Helga Steimel was walking her dog, Fred, a tiny yelp of a poodle. The stars were out and a mild breeze was beginning to cool the evening. Fred, happy to be himself, barked and tugged Helga farther and farther away from town, past the Legion hall, past the church, past the high school and the cornfields behind it, and down the empty streets of the new development being carved out of the last forty acres of farmland out by the highway. There were no houses there yet. No street-lights. The asphalt roads were laid, as well as the sidewalks, chalk white and unscuffed in their newness. Mounds of lumber and roofing materials lay stacked along either side of the street, and every fifty yards or so numbered stakes sectioned off the hayfields soon to be bulldozed into residential lots. Fred kept yapping at the air, pulling Helga along, and she let him, gazing skyward occasionally at the clusters of brilliant stars above. On a night as dark as this she could even make out the wispy thin sheen of the Milky Way, which was exactly what she was doing when Fred suddenly stopped.
