Light Show
He shook me in the dark. “Wake up,” he whispered. “It’s going to start soon.”
I rubbed my eyes to see the clock, sometime in the middle of the night. Throwing off the blanket and stepping into the hallway in my loony toons pajamas, my brothers quietly slunk along the wall and down the stairs.
Following suit, I found them huddled by the bay window in the front room. One of them moved so I could stand in front and gaze out with them. We looked up at the sky, a few stars dotted across the dark in our sparsely lit neighborhood. I wasn’t exactly sure what to look for, my brothers fidgeted and whispered as we waited.
Then a streak of white light ripped across the sky. “Whoa!” we all said, a bit too loud.
The oldest reminded us to be quiet. But we couldn’t help it as more streaks appeared, and a particularly big one flashed for a moment. “Was that the moon?!” My brother exclaimed. Perhaps a bit too loud, I thought, as I looked back and saw our father towering over us.
He was not a patient man. I was often afraid of him, not because of any sort of abuse, but because of the nuclear energy he often carried with him. He was the one to put things to an end if we were too loud. It sometimes felt like he didn’t like fun. So for him to appear now, meant the end of the meteor shower.
I waited for him to snap at us to go back to bed and be quiet. But he wasn’t looking at us, he was looking up at the sky. We all gazed upward and watched the light rain down.
© Stephen Niedzwiecki
Stephen Niedzwiecki’s work spans fiction, journalism, and technical writing. It has been featured in Written in Arlington, Macabre Magazine, and Bright Flash Literary Review.
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