The Aggregate of Our Joy by Elizabeth Rosen

We weren’t surprised when we got the call from the guidance counselor at Avery’s middle school. We’d anticipated it ever since Avery began speaking in Carl Sagan quotes. It didn’t take a fortune teller to predict that the other kids would be weirded out. Most of the kids in her class haven’t even heard of Carl Sagan. They should have, of course, but I think we can all agree that education is a weakly brewed thing these days.

To be honest, her dad and I aren’t sure how she learned about Sagan, dead this quarter-century now, but about two months ago she began carrying a threadbare library copy of Cosmos with her everywhere she went. Now she only speaks in Saganisms. 

The guidance counselor told us that another boy had flung his half-eaten Jello at Avery in the lunchroom and called her weird. Apparently, Avery quoted Sagan at him: “If a human disagrees with you, let him live. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious.” This response seemed to have sent the surrounding children into a frenzy of food-flinging. The teachers on duty had to wade in to pull Avery out of the melee. There will be dry-cleaning bills to pay, for sure.

The lunchroom incident isn’t even the thing that got her sent home. That was because Avery kept responding to the guidance counselor’s questions with Saganisms. The counselor thought it indicated that Avery was depressed. She hung on through Avery’s quotes during her initial questions, but said she felt she had no choice but to call us when the follow-up inquiry about whether Avery had been physically hurt was: “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” 

When I walk into the school office, Avery is sitting hunched over on the spindly bench, looking a little defeated. Sixth grade hasn’t exactly been a walk in the park. Her backpack is squished against her side and Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World is open in her lap. She must have had library time today; that’s one we haven’t seen yet. 

I crouch down next to her, ducking low to peer under the brown hair that curtains her face. “Hi,” I say. “You ready to go?”

She nods and closes her book. “We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.”

As she packs her book away and hoists her Steven Universe backpack onto her shoulder, I go to sign her out. I put my arm around her shoulders while we walk to the car. The guidance counselor says we can’t bring her back until a doctor officially signs off saying she isn’t suicidal. Ridiculous. I’d hazard a guess that all the best thinkers in history were odd kids. They just weren’t trying to stay enrolled in Pierce Academy, a place which is unconscionably litigation-wary.

As our G.P. can’t get her in until tomorrow, we have the afternoon to ourselves. I don’t know for sure that this obsession of hers coincides with an interest in actual science, but on the off chance it does, I ask if she’d like to go to the planetarium at the Franklin Institute. I can feel the shift in energy from the back seat where she is buckling in.

“The brain is like a muscle,” she chirps. “When it is in use we feel very good.” 

“Okey-dokey.” Sometimes I wish she could just say yes, but the thing about Saganisms 

is that it’s hard to disagree with them.

We drive in silence for awhile. I am trying to think how to broach the topic of why. Why Sagan? Why now? It would be helpful for me to understand so I can navigate the doctor’s appointment and the school’s questions. First things first, though. 

“The guidance counselor thinks you are depressed. Are you? Depressed, I mean.”

Avery makes a noise of disdain. “The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence.”

My grip on the steering wheel relaxes a little. This is a reassuring answer. Hopeful, filled with the same curiosity about life and the mysteries of the universe that Carl had.

“Ok, good. That’s good.” I pulled up at a red light and stop. “Because, you know, the quoting thing. Your dad and I, we don’t mind.” I meet her eye in the rear-view mirror. “We actually think it shows you’re very smart and thoughtful.” The light turns green, and I press the accelerator gently. “But other people don’t get it.”

For a second time, she doesn’t even hesitate. She’s got all this stuff committed to memory. “The truth may be puzzling,” she acknowledges. “It may take some work to grapple with. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.”

“What truth is that?” I ask, turning right into Penn Square and steering us around City Hall. Far above on top the building’s tower, the bronze statue of William Penn looms beneficently over us. He looks pretty small from down here at ground level, but he’s actually massive: over 50,000 pounds and six times the size of an adult. They had to hoist him up there in fourteen separate sections over two years. 

“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”

I have to sit with that one for a few moments.

“That is true,” I say, finally. 

Sometimes I try to speak to her in words she’ll understand and appreciate, to meet her where she is. Mostly I use Vonnegut, but her dad relies on Asimovan to get his point across. The child seems multi-lingual in that regard. I search my brain now for something appropriate. 

“Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to conquer the universe,” I say.  “Kurt Vonnegut said that. You should read him. I think you’d like what he has to say.”
“Hmmm,” she hums. It’s a hmmm of contemplation, and my chest fills with a sudden gladness that I might introduce her to another great humanist of my youth. 

“Vonnegut also said, ‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’”
“That’s a good one,” she pipes up. 

It’s such a relief to hear her own words come out of her little throat.

“I think so, too.” 

The Franklin Institute looms up before us, a Beaux-Arts structure that anchors the head of the avenue.  It’s granite, huge. Super impressive. The next few minutes are silent as I navigate the car around the crazy traffic of Logan Circle and into the parking lot behind the museum. Avery knows better than to talk to me in high-stress driving moments like these. She hums a little song to herself in the backseat. 

A few minutes later, we have made it around the back of the building to the parking lot and pulled into a spot. I tell Avery that she can leave her backpack in the car, but she insists on taking her book with her. She tucks it into the crook of her elbow and holds it against her torso. To tell you the truth, it looks like it’s right where it belongs, there in her arms, like it’s part of her.

We pass through the alcove where the grand marble statue of Benjamin Franklin sitting on a chair welcomes everyone in. A group of school kids, younger than Avery and all wearing red t-shirts, are racing around the marble rotunda screaming, their teachers trying to corral them toward the exhibit in the neighboring hall on extreme weather and climate change. Franklin looks down benevolently at their mayhem.

We buy tickets to the next planetarium show, but we’ve got a few minutes to kill, so I ask Avery if she wants to go to the Pendulum Staircase. I can see her struggling to think of an appropriate Saganism to reply with. I point at the quote by Franklin on the wall: You May Delay, But Time Will Not. Avery looks at me gratefully, nods.

We climb the four stories of the wide marble staircase, position ourselves at the railing and look over at the recreation of Foucault’s Pendulum. The eighty-five-foot wire hangs from the ceiling all the way down to the ground floor where its 185-pound bob slowly swings back and forth across the inlaid aquamarine star on the floor. The pendulum crosses the atrium every ten seconds and knocks over one of the metal pegs arranged in a circle under it every twenty minutes in a genius display of proof that the planet rotates.

 “Mom,” Avery says, watching the pendulum in its slow arc. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

The question, asked in her own voice, brings a lump to my throat. I take her hand. What can I say? Of course I don’t. I’m more than a little aware of how the future feels like a dumpster fire, may very well be one, and that we have pushed it on Avery and her peers to figure out how to put it out, or at the least, keep it controlled enough to live with its blaze and smoke. 

“Look at me,” I say, turning her to face me. “Not even the littlest bit.” I lean close to her. “Not even the teeniest, tiniest, atomic-level bit. Ok?”

She looks doubtful, but she nods, slowly, like the pendulum. “Ok.”

I glance at my watch. “It’s almost time for the show. Shall we head over?”

In the planetarium, we settle into our seats, push against their backs to crane our necks up for the widest possible view of the domed screen above us. Avery lays her book on her lap. The lights go down, and the elegiac yearning of Samuel Barber’s Adagio begins to swell. On the ceiling appears the astonishing turquoise and orange burst of some nebula I don’t know the name of. We begin to fly toward it, stars passing to the right and left of us. 

I glance at Avery. The brilliant light of the nebula is reflected in her eyes. Her mouth is gaping a little as she takes it all in. She looks so young. So newly made.

Tomorrow, there will be a doctor’s visit and questions galore. There will be forms to fill out, parent-teacher meetings to attend. But today there is the wonder of Carl Sagan’s universe for us to gawk at. I am reminded of something the great cosmic sage said. I lean over to whisper it into Avery’s ear.

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

Elizabeth Rosen‘s stories have appeared in journals such as the North American Review, Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, and Flash Frog, and been nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net awards. Colorwise, Elizabeth is an autumn. She still wants her MTV.

10 July 2026