The Night You Stole the Stars

You push open the door of the last video store in America and the bell jingles like an echo raised from a dead decade. The scent of plastic cases and carpet dust wraps around you, familiar as a half remembered dream. BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO glows above the counter, although half its letters remain dark. BLO K ER lingers there like a cryptic message left behind by a vanishing world.

The fluorescent lights buzz above you and send uneven shadows across movie posters that have clung to the walls since a time when everything seemed infinite. The carpet has thinned to the weave and your footsteps barely whisper as you move past the snack rack where the popcorn bags have all expired.

The air carries the scent of VHS tape mold and the faint residue of countless Friday nights. Your fingers skim the cases in the horror section and the cardboard edges feel worn from years of eager hands. This place feels holy or perhaps simply haunted.

You have always chased the last breaths of fading things. The weary neon of a diner that claims it will shut its doors next month and keeps promising the same thing for years. The lone paperback abandoned on a bus seat with pages softened by strangers. This store with its slack shelves and lost VHS nostalgia fits neatly into that list. Yet you never come for the tapes.

You come because this is where you hid them.

The night you stole the stars the sky fell silent and empty and no one sensed the change except you. The city kept moving. Headlights carved through fog. Neon signs blinked. Laughter drifted from bars with the weight of restless ghosts. The ocean forgot its rhythm and clocks wandered without purpose. No one remembered to look up. Above you where constellations once gathered there was only a hollow sweep of black that echoed through you.

Somewhere a radio tried to play a Top Forty hit from twenty years ago and the notes wavered as if caught between memory and static. It sounded like the world was trying to remember itself.

You cannot recall your reason. Weariness perhaps. The stars had always floated with a kind of distant pride and you felt the pull of something unclaimed. You wanted to hold a piece of the untouchable for one night. You wanted to take the universe inside you and keep it quiet.

You kneel in the back aisle and pry up the loose floorboard with your fingernails. In the small space beneath the boards where dust has settled and darkness gathers, the stars pulse with faint light. You once captured them the way a child might seize fireflies in a glass jar. Their glow has thinned over time. They were never made for possession. They were never meant to be left behind either.

Your knees press into the rough floor and the musty air stings your nose. For a moment you expect a rat to run from the shadows as if startled by your return.

The clerk coughs. The television in the corner plays Be Kind Rewind with the volume lowered to nothing.

You lift one star from the hiding place. Its cool surface hovers against your palm and the weight feels lighter than breath although your ribs still ache beneath it. You consider setting them free. You imagine the roof beneath your feet and the morning wind against your skin while you throw each star into the waiting sky like a strange confession.

You choose otherwise.

You tuck the star into your pocket with the others and the glow rests against your ribs as if it wants to say something you refuse to hear. Your steps drag as you pass the clerk who never raises his eyes and the flickering BLO K ER sign trembling above the counter.

Dawn rises with pale light that spills into pink and gold and the sky stays empty. It remains yours.

You drive. The stars hum inside your pocket and the soft vibration moves through your ribs.

The streets lie vacant except for a payphone that buzzes with static and a cat that slips between puddles. You lower the window and breathe the cold morning air and nothing inside you shifts.

Somewhere a child asks about the dark sky. Somewhere a phone rings in a hollow house. Somewhere the ocean moves against the shore as if waiting for a name.

You keep moving.

You keep your eyes forward.

-fin.