Day 48 - The Stars

 THE STARS

Prompt - The Stars : Take inspiration from a night sky.  Or write about a time when "the stars aligned" in your horoscope

He lay back, arms outstretched, on the dark slope that would lead him back to the hostel, when the world stopped spinning.  The others had gone on, each in their own dimension, each hoping their two feet remembered how to walk.  It had been a good night.

Above him the stars shone in a clear sky, and he pondered their intensities and patterns and meanings.   While he had no patience for the nonsense of astrology, he did know that the sight before him was an influence on his life, and that of his planet.  It's broad expanse widened the mind, tickled curiosity into action, and fired imagination to shoot out in bewildering shots of light.

At a simple physical level there was the power of our moon's gravity on the oceans, or the ever present, albeit low, risk of some stray rock or ice hitting into the planet's atmosphere.  Beyond that the urge to know something about the neighbours, a fascination and conjecture and fictional horrors of Venus and Mars and beyond.  And beyond that?  Suns, planetary systems, satellites, black holes, asteroid conglomerations, and maybe, somewhere, life.  So much was known, so much more unknown.  So much open to a mind that could take an inherent daftness and spin stories that left reality behind and formed their own universe.  

he laughed out loud.  One star kept winking at him, like a signal.  Clearly a spacecraft in distress, it's journey disrupted by a faulty toaster that had overloaded the circuits and set off the emergency systems.  Clearly.  They would be seeking a landing on the nearest oxygen rich planet, time for repair work, time to explore, time to what the locals had to offer.  

He would help them.  He would tell their tale.  Met with the violent instincts of humanity they would use laughter as their primary defensive weapon.  They would find friends and take them off to another galaxy, to true civilisation, away from the primitives they'd found.  

It was a struggle to get up.  Took four attempts, and by the time he succeeded dawn was creeping in behind him.  But he was happy.  Delirious stupidly, rantingly so.  He shared his news with everyone at the hostel, earning a new low point in the esteem of his fellow man.  So what?  he was going to write a book.