Rexik, Trika and the Meteor Shower

That evening in Fern Valley they ate supper by the river. Rexik’s Dad had caught some fish, Mom had laid them out on broad leaves, and Trika, who had come over to visit, was crunching her ferns. The first stars were already lighting up over the water.

“When I was your size,” said Dad, licking his lips, “I caught a shooting star!”

“A real one?” Trika stopped chewing.

“A real one, through and through! It flew and flew, and I went snap! and caught it. It sat on my paw, blinking and tickling.”

“So where is it now?” asked Rexik.

Dad scratched his brow ridge.

“Er… it flew off in the morning. Stars, you know, don’t like to sit on a paw for long.”

Mom said nothing, only smiled toward the river.

Trika jumped to her feet.

“I’ll catch one too! Rexik, let’s go to Round Hill tonight! The sky is closest from there!”

“At night?” Rexik looked at the dark ferns. “Maybe we shouldn’t?”

“Oh, you Mister Maybe-Not!”

“There’s going to be a meteor shower tonight,” said Mom calmly. “Aunt Frilla has already said yes. I arranged it with her this afternoon.”

“But how did you know I was going to ask?” Trika’s mouth fell open.

“Mom’s ears hear everything,” Mom winked. “Even what you are only about to say.”

Rexik jumped right up. Never, ever before had they let him stay up all night!

The four of them set off for Round Hill. Trika went stomping in front, Rexik came after her, and behind them, like two mountains, walked Mom and Dad. The moon hung as a thin little sliver, but the stars were scattered as thick as sand on a riverbank. Down below, in the grass by the brook, tiny greenish lights were blinking: blink, and gone; blink, and back again.

“Trika, look, there are little stars here too!” whispered Rexik.

“Oh, those aren’t the right ones,” Trika waved him off. “I need a real one, from the sky!”

At the top they all settled on the warm stones and tipped their heads back. Dad softly began a song about the stars. He sang so out of tune that Trika hissed:

“Shh! You’ll scare them away!”

Then, whoosh! A silver streak flew across the sky.

“Mine!” shouted Trika, and she dashed down the slope.

But the streak was already gone. Whoosh! Another one, in a completely different place. Trika spun around and raced over there. Whoosh! Whoosh! Now two at once.

“Stop! Fall over here!” Trika scrambled up the tallest boulder and waved her tail like a butterfly net.

“Trika, come down,” begged Rexik. “Maybe we shouldn’t?”

“I do first and think later!” And she leaped off the boulder to grab a star right in midair.

Thud! Trika landed in a fern bush. First a yellow frill peeked out, and then a cross little face.

“Why won’t they fall into my paws?” she grumbled. “I’m trying so hard!”

Rexik did not run around. He sat quietly and watched. And he noticed a strange thing: not one star ever reached the ground. Each one flared up high, high up, flew a little way, and went out. Even higher than the quetzalcoatluses fly. Higher even than the tallest clouds.

“Mom,” he whispered. “They go out. Way up there.”

Mom lay down next to him in the grass.

“That’s because they aren’t stars at all, sweetheart. Real stars are enormous and very, very far away. Our sun is a star too, only a close one. And real stars don’t fall anywhere.”

“Then what is flying?”

“Tiny little rocks from space, smaller than a grain of sand. They rush along so fast that when they fly into the air they heat up, flare, and burn away. Way up high, long before the ground.”

Trika climbed out of the ferns, shook off her frill, and came closer.

“So I’ll never catch even one?” she sniffled.

“No one can,” said Mom gently. “Not even the biggest tyrannosaurus.”

And that is how it is. Shooting stars are specks of space dust burning up in the air. There were meteor showers in the days of the dinosaurs, and there are still: on a clear night you can see them even today.

Trika turned to Dad.

“And you? You caught one!”

Dad coughed. He looked at the sky. He looked at Mom. Then he bent down, low, low, to the grass where the greenish lights were blinking. One light rose, circled, and landed right on his nose.

“Well…” mumbled Dad. “There she is. My shooting star.”

On the tip of Dad’s enormous nose sat a little firefly, blinking as if it were winking.

“A firefly!” gasped Rexik.

“I was very small,” sighed Dad. “It sat on my paw, blinking and tickling. So I thought…”

Trika snorted, then sniggered, and then burst out laughing so hard her frill shook. Rexik laughed too. Even Dad couldn’t hold it in, and his roar of laughter blew the firefly off his nose and into the grass, back to its own.

Trika didn’t run after the stars anymore. She lay on her back and counted: “Twenty-one… twenty-two…” They headed home when the sky in the east was already turning gray. Trika yawned and muttered as she walked: “Forty-seven… forty-eight…” She hadn’t caught a single star, but she hadn’t missed a single one either.

At the foot of the hill Rexik stepped on something hard and yelped. In the grass lay a pebble, small and black as a coal. Rexik picked it up and was amazed: so tiny, yet heavy, as if it were three times the size.

“Mom,” he whispered. “Maybe this is a pebble from the sky? One that did make it down?”

Mom turned the pebble over on her paw.

“All of tonight’s burned up, you saw it yourself. But sometimes bigger rocks fall from the sky, and they do reach the ground. Maybe this is one of those. Or maybe it’s an ordinary stone from the river.”

“How can we find out?”

“Nobody knows,” said Mom honestly.

Trika stopped in her tracks.

“I spent the whole night catching stars,” she said indignantly, “and you just looked at your feet!”

Rexik went to bed when it was already fully light. He put the black pebble on his shelf with the other treasures and settled into his nest.

“When I was your size,” Dad began sleepily, “I caught a whole moon…”

“I’ve heard that one,” Mom smiled. “Yesterday it was a firefly.”

Rexik looked at his shelf. Among his treasures lay a small black pebble, maybe from an ordinary river, maybe from the sky itself. And because nobody knew, not even Mom, it seemed all the more wonderful.