A Star is More Beautiful in Its Own Sky | Teen Ink

A Star is More Beautiful in Its Own Sky

May 16, 2017
By Anonymous

Good morning, clouds. Good morning, stars. Good morning, sea. Good morning, Phoebus. Wake up, wake up, Phoebus; you’re going to miss the sun rise. She rises, shifting her bed sheets, and stretches, if stretches is the word for what she does, her limbs arrayed and just starting to glow. First, she must take a quick dip in the cool sea. Look at her swim back and forth along the waves; look at her run in the air. This is how she dives down to the bottom of the sea. She plucks a rosy pearl from the mouth of a shell. “Good morning!” she says.
She rises, and look, look how the water boils around her, and the fish all rise too. They lay on their pink sides on top of the roiling waves like their coral bed sheets below. Look at how Phoebus floats in the water with them, like friends playing a familiar game.
The sun is almost about to break the horizon and the clouds are simmering. Quick, Phoebus! She hurries to climb out of the writhing water onto the rocks of the shore, her body glistening, and her eyes and feet set towards the light, waiting. Look at her stand, like one of the laurel trees, and how she holds the pearl tender in the mounts of her palm like a small heart.
She watches the sun surge and rise, eating a red-gold hole in the great blue with its bubbling teeth and ten thousand blooming eyes. It climbs up the sky, devouring, as liquid drops and strings of sun fall like drool to the earth. Look at the birds, who wake and soar to grab strands of it to make their nests and feed their young. Look how the lions form lines, as if waiting for the next teller, to fetch thebroken silk to weave their manes and bodies. See the ants cloaking the ground in search for strands to climb up, up, and harvest the gold-crusted lining. Watch how even the grasses reach for the light.

And look, look how Phoebus stands green on the steaming rocks and watches the sun, eating a road across the sky. How her eyes gleam and reflect that star.
She concentrates, before sinking down, readying to pounce, and then leaping up with her arms outstretched, pulls down a strand of the palpable light. Look how the air buzzes where the pearl and the light touch. She wraps several full lengths of it around her forearm, and then plucks the strand as if it were a cobweb.
Now her feet turn and bound, leading her through the landscape dappled in gold back to the open and reddening hall. She sits down on a lion-legged stool, her outfit from yesterday on the floor nearby. Here, she’s getting ready: this is how she looms the thread into a helmet and some armor, this is how she wreathes her hair and laces her feet, and this is how she crushes the pearl with the back of her brush and pats it onto her cheeks and lips, looking into the mirror on the sill a little disappointed.
It is in this small attended hour when all life flourishes, except for the fish. They, with their more plated skin, serve a different star beneath the sea.
She rises from her throne, standing like a marble caryatid, and commands her feet forward; she is ready. After all, she is a goddess. She strides through the gates, newly molted in gold and pink, and heads off. But what does a goddess do when she goes out for the day? You’re guess is as good as mine. If one ever was needed, though, now is the time.



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