Paper Star Man 

The paper star man cuts his paper stars and admires his handiwork as the firework man arrives and begins to set out his fireworks. He is using thinner paper than usual, but still cuts them with five, six, or seven points as always, and strings them together in a single strand. He is eager to finish his business before the firework man starts to hawk his wares. It’s a week of celebration, after all, and the firework man is a worthy competitor. He has lately been boasting, saying that he is working on a new design that will allow him to possess the sky in its entirety. Each spark, the firework man says, will birth many more at this device’s apogee, and they will all spread out precisely, based on his calculations, and stop under every visible star in the sky, so that for a second, standing directly below the center of the main explosion, there will be nothing but his own construction of brilliant lofted embers, a perfect copy of every constellation, before it all blinks out. It isn’t ready, the firework man says, and today, to appease the onlookers, he places a different device on the ground and lights its long and elegant fuse, which garners anticipation with its slow and sensual burn. It erupts in a beautiful fountain of cascading blue flames to immediate cheers and merrymaking and the ignition of the paper star man’s paper stars, as the firework man knew would happen, being the worthy competitor that he is. He didn’t anticipate, however, the paper stars transforming into weightless flakes of star-shaped ash and getting caught in the upward draft caused by their own burning and, still garlanded, drifting up, glowing red, and becoming an endless ladder to the sky. The paper star man watches them rise until they are a perfect trace of his own gaze following them to heaven. Until it seems that if he could only sit down and continue fashioning his paper stars at the same rate as their burning that he could lasso the world. Until, that is, he runs out of paper and string and the paper stars untether and become just a wish hurtling through space, which is what happens now, the last one burning in his fingertips. It glides up with the rest of them and suddenly the red glow blinks out and the ashen garland vanishes against the darkening night. He notices, then, the complete hush around him. He closes his shop and sets off for home, satisfied, he thinks, with having possessed the sky.