III. The True Meaning of Gaslight
by Jennifer Weatherly
[this is the third in the six part series–
read Nature Always Finds a Way Through from the beginning, here]
I wondered where the stars went once they disappeared for good. I wondered out loud, because it seemed to have happened overnight. A city’s a terrible place for stargazing, certainly, but one or two usually made their way through the haze.
Not this night, though. And not any night after.
Some people raised their eyebrows and said, They’ve been gone for ages, haven’t they? Hell, maybe they never even existed.
Others bit their lips and sighed, because they didn’t know what to think, but had ideas as to where they’d gone, be it light years away or swallowed by a black hole. String theory, they said casually, tossing out the words like they were tossing confetti. Quantum mechanics.
Others still looked at me with wide eyes because they’d not even noticed. What, they asked, could have erased them? Light pollution? Ordinary pollution? Or maybe another act of careless overreach by the central government. It must have been all of that.
Maybe, I said, with a shrug, as if I cared less than I did.
Well, they said, we’ve got to get them back!
Stunned, I asked, Well, why? If you never noticed them until they’d left, then why?
We deserve them, they said, and repeated. So we’ve got to get them back. It’s our duty. We’ll build a tower to the sky if we have to.
I never found out if they built that tower. I didn’t wait around. I had plenty of other shit to deal with that wasn’t star-related. Sure, the stars had vanished, and I used to watch them every night. But without them, I was still someone. I just didn’t know what sort of someone. Someone who didn’t deserve the stars? That was a start, I suppose.
Either way, I was still breathing, and maybe, somewhere far away, the stars were breathing too, in their way. Pulsing, rather. Or maybe they weren’t far away. Maybe they were waiting beyond an unreachable layer of cosmic fabric. Whatever space it was, it was their space, and I’ll never tell the rest of them, but they have exactly what they deserve. Who’s to say, after all, what any of us needs to have?
#
More of the 2024 FLASH SUITE Contest
What’s New at Defenestrationism.net
home/ Bonafides
by 
by
Our sphere