Nine-year-old Emma lived in the country, far away from bright
city lights, so the sky at night was dark, and filled with sparkling
stars. Some were big and brilliant, some were some soft and glowing,
and some were so tiny and distant they looked like specks of dust.
Emma knew them well. She knew how to find the North Star, called
Polaris. She knew how some stars make constellations, like the
Big Dipper and the Winged Horse and Orion, the Mighty Hunter. She
knew where to look for the Milky Way. But one strange and eventful
midsummer night, Emma discovered that the evening sky held many
more wonders than she had ever imagined.
Emma lived on a farm in Georgia with her mother and father and little brother
Will. Their red brick house was surrounded by fields of corn and hay, and pastures
for grazing cattle. A path led from the back of the house to a creek in the nearby
woods, where Emma liked to play after school or on weekends. She had finished
the third grade, and she liked school well enough, but she was happy when the
summertime came and she could stay home in the country all day. Sometimes she
went to play with a friend, or one of her friends would come to visit her. On
Tuesdays she had piano lessons, and on Fridays she usually went swimming. But
the rest of the time she had to herself, and that suited Emma just fine.
During the summer, Emma had several important chores. She fed the dog and the
cat and the ducks, she took clothes out of the dryer and folded them, and she
set the table for dinner every evening. Often she helped her mother take care
of her little brother. But at night in the summertime, after the dishes had been
put into the dishwasher, and the floor had been swept clean and the table and
chairs put back in their places, there was nothing in particular she had to do.
Her mother usually gave her little brother his bath about this time, and her
father usually fell asleep watching TV.
So on warm summer evenings, Emma was allowed to go outside to a special place
that she thought of as her own. It was a little hill on the way to the creek,
far enough away from the house to escape its lights, but not far enough to be
scary. There were no tall trees near the hill, and it was covered with cool,
comfortable grass where Emma would sit on a blanket or lie down and look up at
the stars. From this special hill she could see the whole sky. She liked to come
out after sundown and walk through the fireflies flashing in the grass. Then
she knew just where to look. She would watch as the blue twilight sky faded,
and the first tiny pinprick of a star appeared. Like magic. She would make a
wish on the first star, and keep watching as all the others came out, slowly
at first, then almost all at once, until the sky looked and felt like a huge
black sparkling bowl turned upside down over her.
One hot summer afternoon, a storm arose in the west. The sky over Emma's house
and farm filled with terrible black clouds and lightning and thunder. The wind
whistled and roared around the corners of the house. The trees in the yard whipped
back and forth and bent almost down to the ground. Emma's little brother, Will,
was frightened, so she played with him to distract him. When the storm had finally
passed their house, she took him to a window to show him that it was gone — and
in the east they saw a big dark purple cloud with a gleaming silver lining floating
just over the tops of the trees along the horizon.
That night, when she went to her special hill, not a cloud remained in the sky.
It was one of the best nights she had ever seen for looking at stars. The rain
and the wind had washed the sky and left it clear and shining. The Milky Way
looked like a blurry white river of stardust flowing across a field of glittering
black glass. She found the quiet, steadfast North Star, and Draco, the Dragon,
with his sinuous shape; and she saw the bright three stars of the Summer Triangle:
Vega, Deneb and Altair.
Then Emma saw something strange out of the corner of her eye.
It looked like a silver flash of light very low in the sky. She looked again.
There was something. It was coming closer. It was getting bigger. Emma sat up
straight. Before she knew what was happening, the silver flash of light came
streaking down with a loud whooosh — and landed — right on her little
hill!
Emma stared. There, standing on the grass not ten feet away from her, was the
shining figure of the most unusual creature she had ever seen. He was only a
little taller than she, and he looked like a regular person — sort of — except
that he was completely made of some kind of silvery substance that seemed never
to be still. He looked as if every molecule in his body were in constant, independent,
shimmering motion. In general all of his features — his nose, eyes, hands
and so on — stayed within their proper shapes, but Emma had the disconcerting
feeling that they were moving and changing before her eyes. She blinked hard
and rubbed her face. She felt as if her eyes weren't seeing right. The creature
wore a long silver cape that rippled like a cat's fur in a strong wind, though
the night air was absolutely still, and he carried a huge, lumpy silver sack
that moved suggestively, as if it would take off into the air by itself if he
didn't hold onto it.
He seemed to have something urgent to do, because he didn’t even notice
that Emma was there. He opened the silver sack and stuck his head and arms deep
down into it. Emma watched as a glow of eerie, greenish light escaped from the
sack, curling out like smoke.
“Now where can that be,” the creature muttered to himself. “I
know I put it in here before I left tonight. It’s got to be here somewhere — ah!”
He emerged from the sack with a tiny silver needle that was so hair-thin it was
almost invisible. Then he reached back into the sack and gently pulled out a
wispy, iridescent strand of light, which he threaded very carefully through the
tiny needle. He put one shimmering foot on a corner of the sack to hold it down,
and immediately set to work sewing up a hole near the bottom of the sack.
He still hadn’t noticed Emma. But her eyes were beginning to get used to
the flickering, shivering, elusive nature of his shape.
The Starcatcher is a story for children that I wrote more than 25 years
ago but never published. I’m afraid that readers might think the
idea for the title was taken from the popular recent books by Dave Barry
and Ridley Pearson, Peter and the Starcatchers (2004) and its sequels – but
the concept and the story of my own Starcatcher are so different
that I hope I will be forgiven for not changing its title now.
The Starcatcher tells the story of 9-year-old Emma, who
is carried on a magical journey through the night sky by a
sparkling creature called the Starcatcher, whose job it is
to catch stars when they fall.
Unfortunately, Emma gets in the way of an angry and unreasonable
Cloud Prince. Emma must use the power of her own imagination
and skill – with a little help from her new friend – to
save herself and return to her home on a small farm in Georgia.
Copyright © 2009 Sigrid Sanders| All Rights Reserved