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This week’s prompt: Stars. Stargazing one evening you watch as a bright star disappears. Tell the story either from the perspective of the viewer or the star.
I look at the stars in amazement. The purple-blue light illuminates the smiling faces of my friends. I hear crickets chirping. The sky is beautiful. It seems to go on forever. It looks as if someone took salt and sprinkled it across the sky. I wish that I was up there — no worries, no fears, just floating with the stars.
As I stare at the sky, I see a sparkle out of the corner of my eye. I whip my head in that direction. A star flies across the sky. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The sparkling white star races across the purple-blue sky. It lights up the sky. I smile at its beauty and grace.
It seems like hours that I stare at the beautiful star before it disappears from sight, behind the towering mountains and the green trees. I lie on my back and look at the sky again. The grass feels soft against my bare skin. My eyes drift closed and I slowly slip from reality.
I felt like I was always being watched, compared and ignored. And technically I was right.
I was a star once, one of the brightest, but not nearly bright enough. Every star I knew was an animal once. I was a giraffe.
Who you were determined how bright you became as a star. Some animals chose not to be a star, and decided to go back to Earth as a ghost or a shadow.
I was a star for three years and when every star got brighter, I stayed the same. Soon I started to lose my brightness; I became one of the stars who was only able to be seen at midnight. I knew what was going to happen. I had heard too many stories.
And I remembered too much. My family died in a stampede when I was 5, my mother, my father, my sister and my brother. I was alone for weeks, months, years even, but every night I looked up to the dark sky and I knew that my sister was the brightest one… My sister had saved me. I had been asleep during the stampede.
I was 7 when I was adopted by zebras. They found me sleeping under the pretty tree with small, pink flowers that I loved. They say that they saw me every day sleeping under that tree and after a week they started to wonder where my family was. One day they saw me drinking water from the little pond nearby and asked if they could join me. Soon enough they asked about my family.
In the two years I’d been alone I’d had no interactions, so like any 7-year-old, I lied. I said they were at home making lunch, but then, like any polite zebra family, they asked if they could have me and my family over for lunch. I knew that I couldn’t say no so I cried. I told them everything, the stampede, my sister, the star.
They asked if I wanted to live with them and they would take care of me. I didn’t know if I wanted to or not, but I knew that I was tired of being alone, so I said yes. I moved in the next day. They showed me their huge house and introduced me to their family. I now had a family, a brother, a mother, a dad! I was so happy that I forgot to look up at my sister. … After two weeks passed I remembered that she was still up there, watching and taking care of me. And when I realized, it hit me like a brick.
My sister only stayed a star and got brighter because of people like me who watched her and loved her. I had forgotten about the one who saved my life. …
Read the complete story at youngwritersproject.org/node/9718