The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.

Thinking that maybe we were indeed the sport of the stars. With their invisible silks, they tugged us this way and that.

At any rate, let’s not waste time on ruminations and regrets in the middle of a pandemic.

I’d never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing.

The old world was changed utterly, dying on its feet, and a new one was struggling to be born.