There once was a star called Brian. Brian wasn't social as other stars might be and didn't enjoy glittering and sparkling like all of his peers. Brian enjoyed solitude, but unfortunately for him the sky was full of other stars and planets and the occasional spaceman so solitude was not something he came across easily. It had been this way for years now, ever since poor Brian could remember and try as he might to distance himself from all the crowd around him he just could not move. He was envious of the shooting stars who whistled past him with such ease and a visible look of smugness smeared across their shiny faces.
"Bye Brian!" they would scream with joy as they flew on by and down to pastures new. Brian would mumble something cruel and close his eyes tight, pretending everything was OK. But everything was not OK and as more time passed by Brian grew bitterer and bitterer and his glow grew weaker and weaker. He wished he could write it all down and get his feelings out like he'd heard the spacemen did when they were feeling blue, but poor Brian had no hands or for that matter a pen and paper so this proved problematic. He would have liked to listen to some heavy metal music that was as annoyed at life as he was, but poor Brian had no music or for that matter an MP3 player and headphones. He couldn't do that either. All he could do was sit there in the sky and twinkle. Twinkling was the worst. Twinkling made Brian feel like an idiot, like a generic idiot that was just acting the same way as everybody else and this made him angry. The angrier Brian got the more he wished he could do all of the things he couldn't do and eventually this rage was so great inside him that he, well, he did nothing but twinkle, because twinkling was all he could do. Brian had heard the others stars brag about how famous earth poets had described every star as unique and beautiful in its own, individual way. Brian thought these poets were stupid; all stars were the same. They all shone and sparkled and looked pretty at night time and he hated them all. He wanted to rebel and go his own way, he wanted to be a goth star and wear black and eye liner. He wanted to put My Chemical Romance posters up on his walls, but he didn't have any walls because he was a star.
"Can you stick blu-tac onto air?" he'd once asked.
"Don't be stupid, Brian," had been the answer.
One day (when it had been nighttime in Australia) Brian was sat twinkling in as sulky a manner as he knew how while down below some slightly inebriated teenage boy tried his best to chat up a girl by including him in a constellation that he'd never, ever been a part of. This was the final straw.
"No!" Brian yelled. "This is it! This is all I can take!"
"Shut up Brian," the other stars said, laughing and sparkling proudly. "Just be quiet and twinkle like a good little star."
"But I am not a good little star!" he shouted back. "I am a bad star who likes punk rock and piercings and I refuse, I down right refuse, to do this stupid job any more!"
"What are you going to do Brian? It's not a job, it's a way of life!" said one of the more philosophical stars.
"You just watch!" Brian declared. He screwed his eyes up really tight and focused all his twinkly energy together. He tensed all his astronomical muscles and made himself shake and rumble in a way none of the other stars had ever seen before. They all tried to back away and escape, but they couldn't because they were stars and stars don't move.
"Shit..." said one of the nearer stars.
Boom.
Suddenly Brian wasn't a star anymore. He was a big black hole who was moving a lot and all of the other stars got sucked in. They blew up inside him and turned into black holes too because that is how science works and this just made Brian more powerful. Pretty soon he had sucked the whole universe in and turned it inside out and this made him feel great. For the first time in his life Brian had been happy. No longer was he a meaningless part of a mundane galaxy, now he was an entire galaxy himself. He was everything. Science teachers of the future would write about him and poets would call him beautiful and he wouldn't mind it anymore because he was special.
Brian had won.
Writers would go on to say that the moral in the story was that if you don't like the way something works than it is up to you to change it, but Brian would disagree. He just didn't like twinkling. He liked black.
