The Night Sky Was Different

By Peter Bowden


They lay on their backs in the grass behind the house, the earth still warm from the day and smelling faintly of cut clover. The boy held his hands on his chest the way he did when he was trying to be still. The man pointed upward, his finger steady against the dark. “There,” he said. “See that thin white line moving slow?” The boy watched it form itself across the sky, not bright like a star, not quick like a plane, but patient, as if it had all the time in the world. The man told him it was the first satellite, something men had put into the sky on purpose. The boy nodded, though he didn’t quite understand how something made by hands could belong up there.

The line kept going, stitching the night together. The boy imagined it passing over oceans, over cities where people were just sitting down to supper or already asleep. He imagined men floating inside it, untethered, their feet never touching anything solid again. He wondered what it would feel like to sleep without weight, to wake and not know which way was down. The stars seemed closer now, as if they had leaned in to listen. The man said space was cold and empty, but the boy didn’t believe him. Anything that held that many stars had to be full of something.

When the white line finally thinned and disappeared, the yard felt suddenly smaller. Crickets took back their places. The man folded his hands behind his head and said nothing more. The boy kept looking, convinced the sky might open again if he watched long enough. He did not know yet how hard it would be to leave the ground, or how rare it was to be invited into wonder like this. He only knew that someday, somehow, he would live up there, if not with his body, then with the part of him that had already learned how to drift.

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