She waited a long time for the car to pull up. In that time the sidewalk flooded with thick rainbow pools of gasoline, washed up from the street by the rain.  She sat on the curb under the tin roof of a restaurant, her feet sticking out from under, causing her rubber boots to fill with water. She stood intermittently to drag herself out from the curb and shake the boots empty. The rain cast a time lapse over the whole scene, causing the girl to grow impatient with the cold. Her face had turned the color of snow, her hands an oceanic shade of blue. Night fell sooner than she’d hoped. A man in a tattered overcoat stopped to hand her four pennies and a dime, assuming she was homeless like most thirteen-year-olds sitting on the curb at night in the rain. A second rush of gasoline flowed past her, trailing into the drain beside her. She ran her fingers, pale and blue, through the stream of glittering oil and stopped a falling tear with the shoulder of her dress. The car pulled to the curb seconds later, splashing the polluted waters onto her white tights. She observed the car in all its long, penetrating darkness. Despite being entirely black, it shone and sparkled in the night, a huge shimmering star of a limousine. She opened the back door and stepped inside.

The driver said nothing when she entered. Feeling obligated to break the chilling silence, the girl said “This car must be it, huh? The final visible star in the galaxy.”

“What?” asked the driver, who grabbed a towel and tossed it back to the girl to dry her hair.

The girl shifted in her seat. “Oh, I was only joking. Someone told me once about a star, one that’s still visible from this hill uptown. In all the pitch blackness of an endlessly polluted sky, one star remains visible from our town. Sounds like something, doesn’t it? I’d give anything to see it… A star.”

The driver remained silent until she pulled the limousine to a halt in front of the museum. The girl bunched the hem of her dress in her hand and climbed out of the car. She walked up the slick marble steps, sliding her hands against the brass railing to keep from slipping. The heels of her boots clicked up to the oversized door of the museum and inside. The clicking continued as she made her way down the empty halls, a haunting echo getting louder and louder as she reached the showroom. Immediately after entering, she spotted her parents through the crowd. Her mother wore long black gloves that matched her feathered dress and heels so glossy they blinded the girl for a moment. Her father was dressed in his best suit, giving to his hundreds of guests his classic beam of superiority. Anyone could tell it was their museum, simply in the way they carried themselves. The girl stopped to observe the guests; all in their own world, it seemed. To them there was nothing but money and parties. They didn't notice the streams of oil on the pavement, or the parts of town that were barely breathable, an unspeakable amount of pollution reigning over the population. The girl simultaneously hated and envied them, for both their destruction and their carelessness. The girl’s mother caught her eye and made her way through the crowd with a smile. “You made it! No troubles with the car?”

“No... It was a little late-” the girl kept her glassy eyes fixed on the polished granite floor.

“Great! Aren't you excited for the show tonight? I know you've always wanted to see the stars!”

The girl shrugged. “A planetarium isn't the same.” She wanted to say more, that the carbon emissions from powering the planetarium alone were more than she believed should be allowed any group of a thousand people off the street, but she kept her mouth shut and stepped outside.

The museum sculpture garden was a delightful outdoor patio that housed the town’s greatest sculptures, from smaller clay pots to full body marble figures on pedestals. But to the girl the garden looked more like a cemetery, the thick smog weaving between mossy figures of stone that might as well have been tombstones, tense and afraid in their eternal solitude.

The girl looked up to the night sky. The tops of sculptures obstructed her view, dark goddesses with pointed staffs carved from soapstone. The goddesses seemingly used their staffs to stir the pollution above as if they were witches, and the sky, their communal cauldron. The museum doors opened. The girl watched her father emerge from them, a look of disgust on his face. “Your mother informed me that you’d stepped out,” he said, kicking through a pile of damp leaves.

“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be disrespectful, I’d merely rather be out here with the motionless sculpture-culture,” said the girl lightheartedly.

“No, I know why you’re out here. It’s because you’re ungrateful. Your mother and I give you everything- all of this-” at this he gestures around them at the museum, “And it means nothing to you because all you care about is oil and muck. Look, that’s it all over your tights, isn’t it? What’d you go swimming with all your flower and star and beaver friends in the slush?”

“The car splashed it over me as it pulled up this evening,” the girl said. “And it’s not oil I care about- it’s everything the oil destroys. All the little parts of the ecosystem that died because no one noticed their screams when we invented the factory, the car, the computer. The screen. The planetarium. Those pieces of our world- the plants and animals that have supported us for forever- they are still screaming, Dad. And sometimes it feels like I’m the only one that can hear their shrieks.”

“Well, why do you care? We destroyed some plants. It’s too late anyway. Humanity has done what we have done. There’s no going back. Quit losing sleep over something that’s done. It’s not your fault or mine; It’s simply too late to save anything.”

At this, the girl’s father turned sharply inside and slammed the museum doors closed. Through tears, the girl looked ahead of her at the sad world, drenched in unclean rain. But this time, her eye caught something ahead. Through clouds of smoke she saw a vibrant, grassy hill in the distance. She ran around the corner of the garden and found an open window on the other side of the museum. She stepped onto a hippopotamus sculpture to boost her up to the height of the window, and climbed inside. The room was of elegant victorian style. Long drapes hung from the ceiling and danced slightly with every gust of wind from the open window. Their tassels tickled the oak floor. There were three or four paintings of nineteenth century women resting on easels around the room, but what stole the attention from them was the lounge, complete with antique couches and chairs, so old and dusty the girl was afraid to sit for fear they might turn to dust with a human touch. On a stand next to one of the chairs was an old dial phone, newly polished and in working condition. The girl picked up the phone and dialed the driver from that evening. The driver answered promptly and asked “Are you ready?”

“Yes, I tire very quickly from parties. Come at once, I have just one more place I’d like to visit tonight, if it’s not too much trouble to drive me,” said the girl.

“Of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

The girl hung up the phone, climbed out the window, and sat herself down once more to wait for the same car in the same rain, and thought how nothing had changed in forever. Well, that was not completely true: the smog got thicker, the oil content got greater. But most terrible was that everyone went on, caring for nothing but the human race, forgetting that the fundamentals of human life come from nature, the very thing they neglected to care for. In a way it was self-sabotage, the way that people polluted the sky that contained vast beauty enjoyed by everyone… the stars. The car pulled up.

The driver asked no questions when directed to deliver the girl to the grassy hill in the distance. Perhaps the driver knew what was afoot, or perhaps they simply didn’t care. But the girl closed her eyes during that short drive and she imagined her future, the one in which children could look up and see those bright shining reflections of the galaxy. They would point at constellations and tell stories about each one, connecting the dots with their fingers. They would not have to drive to hills to see them. The stars would be so bright, it would be too difficult for them to even look the other way. They arrived at the hills, and the driver gave the girl a smile and said “I’ll wait.” The girl stepped out of the car, slowly descended the hill, and came to a stop at its rounded peak, covered in a fresh, fine grass. She looked up.

There was the star, not as large as she’d imagined in her early youth, but nevertheless infinitely satisfying. In that moment she felt that to see a far away glimpse of stellar reality was enough to fulfill her for years to come, perhaps for forever. She knew now that she would see stars everywhere: In the eyes of the driver once back in the car, in fragments of broken glass on the kitchen floor, in the oil-flooded streets back in town. She would give the stars the gift of her sight, and they in turn would hand her the hope that she’d searched for her entire life. For lack of strength, she knelt before this night, and gave her tears to the soft soil beneath her.

Looking at the sky, she felt at once large and small, old and young. She knew she would have to fight forever to clear the water and the air, and still she would never completely reverse the damage that those before her had done. But she would try, because there was so much work to be done to improve her world. She knew she’d better start as soon as she could. But that night, with the night sky pouring moonlight and sprinkling the glimmer of the last star in human sight over her body, she just lay down on the grass, closed her eyes, and let her skin absorb the soft galactic light.