Why Stars Fall (A Short Story for Children)

Ajay Pradhan | July 29, 2015

Kori, the six-year-old first-grader, looked up into the sky from her bedroom window at night. She was mesmerized by the stars.

She wondered why some stars twinkled more than others. She wondered when she grew up and became taller if she could reach out to some and touch them with her hands. She wondered if she could pick the bright ones she particularly liked and put them on her bedside table. She wondered what it would be like to turn off the lights in her room and use the starlight to read the picture book that her Mommy bought for her today. She loved books. She loved stars. Maybe she could pin a nice one on her curly dark hair.

She had heard that some stars fall and she wondered why. She wondered what would happen to the fallen stars or where they would go. She didn’t like that some stars fall. She liked them all up in the sky, so that she could look at them at night and maybe someday pick some and keep for herself in her room. But she also took delight in the hope that maybe one of them would fall at her backyard so she could go and get it.

“Kori, sweetheart, you’re supposed to be in bed,” Mom, who had just peeked in from the door, said.

Kori turned her head to her Mom and then back at the stars in the sky. The sky looked so beautiful with those stars.

“Mommy,” Kori asked, “Why do stars fall?”

Mom said, “They don’t fall. They come down from the sky to visit their loved ones on the earth.”

Kori kept looking at the sky and said, “I get it. The sky is the heaven.”

“Yes, it is, darling,” Mom said.

Kori said, “The stars must be the people who leave the earth to go to heaven.”

“You are right, honey,” Mom said.

“You see the brightest one up there?” said Kori, almost in whispers, “I hope that one comes down from the heaven to see me. That must be daddy.”