A silver lighter.

Stellar nebulas, the nurseries of stars, are landscapes of whirling solar winds and scalding rivulets of radiation, meaning light is only conceived in the coldest, darkest throws of infinity. 

"Hasn't the world ended? You shouldn't be here," you say, voice spilling into the apartment, battering the crags built by darkness, and it occurs to me that this is the first time I've heard your voice in over a year. 

"I know," I reply.

"You're wasting both our time."

Hidden away in the labs, sitting tranquil beneath a telescope, meditating on my research – I could be anywhere but here. 

"I'm aware."

"Then why’re you still here? Weren't you supposed to be the smart one?"

My eyelids flutter shut – I'm going insane, but it's the sweetness of sinking into a cool lake; jaw aching, teeth gritted in perfect biting clarity. Maybe it's the vitamin deficiency, the perpetual exhaustion finally catching up on me, or maybe it's just you, the crack in rationality. 

"I am the smart one."

"Then why?" The same as it has always been, resistance is futile, you're older, so your word, worldly authority, is law. 

Your windows are open, it's noon, and the sky is a vacant face grazed by blisters of stars. 

"In your last letter," I tell you, "You only addressed Dad."

"Felt left out then?" you say, tugging at my strings, wrenching anger into stiff limbs like a puppeteer. I thumb at the edges of the little metal box in my fist, still frigid despite my sweating palms. "You have my gift in your hand right now. Light it. Let me see you, the girl you've grown out of."

Your silver lighter, which you left to me, dancing with little marker stars you drew and painted in the dark that merged your memory with a familiar snap and fizzle of the lid and the flame, I clutch inexplicably, like a log adrift in a ravaged sea. 

I stole it once, but it seared my palm, pink and agonising, and when you found me, you bared the mocking orange flame at my face, clutching my lame hand like a vice as you laughed. 

"Fuck off," I spit, heart hammering as I wait for your sharp reprimand. 

But only the wind replies, seeping through the open window, mingling with dust, running fingers through my hair, sweet and warm with an oncoming storm or a tickle of your laughter.

---

Matter collapses in on itself, and a miracle is born, diffusing heat, light, and life amid the vacuum of space; the star maintains itself through gravity, internal pressure and a continuous fusion reaction. The larger it is, the faster it burns.

Today isn't about you. Nor was yesterday, or the day before.

"I didn't ask you to come back," you say. 

"I came anyway."

"You always do. Like a dog."

Not a dog. More like an eel, sinking into a niche of saturnine depths, while you bartered with starlight, always more vivid, more tangible.

I don't speak. 

"You're more boring than I remember. Say something."

Ocean rivulets prick at my eyes when you pry my mind open like a clam and scoop the contents clean, snagging a pearl of thought, rolling it between your fingertips, precious, gentle, like you rarely were, branding it into my mind, stealing it from my lips. 

"I hate you sometimes."

You snort. "No. Not me, but everything I left with."

It's not you that makes me cry, but the vision of myself, an empty shell. Whereas Dad always said you were larger than life. 

---

Days are defined by their presence or absence, existence revolving around stars and the faith that they will still be there even when you are not. Arising when all their hydrogen is depleted, red giants, in their innocent, blameless way, are cataclysmic balloons that grow and grow and consume everything in their path.

I listen to the wafting sound of birds on the trek over: recorded, warbling tunes foreground the groan of an old cello, notes recited blindly like a prayer, weathered by familiarity. A sparkling stream gurgles, wind chimes, the groaning balcony before a verdant whispering grassland, and I find my way in the pitch. Your zone was surrendered to the darkness a month ago because the council wheedles less and less electricity from the deteriorating wind farms each year, the light of the last city concentrating at its epicentre. Alone out here, I don't miss it.

Switching off the music, I'm stung by a sour, putrid smell as I open your door.

"Flowers? For me?" A fixture in a sky until the tremble of a mouse makes you a hawk, you're onto me before I get a word in.

"They're fake. I made them."

The little UV light we produce can't be squandered on flowers, so the bouquet is fashioned with rolled plastic carton cutouts, painted a thin white and glued on wire stalks. 

"You shouldn't have." There's no courtesy in it, only harsh reproval, and the chipped ends of my creation are jagged and deserving.

I shouldn't have. I owe you nothing. You aren't even here, yet the rules of objectivity wilt in your presence. 

"I wish I hadn't."

While I'm ensnared by the red vines of childhood running thick and clotted between us, the rest of the world falls into perfect patterns, square block sidewalks, 7:00 am coffee, military routine and the evaluation of good or bad, strong or weak is as calculable as the inertia of a world that refuses to stop spinning - you are always the exception. 

"I don't know why I made them. There's no logical explanation for why I keep coming back."

Your amusement is a strike of lightning, slamming into my bones. I drop the flowers, nearly bumping into an abandoned easel as I fumble for the doorknob. 

"Oh, sister,” you chuckle. "We’re rotting. We're rotting together."

---

Most assume white dwarves are cold, but they actually burn hotter than they did initially, dim but searing, dense and ruthless, leaving a desert behind. Our sun was too small to become a supernova, cleaving instead a gas-spilt canvas, swooning with a bruised array of colours, waning like dunes in the wind of time until gradually, the light dispersed entirely, and the dying star was solitary. 

"I know the answer," I tell you.

"Entertain me."

Swallowing, I say, "You remind me of home."

"But you don't miss home." 

Stolen rations. Sickly days. Knives of silver linings and dad was never home, which meant days alone together. 

I shrug. "Call it sentiment."

Such an unassuming word. Sentiment, making infants of memories, coddling them with your own image when they wail and ache, cursing them even as you bundle them into your arms.

You're quiet. I guess you're amused, deciding how best to twist this at my expense. 

Instead, you ask, "Do you remember the sun?"

I remember a few nights when we were very young, when I crawled under your covers, kissed by treasured candlelight, and huddled against your breast. Sometimes, you ceded to the ancient storybook Dad bought you, whispering tales of the sun, our bloated yellow ball in the heavens. 

"No." 

"Do you remember playing Explorer? The places we promised each other we'd go?"

Discovering abandoned streets, skiving off of school, we'd be out for hours, lost in the dark, never scared because the only monster in your shadow was me, and back then, that was enough. 

"You put an end to those games. They're juvenile."

Scrambling up onto the rooftop of an old convenience, settling in pools of sand, breathless, listing constellations until our skin itched, then the familiar snap and fizzle. 

"We said we'd build our own spaceship."

For fun, you burnt sticks, paper and bits of litter as the day grew scorching, and I described what I was reading about space and matter and mathematical riddles. 

"Other colonies are decades away."

Once, you snapped a snack bar in half, gifting me a rare chocolate shard. It was mine originally, but I didn't care because, like Alladin's carpet or Cinderella's dress, you swore that with the money you would make through your craft - you'd take us anywhere.

"Time wouldn't make a difference."

But then you left. 

"You promised we'd reach the stars together," I murmur as the candlelight fervour snuffs out. "But then you left."

"It was for the best."

With your stories, you crafted me, hand on a glinting chisel, and I splintered as you carved, as you made the heavens my dream; now I honour you as a ghost honours the shrine of the living in their pyrrhic pity. One fickle dream was all we ever had in common.

Still, I cling to it. 

I ask, "Was I right?"

But you don't reply.

---

From the alternative to a white dwarf, a supernova, only two things can form: a neutron star or a black hole. While created from the same explosive transformation, a neutron star is a radiant orb, an immortal corpse, but a black hole retains no characteristics of stars - devoid of light, time, or space. They are aberrations of nature. 

"You were always good at that," I say, peering across the blackened space. 

I'm fingering your lighter again because you broke the truth. No longer fundamental, it’s something that must be spoken, opened, considered, abandoned, and challenged like one of your tales. 

"What?"

"At dying beautifully. In a way that no one would ever forget you. Leaving me the lighter, and Dad the letter. It had to be poetic."

"You couldn't understand."

I laugh, light-headed. "Melodrama - was that why you did it?"

"Would you like that?" you ask quietly, dangerously, "If everything I did was a means of torture for you? Or maybe leaving you out of the note meant just that. Nothing. Maybe in my schemes, I wanted you here before me, begging to know. Perhaps, dear, most of all, I just wanted for you to move on."

I hear the mutterings, 'I don't understand, I don't understand.' like chittering rats under a piano. Your crescendo buries me. I grip the little silver lighter.

"You said it yourself - there's no reason behind your actions, no familial debt that compels you to weep and prattle and bring me flowers."

"Stop," I say. "Stop." But I am meaningless.

"You owe me nothing, but every day I am revived. Every day, I must suffer again!"

"No. No-"

"Maybe dreams-"

The snap and fizzle of the lighter. 

A delicate glow fends off the darkness. 

In the corner, above your bed, a silhouette - a figure, swaying gently from the ceiling. 

'Maybe a dream isn't good enough to live on,' you finish, a whisper inside my skull.

I brandish the meagre light, which sheds itself on the four walls dappled with a constellation of painted stars. I believe. Your self-portraits are haphazard around the room, melting oils and teary watercolours, all incomplete, but I believe.

From the centre of the ceiling, rays pierce the far reaches of your galaxy, privy to a frivolous golden orb, and I feel the eye peeling wonder, the blazing warmth - the heart of the illustration.