the kindling

for anon, who requested--humans have lights in their skin (kind of like fireflies) and they look a bit like the stars in the night sky

They call it the Kindling, when the faint sheen of prepubescence catches alight, and burns with all the brightness of adulthood. Girls of thirteen stand around bathroom mirrors, examining their faces for bright spots, looking for stray molecular clouds in their nail beds. At seventeen, the boys' voices crack, and their skin flickers on/off like broken neon signs. All of them are in love with the astrophysics teacher, whose stellar wind sends flickers of light across the lab tables.

Late at night, they lie in bed tracing the spiral arms of their evolving galaxies, and dream dry dreams of neutron star collisions hotter than blue hypergiants.

You are in love, they say, when you find the person whose constellations fit with yours.

.

It's said that you are what happens when stars dream of people and get it wrong--too much phosphorus and not enough fear of death, pulsar instead of pulse. They left out uncertainty, not knowing what it was; the softer shades of melancholy and the gentler warmths. But they get the shape right, the brighthot of love. They get that right too.

Stars dream in metaphors of flesh, and give their dreaming taste buds for sulfur, fingers at the ends of spiral arms. You will drink liquid helium from a cracked Dewar flask, watching the brightness of your skin redouble--relearn arithmetic in parallax, counting parsecs between the Cygnus on your lover's hip and the Cetus over their breastbone. When you first feel your child's protoplanetary disc differentiate, you will cry steam tears. This is how stars dream themselves into human skin.

And this is how stars die--by eating away at themselves until only the shell is left, or scoring the darkness with their final breath, a blast bright enough to outshine a galaxy.

(...they get that right too.)