Borrowed Constellations
On the last night of a field assignment, two astronomers finally stop talking about the weather.
The clouds cleared twelve minutes before the observatory closed for the season. Samuel called Alex back from the road.
‘You said the forecast was hopeless,’ Alex said, still wearing his coat.
‘It changed.’
The telescope found the small comet they had spent three months trying to photograph. On the monitor it looked like a pale comma, a pause in the great dark sentence of the sky.
They saved the image. Neither moved toward the door.
Samuel asked where Alex would go next. Alex named a city two days away, then asked a question he had practiced on the walk down the mountain.
‘Was there something you wanted to say before I left?’
The machinery hummed around them. Samuel, who could name stars in six languages, discovered how difficult an ordinary sentence could be.
‘I would like you to come back.’
Alex set his bag beside the console. ‘For the next assignment?’
‘Sooner.’
They watched the comet until morning began to soften the eastern horizon. Later, when the observatory published the photograph, no one could explain why two careful scientists had given the file such an unscientific name: A Good Beginning.