By Brenda Ehrmantraut
A dad far away and his child play catch with the North Star, so no matter the miles they're under the same sky every single night.
A father has to go far away, for a long time, for his work in the military. Before he leaves, he and his child come up with a way to stay close across all that distance: a game of catch played with the North Star. Every night the dad tosses the star up into the sky, and every night, half a world away, his child looks up and catches it, and sends it back. The star is always there, and so is the game, so bedtime becomes the one place they meet no matter where in the world he is. Brenda Ehrmantraut wrote it out of her own family's deployments, and it reads like a lullaby, calm and rhyming and made to be the last thing your child hears before sleep.
It hands a family something to DO. A deployment is too big and too long for a small child to hold, but a star they can find every night is exactly their size, and 'we're both looking at it right now' is a truth they can actually feel. Ehrmantraut never pretends the missing away; she just gives it a shape a child can carry, and gives your child a job on the nights the ache is loudest.