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One sultry moonless night after dinner she walked down alone to the wooden pier. A motorboat had just gone by, and her uncle's rowboat tethered to the dock was softly bobbing in the starlit water. Apart from distant cicadas and an almost subliminal shout echoing accross the lake, it was perfectly still. She looked up at the brilliant spangled sky and found her heart racing. Without looking down, with only her outstretched hand to guide her, she found a soft patch of grass and laid herself down. The sky was blazing with stars. There were thousands of them, most twinkling, a few bright and steady. If you looked carefully, you could see faint differences in color. That bright one there, wasn't it bluish? She felt again for the ground beneath her; it was solid, steady...reassuring. Cautiously she sat up and looked left and right, up and down the long reach of lakefront. She could see both sides of the water. The world only looks flat, she thought to herself. Really it's round. This is all a big ball... turning in the middle of the sky...once a day. She tried to imagine it spinning, with millions of people glued to it, talking different languages, wearing funny clothes, all stuck to the same ball. She stretched out again and tried to sense the spin. Maybe she could feel it just a little. Accross the lake, a bright star was twinkling between the topmost branches. If you squinted your eyes you could make rays of light dance out of it. Squint a little more, and the rays would obediently change their length and shape. Was she just imagining it, or...the star was now definitely above the trees. Just a few minutes ago it had been poking in and out of the branches. Now it was higher, no doubt about it. That's what they meant when they said a star was rising, she told herself. The Earth was turning in the other direction. At one end of the sky, behind her, beyond the cabins, the stars were setting. That way was called West. Once every day the Earth would spin completely around, and the same stars would rise again in the same place. But if something as big as the Earth turned once a day, it had to be moving ridiculously fast. Everyone she know must be whirling at an unbelievable speed. She thought she could now actually feel the Earth turn--not just imagine it in her head, but really feel it in the pit of her stomach. It was like descending in a fast elevator. She craned her neck back further, so her field of view was uncontaminated by anything on Earth, until she could see nothing but black sky and bright stars. Gratifyingly, she was overtaken by the giddy sense that she had better clutch the clumps of grass on either side of her and hold on for dear life, or else fall up into the sky, her tiny tunbling body dwarfed by the huge darkened sphere below. She actually cried out before she managed to stifle the scream with her wrist. That was how her cousins were able to find her... Back to Literature |
