M61: A Place That Grows Fast

Aunt Maddie said the sky was the only thing left that still told the truth, so she made me learn to read it. That was the winter after the water district failed, when half our street had gone north and the rest of us were learning which neighbors would share and which would only watch. She had a telescope in a shed behind the house, bolted to a concrete pier she had poured herself, and a computer she guarded like a well. I was fourteen. I thought it was a waste of electricity. I was wrong about that.

The first galaxy she gave me was M61, out in Virgo, some fifty million light-years away. She told me that people had watched eight stars explode in it, the first in 1926 and one as recently as 2020, which is more than they have seen in almost any other galaxy. "Why that one?" I asked. "Because it makes stars fast," she said. "Big ones. Big stars burn hot and die young, and when they go they take out everything close to them. A place that grows fast buries a lot of its own." She looked at me when she said it. She was not only talking about the galaxy.

For weeks my pictures came out wrong. The stars had rainbow edges, red on one side and blue on the other, and none of them were ever truly blue, though Maddie swore plenty of them should be. I was sharpening everything at the end, after I had already combined the colors, and the sharpening was finding the small differences between the red and green and blue exposures and making them worse. Maddie watched me fail for a long time before she said anything. She believed a lesson you are handed is a lesson you drop.

"Each color comes through the air differently," she finally told me. "Blurs differently. You can't fix them all with one hand. You fix each one the way it needs, alone, and then you put them together." I did it her way. The stars came back round and honest, the blue ones were blue, and near the top of the frame a tiny galaxy I had never noticed opened up like a seed: dust lanes, a bright core, pink knots of new stars. It had been there the whole time. I just had not been treating it right.

Maddie died the next spring. By then eleven of us were living on the street as one household, pooling water and food and watch shifts, and when the arguments started they came to me, because I had learned to hear each person apart before I tried to make them agree. I still keep the shed. I still check M61 every season, because a place that burns that bright will do it again. Maddie was right about the sky. It does not care about us, but it will teach anyone willing to be taught.

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