The Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole

This story began on an afternoon the color of comets, with a girl dressed all in black. A sad girl. A girl with a hole in her heart, and darkness on the horizon.
That girl, of course, was me.
“My name is Stella Rodriguez,” I told the guard at the gates to NASA. “I’m eleven years old. I’m here to speak with Carl Sagan.”
It was late, almost dark, and I was alone. You and Mom would not have approved.
The guard looked up as if he’d heard an annoying mosquito, decided he imagined it, and went back to reading his magazine.
“Actually,” I tried again, “I’m Carl Sagan’s great great-great-great-granddaughter, and I’m here at NASA to tell him that in the future we’ve invented time travel!”
“Please go away,” said the guard.
“But I have an appointment…
“No,” said the guard, “you definitely don’t.”
“Fine, okay, maybe I don’t!” I said, a bit too loudly. “But if you take into consideration chaos theory or the butterfly effect, the very notion of long-term predictions for example, an appointment becomes an absurd impossibility. Time-”
But before I could continue trying to sound scholarly, an ear-piercing alarm started ringing. Lights began flashing, and I could hear shouts from inside the building.
“Okay,” I said, putting up my hands. “Let’s all just take it easy. I’ll go peacefully. No need for alarms. I’m too bookish for prison!”
But the guard wasn’t paying attention to me. He grabbed his phone and started shouting, something about code reds and protocol, and before I knew what was happening he had run inside, leaving the gate wide open.
I wish I were the type of person who would sneak into NASA during a molecular-robot-alien-rocket invasion-explosion. But you know very well I’m not that type. Not even close. I’m more of a chicken-liver jellyfish-fraidy-cat type.
And so I left. I left without seeing Carl Sagan, or giving him the important package I’d come to deliver. Time was of the essence, since the Voyager launch date August 20, 1977-was mere months away.
Avoiding the alarms at NASA, I went to the bus stop and waited. It was the last moment of light, and I had a strange feeling. Like when you sense a breeze on your ankles in a room with no open windows or doors. Like when you’re sure you can see a face in the moon, and it’s staring right at you. Like when you’re the seeker during hide-and-seek, and you just know you’re being watched through a closet keyhole. I darted my eyes from side to side, looking in the bushes and up at the trees. I didn’t see anything anywhere but dusk.
And so I was understandably relieved when the bus came around the bend. That is, until I got on the bus, and things started to get even stranger, if possible.
“My wallet!” shouted a businesswoman. “Someone stole my wallet!”
Everyone scanned the bus for a shady-looking character.
“And where’s my toupee?” asked an elderly man.
This continued for three more stops, shouts of ‘Where’s my lunch?’ and ‘Who took my pet frog?’ To get off the bus, I had to weather an obstacle course of people on their hands and knees searching for something-or-other under their seats.
The stop was only a few minutes from home, but it felt like miles. I mean, what was going on?! The dusk had turned to straight-up gloom, which wasn’t good because by that point I had a severe case of the creeps, a heebie-jeebie fever, and a touch of the willies. I’m not afraid of the dark – you know that from all our time spent stargazing but the minute I started walking, I got goosebumps down my arms and legs and all the way up my neck. I had such a case of the jumps that I’m pretty sure I had goose bumps on my eyeballs, which, by the way, were not helping because in a matter of minutes it had gone from almost-dark-outside-gloom to dark-at-the-bottom-of-a-pocket.
I looked from side to side.
“Who’s there?” I asked. No one answered. Has anyone in any scary movie ever answered that question? Oh, glad you asked, it’s me the axe murderer. Dang it! That was actually supposed to be a surprise…
So I did what anyone in my position would do. I started to run. Fast. I ran through the dark-like-the muck-down-a-drain, I sprinted through the dark-as the-inside-of-a-whale. I didn’t hear footsteps or twigs breaking behind me, but the feeling was becoming stronger. Someone was lingering just out of view. I was being watched. I was being followed.
But by who?
Or, worse still… by what?