The Attic Telescope

Original short fiction written for Revision Library.

Zoe pulled the string for the attic light for the third time, but it only produced a dull, unconvincing flicker before dying completely. She unclipped the torch from her belt loop instead and swept its beam across boxes stacked higher than her head, each one labelled in her grandfather's slanting handwriting: KITCHEN, WINTER COATS, PHOTOGRAPHS - DO NOT LOSE. Downstairs, her mother was taping up another cardboard box, and the sound was sharp and final in the emptying house. In three weeks, Grandad Tomasz would move into Fernbank House, where there were no stairs to climb and someone came round every morning to check he had taken his tablets.

Wedged behind the cold water tank, half hidden beneath a dust sheet gone grey with age, was something long and rectangular that did not match any of the labelled boxes. Curious, Zoe dragged it into the torchlight and lifted the sheet away. Underneath lay a scuffed wooden case with brass clasps, and when she eased them open, a telescope lay nestled inside a bed of faded green felt, its barrel the colour of an old penny. Beside it, tucked into a pocket sewn into the lid, was a slim leather notebook, its pages soft and curling at the corners.

Zoe carried both downstairs and spread the notebook open on the kitchen table. Page after page was filled with careful diagrams: circles of stars connected by faint pencil lines, dates scrawled in the margins, and notes in her grandfather's unmistakable hand. Most meant nothing to her, but one entry, near the very back, made her sit up straight. It was dated for that exact night, and beneath the date, underlined twice, were the words: Perseid shower, peak visibility, clear skies forecast - do not miss it this year.

"You want to drag a telescope that's older than me out into the garden at eleven o'clock?" her mother said, not unkindly, but with the particular weariness of someone who had spent the whole day wrapping plates in newspaper. "It's probably not even pointed at anything real anymore, Zoe. Things like that need adjusting; they don't just work after sitting in a loft for years." Zoe held the notebook out anyway, open to the marked page, until her mother sighed and rubbed her eyes. "Fine. Ten minutes. Then you're both coming in, telescope and all."

Setting up the tripod took longer than Zoe expected, her fingers clumsy with cold as she fitted the brass legs together the way a diagram in the notebook seemed to suggest. For a long while nothing happened except the slow ache of standing still in the dark, her breath clouding in front of the eyepiece. Then, without warning, a thin streak of light tore across the sky like a match struck in the dark, there and gone before she could even call out. Zoe froze. For a moment she was certain she had imagined it, until a second streak followed the first, brighter this time, trailing pale gold above the chimney pots.

Her mother appeared at the back door in her dressing gown, arms wrapped around herself against the cold, clearly intending only to call Zoe inside. Instead she stopped on the step, one hand pressed flat against her chest, as a third streak split the sky directly overhead. "Oh," she said softly, and came to stand beside the telescope without being asked. For a while neither of them spoke, the sky above the small back garden performing quietly for an audience of two, as though it had been rehearsing this exact display for years, waiting only for someone patient enough to look up.

It was only once they were back inside, the telescope dripping gently with condensation by the radiator, that Zoe turned to the very last page of the notebook and found a note she had missed before, written in smaller, careful letters beneath the final star chart: For whoever finds this next - the sky keeps its promises even when I cannot climb the stairs to see them. Look up for me sometimes. Zoe read it twice, then a third time, feeling something in her chest tighten and loosen all at once.

She was still awake long after her mother had gone to bed, turning the notebook over in her hands and thinking about Fernbank House, and whether its windows faced the right direction, and whether anyone there would mind if a girl turned up tomorrow with an old brass telescope under her arm and a very important question to ask her grandfather. The Perseids, she had read on the very first page, would keep falling for another six nights yet, and that gave Zoe exactly enough time to find out.