Cleo and the Light That Wouldn't Wink

Down at the bottom of the garden, under the huckleberry hedge, something was humming.

Cleo stopped with her paw in the air and listened. The hum was low and round, like a plum with a song inside it. It came up through the grass and into her feet, and then it stopped, and then it started again, slow as a sleepy bee.

Cleo was a small hedgehog with a brown nose and a great many prickles, which she had tried to count once on a rainy afternoon and had given up on at a hundred and twelve. She lived under the hedge with her grandmother, Fern, who knew the name of every weed in the garden and was not shy about saying so.

"Grandma," said Cleo. "The ground is humming."

Grandma Fern came out from under the hedge with a lettuce leaf in her paw and a smudge of soil on her nose. "Is it now," she said. She sat down heavily, the way grandmothers do, and folded her paws. "The ground does that sometimes. Sit still long enough and you'll hear all sorts." So Cleo sat still, and the hum went on, quiet as a secret.

Every clear evening after that, Cleo climbed to the top of the garden, where a flat gray stone lay warm as a loaf of bread. From the stone she could see the whole sky, spread out and sprinkled over, and the plum tree standing in the middle with its arms open.

She carried her counting pebbles in an acorn cap and set them out in rows, one pebble for each star she had named. Naming a star was not easy. You had to look at it for a long while and see what it reminded you of, and then you had to be sure. She hummed while she counted, always the same tune, four notes down and three notes up, and she could not remember where she had learned it.

She had named forty-one. There was Butter, who was soft yellow at the edges. There was Slipper, who was shaped like one. There were the Three Stubborn Ones, who slid sideways whenever she looked away and then pretended they had not moved. And there was the Still One.

The Still One sat low over the plum tree and it was brighter than the rest, and it did not blink. All the other lights winked and shivered and wriggled, but the Still One held steady as a dewdrop on a leaf.

Cleo had no pebble for the Still One. A pebble meant she knew what a thing was. And she did not know.

"Do you think the sky knows I count it?" she asked Grandma Fern one evening.

Grandma Fern thought about it for a while. "I think the sky is busy," she said at last. "But I don't think it's too busy."

"Still looking at that one," said Kai.

Kai was a field mouse who lived in the wall by the rhubarb, and he came up the path with his paws behind his back, which is what he did when he had a theory.

"I have solved it," he said. "It's holding its breath."

"It's a star," said Cleo. "Stars don't breathe."

"How do you know?" said Kai. "I've been holding my breath, to see how long I could manage. I got up to nine." He said it proudly. "That's why it doesn't blink. It's concentrating. And one of these nights it will have to let it out, and then, whoosh." He spread his paws wide.

Cleo counted nine in her head and decided it was not very long. "Did you blink?" she asked.

"I blinked at six," said Kai. "But that's not the point."

The hum came up through the flat stone. Cleo put one ear down against it and the hum swelled up warm, and when she lifted her ear away it went soft again, like someone humming in the next room with the door closed.

"Can you hear that?" she asked.

"Hear what?" said Kai. His ears were very good at hearing cheese being unwrapped and not much good at anything else. He tried the stone anyway, one ear flat, both eyes crossed. "I hear my own heart," he reported. "It goes thump, thump. It's been doing that all day."

So Kai's theory was no good, and the question stayed where it was, right behind Cleo's nose, all through the next week.

Here is the thing she never told anyone. Cleo was a little bit ashamed of her pebbles. Lining up stones in rows while other hedgehogs rolled about in the leaves seemed a babyish kind of thing to do, so she kept the acorn cap tucked under her and did her counting when nobody was looking.

Grandma Fern knew anyway. Grandmothers generally do.

"Forty-one," said Grandma Fern one evening, without turning around. She was weeding the parsley.

Cleo sat up very straight. "How do you know that?"

"You say it out loud, little one. You say it the way some folk say their prayers." Grandma Fern pulled a dandelion and shook the soil off its roots. "Ask me a question. You've had one pressing on you all week. I can see the shape of it."

So Cleo asked. "Why does everything wink except the Still One? What is the Still One?"

Grandma Fern got up and fetched the watering can. "Come and look in the puddle by the path," she said.

There was a small white pebble at the bottom of the puddle. Cleo looked at it from the edge and the pebble wobbled and shivered like a spoonful of jelly, though it was not moving at all.

"Now watch," said Grandma Fern, and she lifted the watering can away, and the puddle went flat, and the pebble held still as a stone, which it was.

"The pebble didn't change," said Cleo slowly. "The water did. The water is between me and the pebble." "That's right," said Grandma Fern. "Starlight comes a long, long way, and it comes through air, and air moves. Air moves the way water moves. So the far lights shiver."

"And the Still One?" said Cleo.

"The Still One must be closer," said Grandma Fern. "There's less air to cross. You should look at it proper."

"Properly," said Cleo, who couldn't help it.

"Properly," said Grandma Fern, and she went back to her parsley.

So Cleo looked at it properly. She climbed onto the flat stone, and she pulled a fat drop of dew off a leaf and held it up, and looked through it. The Still One came apart into a small round blob of light, smooth as a drop of honey on a plate, with no sharp points anywhere.

Then the wind stopped. It stopped all at once, the way wind does, and for the length of one breath, every star in the whole sky held perfectly still. Not one winked. Then the air shifted, and every one of them went back to blinking. Cleo's prickles lifted all along her back. It wasn't the stars that winked. It was the air.

She sat there with her mouth open, which is what you do when you find a thing out.

And then she put her ear down flat against the stone and heard the hum, and heard it the way you hear a friend's voice in a crowded room, all at once.

It was a tune. Four notes down and three notes up, and then a small pause, and then again.

Cleo knew it. She knew it the way she knew her own paw. It was the tune she hummed while she counted, the one she had thought she made up. She had thought it was hers. She was up and off the stone and down the path before she knew what her feet were doing.

"Grandma," she said, pulling at a paw. "Grandma, come up."

Grandma Fern came up the path, and Cleo made her put her ear on the stone, and Grandma Fern listened for a long, long time. Then she sat up and looked at the sky and her eyes were bright. "Well," she said. "That isn't a star at all. That's a comet. Comets go humming through the dark. They don't wink and they don't stay. That one has been passing our garden for a good while now, and I never once looked up properly."

"How long does it stay?" asked Cleo.

"Not long," said Grandma Fern. "Look at it. It's already drifting."

Cleo's heart did something complicated in her chest. All at once she understood the wish she had been carrying around without looking at it. She did not want to count the comet. She wanted the comet to know she was there.

So she lay flat on the warm stone with one ear pressed to it, and she tapped. Three slow taps with her paw, tap, tap, tap, and then two quick ones, tap, tap. It was the beginning of the tune. It was the only way she could think of to say hello.

The hum went on. Nothing changed. Cleo's prickles went flat with disappointment.

Then the tune came round again, four notes down and three notes up, and at the end of it, softly, tucked into the pause where the tune always paused, came five small sounds. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Right back to her.

Cleo sat straight up. Her prickles stood out all over and she did not care one bit. "Grandma," she whispered. "It heard me."

"It did," said Grandma Fern.

They did it again. Cleo tapped her small rhythm, and the comet hummed it back, and up the path came Kai with a crust of bread, demanding to know what they were doing on the ground. They showed him. He put his ear on the stone, and he could not hear the hum, but he could feel it in his whiskers, and he said, "Oh," in a very small voice. Then he said, "I told you it was holding its breath." And Cleo laughed so hard she had to lie down again.

After that the night began to slow down. The hum grew softer as the comet drifted over the plum tree and away toward the west, and it went from a hum to a murmur to a thing you had to hold your breath to hear, and then it was only the stone remembering it.

Cleo put her pebbles back in the acorn cap, one by one, counting them out the way she always did. But she left one out, and she set it at the edge of the flat stone where she would see it in the morning.

"What's that one for?" asked Kai.

"For the one that isn't a star," said Cleo. "I'm not going to forget it."

Kai said goodnight and went off to the wall by the rhubarb, and Grandma Fern stayed. She sat on the flat stone with Cleo tucked warm against her side, and the garden went dim and quiet the way gardens do at the end of an evening. The plum tree let go of one leaf. Somewhere far off a cricket tried a note and decided to keep it.

One by one the stars remembered how to wink. The wind got tired and lay down. High over the plum tree a soft round quiet went drifting past, humming to itself in the dark, and the hum came down through the cold clean air and into the warm stone and up through Cleo's paws.

"You'll count again tomorrow," said Grandma Fern.

"Forty-one," said Cleo, yawning. "Maybe forty-two. I might ask a question first."

"That's the way," said Grandma Fern.

Cleo's eyes closed. The sky went on winking above her, softly, all those far lights shivering through the moving air, and the one that did not wink went humming on its way, taking her tune with it.

And the garden grew darker and softer and still, and the flat stone stayed warm, and everything slept.