Her car was wheezing like an asthmatic. Parking in a grassy clearing, her windshield fogged and useless in the diminishing darkness, she turned off the radio and waited for her radiator to stop cursing at her in what sounded like Portuguese.
Cranking down the window a bit she lit a cigarette, kicked back, wound the seat to horizontal and looked up through the moon-roof, taking in the great expanse of stars that were previously obliterated from sight by the headlights on the highway.
She thought about what it was like growing up in the city, about how she had viewed the stars, at least the ones she could see, as a backdrop to the real lights - the windows of Wall Street and Midtown, shining out over a sleepy city. From her books, she saw the patterns the ancients thought the stars made and the meanings behind their arrangements in the night sky, men and gods and everything in between. To help visualize what the long dead had seen when they craned their necks towards the heavens, the books had connected the dots for her, giving Taurus shoulders where before there were only pinpricks of light. Because she had never seen the constellations herself, she believed then that these lines would be visible from the country, real as life. Orion's bow would rival the Milky Way in brightness, buzzing like a neon sign and reflecting off of anything not too scared to look.
As her engine cooled and her arms grew sleepy behind her head she could see herself standing on the roof of some anonymous apartment building in Park Slope, watching the lights wink on and off atop the bridges that connected her with the island of Manhattan. Not even then had she thought she was capable of flight.
She opened the moon-roof wide and cranked her seat to upright, head still tilted back like the nose of a rocket as she calmly pushed the button for the ejection seat.