AT NIGHT, THE CHILDREN

At night, the children wait for the firestars. They sit on their porches or on their porch steps, each with an aluminum bucket full of water by his or her side, spending hours looking up at the sky. Many come to memorize the names and shapes of all the constellations and can tell planets from stars. And of course, they have wished upon many a falling star, mostly for sleep. The firestars are falling stars, in their own way, of course. But they are different, primarily because they are orange. And it is the dim speckles of orange that the children look out for, their eyes open through 3am exhaustion.

The firestars appear first as small and flickering flakes, so high up and moving so slowly that they look like flaming 707 airplanes. As they come down—they do not drift down like leaves, they dart down, like bombs—and get closer, their shapes become more distinguishable: one can see what comprises the heart of the firestar, the black and burning star, surrounded by the fire it produces, the fire that surrounds the star and also gives the firestar its orange-red wake. And as it gets even closer to the ground—and this is a child’s main way of telling if the firestar is going to land anywhere near the child’s house—the crackling sound of fire, like that of wrinkling paper, accompanies the firestar, the firestar which is about the size of a human head.

And then, with a soft tap, a little paf, the comet lands on the ground, creating a ring of fire small enough for a bucket of water to soak out.

If the firestar lands on the front yard or on the backyard or on the roof, it is the child’s job to assure that the fire be put out before it spreads out and consumes the house. So the child picks up the bucket and pours the water over the burning fire, thus putting out last breaths of the firestar, drowning its last few flames, leaving behind what was once the head of the blistering comet: a wrinkled-up, ashen, and paper-textured star, its five triangular legs curled up, like the head and arms and legs of a baby in the fetal position.

The child then puts the bucket on its side on the ground and, using a broom, sweeps the star into the bucket. He walks back to the house and then puts the star in the porch floorboards. The more firestars fall, the more they get heaped up on the porch, the child piling them up as the night goes on and eventually makes way for morning.

When the first rays of sunshine appear and the dark blue begins to brighten—that is when the weary child can go back to sleep and not see the bucket or the night until the next night.

And this is how nights are for the children of Firestar Bay.

For the parents, the day begins when the sun has come up. They wake up with wide smiles and slip on their morning sandals. If their room is in the second story of the house, then they rush down the stairs, almost stumbling over each other—such is their ecstasy as they slam the porch door open and see—oh yes! The heap of firestars! Look how beautiful they look when they are dead, they say to each other, there, dried-up and piled on the porch.

Then, beaming with pride, they wake up their children, who had gone to sleep a few hours before.

“You are so good at star-gazing!” they say.

“I wish I could still be a child, putting out the fires! I miss the smell of the night, the smell of the smoke, the contemplation that the solitude allowed!” a dad says.

“If I could only stay up late without worry of performing badly in my job the next day, I would surely stay up with you and gaze at the sky!” a mother says.

“Oh, isn’t it wonderful to watch a rain of firestars?” they both ask.

“Isn’t it wonderful to watch them when they are alive? It is so sad for us, to only see them when they are dead. But it is what we can have! And we sure are proud of it, and proud of you, dear child, for keeping us safe!”

The child, if the child awakens, mumbles along, a yes or a no or something indecipherable under a sleepy, croaking voice. The parents just nod and nod and nod and go back outside to look at the heap of dried-up firestars on their front porch with doting eyes, holding each other’s hands and remembering their beautiful childhood and their shared past before quickly blowing at the dried-up stars with their mouths and seeing them disintegrate into the white morning air, becoming ashes so disperse that they are nothing, nothing at all, the porch now looking as clean as it ever did.

And then they go to work in their cars, which vroom away trailing smoke.

Two hours later, the child wakes up with eyes surrounded by black rings, to go to school.

Firestar season lasts August to May. During the summer vacation, no firestars fall, and the children are free to play at night and to run around with their friends. But what most children do, at least for the first few weeks of summer, is sleep, because summer is the only time that they can dream.