Frankenberry's Attic

In a prosery prompt from Mish, a dVerse creation of 144 words of prose including a given line from a poem, she pays tribute to Gordon Downie, poet, songwriter, storyteller, activist and former lead singer for the Tragically Hip.

From his poem “Starpainters” she has taken the line “The “Starpainters are taking over now” for us to use in our story.

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(Pixabay – Nicole Rose promo25-milky-way-559641_1920)

The Sky Comes

The Starpainters had always just … been, was the best way Jaad could explain them, well, to start with anyway. For as long as he remembered and his father and his father’s father, going all the way back to the Great Lifting of the Veil, “The Starpainters are taking over now” had always led the triumphant final verse of Song of Sky.

But Jaad knew too that they were just a creation of the ancestors to explain, just myth and most probably not (it was safer, he thought, to think “probably not” just in case) ancient beings that had actually painted the night. They were bedtime comfort stories for children but in sometimes equal breath, depending, fearing tales of Starpainters cast out and thrown across the horizon.

The fearing tales never scared Jaad, until the night the horizon became the hillside overlooking his fields …