Nova

Nova

One night, most nights, I climb out the window and up the fire escape and out onto the roof and lay there, cool tar-and-gravel on my back, and pick little stars out of the milky sky.

A few I know- Aldebaran, Rigel, Algol, the Pleiades, winking back at me as they pause for breath in their dance- they are big and bright and old and tired, and they are my familiars, the ones my book tells me might well be dead already and I'd never know because I'm only looking and light crosses the heavens like a swarm of sullen bees.

The book tells me if one of those feeble giants bites it, it dies so bright the old star-namers called its ruin nova, new, because that's the kind of light that should only come from creation, but really it's just a dying spasm, a cosmic shudder before the light goes out or goes infinite- final push against the crushing pull of heart-iron-

I flick at a mosquito that lands on my arm, and it flies away gorged with blood. I thoughtlessly smear the red bead it leaves behind on my pants. There's a crick in my neck and my eyes are grainy with fatigue, but I don't move. Hush. I'm watching stars die.

It's the great ones, the luminous ones, that burn out first and fly apart, forging dust in their wrack, and the book tells me that's what I am- full of burnout stardust like a rain-wet phoenix, clay and mud that won't catch fire to rise again, iron-blood that killed my makers sneaking through my flesh with every heartbeat.

That must be why I feel so heavy.

The sky's as dark as it's going to get, since the city oozes light enough to shroud the little red stars that burn forever, almost- drown them out until only giants remain and it's a damn shame I've never seen the constant little things or named them, since they'd keep their names far longer.

A brilliant flash, and I think for a second I've seen lightning, but it doesn't drain away. Is that a meteor? It can't be. Meteors don't linger and they don't burn like a thousand Venuses huddled together, and I shiver because I know.

A radiant splotch where Betelgeuse used to be, Orion's arm smeared out into a luminous mass, blinding. I watched him die, tear himself apart from inside. It was his nature to burn, to scream out his agony to the heavens and the earth, and tomorrow the world will sing his eulogy.

I'm too tired to watch him burning, so I pull myself back down, back into bed, and I drift apart.