After Carl left me for a woman he met buying manure off Craigslist, I put in for an out-of-state letter carrier transfer with the postal service. I wanted a fresh start, a chance to discover something. It didn’t matter what. To feel like the person I’d once been, a person I’d liked being.      In my spare time I was what the online community calls a skywatcher. I scanned outer space for signals. You could search any part of the sky. The visual data came in sine waves, like monitoring a heartbeat.

Read this story now