The Day We Held the Whole Earth

This is Part 2. Start with The Day We Shrank the Solar System to Fit on a Football Field

Maya held the blueberry up to the kitchen window and squinted.

“Is this really how big we are?”

She was seven. Her brother Marcus had come home the week before talking about football fields and how you’d have to walk four miles just to reach the nearest star. He’d drawn a picture and taped it to his bedroom wall. Maya had been studying it every night, tracing the lines with her finger, trying to feel how far far actually was.

But Marcus had only shown the distances. Maya wanted to understand the sizes.

“Show me,” she said. She looked up at me with the blueberry pinched between her thumb and finger. “Please.”

 So we went outside.

I set the basketball on the driveway, right in the warm spot where the sun hit the concrete.

“That’s the Sun.”

Maya walked around it. Once. Twice. She got down on her knees and fished a blueberry out of the bowl we’d carried from the kitchen.

“And this is Earth.”

She held it next to the basketball. Her whole hand dwarfed it. The blueberry almost vanished against the orange rubber.

I watched her face change. Something she thought she understood was rearranging itself right behind her eyes.

“Every person who ever lived,” I said. “Every mountain. Every ocean. All on that.”

She closed her fingers around the blueberry. Slowly. Like she was afraid she’d pop it.

We lined the rest up along the front path.

A peppercorn for Mercury. So small she had to get on her hands and knees to find it on the concrete.

Two blueberries for Venus and Earth, nearly twins. Maya gave Venus the slightly smaller one because, she said, “it just looks like it should be.”

A marble for Mars. Wrong colour. Right size.

And then I reached into the bag. I pulled out the watermelon.

Maya’s hands dropped to her sides.

She looked at the blueberries. She looked at the watermelon. She looked back at the blueberries. Then she laughed. Like a prank. Like I’d broken the rules of the game.

“Jupiter,” I said.

“No. Way.”

“Thirteen hundred Earths would fit inside.”

She picked up her blueberry and pressed it against the watermelon’s green skin. It stuck for a second, then rolled off into the grass.

“That’s rude,” she said.

A grapefruit for Saturn. Two tangerines for Uranus and Neptune, same size, different colours. She lined them all up and sat on the path with her chin on her knees.

The basketball at one end. The watermelon. The grapefruit. The tangerines. And way down at the other end, a peppercorn, a marble, and two blueberries you could lose in your pocket.

“Where’s the Moon?”

I held out my hand. On my palm sat a pinhead of foil I’d rolled that morning. Smaller than a grain of rice.

Maya took it. She held it one inch from her blueberry.

“That’s the farthest any person has ever gone,” I said.

One inch.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

“Are there stars bigger than the basketball?”

“Way bigger. Some stars, if you put them where the Sun is, would swallow everything out past Jupiter. The basketball. The peppercorn. The blueberries. That whole watermelon. All inside one star.”

Maya stared at the watermelon. Five minutes ago it had seemed impossibly, unfairly big.

“Inside?”

“Inside.”

She picked up the watermelon with both arms and hugged it against her chest, like she was protecting it from something enormous and invisible.

That night she marched into Marcus’s room. I could hear them through the door.

“Your drawing needs something.”

“What?”

“You showed how far. You didn’t show how small.”

She came out with tape and stuck the blueberry right next to the dot on Marcus’s wall. It was slightly squished. She’d been carrying it in her pocket all afternoon.

“There,” she said. “That’s us.”

She stepped back. The football field. The four-mile line to the nearest star. And one small, dented blueberry holding everything she’d ever known.

“We figured all of this out,” she said quietly. “From here.”

She tapped the blueberry with one finger.

“That’s the part that gets me.”

I looked at her standing on her toes, one hand still cupped as if the blueberry might roll away, and I thought: me too.