Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

Change one thing and everything changes.

It was comforting, somehow, sitting beside the small boy who was able to navigate their precise location in the vastness. The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable,

seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.

Everything is connected. No beginning and no end. But

if the parents insist on waiting for a miracle that will never come—whose death will forever be a stain on the souls of his children.