“Are you sure you want to create a universe with starstuff, Ms. Kearny?” the teacher asked, pausing to look at the dubious ingredients her pupil had lined up on the desk.
But Allison Kearny was too preoccupied to answer her well-meaning teacher. She was busy staring at the tiny cosmos that was forming in the palms of her hands. Starstuff was usually only added to a universe in small amounts, but she’d accidentally tipped out too much, and now… well, now it was obvious what this universe needed. Some wishes. A few dreams. Light, and a large amount of unpredictability. This wasn’t going to be your ordinary universe, Allison was determined. This was going to be something new, something to carefully place in the black space-fabric and point to as an example for future students, as something beautiful and experimental and outside the box.
“See that?” they would say. “That’s a special one. It’s Ms. Kearny’s universe.”
She kept adding other ingredients, making sure to keep it stable, until it could carefully be transferred to the space-fabric. Once it was there, both she and her teacher stood and looked at it in awe, watching it slowly expand and settle into its new home, spinning and winking with excess energy. As other students finished their own projects and walked over to the fabric, they were also drawn in by the spectacle, until this strange little universe had attracted quite a crowd.
“What is it?” someone whispered.
Allison turned to them and smiled. “It’s a place,” she said confidently, “for poets.”
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