Green Tail, Desert Sky

Your phone buzzes at 2:17 a.m. You’re not asleep; you never are on the first night in a new place, and the little desert motel near the observatory is so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat.

“Meteor just now. Huge one, green tail. I made a wish. Not telling you what it was. …Okay, maybe later.”

You met Tara that afternoon on the observatory tour. She was the one in the dusty boots who forgot the official script halfway through and started explaining, with her hands, how starlight you see tonight left its star before the pyramids were built. Afterward she wrote her number on the back of a star map and said, “If you can’t sleep, the sky’s better than television.”

You type back: Where are you?

Ten minutes later, her old pickup crunches into the motel lot, headlights off, a thermos rattling on the dashboard. She leans across and opens the passenger door. “Get in. You’re missing it.”

She drives you out past the last streetlight, down a gravel road, onto a flat rise where the desert stretches away silver under the starlight. She spreads an old quilt in the back of the truck, hands you a mug of cocoa from the thermos, and lies back beside you with her hands folded behind her head.

And the sky. You’ve never seen anything like it. So many stars it looks like spilled sugar, the band of the galaxy arching from one horizon to the other like a cloud lit from inside.

“That smudge, there,” Tara says, pointing. “That’s another galaxy. A whole one. You’re seeing light that left it two and a half million years ago. Nobody who was alive back then is around to see it arrive. Except you, tonight.” She turns her head on the quilt to look at you. “Does that make you feel tiny or enormous? People always pick one.”

You think about it for a long moment. “Both?” you say. “Like I don’t matter at all, and also like I’m somehow exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Tara is quiet. Then she smiles, slow and soft. “That’s the best answer anyone’s ever given me.”

You talk for an hour. About the town she grew up in where the streetlights hid the stars. About why you came out here. About whether there’s anyone out there looking back. She has an old camera on a tripod pointed at the north sky, taking a long exposure, and every so often she checks it and makes a small happy noise.

Then a streak of fire tears across the sky, bright and green, trailing sparks, so close it seems to fall right over the hills.

You both sit bolt upright. Tara grabs your arm without thinking, and you grab hers back, and for a few seconds you’re just two people gasping at the sky like kids. When it fades, she doesn’t let go immediately.

“Okay,” she says, a little breathless. “That one counts. You have to wish.”

You close your eyes and wish. When you open them, she’s looking at you instead of the sky.

“So,” you say. “Earlier. Your wish. You said maybe later.”

Tara laughs and lies back down, gazing upward. “There’s a meteor shower in three weeks. The best one of the year. A hundred an hour, if the sky stays clear.” She lets the words hang in the cold air. “I’ll tell you what I wished for then. If you’re still here to watch it with me.”