There it is, finally!

In her spacious backyard, as the crickets whispered their song of twilight and the trees rustled in the late-summer breeze, a tall girl of about fourteen laid on her tattered, soft blue blanket and sat under the stars. Her alert green eyes flicked back and forth and searched the darkness, trying to find where that swift shooting spark of fire had gone. It had been there one second, slicing a path of brilliant light through the pitch black of night, and the next it was just...gone.

The girl sat up and shook her head, pulling a piece of grass that had slipped through her blanket out of her dark brown ponytail. They’re always gone too quickly.

She took out her cell phone and began to type a message. She squinted against the sudden brightness of the screen, but nonetheless she managed to text:

Ugh, this is frustrating...u see a flash of fire in the darkness, and then, by the time u find where it was, its gone... -_-

She sighed impatiently and looked back up at the stars,

then instantly became calmer. I wouldn’t trade this for the world,

she thought, gazing at the heavens. I would wish to die rather than leave the brilliant beauty of the stars of a clear night in the country.

The girl sat upright quickly as her eyes caught the fiery trail of another meteorite. Gone in an instant, just like the other one.

She rolled her eyes, relaxed once again on that tattered blue blanket.

And, as the crickets whispered their song of twilight and the trees rustled in the late-summer breeze, the girl smiled. She was happy, truly happy, to just stop and think and enjoy the stars above while she had the time. She was happy to be free from all of her almost strangling obligations to everyone and everything, and free from the depressing thought of starting high school in just weeks. And she was happy to finally feel like she had uprooted from her mind the feeling of pointlessness to her work that grew like an ugly thorn-bush from the seed of self-doubt. As a writer, the previous few weeks seemed like it was a burden to pick the right words, to even put her scribbles, supposedly letters and unreadable to others, on a page.

But, under the brilliant stars of Texas, she felt at ease, and for once didn’t worry about anything but looking up at the stars. She felt like she had regained her inspiration, and nothing she would do would fail. When I get inside, I need to find my spiral...

Yawning, she blinked up sleepily at the biggest, brightest star in the sky. She was a writer, an artist of words, not an astronomer; therefore, she couldn’t name a single constellation above her to save her life. But that brightest star held her attention the longest, and she felt that, as long as she stared at its fiery-white radiance, nothing could ever go wrong.

She jumped suddenly when through her jeans she felt something furry and soft and warm rub against her leg. She looked down and smiled affectionately. She recognized the dim, starlit figure of a plump calico she-cat purring and leaning against her. Her fur had a soft silvery glow to it, and her amber eyes flashed and gazed up kindly at the girl. In response the girl stroked the cat’s ears and cooed, "Hey, Krissy. Silly kitty, yes, hi Krissy-kitty." The cat named Krissy purred loudly with delight.

The girl yawned yet again and folded her arms behind her head, and Krissy snuggled closer to her side. I don’t care what my parents say. Tonight, I want to sleep outside, if only for mere minutes.

To fall asleep under the comforting blanket of the sky that wrapped around Earth, that blue-black blanket with white sparks and embers flickering and dancing across its dark, mysterious cloth seemed, to her, to be what could be the highest point of her summer. Her eyelids began to flutter shut as sleep began to envelope her, and darkness took over her mind...

She jumped to full alertness and quickly twisted around as a brilliant blade of fire split that same cloth of darkness asunder as it streaked from north to south. "Whoa..." she breathed, her awed green gaze never straying from that shooting star until it disappeared beyond the trees behind her. Even then, she was still too captivated by that path of flame to turn for many seconds after. She felt a faint buzzing in her pocket, a text in reply to the one she sent earlier, but she ignored it; now was definitely

not a time to answer texts. "Whoa." Her repetitious whisper seemed such an understatement for the cosmic spectacle she had just witnessed, and yet she felt that her mortal voice was limited by mortal words and therefore unworthy to describe the beauty of that fire in the sky.

She lay back down on her blanket as her heart raced from excitement, and she sighed again, this time a sigh of pure contentment. She had seen what she had come out for. As her eyelids slowly began to conceal those bright green eyes still fixed, seemingly for eternity, on the stars above, a heavy darkness thicker than the jet-black of the night began to fill her mind, a darkness full of tiny points of light, a darkness not unlike the one above her.

How lucky I am...

That was the girl’s last drowsy, blurred thought before she fell asleep to the crickets whispering their song of twilight and the trees rustling in the late-summer breeze.

Impressum

Texte: Cover art by *rachelmon on deviantART Illustration by ~Kitsuna-Ri on deviantART
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 28.08.2010

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Widmung:
To God and His amazing natural fireworks show that I witnessed one night this past month, the night this short story is based on.