A Black Star

The stars are going out. No, I'm not plagerising historic Doctor Who. And no, I'm not lying. They really are going out. Our sun, in fact, when it exploded—not by itself, by the by—pushed us through space, so fast, so hard, we fell into orbit around a black star. Who knew there were such things, right?

And we didn't freeze. I think that's the most magnificiant thing about it—we did not freeze. We didn't even get cold. We dug. We dug so far into the ground that we became so close to the magma it was always warm.

I heard New Zealand just made larger hot springs and covered the area in a dome. They were the lucky ones, to still be able to see the sky.

But that was a long long time ago, now. And we are comfortably living on the surface, circling a black star.

A black star? It gives heat. It just don't project light. So the sky is always so clear—we found so many more stars by landing here.

But it also means we can see when they go out more clearly.

Looking into the same sky for year and decades and centuries, you begin to know your sky very well. When one went missing, we noticed. And then slowly others began disappearing.

There are still many stars left, but the way my parents tell it, there were once so many more.  Now we wondering, will the black star go out?

We can't see black stars. If a star disappears and then reappears again, we wonder if it's a black star in the way, but we can't be sure it's not a planet or another obstruction.

I wish I knew for certain. I wish I could say, the star will never go out and we are always going to be safe. But I can't, and I don't want to say anything if it's not true.

When night falls, it is now common practice, in fact it's almost programmed into our bodies; we lie down on the grass in the parks and in our yards and look up at the stars. We count them. We find the constellations we recongise and the star signs we know should be there.

We look for changes, both the expected ones and unexpected ones. Unexpected ones, you know straight off; the city cries out in anguish. Almost rippling from the first peron that saw it to the city limits.

Once there was something called electricity and that made the stars dull. I can't imagine a world that made the stars dull—they are our guiding light.

I suppose you want to know how we know when night is? It's not scientific, really; not like the historic days—the temperature drops rapidly and we need to go underground. It is still warm there, and we can sleep peacefully. Sometimes it's hard to wake up. But we always do, because we can't imagine not seeing the stars and waiting for that moment, that space of time, each night, where we look up at them and count and wonder.

Our sun was taken away, and we are hiding from what did it. A dark spot in space is the best place.