The Common Thing

The bus was not coming. The driver had called Soren's mother from somewhere down the valley, something about a fallen branch and the county not answering, and so Soren stood alone at the shelter at the edge of the school lot with the cold coming up through his shoes.

He did not mind the cold as much as he minded not knowing how long it would last. He pulled his coat tighter and watched the sky, because there was nothing else to watch.

Two things were happening in it at once.

To the north, low and green, the sky was breathing. That was the only word he had for it. A pale curtain rose and thinned and sank, then rose again a little to the left, the color of the inside of a cucumber held up to a window. He had seen the aurora twice before. Both times it had made the back of his neck feel strange, like being watched by something enormous and gentle.

To the west, over the far ridge, a storm was throwing lightning. No thunder reached him yet, so it was silent lightning, quick white cracks that lit the clouds from inside and left green shapes floating in his eyes afterward.

Soren stood between the two of them and rubbed his hands together.

He was thinking that they had nothing to do with each other. One was weather. One was space. The green curtain was two hundred miles up, or more, way past the air, where the sun's wind came sleeting in along the lines of the Earth's own magnetism. The lightning was right there, a few miles off, in the wet and the wind. Different heights. Different worlds. He was sure of that.

Then the lightning cracked again, and for a moment, before it died, its color and the curtain's color were the same.

Soren stopped rubbing his hands.

He watched the next bolt. It was white at the core and it left the same faint green ghost. He watched the curtain to the north. Green, shading to a whisper of pink at the very top. He looked back and forth, waiting for the storm, counting the seconds the way you count for thunder, except he was not counting for thunder. He was counting to see the two colors again in the same held breath.

They came. And they matched.

He knew, dimly, from a library book with a cracked spine, that the aurora glowed because something up there was getting torn. The sun's wind hit the thin high gas and knocked the little pieces of the atoms loose from each other, and when they snapped back together they let go of light. Oxygen let go of green. That was the green.

And the lightning. The lightning was so hot, hotter than the surface of the sun, the book had said, and Soren had not believed it standing in the library but he believed it now with the white cracks in his eyes. So hot that the air along the bolt got torn the same way. Ripped into pieces. Glowing as it healed.

He took his notebook out of his coat and held it against the shelter post and wrote, and the pen dragged in the cold. Aurora and lightning. Same tearing. Same glow.

He did not put the notebook away. He kept looking.

Because if that was true, then the green curtain and the white bolt were not two different things at all. They were the same thing happening in two different places. Not solid, not liquid, not gas. A fourth thing. Air and space gas torn open into something that glowed and answered to magnets and carried the sky's own light.

Soren turned in a slow circle at the bus shelter.

Under his shoes, the gravel. Solid. In the puddle by the curb, water. Liquid. The cold air he was breathing, in and out, gas. Three states, all around him, all the ordinary things the ground was made of.

And the fourth thing was in the sky both ways he looked, and nowhere on the ground at all.

That was the part that made him stand very still.

He went through it again, slow, the way he went through anything that felt too big to be true. On Earth the torn glowing state was rare. You had to wait for a storm. You had to wait for the sun to send its wind and the sky to answer in green. On the ground it did not just sit around the way water sat in a puddle. It needed the lightning's heat, or the height where the air ran out. Special places. Special nights. He had been lucky to catch even one of them, and here were both at once.

So it was the rare thing. The hard-to-find thing. That was what his whole life on the ground had taught him.

He looked up at the green curtain breathing over the north, and he tried to hold the other idea in his head, the one the book had said in a single flat sentence he had read too fast to feel.

The stars were made of it. All of them. Every point of light scattered over him right now, the whole spilled bright mess of them, was the torn glowing fourth thing, burning without stopping, the way the lightning burned for half a second. The space between the stars, the great dark, was thin and full of it too. Almost everything that gave off light in the whole universe was this. This was the common thing. This was what most of everything was made of.

And he lived down here at the bottom of a thin skin of air, on a rare cold ball of the three quiet states, where the common thing of the universe had to break in through a thunderstorm to be seen at all.

He was standing on the strange place. He was the rare one, looking up at the ordinary.

The storm and the curtain matched their green again, west and north, the near thing and the far thing saying the same word at the same time.

Down the road, headlights came around the bend, slowed, and turned into the lot. The bus, at last, its brakes hissing. Soren did not move toward it yet. He kept his face up.

The green curtain to the north pulled taller, folded once along its whole length, and rippled, and the puddle at his feet held a shivering scrap of it, green light lying in the water on the ordinary ground.