Unreliable Sources
- Apr 2, 2020
- 2 min read
by Michael Grant Smith
When you wished upon twilight’s first star, you should’ve made certain your chosen target wasn’t a lesser spark. You bound your yearning to the twinkle of an American Airlines flight outbound to Orlando. No one on the airplane cared about your hopes and dreams; the passengers aspired only to find their luggage on the carousel and receive a decent rental car. Planets are a better second choice — they’re bright and vulgar, which means you finish their sentences. It’s anti-scientific to designate distant suns as uncountable in number and infinite in supply. Some of us do without.
The hair dryer tumbled into your bath but electrocution has no teeth for you. Between your knees the appliance melted, a lump of metal and plastic. Tub water boiled and frothed and rippled, even after the power cord fragmented into em-dashes of slag. Shadows skittered across the ceiling. From windows your neighbors sniffed ozone and sighed at the prospect of rain. Their lamps and televisions dim whenever the blue-white flashes escape beneath your door. What would visitors say if they beheld the potato-peel curls of your wallpaper, pinhole burns in fabric, or rugs scorched into tar?
Stars are invisible during the day but look down on you just the same. Before dawn you pit-pat barefooted outdoors and witness the points of light devoured in turn by morning’s blood in the sky-lake; stripes of salmon and butternut, and gold-rimmed clouds. The night’s last star reminds you to salvage history. Time to search your cache of a life’s sundries. Hidden deep or perhaps in plain view is the electricity of constellations, trapped within transparent containers.
Michael Grant Smith wears sleeveless T-shirts, weather permitting. His writing has appeared in elimae, The Airgonaut, The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Spelk, Bending Genres, Unbroken Journal, MoonPark Review, Okay Donkey, Splonk, and elsewhere. Michael resides in Ohio. He has traveled to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Cincinnati. To learn too much about Michael, please visit www.michaelgrantsmith.com and @MGSatMGScom.
