ANNE OF FIRESTAR BAY (revision of "At Night, The Children")

At night, Anne waits for the firestars. She sits on her porch, the only lit part of the house, an aluminum bucket full of water and a broom at the ready; she spends hours looking up at the dark dome of night.

She has memorized the names and shapes of all the constellations and can tell planets from stars. The firestars are orange falling stars. She looks out for them, her eyes open through 3 a. m. exhaustion as her parents sleep in their queen-sized beds.

At 4 a. m. the first firestar appears: small and flickering flakes, distant like all the other stars and falling at the pace of an airplane in flight. As time passes, the firestar’s shape becomes more distinguishable: she sees what comprises the heart of the firestar, the black and burning core which emanates fire and has that orange tail. And as it gets even closer to the ground—and this is how she knows if the firestar is going to land anywhere near her house—the crackling sound of fire, like that of wrinkling paper, accompanies the sight of the firestar.

And then, with a soft tap, the firestar lands on the front yard, poofing out a ring of fire small enough for a bucket of water to soak out. If it had landed on the roof, she would have had to climb the ladder, which had been fastened to the wall specifically for this—as have been all ladders in all the houses of Firestar Bay.

As the child of her parents, Anne ensures that the fire is put out before it spreads and consumes the house. She picks up the bucket and the broom, rushes over to the front yard, and pours the water over the burning fire, drowning its last few flames, leaving behind 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. When the firestar has been put out, it is no longer black, but fossil-grey.

She puts the bucket on its side on the ground and, using the broom, sweeps the star into the bucket. She walks back to the house and then puts the star on the porch. The more firestars fall, the more she piles them up on the porch, as the night wears on and eventually makes way for morning. Tonight, she collects fifteen.

When the first rays of the sun appear and the dark blue begins to brighten—that is when she can clean her hands and go back to sleep, not seeing the bucket or the night for another twelve or so hours.

For her parents, the day begins when the sun comes up. They wake up with wide smiles and slip on their morning sandals. They rush down the stairs, almost stumbling over each other, slam the porch door open and see the heap of firestars.

“Look how beautiful they look,” they say to each other.

They then run to their daughter’s bedroom to wake her up.

Mother says: “You are so good at star-gazing!”

Father says: “We wish we could still be children, putting out the fires!”

Mother says: “I miss the smell of the night, the smell of the smoke…”

Father says: “…the contemplation that the solitude allowed!”

Mother says: “If only 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!”

Both say: “Oh, isn’t it wonderful to watch a rain of firestars? We sure are proud of you, dear, for keeping us safe!”

Anne mumbles along, a yes or a no under a sleepy, croaking voice. The parents 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 childhoods and their shared past before quickly blowing at the dried-up stars with their mouths and seeing them disintegrate into the white morning air, so dispersed that they form into nothing, nothing at all, the porch now looking as clean as it will until the next morning. Then they go back inside and have coffee and breakfast together, sipping and chatting in whispers so as not to wake up the girl.

Then they go to work in their cars, which vroom away and leave wakes of black smoke.

Two hours later, the girl wakes up and, with eyes surrounded by black rings, slings a backpack and walks to school, where she will slouch through a day of assignments and lectures.

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

***

At the cafeteria, Anne and the boys eat sandwiches at the table.

“I hate the firestars,” a boy says. All nod along, except Anne. They do not ask her why she doesn’t nod along. But this time, she feels the need to say something.

“But it will end soon,” she says.

All the boys turn their heads, a little befuddled. Perhaps the vagueness of the comment has given it a cosmic dimension that confuses them. She clarifies it.

“Whether we like it or not, it’s going to end soon. And then we’ll be adults who can’t be awake through the night, and we’ll miss it,” she says.

“That’s what my parents always say,” another boy says. “But I’m not going to miss anything made of fire or night.”

The other boys agree and applaud him. All of them, even the girl, have black rings under their eyes.

The girl crosses her arms. “You’ll see it,” she mutters to herself. “It’ll end soon, and you’ll only know that it’s over when you grow up.”

But that night, sitting alone on the porch of her house, after having received forehead-kisses from both her parents, looking at the boy sitting on the porch of the house across the street, looking at all the children sitting on the porches in all the houses she can see from left to right, she thinks that she does not actually like the firestars, but only that she is supposed to like them, and that she is only supposed to like them when they stop. That is, she does not really need to like the firestars right now, she only needs to miss them when she doesn’t see them alive anymore. But all this supposing makes her sick, so instead she lets her thoughts turn to the black night sky, hoping that she won’t fall asleep, because she supposes that it is better for the children to catch the firestars than it is for them to fall asleep and let all the houses go up in flames.

Because if the houses go up in flames, then her parents will die, and if their parents die, then her own children will not have any grandparents.

But if her parents die, she won’t have to hear all this about tradition and the firestars. She won’t have to look out for the firestars at all. Somebody else could do it.

But somebody would always have to do it.

And she never told this to the children. This line of thought she kept to herself. Because she felt that she knew something that was hers in an exclusive way—that was only hers. It was the kind of knowledge, she thought, that would allow her to see the world unfold with more relaxed eyes. She could have rings under her eyes, yes, but she didn’t need to feel all that hate. She could simply look out for the orange dots and have a happiness that nobody else had.