Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-07-17 16:33:00 |
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When Rosario was a kid, the night sky seemed like a magical place. Her imagination would populate it with a menagerie of shimmering-bright creatures, dragons and winged horses, bears and eagles and swans, animal friends built on the asterisms and scraps of legend she’d gleaned from children’s astronomy books. On oppressive nights when sleep wouldn’t come she’d creep up to the roof and pick out their familiar shapes in the sky, telling herself stories about their adventures till her eyelids grew heavy. All through the sweltering summer she would add to the stories, and where her patchy reading failed her, she’d fill the gaps in the sky with people from her own life. The ‘W’ of Cassiopeia became her family, a jagged line that might as easily be a bolt of lightning as a fracture. Aquila was Rosario’s, a bird with wings outstretched flying up to meet its swooping twin (which turned out to be Lyra’s namesake constellation, in a symmetry she hadn’t even been aware of back then – one of those perfect coincidences that border on the unbelievable but seem to happen all the time when Lyra’s involved). It’s the most human thing in the world, really, gazing up into the sky and wanting to join the dots. Pareidolia is the technical term for it, a little quirk of evolution that inclines the human brain to find familiar shapes and patterns in random visual stimuli. The hunter-gatherer who’s able to distinguish lurking threats in the shadows, tell friend from foe or recognise signs of aggression is the one most likely to thrive. Natural selection does the rest, and so we wind up with generations of humans finding animals among the stars, faces in the clouds and the baby Jesus in a piece of toast. It was not so long after Rosario learned the word – she was in middle school by this point – that she learned that not everybody found concepts like pareidolia and precession of the equinoxes as revelatory as her. The words ‘smartass’ and ‘killjoy’ got a lot of play. And yeah, she gets it now, she was a know-it-all kid and nobody likes being lectured at. (Especially when they’re wrong.) Killjoy, though. That one still gets under her skin, on the rare occasions it’s flung at her. Knowledge and clarity bring Rosario joy. They don’t spoil the magic of the night sky, they only add to it. Knowing that Aquila isn’t an enchanted star-bird at all, but a constellation filled with rich starfields and nebulae and star clusters and galaxy filaments— that makes it better. And it doesn’t stop her heart from lifting when the Summer Triangle arrives on the horizon in Spring, Lyra and Aquila glittering side-by-side. And it doesn’t stop her from looking to Cassiopeia for reassurance when things get shaky at home, when Camino’s giving her the stone-cold silent treatment (again) or Dad’s trying to make good with his parents (again) and it’s going predictably awful or Abuela’s dipped into the rent money (again) because Maritza’s son-in-law’s brother got picked up by ICE and they gotta pay for a lawyer— every time, she can look to the sky and find Cassiopeia, six stars in a messy, imperfect line, just like the six of them, messy and imperfect but still there. There’s nothing supernatural about it, but it’s a comfort. The air tonight is stifling, sticky and humid even with her window cracked open, and it’s brought her back to her old nighttime haunt. Stretching back on concrete still radiating the heat of the day, Rosario pillows her arms behind her head and raises her face to the stars. They’re all there waiting for her: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, Big and Little Dipper curling towards one another; Cassiopeia, a crooked crown still holding together; Pegasus swooping across the eastern sky; and there, dead above, the Summer Triangle, Altair, Vega and Deneb. Altair shining at the head of Aquila, Vega blazing at the tail of Lyra. Rosario smiles at them sleepily as a wave of drowsiness sweeps over her. Her vision ripples, blurs. Lyra’s eagle dives, a guitar clutched in its beak, and from this height it’s impossible to tell whether she’s swooping or being dragged down by the weight, but blood glistens wet on her wingtips (her fingertips are bleeding, ask her ask her ask her why her fingertips are bleeding), and Aquila surges up (does she see?), but Sagitta hangs suspended between them, a luminous golden arrow tipped with a burning coal— but there’s Hercules standing tall and steady at Lyra’s right side, hand outstretched to take the guitar, and Cygnus alights on the left, a sweetly-smiling swan-lady, and it’s fine, it’s fine. (But the blood— the arrow—) The arrow. It cuts a blazing arc across the sky toward the eastern horizon (don’t look don’t look you won’t like where it lands), but when Rosario tries to trace its path she finds herself squinting against the sunrise, an untimely, unwanted intruder— the Sun, so small and unremarkable on the cosmic stage, yet at this proximity it overpowers everything— it’s blinding— The dream (she’s sure, afterward, that it was a dream) collapses in a tumble of confused images, and she falls into a proper doze, stirring when her arms begin to ache. Rosario winces, stretches, shrugs off the dream as easily as a bird shaking water from its feathers. By morning, she’ll have forgotten all about it. There is magic in the sky, but one has to be able to see it to make use of it. |