On the other side of a screen, forty-one walking days away, a woman begins to explain something we can’t really explain at all. She begins – “the sky is a time machine…”
Standing on the edge of the crowd I hear the murmur in response to a voice. I look and see nothing, ask softly where. Fingers point and I nod in the darkness, but I still do not see them.
“They’re very faint,” someone else says, “it’s really not much of a show.”
I try to convince myself I see something, flickering, above, but this is a lie.
I did not come expecting this gathering. But these strangers, these sons and granddaughters of shade tree mechanics, nurses and wheat farmers, have converged here. They have brought telescopes over lovely and lonely gravelled roads, to this site overlooking a valley where coyote and antelope run; where rangers tell us matter-of-factly the prairie dogs sometimes carry plague, and the swallows are welcome to nest over the outhouse door.
This is an island of reversed time; it feels a secret place. Any cell phone service is incidental, there is no internet, there is no television. There is no hot water, unless you boil it yourself, the cold-water pipe is communal. They turn the artificial lights off, for us.
In the morning, if we are lucky, there will be enough wind to keep the mosquitos down. We will walk over dry earth through the grass, until we are too hot and the blue squints sight lines into our faces. Returning to our motorized encampment, we’ll wait, and rest, for the world to turn us into night again.
We are strangers, but we are not strangers, because we have all come here, and all who are out here tonight have come out to see the night.
We’ve peered at other planets, at suns, at storms. We’ve counted rings and clouds we’ll never reach and talked of twinning moons. I don’t know the names of anything up there, won’t remember the names they give me; all I know is it is very dark, and also the stars are very bright.
Now a voice brings us back from the distant galaxies and nebulae where worlds are born to where we are, when we are, on this world, and the voice is saying, simply, “wow.”
Wow. Coronas, solar winds, magnetic fields and atmospheres, particles, electricity.
Wow.
But this is nothing, another voice says, a bemused voice; if you go further north, or in a few weeks, and once when I was in…; and there are murmurs of agreement. This isn’t the best, there is some smug self-satisfaction, brief exchange of recollections. And I still see nothing, but nothing can stop the amazement. The amazement in this stranger’s voice. Their wow becomes the heart to our brief constellation, and the dissenting voices fade and we listen and we look.
It’s their first time, seeing the northern lights. I do not see them, this time, at all.
But from across the continent a woman tells me the sky is a time machine…
And my mother and sister, who I do not see or speak to, and I, pupils wide, walk the path to the lake we borrow, to the shore. My mother teaches us to whistle and click, to set the sky blaze dancing, over the lake we visit each summer, until there is an off-season robbery, until our parents grow tired of each other, until everything becomes “too busy,” a green blaze lives over the lake where loons dive.
The sky is a time machine. I learn of spirits playing, and walrus heads rolling, and how you must beware the tusks.
The sky is a time machine and my seventy-something father and I make an appointment to watch the next solar eclipse over this land, together, twenty years from now.
For a long time, I remember, falsely, seeing the ISS, transiting, new, when I was a child – but it must have been Mir and I have outlived that miracle and blemish and I will outlive more.
The sky is a time machine and we all have a birthday star, a sun whose light has been travelling to us for as long as we’ve been alive, reaching us now. My birthday star is a faint yellow white to the naked eye on the other side of the equator.
The sky is a time machine and my father’s father doesn’t believe the world is round, until, answering a call to war, he gets on a plane and sees the earth curve and burst into flame.
I give you no birthday, there is no sensible way.
The sky is a time machine; a star’s light takes so long to reach us the sun that created it could already be gone, or be born again. What we see is moments, what we see is history, what we see is the future, starting again.
The sky is a time machine and a voice says wow, aurora, wow, and the wow is ancient and everything and an answering voice in the dark assures us it gets better.
I can still get better, I can change my mind, it’s not yet too late to show someone else – you – the stars. I don’t know their names or your name but what does it matter how we name these wonders? Being able to show you these stars may be exactly the reason for you, a good reason, a perfect reason, this is greater than reason, and I believe.
Wow, the voice of the stranger who is not a stranger says, the sky is a time machine, and I lie on my back in dry, sun-warmed grass, alone but near everything, seeing the galaxy move, watching for shooting stars.
Kilmeny MacMichael writes short fictions, not-fictions and poetry from a small town in western Canada’s Okanagan Valley. She has over thirty works published, including with Allegory, Short Édition and Worlds of Possibility. You may find more through kfmacmichael.ca
