Jess looked up at the night sky so full of stars and felt like throwing up. To think, the sun, that mighty yellow beast that gave life to everything, was but a tiny star. And here he was, Jess, one of billions on a planet so insignificant compared to the endless heavens.
To the stars, so far away, so huge, he was no more that a mote of dust caught in a shaft of early morning sunlight. The sheer size of it all was staggering. And nauseating. What did the universe care about him?
“Jess! It's bedtime!” his mom called.
Bedtime! What did bedtime matter? He lay back in the grass and stared skyward, awestruck.
“Jess, come inside. The stars will be back tomorrow.”
That was true. Tomorrow the sun, that tiny star, would reappear and another day would dawn. The Earth, a mere speck in the cosmos, would keep spinning. And Jess, one kid in a world of seemingly countless people, would again wake up. And tomorrow night the stars would be there to mock him. But not until after the sun had done its thing.
“Coming, Mom!” Jess called
Paul Michael Murphy [Holt, MI] is a teacher and aspiring author who, when he was but a lad, tried to count the nighttime stars but gave up when he was pretty sure he counted the same one twice. Read more at: http://paulmichaelmurphy.blogspot.com/
© 2008 Paul Michael Murphy. Original for CCF. (Murphy grants CCF first electronic rights for one month; CCF may archive the material indefinitely and include it in an eBook anthology).
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