Holding a Spoon Up to a Shooting Star #WeeklyShortShortNote

One night, an old man fell into our garden.
With a loud crash behind the shed, my father rushed out to find a soot-covered old man sitting on the veranda, eating pudding.

The neighborhood children call him the "Meteorite Old Man."
At night, he looks up at the sky in the park and points, saying, "That is my old home." His fingertip always points in a different direction.
What he says is nonsense, for instance, "Life is a series of course corrections," or "Eating too much pudding interferes with interplanetary navigation."
Even though it makes me laugh, it has a strange sense of persuasiveness.

One evening, all the pudding in the town's refrigerators disappeared.
When questioned, the old man only said, "I was called by gravity," and floated gently off the veranda. After that, we could only look up as he was sucked into the sky.
For a while, the sweet scent of burnt sugar lingered in the house, soaking into the hems of the curtains.

On the night of a meteor shower, I stared intently at the sky.
The tails of falling light. I wondered if the caramel color of pudding was mixed into any of them.
Clutching a spoon, I search while straining my eyes.

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