The Child of the Meteor: Chapter 1

 

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Lynn laid back in the thick grass, whose lush green blades arched upwards, past her ears and settled snugly against her legs. She flicked on the small portable radio that she had propped up to the side of her head. With a crack, the radio fizzed to life, and out came the muffled voice of talk show host Dan Davidson:

“...All you star lovers out there, listen up! Tonight the annual Orionid meteor shower returns to our lovely little planet and boy is it gonna be a show. Astronomers say the peak of the meteor shower is scheduled to begin around eleven thirty tonight and the weather looks to be perfect; nothing but clear skies in every direction. It may be a tad chilly though, so be sure to have your favorite coffee mug at the ready when you head outside. Bring a blanket to a clearing, climb up on a roof, do anything that you need to do get a good view. You may never get an opportunity to see a spectacle as amazing as this on a night so flawless, so let’s make it count, folks. I’ll see you all tonight. Now back to your Sunday tunes…”

Lynn turned down the volume slightly, and stared up at the large, forget-me-not blue sky.

A meteor shower, huh? Lynn mused, Now that’s something. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, I’ll bet I could see every star there is out there in the night sky. But how am I going to get outside? He’s gonna be downstairs in his office until midnight at least, so I’ll need to find another way to -

“Evelyn?” came the distant cry of her father.

She groaned, and quickly turned the volume up to pretend that she hadn’t heard him.

It was a rather pleasant day, though it seemed as though every day was pleasant here. It was always warm, but not too hot, and when it rained, the water would sprinkle down on the world gently. It was almost as if nature was particular to this corner of the earth.

That was the reason, she supposed, why her family had moved out here.

“Evelyn!” came the cry once more, with a trace of worry laced in.

Reluctantly, Lynn flicked off the radio and sat up, “Yeah, Dad?”

At the sound of her voice, Lynn’s father came rushing over. He was a tall, thin man of forty one, dressed in a simple tweed suit with white shirt and red tie. That same jacket he wore every day of the year at his job where worked six days of the week. In many ways that brown jacket had become a part of his skin. The creases aged into the suit bore an uncanny resemblance to the wrinkles aged into his own face.

“I couldn’t find you in the house,” he said, loosening his tie in relief.

“That’s because I wasn’t in the house,” Lynn returned.

“You should leave a note so I know where you’ve gone. If something happened...what if I couldn’t find you in time?”

“I’m fine, Dad.”

“This time perhaps, but not every - look I don’t want to talk about this out here, Evelyn. Can you please just come back to the house? There’s pollen everywhere.”

Lynn, sighing slightly, brushed off her dress and stood up. She collected the radio, and followed her father back to their house just over the hill.

Their house was the only one in sight (the nearest neighbor was two miles down the road) and it overlooked a large field bursting with laurels, daisies, and a healthy population of gophers. The house itself stood at rickety height of two floors, held together by stray two by fours nailed onto the sides. The east “tower,” if it could even be called that, was rented out to one Marley Lavender, an elderly gentlemen who was remarkably content with the state of his arrangements. The house, as haphazard as it may outwardly appear, (indeed the infrequent visitor might regard it as a quilt of amateur architecture tactics) was a house built to last. It was a home built on more than just wood and nails. It was a home built by sweat.

Lynn’s father would often remark that work done through sweat was the most honest work a man could do. “There is a lot of work that a man can fake,” he would say, “but you can’t fake sweat. That is a true measure of a man’s effort.”

As the two entered their home, a dry smell greeted them, along with dust and a noticeable patch of mold by the kitchen sink, whose faucet was periodically dripping. Dirty pots and pans climbed towards the ceiling while cobwebs streaked towards the floor that was littered with scuff marks and old newspapers.

However, neither Lynn nor her father blinked at the scene before them; in fact they did not even break stride. Lynn simply went up to her room on the second floor, with the creaking of the floorboards to mark every step of the way. Her father, retreated to his study on the first floor, where he began to remove files from his briefcase to work on.

If there was any clean room in the house, it was Lynn’s. Her father made sure of it. It was the eye of the storm, a blip of tranquility in a house of disarray. The wooden floors were smooth and polished, the books on her shelf were stacked neatly against one another, and her clothes were either folded in her drawers or deposited into her hamper. Her bed was made, although the crumples of the comforter betrayed Lynn’s haste in the task. Indeed most everything in her room was maintained by a thin, but careful, veil of neatness. Any facet of cleaning was handled with expedius prejudice and remarkable efficiency, as to appease her father with as little amount of energy as possible.

It was as though there was a mirror standing in the threshold of her doorway, and whenever her father opened the door to check on the state of her room, what he saw was a reflection of himself, rather than the true nature of the room. However, as is the nature of mirrors, as Lynn stood before her father, she too saw a reflection of herself. And so, though they were mere feet apart, each would fail to truly regard the other.

At this moment, however, her father was not at Lynn’s door, but working in his office. With the pressure of his presence isolated, Lynn ungracefully flopped onto her bed, kicking off her shoes into the corner.

She glanced up at the clock hanging on her wall.

“Seven forty two,” she sighed. “Four hours to go.”

And so began Lynn’s time whittling routine, perfected from years of diligent practice. While laying on her stomach, Lynn stretched an arm underneath her bed and produced an old jewelry box. It once was bright green, with paintings of rose buds scattered across the sides, a scene not unlike what might greet a visitor to a spring garden. Time had not been kind to the box, and its colors had faded to a dull rust, with the red of the roses barely visible anymore. It was as though the garden had been overcome with weeds. And yet, Lynn tended to the box with care. Rather than uproot the weeds, she chose to water them, and extended the virtues of the garden to the plants that were so often overlooked.

She opened up the box, and pulled out a folded piece of paper from within. She unfolded it carefully and placed it on her pillow. Lynn read it over, pressing her lips together tightly. At first, her eyes slowly traced each line, but as she neared the bottom of the page, her eyes darted quickly from one section to the next, barely taking the time to absorb any of the words.

With a grunt, Lynn went over to her desk, piece of paper in hand. She grabbed a new piece of paper and a pencil, and she began writing furiously. Her pencil streaked across the page in sharp, focused movement as Lynn bit down on her tongue lightly. She wrote with vigor, scrawling until the entire page was covered in tiny words and completed with a signature at the bottom for a finishing touch.

The pencil dropped to the floor as Lynn collapsed backwards in her seat, sighing in relief. A sudden pressure was lifted from her jaw as her teeth unclamped from her tongue. Her hand went to her mouth and she pressed a knuckle to her lips.

There was blood on her hand.

Lynn blinked a few times, and then wiped her hand on her shorts.

She folded the page in half, then in half again, and then half one final time. The new piece of paper was placed inside the jewelry box, and the original one was thrown into the top drawer of her desk, which already contained a pile of unfolded papers.

The clock now read 8:12. Exactly a half hour had passed, as usual. For the next half hour, Lynn paced back and forth. Then she read “Wind, Sand, and Stars,” picking up from where she had last folded the corner of the page. This was followed by laying on her bed imagining what it would be like to be Amelia Earhart. Then came the drawings of “The Canary” and “The Spirit of St.Louis.” Then these drawings were folded up into paper airplanes and thrown around the room until their noses were bent so thoroughly that they would promptly nose dive into the floor the instant they left Lynn’s hand.

By the time it was nearly eleven, Lynn thoughts began to drift back to the meteor shower.

There’s no way I can get out through the front door, she thought. I’ll have to use the window. Lynn peered out her window, and saw how the roof of the first floor came out underneath. It was only a short drop down. Then a much larger drop to the ground, but she figured that the ground was soft enough.

At eleven thirty, Lynn scrambled over to her dresser, pulled on a pair of black pants, an oversized sweater, and then grabbed her favorite pair of sneakers. She threw open her desk drawer and snatched out a flashlight, flicking it on twice to check the batteries, and then turned toward the window.

As she slid down the roof, Lynn could hear the muffled voice of her father in his study. Her heart rose to her throat. Lynn poked her head over the edge of the roof and stole a glance inside the window below.

Her father sat with his back to the window, with his tweed jacket cast carelessly in the corner. He was sorting through a thick pile of envelopes slowly, placing some into a pile on the left side of his desk, and the rest into the bottom right drawer. After a few moments, he ran his hands through his hair, sighing deeply

Lynn, holding her breath tight in her chest, inched over the edge of the roof, hanging by her fingertips. Then she let go, and dropped the last few feet to the ground silently. Her father didn’t even turn around.

With a grin plastered across her face, Lynn took off into the night. The wind rushed over her ears and her jet black hair trailed out behind her, free and flowing like smoke. The grass brushed up to her knees and the ground squished beneath her feet. The fields stretched out for miles, and then were swallowed up by the nothingness of the sky.

Lynn flopped down on her back and saw the majesty of the stars unfold before her eyes. It was as though there was a giant sheet of black paper blocking an equally giant lamp, and someone had taken a toothpick and poked thousands of tiny little holes in the paper to let some light through. They winked and turned and twinkled down from above, some brighter than others but all of them spectacular.

Without warning a bright dot streaked across the sky and vanished as suddenly as it appeared. Lynn, who was gazing over in a different corner of the sky, turned her head only to see a brief trail of smoke left behind way up high. She groaned and pulled at her cheeks and waited for another. The next meteor appeared twenty minutes later, as Lynn was rolling around in the grass. She caught the flash of light out of the corner of her eye and jerked upright just as the meteor blinked out of sight. After making a few strange sounds of distress, Lynn rubbed her eyes hard and stared out into the nothingness.

The sky twinkled down from above tauntingly for another eleven minutes, and then it happened. Then came the first meteor that Lynn ever saw. It wasn’t as large of a streak as the other two, but it burned bright and it shot out like a bullet, slicing a swath of light across the sky. Lynn’s eyes widened to fit the wonders wonders of the cosmos in her sight. Her body became very still.

One after another they came, slicing across the night, unfolding their beauty before all who simply bothered to look up. There is nothing quite so sad as ignorance, for all those who did not know sat inside, missing the most spectacular night of their lives. It is not unlike one who goes to a fabulous French restaurant and eats so much bread that they are too full to have the main course.

The meteors fell for nearly two hours. As they began to peter out, Lynn slowly stood up. She felt numb inside, warm and intrigued and delighted and confused and awed all wrapped up into one numb feeling that made her fingertips tingle.

Suddenly the world began to fill with light and tremble.

A final meteor, flaming red in a ferocious blaze, rocketed across the sky, getting larger, and larger. There was a thunderous boom and the ground shook beneath her feet as the meteor plummeted down into the forest less than a mile away.

Lynn’s feet became rooted in the dirt. She cast a look back at her house, dimly lit off in the distance, and then turned back towards the smoldering forest. Curiosity had been lit in her soul, and like a magnet it pulled at her, dragging her away from the world that had been built around her.

Once her right foot lifted off the ground, the curiosity burned ever brighter and the magnet pulled ever harder. She darted off toward the blazing smoke billowing from beyond the distant trees, leaving the world she knew in the dust.  

She switched on the flashlight as she started into the forest, branches crunching underfoot. The forest was dense, and Lynn slowly made her way through, wheezing as she hurtled over logs, ducked under low hanging branches and scrambled along the trunks of fallen trees.

She could smell the smoke now. Flames were rising just beyond the trees, blazing through the gaps in the leaves.

Lynn grabbed a branch and pulled herself up into a tree, climbed a few feet higher, and then looked down at the scene below. What used to be just another part of the forest was now a  clearing, a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. Sitting at the end, among trees and roots alike tossed aside like rubbish, was an odd, spherical rock.

Inconceivably, beyond any sense of reason, there was a person on the meteor.

With a shriek Lynn fell out of the tree, slamming down on the ground hard. Heart pounding in her throat, she peered closer at the rock; a small boy, no older than herself, dressed in peculiar red pants and blue overcoat, laid curled on his side, knees tucked into his chest tightly. With his bleach blond hair and rounded cheeks, he looked like a sleeping baby, wholly oblivious to the destruction about him. Flames were closing in around him on all sides, forming a ring of fire.

Lynn’s stomach clenched and she doubled over, coughing so hard she thought she would vomit. She weakly lifted her head and shouted something indistinguishable at the boy on the meteor.

The boy did not stir.

Lynn, now back on her feet, was breathing heavily. She ran her hands through her hair, looking panickedly all around.  

The flames drew closer.  

She clenched her fists so hard that it felt as though her veins would burst, and then she leapt down onto the rock. Walls of red enclosed her, and the heat pressed down on her heavily. She could taste the smoke, it filled her lungs and choked her from the inside.

Lynn slung the boy across her shoulder, but it was too late, the fire was around the entire rock. She was trapped.

The world began to dissolve into darkness, and the trees above started swirling. Lynn fell to the ground slowly, as though underwater. The last thing she heard before everything turned black was her name, solemn and resounding.

“Lynn.”