It came as no surprise that every which way he looked, he saw stars, and quite a few of them all together in small clumps so that if you cast your gaze too quick they would appear as one hot ball. With his one eye on the telescope and his other not on it, he gazes through to a spotted marvel. The presence of those lights in the sky reminded him of nothing other than a dish sieve that he’d used to drain his pasta for lunch. Such wonders, he thought to himself, natures natural sieve.

He was first person on the planet of the Gulugs to have ever looked up. A lack of a neck made any rotational motion of the head impossible, and a lack of a torso made any rotational motion of the body impossible. In fact, the Gulugs were cubes of ferrite, perfectly geometrical and admirably cubical. Why how one Gulug would quake and shake all six of its vertices when a fine Gulug passed with not an error in its perpendicularity. What marvels! But to not be able to crane and peer at the sky and wonder, well this was a lack that the Gulugs weren’t even aware they were lacking.

Yulug, for that was this star-peepers name, was out one evening for a stroll when he caught in the chanced reflection of an aluminum statue a dappled image of white dots all over something black. When he overcame the thought that the painter of this statue was careless with the brush, he realized no, this image is not tied to the statue, for when I move left, so does it shift and bend so slightly like the light from the sun. He then realized it was not below, but above him.

Twelve months he spent fashioning a device that could steer his two peepers up. The first attempt involved a count of eighteen mirrors, placed in a petal formation for he believed that the patch above was small and he would have to amplify its presence. Before he could test his device, it was confiscated on account of being too bright in the day time.

Liquid calcium was on his mind next, and he laid it on in thick slabs across six strips of steel sheet. It bubbled and broiled in the sun and he watched as it moved to form a perfect circle. Here he thought success and began a great cheer but realized it was still daytime, threw the calcium out the window, and went right back to his desk to try again.

Yulug couldn’t fake his frustration if he tried. His usual outlet for such a mind state was to rattle his cactus with some angry words. That afternoon he turned to the spiked cucumber and threw everything out of his mind, right through his lips, and all into one spot where the cactus sat, brimming. The convenience of a cactus assault is that cacti are hardy entities, for they exist with a thousand spikes drilled into them from the get go and this means they have always known hardship and cannot be interrogated further. Yulug knew this and so the things he said, oh they really went far. And just as he was at the height of his cactus anti-serenade, he stopped stock still like one made of crystal (for that is exactly what he was). There upon the cactus sat a single drop of rain. A tear from above. What Yulug saw in that droplet was not the components of hydrogen and oxygen as one normally would, but rather his living room, amplified in a way that his four walls, his two ceilings, and handful of floors were all there at one point.

The yelp was great that came from Yulug that afternoon and if you put an ear to his door any day of the week, all you’d be able to hear was bangs, twangs, and the harmonics of a saw.

Finally, Yulug emerged and presented to the town a pipe with a bend in it. He told everyone to wait until nightfall and they did so, but not without a little resistance. As the moon rose and the stars came out, of which the Gulugs idly continued to look forward and at the backs and fronts of each other, unaware of the bespeckled dome above the, Yulug called for attention. With one eye upon the pipe and another not on the pipe but closed, Yulug laid his gaze upon an ocean of light. Mites! he decided they were called. And he told everyone this as he passed around his invention and others looked upon these little creatures. For that’s what they were, said Yulug, tiny imperceptible entities that spent the day time eating the sun and in the night time they paid for their greed by glowing. This frightened one of the younger Gulugs so much that they kicked the lower half of their father, who was holding Yulug’s device but was holding it no longer, for through the air it sailed and greeted the floor as one-hundred pieces.

Soon after, the Gulug civilization perished. They failed to detect the imminent strike of a large asteroid, for they never saw it until it was right on top of their noses.