The night the ship docked, all Toby wanted—after forty years away—was to sleep in his own bed. But high above his hometown, a young man’s face glowed pale blue at the very top of the sky, and it took him a while to realize the face was his own.
Star Toby, the townspeople called it. The light of the young man who’d set off for a distant star had finally reached the town’s sky—forty years later. It was Toby’s face from the night he left: broad-shouldered still, black-haired, unmistakably young. Though nothing, someone at the harbor muttered, is less trustworthy than a face made of light. Whoever said it hadn’t gained much from the observation.
Mine was still there, waiting at home. His childhood friend. Her knees had gone bad, and now she sold roasted tea from a corner of the harbor. “Mine, it’s me. It’s Toby,” he said. She studied the old man’s face for a long moment, then—without so much as a flicker of a smile—pointed at the western sky. “Toby’s right there.”
The harbor kept what they called an arrivals board: rows of faces made of starlight from travelers still decades out, each one frozen at the age it had left. Mine, it turned out, had spent every evening for forty years gazing at the finest face on that board. “There’s no way someone that handsome could be you.”
Toby argued his case again and again. He even brought up the signal they’d agreed on the night he left: two claps at the edge of the harbor, their private code for I’m alive and well. He clapped his old hands together to prove it. Mine only looked more troubled, and pointed at the sky again. Right on cue, young Toby’s star flickered a little brighter. It was hopeless—next to that light from forty years ago, no pair of wrinkled hands was ever going to look more alive.
So Toby stayed in town, with nowhere else to go. The harbor register listed him as a “visitor.” Young Toby, up in the sky, was marked “resident.” Old Toby, who had walked home on his own two legs, was a “visitor.” In this town, people were counted by their faces of light.
Eventually Toby found himself a decent job: standing at the harbor each evening, pointing out Star Toby to the sightseers. “That’s Toby up there—the handsomest man this town has ever had.” Star Toby was, officially, the handsomest man in town. Not that anyone standing in front of the real one would ever have guessed it.
Visitors left coins, pleased with the show. One evening, a child tugged at his sleeve. “Mister, have you ever met Toby?”
Toby paused. In the western sky, the self he’d been forty years ago was smiling, bright as ever, that very night.
“Just once,” the old man said, closing his fist around the coins. “He wasn’t much, honestly.”
Somewhere behind the steam rising off her tea, Mine let out a short laugh. Young Toby’s star didn’t seem to notice, or care—it just went on shining, that night as every night, at the very top of the western sky.