Painting the Heavens: The Leonid Meteor Shower - Illusion - 2001.11.18

I was at work when my mother sent me an instant message, asking me to please wake her at five for the meteors. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I said sure, "if I'm still up."

Driving home at four through thick patches of fog, I wondered if it would even be worth it to rouse my mother. With this much condensation in the air, clouds would probably block any view of these meteors. And even ignoring that fact, it wasn't like we were going to drive out into the country to view them: we were most likely going to step into our front yard and try to squint past the glow of the streetlights and the city behind the house into a not-so-dark sky.

I arrived home and went about my usual business of getting ready for bed. At around 4:45, I decided I was tired and that I would like to go to sleep. It was probably too cloudy and bright outside to see meteors anyway. I wouldn't disturb my mother.

But then I was digging in the back of the closet, finding my robe and pulling it on, stepping into my sneakers and creeping through the quiet house until finally I slipped out through the kitchen door and turned my face upwards.

A tiny point of light burned across the sky then, leaving a tiny tendril of fire in its wake. In a split second, it was gone. I almost didn't believe I'd seen it...and then there was another.

Hurriedly I swept back into the house, rushing back to my mother's bedroom and opening her door.

"Mom..."

"Is it time?" She was suddenly alert.

"It's ten till. I've seen a couple already."

Mom flung herself from her bed and made for the far wall. "Let me get my shoes."

Seconds later we were moving down the hall together, expertly maneuvering through and around the pack of family dogs who had until this point been sleeping peacefully under Mom's bed.

"I think it'd be best to go out the back, so the streetlights don't get in the way," I said.

"I want to get the camera. Let's go out the front first."

We stepped softly through the kitchen and into the office. I found the digital camera and brought it outside, following my mother. Instinctively, we both moved behind the bulk of the family van, blocking the light of one of the streetlamps. I turned the camera on and held it to the sky, zooming in as far as it would go.

"It's not even registering the stars," I said disappointedly.

Mom laughed. "Okay," she said.

"There's one!" I cried suddenly, pointing at the spot where the tiny point of light had already faded. Within seconds I was uselessly pointing and identifying more and more tiny meteors as they trickled randomly across the sky. The span of several seconds between each one made the viewing seem leisured, despite my excited gestures. It felt comfortable, not urgent.

A woman's voice sounded faintly over the PA system of the tobacco farm across the street, and I blinked incredulously. "People are at work already?"

"Wow," Mom said. And then we saw it.

Almost directly over my head, a meteor, the size of the visible stars, lanced across the sky, leaving a burning, dusty trail behind it as though someone were drawing on the heavens with a colored pencil. The debris from this meteor lasted longer in the atmosphere than that of the previous, smaller meteors...it was a few seconds before the trail disappeared.

Mom and I both gasped with delight.

We stood there for fifteen minutes, necks craned, backs arched, faces tipped to the heavens, indulging a fascination with astronomy that I hadn't known we shared. As artifacts from that greatest of mysteries, outer space, impacted with the protective shell of Earth and were subsequently destroyed by fire, we gazed, bewitched, upon their celestial funeral pyre.

Previous editorials:

• Lack of Serious or Dark Anime?
• Ownership

• Return to U.N. Spacy's front page