Orion's Eyes

Title: Orion’s Eyes
Author: living myth
Type: Original Fiction
Genre: Drama | Tragedy
Rating: G

“I didn’t care for school or the people there. I didn’t really care for being home either. I just wanted the sun to go down so that I curl up in bed with a flashlight and the book of constellations my grandmother had given me for my sixteenth birthday.”

There is a certain kind of beauty and poetry within the stars. There’s romance in star-gazing and tracing the constellations with a point of your finger, even if it’s just The Big Dipper that you learned about in school. However, it can also be easy to feel overwhelmingly small in the grand scheme of things when we look up at night. With millions of years of history and stories to tell, the idea of the infinite amount of stars above us can make you feel upsettingly human and unimportant sometimes.

In Orion’s Eyes, the narrator suffers from a deep-set feeling of loneliness. Having grown up with an alcoholic father and a mother that spends too much time trying to take care of him, they’re guided through life by their grandmother and a book about the constellations. Instead of feeling trivial and even lonelier, the main character actually finds comfort and safety in the constant promise that the stars will always be there when no one else is.

Written with a flowing and descriptive first person narrative, living myth creates a unique love story on the premise of reassurance and consistency rather than romance between the protagonist and the stars—Orion specifically. As the story moves in one fluid motion through the main character’s life from childhood to adulthood, the readers are hit with emotions that make it easy to connect with every word.

Orion’s Eyes can be easy to sink into and read in one fell swoop without even realizing that you did until the end with its captivating prose that produces an emotional and immersing depth for the readers.

Although this one-shot is a quick read, having finished at a little under 2,000 words, it’ll hook you and pull you in effortlessly. So even if you don’t know much about the stars or constellations, this story should definitely be at the top of your to-read list.