December Nights

I wrote this for my advance comp. class. And I liked it.


We’re lying on blankets-all of us- our heads on laps that lie on quilts that lie on the cold grass. At the top of the hill, the trees fall away to the edges, leaving a frosty window of the sky open. I open my mouth and blow slow and steady, watching the white puffs of my breath move up, up, and closer to those angel’s faces in the sky.
The cold is in my jacket, and in my hair. I don’t mind. It feels beautiful to me. I don’t know what time it is, it might be really late, or really early if the sun is about to rise. That’s seems possible…for the moon to fall and the sun to rise. Or He could show up. I blow another puff of white, and laugh at a joke someone just said, maybe it was John or Kimberly.
Someone is talking about God. I look at the stars, unmoving. I think about God moving them between His fingers like a magician moves quarters through his. He’s that big huh? I think about him in a ball, his hands around his knees, sitting in that black sky in a ball of fire like those stars, and then I think about him stretching out, arms and legs, fingers and toes pushing aside the space and the time… my little white puffs of breath. I could go on, but my head isn’t big enough to fit the universe and God into.
Someone is playing the guitar now. Someone else is singing. The strings reverberate loudly in the cold. I always thought cold air was cleaner, purer somehow. Maybe it really is, and that’s why the song sounds so good.
“Hey, Martha, have you heard from him?”
“What?” all I heard was “Martha.”
“Have you heard from him?” someone said again.
“Oh, uh, no. Wait who?”
It was Kimberly. She looks over at some of the guys, and then leans in to my ear to whisper the person’s name.
“Oh, him..Nope.” I laugh at the look on her face. “It’s fine.”
She leans back down and closes her eyes to listen to the song too, disappearing into the laps and the quilts, and the cold. I look back at the stars and wait for Him to move, and that’s when I see a white breath streak through the sky. I waited all night for that star to fall, and it’s gone in only a second.