The Jar of Stars
Halle walked into the forest with an empty glass jar held in both hands. Fern walked close beside her boot, her spines tipped with mossy green. Lanterns of light hung between the branches where the stars came through. Halle had carried the jar all the way from the gate and had not yet said what it was for. Fern did not ask. She was quiet at the start of any walk. Her small feet made a sound like rain beginning. The path dipped, the moss grew deep, and the old trees leaned in as if they were listening. Halle stopped where the brook turned and the water ran shallow and bright. "Here," she said. "This is the place with the best sky."
Halle knelt and dipped the jar until it filled, cold to the wrists. She lifted it slowly and held it up against the dark between two branches. For one breath a star lay on the water, whole and white and shivering. Then her arms trembled, the water swung, and the star broke into little pieces. She lowered the jar and tried again. The star came back and left again, over and over, like something shy. Fern watched from behind a root, only her face showing. "It won't stay," Halle said. "It stays when the water stops moving. Hold it still and the light comes back." She looked at her own hands. Hands, she decided, were the problem.
So the jar needed somewhere to stand. Halle set it on the moss, but the moss was soft and the jar leaned and the star slid off the edge of the water. She set it on a root, and the root sloped. She set it on the flat of her knee, and her knee had a pulse in it she had never noticed before. Everything in the forest, it turned out, was moving a little. Fern came out from behind the root. She did not say anything yet, but she stood near the jar and looked at it with great seriousness, the way she looked at a beetle. Halle grinned. "All right," she said. "We build it something to sit on."
They gathered three straight sticks and a handful of long grass from the bank. Halle crossed the sticks near the top and bound them with grass, winding and winding until her fingers ached. The stand stood up on its three legs like a thin animal. It was taller than Fern. It was, Halle thought, rather fine. She settled the jar into the cradle at the top. The sticks bowed. One leg walked itself slowly sideways across the moss. The water tipped, climbed the glass, and the star inside went wild. "Wait," Halle whispered, both arms out. "Wait, wait." The stand did not wait. It folded like a sleepy giraffe and laid itself down.
The jar rolled into the moss and stopped there, unbroken, pouring its water out in a dark line. The water ran off into the roots and was gone. Fern had jumped backward into a leaf. Only her nose was visible, twitching. Halle picked up the jar and sat down hard on the ground and laughed, quietly, because the forest was a quiet place. After a moment Fern came and sat on the moss beside her boot, which was as close as she had been all evening. "I made it tall," Halle said, "because the stars are up." Fern looked up at the branches, then at the puddle shining in the moss, where a star lay flat and calm and entirely still.
"They're down here too," Fern said. Her voice was so small that Halle had to stop breathing to hear it. It was the first thing Fern had said since the gate. Halle looked where Fern was looking. On the curled frond of a plant hung one round drop, and inside the drop was a point of light, steady as a held breath. There were others along the frond. There was one in the hoofprint of a deer. There was a whole scatter of them in the brook's slow bend, lying there without any trouble at all. None of them were up on stilts. Every one of them was low to the ground, and heavy, and leaning on the earth.
Halle turned the empty jar over in her hands and thought about this for a while. The forest went on glowing gently around her, patient as a cat. Low, then. Low and wide and pressed down. She went to the brook and felt along the bottom until she found what she wanted: a flat stone, grey, broad as a dinner plate, cold and smooth and heavier than it looked. She hauled it up with both arms and water ran out of her sleeves. Fern trotted along beside her the whole way back, nose up, looking pleased in her own small way. Halle set the stone in a clear spot under the gap in the branches, where the sky came straight down.
The stone rocked. Halle dug out the earth beneath its high side with her fingers until it sat without a sound. Then they packed it. Fern knew where the best moss grew, thick as a blanket and still wet, and she went back and forth bringing it, a green pile riding on her spines. She looked like a small walking garden. Halle pressed the moss in tight around the stone's edges, then built a low ring of short sticks pushed deep into the ground, weaving the grass between them the way you'd weave a basket. It was not tall. It was about as tall as a hedgehog. It did not look fine. It did not move at all.
Halle filled the jar at the brook again. Carrying it back was slow work. The water swung one way and she swung with it, and the glass was slippery, and every root in the forest put itself under her boot on purpose. Fern walked ahead, stopping when Halle stopped, stepping off the path to show a safe place to put a foot down. Halle went at Fern's pace, which was a good deal slower than her own, and found that the water liked it better. She lowered the jar into the ring of sticks and let go. The water went on turning inside, round and round, a silver ribbon with nothing in it yet.
They sat back on their heels and waited for it. Halle wanted to look right away. She made herself count instead, and then stopped counting and just listened, which was better. An owl let out one soft note somewhere above them and did not say anything else. The brook kept up its small talk. The ribbon of water slowed, and slowed, and flattened, and then the surface went smooth as a window. "Hold it still and the light comes back," Halle whispered. One star arrived in the jar. Then another beside it, and three more, and then so many that the glass seemed full of something poured rather than gathered. The stone held them. The moss held the stone.
Halle lay down on her stomach with her chin on her arms, and Fern settled beside her with her nose almost touching the glass. The light in the jar lay across Fern's face and turned the green tips of her spines to silver. Nothing in the forest hurried. A moth came and sat on the rim and left again. The lanterns of light between the branches shifted when the wind did, and came back. Halle thought about taking the jar home, and then thought about carrying it, and how the stars would spill out of it at the gate the way water had spilled into the moss. "It lives here," she said. Fern yawned, which Halle decided was agreement.
So they left it where it stood. Halle topped it up from the brook, one careful handful at a time, until the water sat level with the rim and looked like a coin. She pulled dry moss into a heap for a pillow and lay down with her coat over her and Fern tucked into the warm crook of her arm, spines turned carefully away. From down here the forest was all trunk and root and shine. The jar was near enough to touch. The last rings from her last handful moved out across it, smaller, and smaller, and smaller still, until the water forgot it had ever been disturbed.
Then the stars came back into the jar one by one, the way they had all evening, and stayed. Fern was already asleep. Her breathing was quick and small and warm against Halle's sleeve. Halle watched the little round sky she had built lying flat and perfect on its stone, with the moss banked around it and the grass woven between the sticks, holding everything low and steady and down. The brook kept talking to itself. "Hold it still," Halle said, "and the light comes back." The water did not move at all now. It only lay there, full of stars, settling, while the forest put its arms around the both of them and let them sleep.
