The Nearest Star to Everything

The stones were warm from the truck and warmer from the sun, and Soren liked the weight of them in both hands. His aunt had dumped them in a heap by the fence and said, make me a path to the gate, space them however looks right, and then she had gone inside to argue with the lawnmower.

He set the first stone near the door. He set the second a step away. He kept going, dropping flat gray stones across the dirt, leaving room between each one for a foot to land.

When he stood up to look, the gaps bothered him.

Not the stones. The gaps. The bare dirt between the stones had broken itself into shapes, and the shapes were not random. Each patch of dirt seemed to belong to the stones around it, like every crumb of soil had quietly decided which stone it was closest to.

He crouched and pressed his thumb into one patch, right in the middle, the spot that felt equally far from three stones at once. The dirt was cooler there. Farther from the warm rock on every side.

Soren got a stick.

He drew a line through the dirt, halfway between two stones, dividing the ground into what was nearer to one and what was nearer to the other. Then halfway between the next two. The lines met. They fenced each stone inside its own little yard, and the yards had four sides, five sides, six, depending on how many neighbors a stone had.

He sat back on his heels. The path was no longer a path. It was a map of who owned what.

His aunt came out wiping her hands. She looked at the stones and then at the web of stick-lines around them and made a face.

"You drew on my dirt," she said.

"Every spot belongs to its closest stone," Soren said. "Watch." He stood and dropped a pebble into one of the cells. "This pebble is in this stone's yard. It's closer to that stone than any other. The lines are the exact ties. The places that can't decide."

She tilted her head. "Huh," she said, which from his aunt was a lot. "Looks like a giraffe."

It did. The patches were patches now, dark soil quilted into rough polygons, and the seam between each one was pale where his stick had scraped it. A giraffe wore exactly this. He had never once wondered why a giraffe looked like that, and now he could not stop.

The lawnmower won the argument and his aunt went to find a wrench, and Soren stayed in the dirt.

He thought about the giraffe. The pattern was not painted on. It grew. Which meant something inside the skin had behaved like his stones, points spreading out, each one claiming the ground nearest to it, until the leftover seams became the white lines between the brown.

He reached into his pocket and got the notebook. He drew a handful of dots on a blank page, scattered, no order. Around each dot he drew the boundary, every point on the page handed to its nearest dot. The dots near the edge got huge open territories. The dots crowded in the middle got squeezed into tight little rooms. The page filled with cells, no two the same, none of them planned, all of them obeying the one rule.

Nearest wins.

He looked at his finished page and the back of his neck went cold the way it did at the aurora, the good cold.

Because the rule did not care what the points were.

If the points were stones, you got a path. If the points were the centers of cells in a leaf, you got the cracked-glass look of a leaf held to the light. If the points were the places mud dried fastest, you got the broken plates of a dry riverbed. If the points were giraffe pigment, you got a giraffe.

And if the points were stars.

Soren stopped drawing.

He had seen a picture once, a map of where galaxies sat in the universe, and it had not looked like dots scattered in a bag. It had looked like foam. Like soap bubbles. Like the dirt between his stones. Huge dark empty rooms with bright walls and bright corners where the walls met, and he had thought, when he saw it, that someone had drawn it to look pretty.

Nobody drew it. The same rule that quilted his aunt's backyard had quilted the universe. Matter had spread out, each clump pulling at the ground nearest to it, and the seams had filled with light and the centers had emptied into dark, and the whole sky above his head was wearing the pattern he had just scraped into the soil with a stick.

He lay down flat in the path.

From the ground the stones rose around him like walls, and above the stones was the dimming sky, and he was lying inside one cell of the backyard, one room that belonged to one stone, the way the Earth lay inside one room of the universe that belonged to some nearest knot of galaxies he would never visit.

The same shape. The very small one under his back and the very large one over his face. One rule writing both.

His aunt's voice came from across the yard. "Is the path done or are you taking a nap in it?"

"It's done," he called. It was. The stones were placed. The gaps had told him where they wanted to be all along, and he had only listened.

He sat up. The lines he had drawn in the dirt were already softening, the loose soil sliding back, the boundaries blurring. By tomorrow the rain would erase them. But the rule would still be there, invisible, doing the same work in the leaf and the dried mud and the foam of distant galaxies whether anyone scraped it into view or not.

He brushed the dirt off the back of his shirt and walked the finished path to the gate, stepping stone to stone, and at each stone he was, for one step, closer to that stone than to anything else in the world.

A moth crossed the yard and landed on the farthest stone, and Soren watched it sit there, alone in its little room, exactly where it belonged.