Young Writers Society

Read Part 1 here

Whatever romance we might have had, I can hardly remember anymore, was short lived. Not a month later we moved to the country. Momma had saved her money from clerking at the grocery for years so we could be some of the last people to really see the stars.

It was an absolutely ancient place, even more grimy and decrepit than the stinking apartment building I’d called home through the entirety of my childhood. The air was fresher in the country, Momma insisted, but at sixteen the last thing I cared about was fresh air. So what if some damn stars were disappearing. They’d been going out as long as I could remember, and I didn’t want to give up friends and familiar places just to go live in the middle of nowhere for some stupid lights.

Still, it was hard to argue against the charm of the country at night. With eleven year old May Ann in tow, I’d lug a thick wool blanket under my arm up to the nearly bald hilltop back behind our old farm place and spread it out under the last remaining stars. I’d lay head-to-head with May Ann and together we’d count the lights for hours.

“What’d it used to look like?” May Ann would ask me as I tried to search out the constellations I’d once learned about in a science class years ago.

I’d curl my lip under my teeth and try to think back to a time there weren’t swaths of deep black between the tiny sparks of starlight. Back then we hadn’t even lived someplace you could properly see them. The city never turned the lights off long enough to really get a look, and even in the parks at night it looked like there were fewer stars than there were. But out in the country, nothing was hidden. Even so, I could barely remember a time blackness wasn’t normal.

I’d lie to May Ann anyway, and tell her made up stories of things I hardly knew anything real about in the first place. “It was like a sea of complete white,” I’d tell her. “Like the whole sky was the moon. It was brighter than daylight, and all the kids would stop and stare while they dragged the trash out to the curb. Momma’d give me hell for shirking my chores, but you had to look, ya know?”

And suddenly it was almost as if it were true. The first night I told that story something shifted in me. I could see the constellations merging in the sky above us in the way I’d only ever really seen in pictures in books. Pictures of myself leaning on the handle of a garbage can gaping up at the sky as it sparkled and danced with white light. Pride bubbled in my chest, as if these made up memories were real and mine and I was a part of something special that set me apart from everyone else. I knew what it was like before the stars went out.

“You’re a big liar,” May Ann would retort, teenage entitlement already creeping into her tone. “We never had a curb, and you’d never done your chores.” But she didn’t understand. She couldn’t have understood. I was there the night the stars went out, and I’d remember.

I was twenty-three the night it ended.

Momma and May Ann still lived in the old farm place out in the country, but I’d long since moved on to another city in another place too far to be with them the night the last of the stars were set to go out.

Instead I got on a bus by myself and rode far out from the city lights. Everyone on board was silent, but the anxiety was palpable. Buzzing around us like static, like that first night in my nightgown and church shoes with my momma’s fingernails dug into my wrist.

I cozied close to my window, my forehead resting sleepily against the glass as I stared up at the black sky. A book titled ‘The History of the Stars’ rested in my lap, my thumb unconsciously flicking over the wrinkled and dog-eared pages. My heart thudded steadily against my chest. An hour after leaving the city we came to a grassy meadow at the peak of a deep river valley. Blankets and miniature telescopes were passed out as we lumbered off the bus onto dewy nighttime grass.

Couples and families with children spread out over the hillside, but I hung back by the bus for a minute longer. Images of that first night flashed in my mind’s eye, and I suddenly regretted not trying harder to catch a flight home to be with momma and May Ann. I’d have taken them up to that balding hill and we’d lay out like a three-armed star and share peanut butter sandwiches as the last of the stars blinked out forever.

It had been this way for weeks. There was no knowing just when the last star would vanish; even by then no one had figured exactly what was happening to our universe. Every night I had gotten myself on a bus at sunset in hopes to see it. Somehow, deep down, I knew tonight was the night.

I sighed and pushed myself away from the bus. The hillside was already covered in patchwork blankets and the scattered dashes of flashlights in the night air. I settled into a place far enough away from anyone else that I could feel alone as I watched the face of my world change forever. I laid back, my arms tucked under my head, and I waited.

In the end it wasn’t what anyone would have expected. There was no great destruction, no apocalypse, no son of God descending among us. The world didn’t end. When the last star began to flicker, I pushed myself up, clutching my knees until my fingernails cut through the worn denim of my jeans and watched. It fought; harder than any of the stars I could remember before. It only took a few minutes to burn out forever.

I let out a long breath and sat back. Of course I’d known all I saw was the permeating light of a long dead star ending its path to Earth. The last star had really gone out hundreds, if not thousands of years before. My heart sank; my gaze held to the empty black sky. Somehow I’d expected more.

The families and couples on their blankets around me stayed, chatting and staring up at a sky entirely black but for the moon. The next morning the sun would rise as it always did; it had yet to fade away, and never did as long as I was alive, not that anyone figured out why. On a blanket nearby, a teenage couple had fallen asleep wrapped in each other’s arms. They’d missed the whole thing, I was positive, but by the way they curled against one another it didn’t seem that they cared. All around people talked and laughed and stared up at the dark sky as if the stars had never gone out after all. As if the constellations of my childhood still danced pictures across the night.

Anger rose in my throat. I wanted to yell at them, grab them by the backs of their heads and make them look at what they had given up, what I had given up, because of the stupid stars. My eyes stung with tears as I recounted the relationships, graduate degrees, and jobs at upscale city companies with excellent benefits but no free time to stare at the sky I’d given up for some silly obsession that hadn’t even been mine to begin with.

I let out a deep sigh, my shoulders falling, as I let it go with my breath. In the end nothing felt different, not really. The sky was different but the world was the same. Tomorrow I would wake up, take my dog for a run, quit by job at the Quick-e-Mart, and finally start living again.

After a few more moments watching the full white moon hanging alone in the sky, I gathered my blanket, stuck it under my arm, and hiked back up the hill to the bus.