He looked towards the blank sky, textured only by the shaded overlapping of clouds, and wondered, how it could possibly be nighttime, if there were no stars. For without the stars, what made the endless, ink-touched canvas above him anything out of the ordinary. A day could be dark, in winter, in rain. A night had stars. It was simple, really. So he wondered, as he looked at his watch and read the time, precisely 11:27 pm, how this could be right if the stars were absent? What declared it nighttime if not for the diamond dust scattered above? He could not possibly comprehend this absurdity, the time in which the stars were replaced by a murky, shifty sky. This was not night, he concluded, just a celestial event, an astronomical phenomenon. He knew, with complete certainty, that this was true, for the simple fact that night did not exist without stars.
