The boy looked up at the sky, and the stars spread all over. Memories flooded back of days when he would spend hours with his mother on the terrace as she told him all about the tiny bright dots in the night sky.
“That is the great bear.” his mother said, tracing a jagged line in the sky.
“That does not look like a bear,” he protested.
His mother laughed. “I knew you would say that,” she said, “that is why I came prepared.”
She opened her office bag and pulled out a plastic sheet with ‘Big Bear’ written on it. I had the image of a bear, and she held the sheet against the night sky. The stars aligned neatly against the points on the sheet.
“It looks like a curved dagger to me,” the boy said, hoping to put up a fight. His mother had laughed, and he laughed with her.
The sound of her laughter was all he had in his memory. He looked at the crumpled newspaper in his hand. The headlines in bold letters declared, ‘Brilliant astronomer dies in a tragic accident.’ The boy kicked the newspaper away, tears rolling down his cheeks.
He looked up and saw all the stars his mother had shown him. He saw the belt of Orion, Taurus, Gemini. They were all there in the same spot, all looking at him.
The boy stared for a long time and then wiped his tears.
“I will become an astronomer like mother,” he said and began connecting the dots in the sky.