THE MAN WHO STOLE THE STARS
BY ABIGAIL EDGE
The night was clear and bright as Joe Solitair closed up the automobile garage where he worked and
put the keys into the pocket of his oil-stained overalls. The shop had been busy with customers and
he was keen to get home having lost track of time tinkering with the fan belt on a rusty green Ford, a
favourite pastime. A youngish, tallish, thinish man with a mop of mousy hair that never quite sat right
on his head, Joe had a face that might once have been handsome had he not deprived it of the
pleasure and company of others. Yet pausing outside the moonlit forecourt to hold a match to a handrolled cigarette, Joe was for the first time stuck by the glittering radiance of the sky.
The stars gleamed like new pieces of silver scattered on a velvet cloth, like jewelled sea
crustaceans clinging to a dark rock. A celestial swarm spiralled across the sky, like a firework frozen
in motion, a mass of innumerable night-lights, beneath the breast of the full moon.
In the garage forecourt gasoline-topped puddles made rainbows on the wet tarmac strewn with
abandoned till receipts and empty cellophane wrappers from the Snappy Snack vending machine. A
cool breeze blew the long thin match flame closer to Joe's dirty fingernails as he stood and smiled a
strange and unusual smile. Then reaching upwards and taking it by the utmost corner, he peeled
away the starry night as one might a sheet of wallpaper. He did this in the same way that a nature
enthusiast might pluck an unusual and perfectly formed flower from its bed of grass and press it
between two sheets of blotting paper. With both hands, as though holding a large map, Joe folded up
the sky, square by square, and put it in the pocket of his blue overalls. Where the night had been was
now vast and vacuous, a vague and colourless oblivion. That is what nothing looks like, Joe thought
to himself and continued on his way home, the stars chiming in his pocket at every step.
The astronomer in the planetarium on the verge of making some weighty cosmological discovery
lowered her telescope and blinked in surprise. Gone were the asteroids and satellites and galaxies
that she had observed mere moments earlier. Groping around for her spectacles the astronomer put
them on and peered into the gloaming with uncertainty. "How extraordinary," she murmured, reaching
for her logbook.
On board The Explorer, far from shore, the mariner frowned up from his nautical almanac and
scratched his great beard with the sharp end of an astrocompass. The ship was dark and most of the
crew asleep. "What do you see from there?" he shouted upwards to the crow's nest where a rattylooking man stood framed against the empty sky.
"Nothing captain," floated down the thin reply. "Nothing, but nothing."
The mariner cursed and stared out across the vast, directionless sea.
A flock of swallows flew in perfect formation on their annual southern exodus. The bird at the head of
the crest led the others in a large, sweeping circle, then repeated the motion before coming to a stop
without warning mid-air. The sudden change caused several near-collisions and the neat V began to
zigzag haphazardly across the sky. Hovering in confusion the swallows flapped blindly as they
searched for some celestial clue to their co-ordinates and found nothing in the hollow shell of the sky.
The birds flew on in search of a place to rest for the night, passing as they did a willow on the banks
of a river where two lovers lay loose-limbed and half hidden beneath the mossy boughs.
"How much is it that you love me?" asked the one, stretching coquettishly on the soft grass.
"For you my love is immense and immeasurable as the stars," the other assured, for he knew
they were many miles from the impairing fumes of the nearest motorway and was so sure there would
be many in sight.
Lying there entwined on the grass beneath the willow beside the river the pair looked into the sky
above and saw: precisely nothing.
The astrologer in his cabin of tarot and runes sat at a table strewn with star charts and mystic
paraphernalia. "The stars forecast a promising future," he said to the anxious-looking woman before
him. "I sense you are searching for something or someone which has so far eluded you. Venus in
Saturn indicates an unexpected visit, any day now – "
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Absentmindedly the astrologer gestured his ring-laden fingers toward the window and paused openmouthed. His customer followed his eyes to the place where the sky used to hang, gaping starless
and void.
"I want back my money," she announced.
In a small one-room apartment above a utility shop, Joe Solitair was preparing for bed. He ate a light
supper of burnt toast and onions, smoked one of his hand-rolled cigarettes and removed his shirt and
overalls, slinging them over a low wooden chair. The stars fell out of the overall pocket with the sound
of breaking glass. Dusting them off, Joe turned out the bare electric bulb and smiled that peculiar
smile as he held the sky in both hands and unfolded it. From his armchair across the way a neighbour
saw the filmy blue glow radiating from Joe's window and wondered what it could be. Sitting in his grey
underpants Joe held his breath at the starry, starry night spread upon his bed, the reflection of its
many constellations glimmering on his bare walls like rare and precious gemstones in a ragged
cardboard box. Joe's face shone with second-hand light. Folding up the stars carefully, crease by
crease, square by square, Joe placed them beneath his pillow and got into bed. That night he slept a
torrent of strange and tormented dreams.
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© Abigail Edge, 2006.
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