The Boy Who Wouldn't Come Down From His Star - Paul William Hollingsworth (e book reader free TXT) 📗

The Boy Who Wouldn’t Come Down From His Star
By Paul William Hollingsworth


For Bode Dillard


Everyone knows that storks don’t deliver babies. No, all babies wait on stars until they’re ready to be born. Then they slide gently down on beams of starlight into the waiting arms of their new mothers. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
Once however, and not very long ago, a little Boy refused to come down. He had so much fun playing on his tiny star, roaming and running amid the other stars in the sky, that he absolutely refused to have anything to do with something as boring as a mere planet.
“But you have to go,” said the two large stars that always kept near him. They were his guides and his guardians, and they never let him out of their sight.
“I won’t,” the Boy replied.
“But they’ll be waiting for you. You don’t want to hurt their feelings, do you?”
“I don’t care,” the Boy said. “I don’t know who they are, and I don’t want to know.”
“But they’ll want you.”
“I don’t want them.”
“But you can’t have a name unless you go down.”
This made the Boy pause.
“What’s a name?”
“A name is a special word that makes you who you are.”
“Oh, that’s easy. I already have a name! I’m ‘Boy’.”
“Yes, but there’s plenty of boys up here. Your name is just for you.”
This was new to the little Boy, who squinted his eyes and thought about it.
“No. I don’t want a name. I don’t need one. I like it up here.”
The two guide stars didn’t know what to do. They had never had this happen to them before. One of them had an idea.
“What if you went down first? Just to see what it’s like?”
“Will I be able to pick them?”
“Pick what?”
“My people.”
Again the two guide stars fell silent. This little boy was a handful! Little boys and girls didn’t get to pick their parents. They just went. And in the order assigned. That was the way it had always been. Those were the rules. Now here comes this youngster, refusing to go down, and making unheard of demands!
A voice piped in.
“I can take him down, sirs. I can watch him, if you like.”
The voice came from the little star that the Boy rode. It was usually a quiet little star. In all this time, it had never spoken. Not even when alone with the Boy who rode him. It had never spoken to any of the children up here, and the other stars, the larger stars, had simply forgotten it could speak.
The two larger stars conferred.
“I think we can let him,” they said, “just this once. But we can’t make a habit out of this. Mum’s the word. Hush hush, you know.”

The little Boy was as surprised as anyone else to learn that the star he rode, his star, could talk. At first he wondered why it had kept so quiet for so long. Then he forgot about that. His curiosity about the Earth below him had gotten the better of his stubbornness. Maybe it wasn’t such a dull place, he thought. Anyway, it would be exciting to find out what exactly did go on down there.
It sure made enough noise for such a little rock. If you got too close you couldn’t hear yourself think. That’s why most of the stars kept their distance. Oh, one or two of the wilder comets would zip by it just for fun, and sometimes an asteroid would suddenly go Earth-diving, never to come back. But most of the stars stayed away, to chat quietly among themselves.
II
The journey to the Earth didn’t take anytime at all. It turned out that the Boy’s private Star had a special and very private way of getting down to the planet where they wouldn’t have to worry about getting burned up in the atmosphere or break their heads landing on concrete. No, one moment they were safely floating in the sky and the next moment they were both of the standing on Terra Firma, which is just a fancy way of saying Earth. The Boy didn’t remember much about the trip. He thought he remembered a long bright tunnel, but it all went by so fast and there were so many other things to pay attention to once he got here, that he quite (almost) forgot about the trip down.
The Earth was a noisy place, and the place where they had landed was no exception. There were loud animals in the sky, there were loud animals thumping over the ground, and there were loud animals jabbering in the trees. And of course, there was the constant voice of his guide talking into his ear, telling him what everything was.
“What are those tall things?” The Boy asked, “Those tall things with the green things stuck all over them?”
“Those are trees,” his Star said.
“And those black furry things climbing all over the place?”
“Monkeys.”
The Boy was a quick learner, and he soon found out that the big animals with the long noses called trunks were called elephants, and the big yellow things with sharp teeth and sharp claws were called lions. He learned about gazelles, wildebeests, leopards, chimpanzees, gorillas, zebras, hyenas, hippopotami, crocodiles, tarantulas, scorpions, bees, and so on and so on and so on.
“Is everywhere on the Earth like this?” he asked. “No wonder it’s so loud.”
But his Star said no, the Earth was different all over, and some places had more animals than people, and some places, most places, had more people than animals. Right now they were in a place called Africa, a very big place with lots of little countries made up of lots of people. “And the people places are even noisier than the animal places, if you can believe it.”
The Boy learned that the Earth was made up of different continents, each with different kinds of people and animals, but all constantly changing so that you couldn’t really tell which continent was what. “They’ve had to invent people called mapmakers and geographers simply to keep track of everything, and lately they’ve all been working nonstop, let me tell you. They even invented people called sociologists to help out, but that just caused more confusion. Nobody pays much attention to them anymore.”

The Star took the Boy across Africa, over the wide dry desert of the Sahara, over the wide grasslands of the Serengeti, through the thick wet jungles of the Congo. They travelled to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa to the Delta of the Nile River in Egypt. The Boy saw many people and many young couples, preparing for their child. Of course, they did not see him. Neither he nor the Star were visible to human beings. They could see and hear everything, but they could not be seen or heard themselves.

Once they visited a small house in the great capital of Kenya, Nairobi. A young couple were making plans for their new child and deciding on a name. The Boy thought that the young man and woman looked sad, and wondered at this.
“Some visits are not as long as other’s,” said the Boy’s Star. “Sometimes a child can only stay for a short time.”
“Why?” asked the Boy. “Don’t they like it down here?”
“Some do, some don’t, but that’s not what I mean. You see, how long a child stays or doesn’t stay is not up to the child. Not usually. No, the time and place has already been set, but no one, not the child, not the parents, knows what that time or place is. And no one is happy when the child has to leave. It is a sad time, like all goodbyes.”
“But this child is just coming in,” said the Boy. “Why do the parents look so sad? And happy too?”
“Because this won’t be their first child, and they are both sad at the departure of their first and happy at the arrival of this second. They are scared, too. And brave.”
The Boy looked at the swollen belly of the expectant mother. He smiled at the child inside, and she smiled back at him and tried to wave.
“It’s going to be a girl!” the Boy cried out. “Will they be happy?”
“I don’t know,” said the Star.
“Will she have a name?” asked the Boy.
“Of course,” said the Star. “That’s how it works.”
“What will they call her,” asked the Boy. “Do you know?”
The Star looked long at the mother, then he finally said, “Awiti.”
“Awiti,” the Boy repeated quietly. “That’s a pretty name.”
III
The Star and his Boy went to many more places in Africa, from big cities filled with cars and trucks and tall buildings and millions of people to small villages of just a few houses, small villages where the farm animals seemed to outnumber the people. The Boy saw many young couples, some couples not so young, sometimes just a woman alone, sometimes a woman surrounded by many other woman. All of them were expecting the arrival of a child like himself. And just like his Star had said, the visit could be very short indeed.
Once they had had dawdled too long at the house of a mother who was going to have a set of twins, and they had to run across half the continent to witness the birth of a boy named Kanoro. The had just gotten to the hospital room when they heard the sound of weeping. The Boy looked up at his Star, but the Star shook his head sadly.
“This child’s visit lasted only a few minutes,” the Star said. “A few minutes only, but what sorrow comes of it. We should go.”
The Boy learned many names in Africa, from Abena to Zina. They all sounded beautiful, but he didn’t see anybody he wanted to be born to or any name he wanted to be born with. Finally his Star said, “I have an idea. Let’s go to another continent, a larger continent with more people, you’re bound to find someone there to whom you want to be born.”
IV
The new continent was even larger than and more populated than Africa, but to the Boy’s delight it also had elephants (a little smaller, perhaps, but elephants all the same) and animals that were a lot like lions, but bigger and with stripes. The Star said they were called tigers. The Boy wanted to pet one, but the Star shook his head, no.

If anything, the new continent was even louder than the first continent, and the Boy’s Star found that he often had to shout to get the Boy to hear him over the din.
“Welcome to Asia!” the Star said. “Surely you’ll find something here to suit you.”
At first the Boy tended to agree, so overwhelmed as he was by the spectacle