Under the Light (Light #2)

And that's where every ghost story begins, with a death.

He lifted his foot and rested it over my ankle, gently pinning me down.

Then he pointed into the heavens. "Want to go there?"

"Where?"

"That star." He gave his finger an extra stretch toward the dozens of stars in that general direction. "The one by those other two stars."

"What do you mean?" I lifted my arm so it was touching his, our hands and fingers aligned, and pointed. "That one?"

"No," he complained. Then he swiped his fingers across our view of the sky, like he was flicking away a speck of dust or a drop of water, and the night surged forward. The stars, staying perfectly aligned, curved across the sky--time had sped into the future an hour.

I gasped at this and grabbed his hand, pulling it back toward our bodies as if he might accidentally throw the earth off its rotation. The stars slowed again, appearing to have stopped.

"How did you do that?" I whispered.

"I took us somewhere we hadn't been yet," he said. "Forward in time."

He said it so matter-of-factly, but the idea made me shiver on the inside.

"Just a little," he reassured me.

"Thats . . . so cool." I pointed at one particularly bright star and gave it a push with my fingertip in the air. The map of stars glided forward again, constellations staying aligned as they gracefully passed over us, not a long way, just a bit into the tail of the night, an hour or two closer to morning.

He made a sound of alarm, a fake cry, and then laughed, "Here." He lifted his arm to mind, our hands together, our index fingers pointing up. As one, without saying aloud what we would do, we moved the stars a few minutes westward, then froze. "Look what we can do together," he said.

The breeze danced my hair around, tickling my face. The sky was a watercolor of grays and whites and lavenders.

"Somewhere, I thought, there’s a place where this sky touches down to the ground in every direction instead of going behind houses and trees and power lines. And somewhere the grass grows long with no lawn mowers cutting it and it gets dry and brown without sprinklers,

The breeze danced my hair around, tickling my face. The sky was a watercolor of grays and whites and lavenders.

"Somewhere, I thought, there’s a place where this sky touches down to the ground in every direction instead of going behind houses and trees and power lines. And somewhere the grass grows long with no lawn mowers cutting it and it gets dry and brown without sprinklers, and the land is so flat, you can almost see the curve of the earth if you try. (...)
A drop of rain, invisible until just before it hit my throat, startled me. I have no idea why, but I thought it should have passed through me instead of tapping a wet spot on my skin. As another drop struck my cheek and another my wrist, I lifted my arms and stretched my fingers toward the sky. I tried to move that gray cloud out of the way, but I had no power over it. Of course. If I’d ever had powers, I’d lost them. Another drop hit the corner of my eye like a cold tear.".

I sang a folk song I’d sung to my own little girl a hundred times—the one about the rolling river. Soon Jenny’s eyes were closed and her breaths came smooth and far between. Tears had dried on her face in delicate salt lines. Her hair fanned out on one side of the pillow.
“Why are you sad?” I asked her.
I didn’t expect her to answer, but from her throat came the faintest sound of question, as if she hadn’t understood me properly. It gave me a thrill to think she might have actually heard my question in her sleep.
“Why were you crying?” I asked.
Then the faintest sound of regret from deep in her dream. And four words, “I used to fly.”.