Red shifts

On quiet afternoons, when the sun glistened between the leaves, the lakeside was usually empty. And during those lonesome hours the blades of grass soaked up the last rays of sun. In a few hours the sun would set, and a twilight glow would fade slowly into night.

The universe is expanding. Galaxies are moving away at speeds faster than we can imagine. Phoeki looked up from the book. The sky was still blue. Was that big dragon shaped cumulous-nimbus slowly changing shape again? Her eyes returned to the words on the page. Sometimes she found the explanations hard. But there was a dreamy intoxication in just reading words like velocity, spectrum, red shift, nanometers, parallax, names like Hubble and looking at diagrams which explained distances, angles and wavelenghts.

That night she thought she would slip out from her room and try and watch the sky. Maybe if she looked hard enough she could actually see that red shift. Well maybe that was being too ambitious. Unlikely that she would be able to slip away unnoticed. The door made too much noise. Besides there was school the day after, and it was scary at night walking out alone.