every small shining thing
A man walks to a computer and opens it. The screen lights up, accompanied by the whirring of fans. Today, there are three things waiting for him.
His name is Najm, it means morning star. Because of it, people often ask if he wakes early, graceful in the day’s light. What people forget is that a morning star is also a weapon, heavy and rough. Of course, he wants to be the one of those that shines in the sky. But most of the time, Najm finds himself more in line with the blunted end of a rusted mace.
All three things are lined up nicely on the screen. They are requests, with photos ready to be edited. Najm has always liked photography, to capture a moment in a frame. He can’t remember the first time he held a camera, though he has one of his oldest photos framed on his desk. It is of him and his sister. It sits next to a gallery of other pictures, all taken by him over many years.
Nowadays, he has less time to dedicate to photography. It’s too much of a hassle, to get everything he needed and find a good spot, so his collection of scenic cities and vistas has remained stagnant. When he does take photos, they are quiet and understated, coloured with the innocuous greys and browns of the city. He devotes much of the time he would spend with the camera editing other people’s pictures. They send him requests with the image attached.
He's made quite a name for himself by now; he gets at least a few requests every couple of weeks. Some of them are from people he knows, but the vast majority are strangers. He likes the messages. Usually, people over a computer screen remain faceless, barely a person more than a series of words. In the photos, Najm gets to see their faces, their family, their passions. He also gets to see what they don’t want, what they remove from their perfect pictures.
Much of the requests are innocent. Editing out a shadow, or a tree, or maybe a stray bird. A few ask to remove people. These are often accompanied by explanations of we wanted an all-family photo, or we don’t keep in touch anymore. Sometimes it is themselves they want to change. But what Najm sees more than anything are the people who were never meant to be there, who the photo was not about but were present in it anyway. They don’t know they were caught in the picture, but Najm supposes it doesn’t matter when he is asked to get rid of them. Many of them are marriage officiants, standing in the background of wedding vows. It makes sense, he supposes, that the newlyweds would want nobody in between them. When he removes these sorts of people, he wonders how they would feel to know they weren’t wanted at a place they weren’t planning to be. The train of thoughts always ends at the same place: that he’s thinking too much about it and it has probably happened to him.
There is a folder on his computer. It is filled with the cutouts of background people that he takes from the photos. He puts them in there when they are edited out of the picture. He hasn’t got around to deleting it yet.
The first of tonight’s requests is simple, an ask to move two people closer together. It takes him little time; he has gotten quick with the editing software. The second is similarly unremarkable. A group of people looks excitedly at the camera, being held by a woman on the far left. A man has his eyes closed; this is what he needs to fix. They have sent him a picture of the man’s face, so he can use his real eyes. His name is Joshua, according to the tag on his vest.
The third message is a photo with no request. It is not a stranger, but someone he knows very well. His sister has been showing Najm her vacation for the past week. There are beaches, white sand on a picturesque green sea.
“Wish you were here!” He can hear his sister’s voice reading the caption written underneath the picture. She’s been sending many of these lately. She will be away until next week, and by then Najm’s birthday will have passed.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said before she left. It was a tradition for just the two of them to go to their favourite cheesecake place during either of their birthdays, but that wouldn’t happen this year.
“No problem,” he had told her. “After twenty-four years, we can miss one.” What he hadn’t told her was that there was no one else to celebrate with.
━
Najm stops studying after the sun has already set. He closes his book and plans to go to bed by midnight, but before he can, a ringing shoots through the room. It is his sister, calling him.
“Hey,” she says, “happy birthday!” For her, it is the morning of the next day. That is also why she is so energetic. No one Najm knew would have a voice so motivated near midnight.
“Inas, it’s still night for me,” he pauses, “but thank you.” It was kind of her, to call even when she was so far away. Inas was always kind to him, despite the fact that he was older.
“Oh, do you need to sleep?” Her voice sounds metallic over the phone, with the grainy voices of people surrounding her filtering through as quiet splashes of background noise. She’s probably at another beach. Or maybe a busy pool.
“Probably,” Najm replies, “but we can talk for a bit.” They talk, for more than a bit, mostly Inas talking and Najm listening. He thinks that if he stays on the phone, the sun will stop moving, and neither midnight nor his birthday will ever arrive. But the world will always keep spinning, with or without you.
At midnight, Najm interrupts his sister, who is telling him some anecdote about her trip. “Now you can say happy birthday,” he says jokingly. “The day just started.”
“Then you should really get to bed,” Inas declares. “Weren’t you telling me about some exam soon?”
After a moment of deliberation, Najm agrees to stop the call. He hangs up, and the single phone light that is illuminating the room goes out. He tries to fall asleep, but the silence of the still air seems inconceivably loud.
━
By the time the evening of his birthday has rolled around, Najm has still not celebrated. He wishes birthdays could be moved, so maybe he wouldn’t have to sit with the shame of celebrating alone.
He is halfway to the cheesecake shop when he decides to do something different. They were breaking tradition, after all. He takes a random turn and walks down a new street, one where the shops are mostly unfamiliar to him. He stops at a quiet place, small with a few people inside. Sitting down, he orders some food and waits. This is the kind of place for people that are eating alone. The tables are narrow, not meant to accommodate more than a few people. No conversations are had inside, so instead the room is filled with the sound of mellow jazz playing from the speakers scattered around the ceiling.
Next to Najm is a long window that gives him a perfect view of the sky. He looks at the stars, absentmindedly counting them all in his head. His eyes wander before settling on one, especially bright.
Sirius. He knows this one because they share the same name. Morning star. He is still looking when a voice calls out to him.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” Najm turns his head, surprised. The voice belongs to a woman with blonde hair that is streaked with grey and tied in a singular, thick braid that snakes down her left shoulder. She is sitting by herself across the room, dressed in tan pants and a green jacket.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t really know quite what else to say. The woman rises from her seat and moves over to him, sitting on the other side of the table. She is older than Najm initially thought, he realizes now that he can see the lines on her face.
“This is a great spot,” the woman says, gesturing towards the large window, “at least for the city. You can see a good chunk of the sky from here.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Najm confesses.
“Not big on stargazing?” Her eyes are dark, filled with a wisdom he can almost see twinkling in the irises.
“Not really. That’s more my sister’s thing.” Of the two, Inas is more versed in stuff like this. On clear nights, she would bring Najm out and tell him about them, trying desperately to point to the star she was talking about in the vastness of the night sky. She knows the names of many of them, telling them to Najm, though he often forgets.
“I know that one,” Najm says, pointing to the morning star as it sets in the southwest.
“Sirius,” the woman murmurs. “Brightest star in the sky.”
Their food comes and two talk while they eat. Najm says he is a student and a photographer, though he hasn’t held a camera in a while. He learns the woman is an astronomer, though she’s been retired for a while, and this is why she knows so much about stargazing. He tells her he plays guitar, and she replies that she plays the flute and has a friend who sings, and maybe they should start a band together. They exchange soft peals of laughter that are cut short with the woman’s next question.
“How was your day?” She has been good to him, so Najm tells the truth, or at least most of it.
“It’s my birthday, actually.” Najm looks down, red flushing across his face in embarrassment. “I usually go out with family, but they couldn’t make it.” A soft look comes across the woman’s eyes, not of pity but more acknowledgement.
“Well, I’m glad neither of us are by ourselves anymore.” Najm opens his mouth to ask why she is here, but he doesn’t. It doesn’t seem important to him, to ask why, as much it is to appreciate the company. He doesn’t say much for the rest of the meal, and neither does she, but both listen to the sound of the other’s breathing.
When they are finished eating, they pay and leave the restaurant. The woman stops outside the building; Najm does so in turn. The stars are out in full force, what seems like hundreds shimmering above them with various amounts of light.
“You know, you learn a lot of things in my line of work,” says the woman, her voice quiet but solid. Still looking at the sky above, she continues to speak. “One of them is how little we are compared to everything else. The stars above us are so far away, some of them have already disappeared, and we just haven’t realized.” Najm turns to look at her, intrigued.
“I’ve heard about that,” he mumbles, “how long the light takes to travel.”
“The planet we live on is small,” the woman continues. “So small, compared to everything else. Just a tiny rock. And so are we. Even tinier.” As Najm sees her eyes, still directed upward, he notices the wisdom has turned to a great sadness.
“I’m old,” she states, “if that wasn’t obvious enough. I’ve seen people, lots of people, die. I’ve seen a table of friends get smaller and smaller with each passing year, until it’s only me left. I’ve felt like the world is empty.” Seeing the lines on her face and the greys of her hair, Najm believes it, wholeheartedly.
“But when I saw you looking at the stars, I thought about something. That no matter how big the distance is, all the stars in the sky are close enough that we can see their light. Every small shining thing up there is something we can feel and see.” There is a moment of silence between the two before the woman speaks again.
“I just think,” her voice trembles, only a little bit, “that sometimes it’s hard to remember if we are all too far or too close to each other.”
The two continue to look at the night sky, savouring the sight before it inevitably fades into the morning. And there is nothing more to say.
━
It is only when he gets home that Najm realizes he had never gotten the woman’s name, nor did her tell her his own. What he does have is a single picture of the two, standing outside the restaurant. He will remember what she looked like, at least, and he is sure he will remember for a long time.
The night is still young, and Najm does not yet want to go to sleep, so idles his time doing various errands. Eventually, he reopens his computer and is hit with the harsh white of the powered screen.
There is another photo from his sister. This time, she is not at a beach or lake or party, but instead sits by herself in a hotel room. The waves of brown hair droop down to her shoulders and into the caption that reads waiting for someone.
Also open on the screen are the two photos he edited prior and the folder full of cutout background people. He closes the two pictures and the one from his sister but stops at the folder. Each image is a different kind of light, reminiscent of the constellations outside that formed shapes of anything one could imagine.
The sun begins to rise again to signal a new day, and so does Sirius. Najm takes the photo of him and the woman, transferring it to his computer, and opens it next to the folder of people. He edits them into his picture, one at a time.
