The Cloudy Night

On the third night, the sky filled up with clouds.

They came in slowly all afternoon, the way clouds do when they mean it, and by bedtime they had covered everything — the moon, the aeroplanes, and every single star.

The child stood at the window in their pyjamas and looked, and looked, and could not find their star anywhere.

“It’s gone,” they said. “The fairies took it back.”

Now. Down at the very bottom of the garden, under a wet leaf, a fairy was having a very frustrating evening.

She had been trying for an hour to push a hole in the clouds. She had pushed with both hands. She had pushed with her back. She had taken a run at it. Clouds, it turns out, are enormous and extremely soft, and pushing one is like trying to move a whole field of feathers.

She sat down on a stone and thought about it, which is what you do when pushing has not worked.

Then she flew up to the window, and she knocked on the glass — three tiny knocks, so small they sounded like a moth.

“I can’t see it,” the child said.

“No,” said the fairy. “Not tonight.”

“Is it still there?”

And the fairy said something that the child thought about for a long time afterwards, on and off, for years.

She said: “Everything that is up there is still up there. The clouds are only in front. They are not instead.”

The child put their hand flat on the cold window.

“How do you know?”

“Because I put it there,” said the fairy. “And because it is yours. Nobody takes back a star. That isn’t how stars work.”

She sat on the windowsill for a while, which was not something she usually did, and the two of them watched the clouds move very slowly across the whole sky.

“Tonight will be a hard one,” the fairy said. “Some are.”

“I know.”

“You can be sad about it. That’s allowed. Being sad about something doesn’t mean you want it back.”

The child got into bed. The rain started, very lightly, on the roof — the good kind, the kind that sounds like someone tapping their fingers on a table in another room.

“Will you check tomorrow?” the child said. “That it’s still there?”

“I’ll check tonight,” said the fairy. “You sleep. I’m quite good at the dark.”

And in the morning, when the child ran to the window before anyone else was up, the clouds had gone off somewhere else entirely, the grass was shining, and the sky was that pale washed blue it goes after rain — far too bright to see a single star in.

Which was fine.

Because they knew, now, where it was.

★ ★ ★