Moving

We're in the yard, eleven at night. He's four. He can't say why he's not asleep,
and I don't ask — he just appeared at the door.

I carry him out to the dark lawn and we stand there. He's warm the way children
are warm, impractical warmth. He smells like the soap I use, because I gave him
the bath.

I say: watch.

A point of light appears over the roofline, moving. Not blinking. Steady, west
to east, too high, too fast, too silent to be a plane. Slower than you'd think,
for how fast it is.

He watches it cross the whole sky. Four minutes. He doesn't speak.

When it goes behind the tree line, he says: again?

I say: no. Not again. That one won't come again tonight.

He's in bed five minutes later, out in thirty seconds.

I stand in the yard. I try to find the sentence for it — the arc of light, the
silence, the way he tracked it without blinking, the question after. I try a few.

He'll remember it wrong, or not at all. I'll remember it this way.

That's already how it works.

—

~190 words. Prose poem.

CRAFT NOTE: First draft over-explained: "there isn't a sentence for what happens
when someone who has never seen anything before really looks at something" — told
the reader what to feel. Cut that. Replaced with "I try a few." — shows the
failure without labeling it. The ISS is never named; the child doesn't need to
know what it is for the awe to be real. "Again?" is the emotional hinge: not
just "show me again" but the first time a child asks for something they felt and
couldn't hold. The title is a double: the light moves, the moment moves. The
real subject — the asymmetry of memory between parent and child — arrives in the
last two lines without announcement. "That's already how it works." is the gut
punch: he's not describing tonight only, he's recognizing the permanent structure
of it.