The Last Handful of Clover - Book 1: The Hereafter

1.53 Under the Stars

June 7, 1:10 am

Richard's maniacal laughter, and the tainted joy behind it, passed. As he knew it must. And as the hours crawled by, he was left with a much more mundane emotion.

Boredom.

He stayed with Keith as he slept, listening to the tick of the grandfather clock downstairs. But just past 1:00 am, he had finally had all that he could take of the silence and the discomfort of lying on the rigid, unforgiving bed. He became restless, and began to pace—first the bedroom, and then the entire upper floor. He had promised to always stay with Keith, and it was a promise he planned to keep. But did that promise mean always staying in the same room with him? Or could he give himself a little latitude on that promise? Surely, Keith would allow him that. They were never the kind of couple that needed to be with each other every second of every day...

By 3:00 am, he had decided that there was only so much waiting that a ghost could do in a dark room. So he allowed himself to slip out of the house and into their backyard.

When Richard was a little boy, growing up in this house, he had spent the summer of his twelfth year obsessed with sleeping outside. Fortunately, the climate in Utah was dry, and it was possible, for several months of the year at least, to just roll out a sleeping bag on the grass and spend the night under the stars. He spent more time just staring up at those stars than actually sleeping that summer—watching for meteors, and dreaming of the UFO that would come to abduct him and take him on some grand adventure. But now, standing in that same backyard, it all looked totally different from what he remembered as a child.

He and Keith had spent a lot of time and money turning their backyard into an urban oasis. When he was a kid it was just grass, some wooden fences for privacy, and an old mine car his father had brought home in his truck when Richard was a toddler. Now, more than a half-century later, the mine car was still there, but it was more rust than steel. There were also some beautiful hedges, two fine rock garden beds full of flowers (that he had tended just a few days ago), and even a tiny pond with koi fish. The amount of grass remaining was probably only half of what it had been when he was young.

So the back yard was different from when he was a child. But surely the night sky was the same. Tipping his head back, he looked up.

The stars were brilliant...

No, they were more than brilliant. In fact, they were unlike anything Richard had ever seen. He had spent plenty of nights camping in areas where the city lights didn't interfere with the milky way. But he'd never seen stars like this, on any desert hike or on any mountain top, ever in his life.

He wanted to say it wasn't natural, but it was actually the opposite. It was nature, unfiltered by either the atmosphere or the limitations of his physical eyes. Having ghost eyes allowed him to truly see the heavens as he never had before. It was as if he had been given the eyes of a hawk or a wolf.

Maybe this is the world as it appeared to our ancestors, he thought. Before too many books and too much television dulled our vision. Maybe I've returned to the original eyes of men, the way we were when we were still both predator and prey.

If anything was the same as when he was twelve, it wasn't the yard, and it wasn't the sky. The only thing that seemed the same was... the joy. And the wonder.

Richard remembered the thrill he felt as a boy, lying in the grass in this yard, looking up at the stars and trying to make them come down to him. He had studied astronomy that year, and could name all the constellations and each of the major stars in the sky. Looking now, he realized that all that knowledge was long gone from his memory. There was the Big Dipper. He recognized that, and following the pointer stars, he could find the Little Dipper as well, and the North Star. The cloud of the Milky Way was so vast and brilliant that his mind could barely take it all in.