The Last Star in My Sky

Lines. She doesn’t remember where they came from, but there they are, tracing her face like burros through the Grand Canyon, heavy-laden, each bearing a burden. The mirror has become no-one she knows, but that is why she opens the windows at night. She pads across the old oak floor to the window, on weathered feet shod with the slippers she received this Christmas from the Presbyterian church down the street. A chill breeze ghosts across her rice-paper hands and they start to shake. She grips the windowsill and leans out.

And then, suddenly, there it is above her: the last star in the sky, strung from the place where the universe ends. Dangling there. What was it, she asks it, that set the game in motion? Who tipped the first domino? Who put out the first star, succeeded in a rolling motion by myriad dots blinking out all across the sky? Who dipped the brush into the inky grey, LED lights straining somewhere behind a galactic screen where electrons careen through wires of infinite space? Was it God? Was it you?

She imagines a face. Tries, but the lines kept falling out of touch. Somewhere where atoms don’t stop fingers from moving any closer, anymore. The hair, it should be like this. Just this shade, and it should fall this way, and it was never quite right and that is why it was perfect. She can’t rightly imagine it now, because there are no more constellations to paint the pictures. No more plasma. No more stardust. No more ghosts.

She strains to remain in fellowship with the window, once a parking lot, once a garden, once a rolling plain, once elements whirling through a massive, explosive tide. She looks up at the last star that will ever hang in the sky, and with arms larger than worlds, she reaches up, and plucks it.