Penny's Pinwheel

Penny wasn’t sure why she chose this night to rearrange the stars in the sky. She’d had a creepy feeling ever since dinner. The air-raid sirens had started early, even before full dark. She tried to ignore them. But they definitely sounded different tonight, so shrill and insistent. Her mother had felt it too, and sent her up to bed early.

She moved one of the stars just a little bit to the left. Of course they weren’t the real stars and it wasn’t the real sky either. A month ago her father had painted her bedroom ceiling a pale blue and together they’d stuck up little plastic stars to make the constellations. The stars were a dull, sickly yellow but at night when the lights went out they glowed in the dark, at least for a little while. Night after night she watched their glow slowly fade away, thinking of her father, just as her eyes closed to sleep.

She didn’t know how they glowed like that. He’d said it was magic but she wasn’t quite so sure.

Her father loved the stars. He’d hold Penny up so she could reach the ceiling and help her add each new constellation and then she’d sit on his lap and he’d tell her the story. Every constellation had its own story. One was a scorpion and one was a lion, and another a fierce dragon. Cassiopeia’s vanity had caused the downfall of an entire kingdom. And Andromeda had been chained to a rock, to be sacrificed to an angry monster. Maybe her father dwelled a little too much on the swordfights and the monsters and sometimes his stories were a little bit frightening. But curled in her father’s lap, Penny felt safe enough. He always smelled of sandalwood and walnuts.

A loud crash rang out down the street, sending a sudden flash of sharp, amber light knifing through her window curtain. Penny didn’t look outside. Instead she wondered at the stars on her ceiling. Her father had helped her put them up, telling her the stories, one each night. But there was still an empty space, one story left undone since the night he’d put on his uniform and went away.

That last constellation was called Orion. After her father had been gone a few weeks Penny had looked it up. Orion was a great warrior with a bow and arrow and a jeweled sword on his belt. She’d memorized the pattern but had not put it up. She decided she didn’t like Orion the warrior. His constellation seemed just plain wrong, with her Daddy gone and all the troubles. So she’d decided to improvise. She arranged the little plastic stars in a different way, marking out a rocking horse, and put them up instead. Orion the rocking horse.

And now, tonight, she got to thinking that a lot of the constellations were wrong. So she climbed up on the chair and set about rearranging the stars.

The sirens in the street rang louder now, like buzz saws screaming from either end of the town, blaring useless warnings over the sound of ear-shattering explosions. One after another after another. Penny ignored them all.

She changed the constellations to better ones, dragging a chair across the carpet as she went. The Hydra became a colorful ribbon in the sky, Andromeda a bird on the wing, Cassiopeia a flower bud just ready to burst into life. Ursa Major was no longer an angry bear but a handsome and well-dressed boy, bowing politely at the waist. She gave them all stories of her own design, stories without bullets, or gun smoke or screams in the night.

She heard voices carrying up from downstairs, shouting. Her mother had told her what to do. She should hide in the closet if there was trouble. “Don’t come down,” her mother had warned, “If people come in the night, don’t come down.”

She was to go into the closet. Hide in the bottom of the closet and don’t make a sound.

But that wasn’t right. 

She had to hurry. The sky still wasn’t finished yet. She should at least finish fixing the constellations first. Another blast set her ears to ringing and she smelled burning wood. She heard her mother scream.

Just one more to go. She reached up for Draco, the dragon, pulled two stars down, moved the putty over just a little. She stuck the stars back up, transforming the dragon into a glorious, spinning pinwheel. Penny’s Pinwheel.

Standing on the chair, she saw the floorboards of her bedroom fall away into splinters and ash. She saw hungry flames licking up from the living room, felt searing heat rising up from below. Her closet was gone. Her entire bedroom floor was gone. She didn’t understand how the chair, dangling above the fiery abyss, could still be supporting her weight. She ignored the heat, looked quickly away from the fire.

The ceiling of her room had grown a deep blue. The yellowed stars, now far beyond her reach, spinning slowly overhead. The rainbow ribbon, the blooming flower, the little boy. The dazzling, sparkling pinwheel. All her wonderful new constellations glittering across the broad blue dome. And in pride of place was Penny’s Pinwheel, so many stars, millions of stars, trailing shimmering spiral arms, slowly spinning.

What kind of wonderful world would such a sky shine down upon, she wondered? Let’s go see.

A fiery abyss yawned below, the cool sky above. Let’s go see.

Penny jumped away from the roaring fire.

She jumped into the sky.