Moss in the Observatory

At the hilltop observatory, the dome is split like a seed. Rain threads through rusted gears and settles in the eyepiece. Night leans down, patient as a teacher with ink-dark sleeves. Even the spiders hang their ladders toward Orion.

Ferns uncurl from the cracked control panel, green tongues tasting old equations. A moth beats against a map of constellations until the paper remembers it was once a tree.

I place my ear to the brass tube. Inside, not stars but a tide of small sounds: water traveling stone, roots nudging mortar, the long vowel of wind through missing glass.

So this is how a future arrives, quietly, leaf by leaf, over instruments of distance. The sky keeps widening above the broken dome, and earth writes back in luminous moss.