Starless Night - The Ballad of Cassidy Kidd

CHAPTER I: MADE OF STARSTUFF

I’VE NEVER SEEN THE STARS.

   Not because I’ve been locked in or confined somewhere, and certainly not because I haven’t been outside. I haven’t seen them because they’re hiding-
hiding behind the curtains that the lights have painted over them.
My entire life, I’ve despised the phrase ‘light pollution’. Pollution is putting something bad into the world. Light pollution is taking something magical away.
I can’t tell you what the night sky looked like before. Nobody took any pictures- nobody thought it would go away. Maria said it was gorgeous; a black sea jeweled with little gems of all different sizes and colours. She said the black sea is still there, but now it instilled a sense of dread, not one of wonder. I see it every night. It helps me sleep.

Maria has been jittery lately. For such an old lady, she sure can be fidgety. I asked her why, but… well, she’s always been a bit more apprehensive. The more reserved type, I mean.
As for me, I do fine on my own. It's not easy to shake off the feeling of solitude that comes packaged with living alone in the middle of a winter wasteland, though. Maria isn’t bad company. She’s just not very talkative.

It doesn’t help that I don’t go to school. Or talk to anyone outside of Maria. Or… do much of anything besides chores, really. I clean, dry, fold, just about everything you can imagine, except cook. Maria really is a much better cook than I am.

I stared up at the birds, who had started brewing up a storm of chirps and screeches after the train passed by the house again- You can hear the new trains, even from a few miles out- since they started using those super-advanced engines. Apparently, they moved only a bit slower than commercial airplanes. Not that planes were a great point of comparison, as I had only seen them stream through the sky above the house once in my entire life.
I wonder if the birds have noticed that the night sky has gone dim, too, or if they were too busy yelling at each other to look at it. Or, maybe, they weren’t born until after it went dark, like me.

I continued on the rocky footpath leading down to our well, carrying a few gallon jugs of water that I had ingeniously strapped to my back with a piece of scrap wood and some rope. It took quite a bit of convincing to get Maria to stop moving all the water with buckets.
The well certainly wasn’t something out of a fairytale. It was just a pipe stuck into the ground, a little faucet to pour water out of, and a handle to turn on the pump. Maria told me that the well water was fine to drink, but the rain had long since ruined the lake water- I learned that firsthand when I watched one of the birds drop dead just a few minutes after drinking some of it. They know now, too, to only drink the water from the well. I usually let the faucet run for a little longer so they can get some.
I dropped down the gallon jugs, untying them from the piece of scrap wood, and began filling them one by one. The birds were all silent now, their noiseless gaze watching down on me from above.
I was cold. It was cold. There was no snowfall, but plenty on the ground; snow that I’m sure was toxic, too, given that it came from the same place as the rain. I had failed to prepare properly for the weather- I was wearing nothing but a hoodie over a t-shirt, jeans, boots, and a beanie, all of which didn’t help to shield my body much at all.
I strapped the jugs up again, and headed off back towards the house. I turned to see the birds all drop down from the trees to get at whatever water they could, then looked back up at the trees to see just one bird still perched in the branches. It was shiny. And a little unnerving.
My feet started moving on their own, like a fight-or-flight response, back towards the house again. The bird was probably just wet, maybe got sick from the lakewater. That’s why it was looking at me weird.
The rocky footpath went on for about a half-mile until it hit the backyard of Maria’s house, which wasn’t much more than a dying field of dry, yellow grass, spotted with a few half-dead, wilting dandelions. You know the soil’s bad when even dandelions struggle to take root in it. The house itself wasn’t any less dreary; it was a pale red, with a faded greyish-white gabled roof and a couple shut windows adjacent to the back door, which was a poorly fitted slab of wood attached to the rest of the house with two rusting hinges. It looked like a barn, but smaller, and somehow less maintained.
I approached the decrepit entrance to Maria’s home, heaving the door open and stepping up into the house. There was a small mudroom where the back door entered, and by ‘mudroom’, I mean the washing machine and a stained, tattered welcome mat held together by all the wet dirt and dead plants that had been packed into it over the years. In front of me was the living room, which held the only lights currently on in the house, and to my right was a depressingly modest white-and-black tile kitchen that couldn’t have been more than a few square feet. To my left was another flimsy door that led up to the second floor.

I kicked my boots off and dropped the gallon jugs, still strapped to the scrap wood, onto the mudroom floor. Maria was sitting on the couch when I walked in, and the TV was blaring some old rabbit cartoon. The worn-out, battered couch sat on the opposite side of the room to the bunny show. I’m not sure exactly why we kept the thing, because it wasn’t much softer than a slab of rock and kind of felt like tinfoil. There weren’t any pillows, either.