In third grade we made the planets, and made space in our heads for nine spheres strung to a coat hanger like a wire milky way. Saturn’s hula hoops spun like the girls at recess, Earth was a tennis ball, green splotched blue cozied between painted-ping pong ball Mars and Venus, lemon. All was strung, then they regaled us with the asteroids. A fragmented snake made from recess-pebbles sneaked its way between giant Jupiter and our apple-red neighbor. (Tiny stones flew in our faces when a rubber kickball bounce bounce bounced over blacktop over hopscotch over jacks; we scooped up the plaything and kicked it back through robiny sky where it came from.) A film with two men throwing around chance and percentages showed one pebble asteroid and our tennis ball crossing paths: blazing irregularity, forward-tumbling, green-white-blue swirls, impact. Incoming airplanes with squealing pitches grow deeper as they approach. Rocks turn molten when hurtling closer. We realized you can’t kick an asteroid back through deep black sky where it came from. As we sat by the swings, hands turning up dusty stones & sieving downward, each of us took our places as one ink dot on a letter e of a sentence of a long paragraph on a page of a book in the school library and we wished to be big again.