reaching for the remote. She had to try three times before her incorporeal hand could grasp it—the boundary between her existence and nonexistence was growing thin.

Soleil brightened briefly, mustering her remaining energy to cast a warm glow over our little group. Willow’s tail thumped against the cushions, and her dream-bears raised tiny champagne glasses in a final toast.

The familiar theme music started playing, though now it seemed to contain harmonies from the beginning of time, bass lines from the birth of stars. I settled onto the floor at their feet, my own cup of tea warming my hands. The light from the TV mixed with Soleil’s fading glow, creating patterns that reminded me of summer afternoons from my childhood, of Mom in her garden, of Willow chasing imaginary bears through the park, of all the small moments that make up a life.

“You know,” Soleil said softly as Jerry delivered his opening monologue, “I’ve seen galaxies born and stars die. I’ve watched civilizations rise and fall on worlds you’ll never know existed. But this”—she gestured at our little group, at Mom’s eternal cigarette, at Willow’s peaceful sleep, at the familiar scenes playing out on the TV—“this has been something special.”

“It really has,” Mom said, and for a moment her form solidified completely, looking exactly as she had that last good day before everything changed. She reached out and took my hand, and I could almost feel her touch.

The episode played on as reality continued to dissolve around us. The laugh track began to include the sounds of distant nebulae and the music of spinning pulsars. Kramer’s entrance sent ripples through multiple dimensions. The studio audience had become a quantum superposition of every possible reaction to every possible joke.

We watched it all together, this family we’d somehow become—the dead mother, the living son, the star who had chosen to spend her evenings watching sitcom reruns, and the oversized basset hound who dreamed of bears. Outside, the world was ending, but in here, for one last half-hour that might have been an eternity, we were exactly where we needed to be.

The world could wait until after the credits rolled.

And until then, well, we could always find time for one more episode.

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