When the Sun Rose Red over Machu Picchu: A collection

"Take a look through the telescope, Trevor. What do you see?"
Trevor McElroy squinted as he obeyed and placed his eye next to the refracting telescope lens. Michael had angled it towards a small star cluster on the edge of Orion's belt. He squinted as he tried to make out what his brother was pointing out, but he saw nothing except the twinkling stars that shone brightly through the thin atmosphere.
"The stars?" he asked hesitantly.
"Nope. Try again," Michael replied with a toothy grin.
"Is one of those stars special?"
"All stars are special, Trev."
"Michael! You aren't being fair! What do I see?"
"No one can tell you what you see through your own eyes. That's for you and no one else."
"Michael!"
"Fine, I'll tell you what I wanted you to see." Michael knelt down next to Trevor so that he could look him in the eye. "What you're looking at up there is history. Not one of those stars out there look like the one you see up there. Some are brighter, some are darker, some got big, some got small, some are dead, and some new stars have been born. We just don't see it because we're too far away; it takes hundreds of millions of years for the light to get here from so far away." Michael chuckled. "Don't you think it's silly? Everything we ever knew about stars is old news. We don't actually know anything about what's really out there, just the universe's memories of what was."

Trevor didn't know what to think about this. He was smart for a seven-year-old, but he'd never heard of a light-year. He didn't know that stars died.