Phoeki and the Blue lake

A little girl by the name of Phoeki lived by a glass blue lake. During her walks back from school she would run across the edges and watch how her reflected playmate ran along with her. She would smile and her playmate would smile back at her . It made Phoeki happy when she could smell the leaf, the mud, hear the ants trailing along the stones. In the summer when the school ended a bit early. Phoeki would sit by the edge of the lake and bounce pebbles off the mirrored blue surface.

On days she was running late, she would run as fast as her legs could carry her. As she ran faster and faster, her heart would beat faster and faster like drummer in a rock band. She imagined it was the drummer in the concert she swallowed in her dream in a big gulp of glee. Since then whenever she ran, he would speed up the rhythm and her heart would beat faster. She smiled to herself as she watched her feet race, jump, skip over the rocks, grass and sand.

On one such day that she didn't have time to stop. a silent rainbow ripple broke the blue surface. Phoeki hadn't noticed.

There was so much running through her mind. Her body ran, beads of sweat gathered round her face, making her face sticky. All she was thinking off was how was she going to finish her class assignment? There was so much to do. And lately she was finding it difficult to keep up. During class, often her eyes would rest on the shafts of sunlight , the teacher's voice would become an incoherant rumble, and she would feel her mind wandering away, away out...somewhere else
.

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.