A paper cup has hung from a shelf in my house for sixty years. A string runs from its bottom, out through a gap in the window, straight into the dark sky.

In this town, we talk to people who’ve gone off to distant stars using cups like this one. The voice rides on light and takes decades to cross the distance. The answer takes just as long to come back. That’s why the old folks here like to say, with a knowing look, “You hear the answer with wrinkled hands.”

Let me say this up front — I forgot about that cup ages ago. It’s just that a dusty string looks shabby, so every night before bed I glance at it. That’s all there is to it.

Tae was the girl who lived next door. Terrible handwriting. On the bottom of the cup, you can still make out her name — faded now, scrawled like a wriggling worm.

We built this string phone the day before her family left for their distant star. I was furious, for no good reason I could name. I suppose I just hated being left behind.

“Hey. Can we play again sometime?”

Tae said it into the cup. I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked her something cold, on purpose.

“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do, once you get there?”

And without waiting for a reply, I flipped the cup facedown. I won. I was the one who spoke last. Kids hang onto the dumbest little victories.

The starship lifted off, and that was that. I grew up, sold fish for a living, took a wife, and somewhere along the way became an old man.

The whole time, I was always the one who talked first. Say your piece, then flip the cup down before the other guy can answer. Waiting around for a reply seemed like something only fools did.

—Though I’d rather you didn’t ask why a man who believed that kept the cup for sixty years instead of throwing it out.

Tonight, the cup on the shelf started to crackle. That static, riding in on light from a distant star. It had been sixty years.

I picked up the cup with my wrinkled hand. Out of habit, I raised it to my mouth and started to say, “Hello?” — then stopped. There was already a voice coming through from the other end.

A small voice, a girl’s voice. Tae’s voice, exactly as it had been that day.

“Ren. Listen — once I get there,”

Crackle.

“the very first thing I’m gonna do is call you. That’s the first thing.”

To that stupid question I’d asked just to push her away, she’d given me a straight answer. The first thing she’d do once she arrived: call me. And she really had called first. It just took sixty years for her voice to get here.

Inside the cup, the static kept going. Seemed there was more to the story yet.

For the first time in my life, I raised to my ear the cup I’d spent sixty years holding to my mouth.