Light Fantastic

Through the viewfinder the sky is black – the stars are missing. Nowhere to be found. She fiddles with the focus, takes her eye from the eye piece, scans the sky, making sure she is pointing in the right direction. There is only one direction and she’s on it. She hunkers down again, her breath carefully flumed away so as not to steam up the lens. Be patient.

After a few moments her eyes detect photons randomly finding their way through millennia through the barrel of the telescope. She sees stars begin to pop out of the blackness, pop bright like the eye of a tiger, pop like signals from a whale in distress. She wonders if the light feels weary after the distance it has travelled, worn down by storm clouds, frazzled by lightning strikes, and is happy to rest on the retina of her eye, happy to be absorbed into the swirls and eddies of her iris. Do they know, these errant photons, one blink and they’re gone?