Tungolcraeft

“Is that Orion?” Josh asked.

Benjamin looked up to the sky, matching his perspective with Josh’s. In the clear December night, the belted hunter blazed brightly over the earth.

“Yep.”

It was rhetorical. Every time they drank whiskey well into the night, Josh searched the sky for Orion. It was a ritual to point him out, providing some sense of eternity and unity to all of those disparate evenings they spent together. Orion was the guardian of their time together, a way to give meaning to what was otherwise a series of excuses to get drunk outside.

The thought of it struck him as empty. Each of those stars was a fiery world infinities away from the earth. It was only from their vantage point, positioned randomly in time and space, that each star could be viewed in the arrangement they saw it in. The luck of their positioning made Orion shine in the sky, not any greater purpose. And if this Boeotian hunter could not be glimpsed, it would certainly be some other figure. A warrior, or a beast, or something else entirely, holding his celestial vigil.

Benjamin sipped his whiskey and contemplated the arbitrary patterns according to which he arranged his life. The liquor burned. The stars burned hotter.