Nebula full sleeve on an arm

The bus put me down at the cattle grid at half past four, and I walked the last six miles of the Salt Flat Road with my boots full of grit. You will laugh, but the nights out here are so clear that the dust over the ridge looks like someone has spilled milk across the sky. Mr Okafor at the filling station told me the dark sky people set up their dishes on the far mesa, and I asked whether they ever sleep. He said only in daylight, like the cacti.

I have taken the room above the shop with the blue door. The landlady, Mrs Pell, keeps a jar of boiled sweets on the counter and a notebook where guests write the weather. Last night I stood on the step with a torch and no coat and tried to find the pillars you showed me in that book at college, the ones shaped like fingers reaching out of a cloud. I could not see them with my eyes, only through the lens she lent me, which fogs up if you breathe too close.

Something has changed, though. Yesterday a red point flared near the top of the eastern pillar, bright as a fire lit under the ridge, then gone within the hour. Mrs Pell says it is only a star being born, which the sky does all the time without asking anyone. I wrote the time down in her weather book beside the words clear, wind from the west.

Keep the coat for me. I will bring the lens home when I come, and you can tell me what you think it means.

Love, Maggie