She
stopped in the middle of the front yard and looked up, at first
watching the thin ghost of her own breath jetting out in hot angry
bursts, rising and vanishing into the dark. Then the stars caught
her eye. Beautiful: chill and clear and so incredibly present,
the ancient light of long-gone suns seemed almost within her reach.
She let out a long, shuddering sigh, and the tears that had been
threatening finally came. Gravity won its struggle too, and she
collapsed, arms hugging shaking knees, sobs coming in bursts too
powerful for her to mute completely. She didn't bother to wipe the
tears away, deciding instead in some hysterical tragicomic way that
they were her mask, her saltwater mask, and she was melting it off.
At the thought, a humorless bark of laughter escaped her and she
turned her eyes again to the heavens. A blaze of light burned an
ephemeral path across the sky, first white, then blue, then
yellow, then red, then gone, all in an instant. After a moment she
noticed that she had stopped crying. After another moment, she
realized that she was musing on the shooting star. Maybe that was
it: everything is only a flash, gone before you know it. Or maybe
the beautiful things are almost illusions, like the fiery
brush-stroke across the night sky was really only something burning
to cinders in the pull of its own gravity. Nothing left but a memory
of light and the notion that there must have been something of
substance there, once.
“No,”
she said to the unhearing night, the ghost of her word tracing its
way up towards the silent constellations. She would not
be that: not a quiet, almost unnoticed flicker. If this was the end,
the breaking point, the first moment of the next Life, then she would
be damned if she'd play the role of the meteor. She would not fall.
She would explode.
“Supernova,” she said, again to the senseless dark. A star that
has blown up to unimaginable proportions, destroying old worlds,
blasting out the beginnings of brand-new worlds, the engine of change
in the Universe. It was time; it was well past time, she knew now.
She stood, brushing herself off and wiping away the last bits of her
mask. She turned towards the house, knowing – finally – what
must come next.
The stars were, indeed, beautiful tonight.
*
© 2018 B. W. Flatley
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