The Night of the Comet by George Bishop Read Free Book Online Page B

it came to his comet, he was indefatigable.
    Nights, he would take my telescope and head for the back door.
    “I thought you said we weren’t going to see it for another couple months,” I said.
    “I’m just checking. I’m just having a look, that’s all. Turn off the porch light, would you?”
    From my bedroom window I watched him set up the scope in the backyard. His white shirt caught the light from the Moon so that, moving against the dark line of trees, he looked like a ghost bobbing around at the rear of our yard. He hunched down to the eyepiece and then stayed there a long time, his hands resting awkwardly on his knees. He seemed to sigh occasionally, his shoulders rising and falling with his breath.
I’m here
, he might’ve been whispering to the comet.
I’m ready. I’m waiting
.
    When I went to bed he was still there in the yard with my telescope, still waiting with his head bowed beneath the stars. Drifting off to sleep, I imagined a spark from the comet floating down, down like a mote of stardust, to land inside my father, where, settling in his belly, it rekindled the long-forgotten dreams and ambitions of his youth. I saw his white shirt glowing yellow in the moonlight, flames shooting from his fingertips, like he was a man set on fire.
    And who knew then how great the flames would grow, how bright they would shine? Or how completely they would consume him? We couldn’t have known, not then. Then, his comet was still little more than a joke to us all.

CHAPTER SIX
    Groovy Scienceby
Alan Broussard
    In a weekly special to the
Daily Herald
, local science teacher and astronomy expert Alan Broussard discusses scientific topics of interest to a general audience.
    A Sunday morning a month into the start of the school year, my father trotted into the house in his pajamas and bedroom slippers carrying the newspaper. Megan, our mother, and I gathered at his elbows as he unfolded the paper on the table with a jerky excitement. On page three of the Fun section, just below my mother’s horoscope column, was a black-and-white photograph of him. His glasses looked larger than in real life, and he wore a stiff, crooked smile.
    “ ‘Groovy Science’?” Megan said, frowning. “Whose idea was that?”
    “The column was my idea. But the title, that’s the editor’s. They wanted to, you know, jazz it up a little.”
    We knew he’d been working on something for the newspaper but didn’t know what, exactly. He told us he’d delivered this first piece just last week and everyone at the newspaper had liked it. “Careful you don’t get butter on it.”
    I began to read the article aloud.
    The Great Comet Kohoutek
    Aristotle called them “stars with hair.” Before the telescope was invented, people didn’t know what to make of comets. They seemed to appear from nowhere in the sky, like strange stars with long hair. They would linger for a few days, weeks, or sometimes months before gradually disappearing. Early astronomers said they were rogue planets, or the exhalations of gas from the Earth, or even the smoke of human sins that rose into the sky and burst into flame. But no matter how they understood them, people throughout history have always been frightened by comets. They were bad omens. They portended disaster: wars, famine, the death of kings, even the end of the world.
    Today, of course, we know that comets …
    “Okay, okay, you don’t have to read the whole thing,” Megan said.
    “It’s just something easy. Something for families and kids,” my father quickly explained. “I thought with the comet coming, this would be a good opportunity to raise awareness in the community about the importance of science in our everyday lives.” He had already mapped out a bunch of ideas for future columns: the history of astronomy, early views of the solar system, the laws of gravity, the origins of the universe, the nature of time … “You could go on and on.”
    My mother looked at him with a peculiar