Maria Isabella looked down and thought she saw everything, everything.
At one exquisite interval during her ascent, Maria Isabella thought she spied the precise tower where Lorenzo du Vicenzio ei Salvadore, the Stargazer, must live and work. She felt the exuberant joy of her lost youth bubble up within her and mix with the fiery spark of love she had kept alive for sixty years, and in a glorious blaze of irrepressible happiness she waved her free hand with wild abandon, shouting the name that had been forever etched into her heart.
When a powerful wind took the kite to sudden new heights, when Ciudad Meiora and everything below her vanished in the dark, she stopped shouting, and began to laugh and laugh and laugh.
And Maria Isabella du'l Cielo looked up at the beginning of forever and thought of nothing, nothing at all.
And in the city below, in one of the high rooms of the silent Torre du Astrunomos (where those who had served with distinction were housed and honored), an old man, long-retired and plagued by cataracts, sighed in his sleep and dreamed a dream of unnamed stars.
Story copyright (c) 2002 Dean Francis Alfar
The story "L'Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)" by Dean Francis Alfar, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
If you redistribute this story, please include a link to http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030106/estrellas.shtml.
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