Week 6, Theme 4

Prompt: With Firbank, Durrell, Morrison, and Shakespeare in mind, describe a night sky. Use the theme as an occasion for fantasy, for passages of “violet-farded,” “deckle-edged: writing, for impossible perspectives, for mixing the abstract and concrete, for “quibbles” and unfamiliar vocabulary that make your spell check light up. Be sure to use one word you’ve never used before. If you use the sky as a backdrop for some scene or incident, let it be a “luminous vapor” that distracts you and the reader from the action, or takes the place of it, reversing the usual relation between background and foreground. Let your mind and language wander…

Like dots of white on an expansive black sheet, the orbs of light above blinked at me. I lay with Sherry on the blanket, looking up. She tried to catch my attention, but I unhinged my focus from her and instead engaged with the spots in the sky. For what seemed like a quicksand-pace flow of hours, I gazed at the stars as they danced around their apex. Being on a bench in Buffalo rather than somewhere in, perhaps, Greenland, I had to imagine an Aurora Borealis rather than observe one. But, oh, did my imaginary Aurora dance for me among the orbs, ducking here, twisting there, and making her joyful rounds through the creatures of the night sky. She possessed only a nebulous form, but I knew that she was winking at me, flirting with me in an attempt to persuade me to jump into the abyss, the abyss that she had surrendered herself to eons ago. Sherry was a nice girl, I thought, but she was no competition for Aurora, my imaginary sky-lover.

As I watched the stars move and jostle for position in the spaces in close proximity to Aurora, I understood the intense filiopietistic spirit of my native ancestors, those who possessed a closer connection with the land, the earth, the spirits, and, of course, the sky, than I or any of my contemporaries had. Aurora could just as easily be my God as some guy who died in Israel 2,000 years ago; indeed, if Aurora’s purple mist decided to one day send me on a mission to accomplish her night-sky wishes, I would jump to action. But, for now, our love was in the expository phase. I would come to know her even better, perhaps, if I remained in my state for many more impossibly short hours.

*Filiopietistic definition: of or relating to an often excessive veneration of ancestors or tradition (Merriam-Webster)