The Wound

Stars are fires flung across an indifferent dark. Each burns alone. Your hand rises before you tell it to. This fire to that one. You name the shape: a hunter drawing his bow, a bear circling the pole, a serpent rising in the south. The stars do not move, but the tremor leaves your hand. Beneath your hand, scattered fires resolve. In the pattern, direction. In the direction – home.

The Path

You want the pattern to have been there already. The stars hang above, offering nothing. Yet you drew. You named. You chose. Ten thousand years ago, someone shivering looked up. Two fires became shoulders. A third – a drawn bow. Every generation since has steered by that hunter. That hand was no different from yours. You draw a line. By morning, something exists that did not exist before. What you draw is not true the way stone is true. It is true the way promises are true: because you will steer by it.

The Shadow

The Reverent drew once. Seven stars – her forehead, her eyes, the four points of the smile she kept for him alone. He showed his father. His father looked. There's nothing there. The son looked again, trying to unsee what he'd drawn. The stars were there but the face had dissolved. His father was right. The night his father died, he tried to find him in the sky too. The stars stared back. They would not hold. Even at the end, his finger raised. One star. Then another. But never seven. ❖ The Measured watched a captain steer by a constellation her grandfather had drawn. She watched the ship break on rocks the stars no longer named. Since then, she catalogues. Every pattern, its error. Every line, its drift. Some nights her hand rises against her will. Her eye catches two stars, then a few more – the memory of her mother's hands, taking shape. The line wants to close; the name waits on her tongue. But the stars, she knows, have already moved. She dies amongst her charts. Hand frozen mid-reach. One star short of her mother's name.

The Cut