By Zoë Meager.
The stars are as beautiful as dead lovers a billion years away! she cried, then hitched up her skirt and began the climb. We were all so proud of our ladder of bones, long enough at last to reach the sky. It rattled as she ascended, sprinkling us with an unfamiliar dust. Farewell! we called, Farewell! and, although she didn’t look back, Good luck to you among the music of the spheres! Her many petticoats receded into the shell-blue morning sky, a frothy farewell.
She’ll never make it, we concluded, turning home, shaking dust from our hair. I only hope she doesn’t tread on any baby bones, poor dear. They’re terribly snappy. We told ourselves we’d forget her like a soap bubble that drifts away, yet throughout the day we returned to her as a story half-remembered. We paused at spindle and at cloche, at bassinet, at baler and mangle, shaded our eyes to watch her scud across the impossible faraway. Whatever’s she wanting? All these years gone by, we pecked at each other, and now up there, bothering the stars like a godwit. It grew dark and she was out there still, a breathless swimmer against the lido of sky. We waited for a ripple.
The first star arrived a-whistle-plummet-thump. Shot down with a blazing whip-tail and ploughed into a tender flowerbed. We turned from shutter and blanket, from sty and fire and plate; we gathered round the star, admired it, feared it, and felt the warmth of our guts warmer against the bright cold of its breath. It sparked there in our soil like an undecided traveller, shone there like a child’s upturned face. Why would it leave the heavens? we asked. Why would it leave? We tried to count its points but soon, all around, as if to pin the world to the ground, the rest of the stars began to fall. They plunged through rooftops and sheep, they whizzed down chimneys, they skewered the feet of our children to the ground. Then we kenned: it was her up the ladder, upending all our stars. She’s a maniacal pusher, we shouted, she’s Zeus throwing a histle fit! We floundered, ran for shelter, scrunched into our beds—blankets to chins, eyes to ceilings—and listened hard to the hammering of stars against our roofs. We imagined the many other horrible things that might rain down upon us and never stop.
In the wee hours, we each told the person beside us to get up and look out the window, and they stood there, expectant as empty shoes. What can you see? We wondered.
Nothing, they said. It’s all dark.
So we lay there in cold-kiss fields and felt our bones hiding inside us.
More and more, now, our bones tug. Draw chalky lines on a backwards path. Call us to become part of the past. One day our flesh will be teased away with soap bubbles—a frothy farewell—and our bones will be dried and stacked and fastened against a shell-blue sky. Four or five more clunking rungs on the ladder. So we each ask our person, Why don’t you come back to bed? And all night we feed sweets into their ears.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zoë Meager is from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has appeared in Cheap Pop, Granta, Hue and Cry, Landfall, Lost Balloon, Mascara Literary Review, Meniscus, North & South, Overland, Splonk, and The Offing, among others. She edits fiction and comics for takahē magazine.
