The Boy Who Counted Stars

Reuben had decided, at the age of nine, that he was going to count the stars. All of them. He understood, dimly, that this was probably impossible — his geography teacher had said something about hundreds of billions — but Reuben had a great deal of confidence in numbers, and numbers had so far never let him down.

He began on a Tuesday in October, sitting on the flat roof outside his bedroom window with a torch, a notebook and a pair of his father's old binoculars. The first night he counted four hundred and seventeen. The second night, with patience, he counted eight hundred and sixty-three. By the end of the first week, he had drawn a careful map of the eastern sky, with every star numbered in his neatest pencil, and his bedroom floor was a soft litter of star-charts.

His older sister, Aanya, was not impressed. "You can't count them, you know," she said, from his doorway. "There are too many. And anyway, half of them aren't even there any more. The light just hasn't caught up with the news."

Reuben thought about this for a long time. He thought about it during maths, and during lunch, and especially during the bit of his swimming lesson when he was meant to be doing the front crawl. The idea that he was counting things that had vanished long before he was born did not, he discovered, discourage him. If anything, it made the project feel more important. Someone, after all, had to keep a list of what had been here.

That night he wrote a new title at the top of his notebook, in capital letters that he underlined twice: A RECORD OF EVERYTHING THAT WAS.

Then he climbed back onto the roof, raised the binoculars, and began again.