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intrigued too. “Something very important?”
    He murmured.
    I pouted, folding my arms.
    He noticed. “Jade, what is it?”
    “I know I’m a little dense when it comes to astronomy, Daddy, but…”
    Daddy chuckled.
    He was suddenly very serious. “Like many others throughout the world, I’ve been observing the progress of the Icarus 9 Comet for the past few months now before it had made breakfast television. I’ve kept a close eye on the number of fragments that have actually impacted with Jupiter. Then I noticed some days ago something that puzzled me. One of the fragments from the comet was missing. At first, I thought that it had disintegrated before it had reached Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.”
    “It hadn’t?”
    He shook his head. “No, it was too big, perhaps one to three kilometres in radius, for that to happen, so I began sweeping the night sky, searching for it through the telescope, and earlier this evening I found the missing part of the comet.”
    “Where is it now?” I asked inquisitively.
    His eyes darkened. “Something very odd happened, Jade. A large fragment of the Icarus 9 Comet was tossed out into deep space by Jupiter’s huge velocity. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did.”
    “Daddy?”
    “It’s on a direct collision course with earth!”
    Daddy looked at me concerned as a scream filled my throat, and I fainted.

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    3. ‘ROBINSON’S COMET’
    People talked. People laughed. People loved. The fiery comet drew closer to earth…
    I was confused again, and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t think straight. What day was it now? I think it was Tuesday. No, it was another lazy Wednesday. I think it was Wednesday. It all seemed a little strange to me. Wendy and I sat on our school blazers on the common, sharing a takeaway in our school lunch hour. We were exhausted, for we had walked kilometres or so it seemed from the burger bar near the academy, and the fries were already cold. I hate eating cold fries. It didn’t bother Wendy. I glanced at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight anywhere. It was another fine day in early summer, puzzling me briefly. There was something that I was trying to remember. What was it now? I frowned when Wendy pinched some of my fries. I laughed when she poked her tongue out. I looked around for the old man in the cloth cap with his dog. I didn’t see him. Was I disappointed? Then I noticed it for the first time in the corner of my eye. It was a small shadow that grew larger and larger in the sky until it had almost blocked out the sun. The whole land had suddenly turned very dark. It was almost like an eclipse of the sun, yet it wasn’t. It was something else much more terrifying. The giant comet fell out of the blue sky towards us. OH, GOD!
    This was so unreal; it wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be! I slowly turned my head to look at Wendy. She slept soundly in her bed in her room, puzzling me. I wanted to be there, too. I rose on wobbly legs and walked into the bedroom that was there in solid form on the common, yet somewhere else in real time. I hid under Wendy’s blankets where I felt safe from the comet. It couldn’t touch me now. It couldn’t hurt me. Wendy woke.
    “Bad dream?” she asked in the dark of her room.
    “Yes,” I whispered, drawing closer to her.
    The 2015 summer was almost unremarkable in its passing. The summer of that year was in fact a few hot days in July. Thousands, who took advantage of an unusually hot sun, rushed down to the seaside, stripped off on the beach, and got sunburn for their pains. We didn’t. During this fine but all too brief spell, I wore one of my little cropped tops to school and got sent home. I wasn’t bothered. The boys in my class didn’t seem to mind either, though mum did. I sweated through my 13+ exams at the end of term, doing very well in maths and science, which surprised me. Where did I go wrong? Joking apart,