She woke up from a strange dream.

The starlight had spoken to her. She heard its voice obscured and pretty like a fistful of sapphires held up against the moon. There were other things speaking too. She heard a twister of frogs barking like mimic cats, or the song that raincoats dance to when nobody's looking. But it was just background to that sugary voice of the starlight. It was calling out to her, telling her secrets and building statues out of the syllables in her name. Her face was mirrored in those statues, magnified by them, expanded into the universe only to fall back in on itself and then drift away like twists of black crepe caught up in an ocean breeze.

She woke up from a strange dream and wandered, groggy and barely cogent, into the cold dark of her kitchen. She fumbled for a light switch, flipped it, drenched the room in blinding luminescence, teared up and shut it off again quickly to cease the stinging under her clamped eyelids. Her vision swam under a layer of duct brine, wobbling and doubling the fizzle of yellow glow around the nightlight. She stumbled toward the fridge, braced herself for the light flood that would follow opening the door, and grabbed a bottle of Aquafina from inside.

The visions of the dream still sprang vividly across her mindscape, holding their ground against the vapor swell of waking. The audio track was fuzzy and scuffed, a tape dragged against gravel, and it was always threatening to break down completely. She felt like there was something profound in the starlight's words, in the imagery and iconography it drafted and sculpted from the sound of her name. It certainly seemed important, and she wanted to pay it closer attention, but real life and its ceaseless outdoor hum of wee hour traffic and bursts of sirens and train whistles and plane engines, and the indoor symphony of refrigerator buzz, furnace fan roar, pipes clanging, beams and joists popping and settling, and random unidentifiable noise had intruded so roundly that she kept forgetting what it was she was trying to concentrate on in the first place. The memories of it fell apart. She was clutching at them, trying to tether them as balloons to something in the tangible world, and failing, losing sight of the helium filled things as they caught air and wandered far off. She still had a firm hold on the ropes she wanted to tie them down with, at least. She was awake, now, and very nearly fully aware, drinking her water and shivering.

She sat down at her table in the dark, her bare legs screaming from the cold metal frame of the folding chair, resulting in a body-wide outbreak of goosebumps. She was annoyed by it, but growing accustomed to it quickly, and soon she'd either acclimated to the temperature of the chair or raised it with her own body heat. She held her chin in one hand, her elbow propped precariously on the vinyl top of the table, and used all of her energy to maintain the openness of her eyes. As she sipped the water, she hardly thought it was worth the effort.

She finished half the bottle and put it away.

As she shielded her eyes from the fridge light, she swore she heard something familiar coming from inside of it. It was hushed, a smoke trail of a whisper snaking up into her ears. It jangled her, ringing the church bells in her skull and cracking her memory with the sound. It lingered in the canal, trilling like a cricket song, filling her head and pouring from her mouth in a parroted repetition. It was the starlight's voice. She remembered it, and it was telling her secrets again. But it was too low, too quiet to be intelligible. It was coming from inside the refrigerator. She knew if she could find the source she'd be able to hear it better. She'd be able to hear what the starlight had been trying to tell her.

As she rooted through leftovers and old milk, through half empty bottles of soy sauce and handfuls of various restaurants' ketchup packets, through indeterminate substances growing science fair mold in generic Tupperware-esque containers, and a remote control for some reason, she heard it get louder and louder and clearer and clearer. Her heart started to beat quicker and she felt a rising excitement move up her spine like mercury in a thermometer. She knew whatever the starlight had to tell her, whatever it had come to say to her in her dreams, had been incredible and important. She just knew that hearing it would be one of those momentous events that puts its tendrils into every aspect of life. It was going to be a moment of revelation, an epiphany, a transfiguration. Finding the starlight's voice, wherever it happened to be hiding in her refrigerator, was by far the most important thing she'd ever done in her entire life.

It was not in the anthropomorphic bottle of syrup.

It was not in the crisper.

It was not, as far as she could tell, anywhere amongst the butter, or lazily packaged pre-sliced cheese, or the weird flavors of yogurt that she always bought but never ate.

She had emptied the contents of the damned thing all over the kitchen floor. The sound was still there, still faint and still rising and falling in volume as she moved around in the icebox like she was playing a stranger version of the hot/cold game.

She practically removed everything, becoming more and more aggravated as she did. It was driving her crazy trying to find the source of that blessed voice. It was odd, of course, that it was in her refrigerator at all, but she was going to lose her mind if she didn't find it soon. There was barely anything left on the shelves, just a bottle of mustard and a jar of Miracle Whip.

She pulled the Miracle Whip out and held it up to her ear, fully aware of how silly it must've looked. The starlight's voice was louder, clearer, but she still couldn't make it out exactly. She wondered at the series of events that led the voice of starlight, the life changing, secret uttering voice of the cosmos themselves, to somehow become trapped in a quarter full tangy salad dressing jar located in a tiny apartment in southern Illinois. She wondered what the physics were behind capturing the voice of starlight and if it had been a conscious choice or merely an accident. She wondered, with the anticipation usually reserved for children's Christmas Eves and birthdays, what grandiose truth the starlight's voice was going to lay upon her when she opened the jar. She held off for a moment, savoring the potential while terrified of being disappointed in whatever it had to say.

She took a breath, unscrewed the lid, and listened to the starlight's voice.

THE END.

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