Under Sky & Stars

A short story by StoryofAshlyn 

Jo built a playing-card house of murky memories and dim morning dreams...

But lover didn't want to be locked safe inside.

#

She leaves in the morning.

When the first light has caught fire from the church steeple. When the 4:30 runners are long done lacing sneakers and dodging branches. When Skye, asleep on the couch, stirs but does not awaken.

Child tucked close to his chest, mouth lax, he snores. Colors from the TV flicker across his temples. Her parents' house is small – the walls are thin – and the smell of her father's smoking percolator and cigarette wafts onto the patio. Onscreen, Johnny and Baby tug each other close, snap apart, skirt flailing, leather sharp on darting white hands.

If she places her hand on his shoulder, she can feel the tug of his heartbeat. Slow. Sudden. A start. The gentle push-pull, pull-pull of a wave as it retreats from the shore.

ICE COLLISION CATASTROPHE.

Headlines buzz behind her eyelids. After four years on the school paper these things become instinct. A hammer: CAUTION: SHIPWRECK.

Footsteps, and she's across the room closing the doors. Icy fingers tucked in her pockets. Uncertainty on her cheeks.

It's a Monday; a school day. She should be sprinting for the bus but instead she lingers at the faded corner between dream and memory. The details are painted on the backs of her hands, her forearms, down to the half-moon arch at the top of lover's nose, child's whisper-gold lashes, the merry-go-round advertising tune at the top of the commercial break.

LEFT-BEHIND STRANGERS IN SAD TALES.

On that she closes the door. Opens her eyes. Climbs out of the card house she has constructed, the paper filaments of tendon and tenderness that keep her anchored close enough to sane.

Safe inside, child and lover slumber.

#

Lover was bullied in middle school. He always thought she didn't remember, because when he told her, that night, they were drunk on the rooftop shouting nonsense at the stars. She was laughing. He never knew she understood what he was trying to say, but she did, she remembers:

For six months after child was born, right after he moved into her parents' house, he couldn't listen to the sound of the toilet flush. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, hair matted to his forehead, cheeks pink.

She tries to ask him what's wrong, but he turns his back on her. Those are the only nights he turns his back on her – she thinks, but she could be wrong.

In ninth grade, she met lover. With new love and new lover and don't listen, she spun mid-air, heedless, a kite with its wings clipped by the wind. Tumbled down to earth just long enough to read the blue lines on the test, little numbers that changed her body one decimal at a time.

And of course it was perfect. He loved her. Enough to change the sheets on the bed after his nightmares, enough to brew her coffee in the morning and place a kiss on the top of her spine, a stamped reminder to come alive, come alive. Enough to keep her, on mornings she couldn't even climb awake, crushed by the prison that sits inside her mind. He loved her enough to lose her, which is how she knows he was watching, ethereal, as she stepped out into the snowbank this morning and dropped the key between the slats of the front porch.

Not coming back. The metal tumbles, a glint of silver, drops into the dirt. Never coming back.

It's Monday, and Jo has caught the bus. Wind-stained cheeks, socks drooping around her ankles, cracked cuticles and blackberry bruises under her left armpit. Each fruit pit is exactly the size of each of her ten fingers.

Inside the breath pull-pulls away from lover's chest. The waves flail, the dream-house flickers, the constraints begin to narrow.

One eye opens.

#

She doesn't realize the house is empty until Wednesday.

Shaking off her first round of dreams, she sits under a lucid blanket of stars and dim, horrifying remembrances. Stall door, marker slashes. Lover's desperate, tear-steaked faces. Buckle falling around his knees. The tormentors, features blurred. Screaming.

His eyes are brown. Not blue – not like the rest of them. This is part of why she fell for him.

That, and: he laughed when no one else would. Ran through battlegrounds and athletic fields and mirages for her. Sometimes she still feels like a little girl in gym class no one else lifted a hand for, and – it changes her mind all over again when she remembers his face, doe-eyed and gentle through the afternoon haze. Closing his fingers around the blue lines and saying I still choose you.

He hunted the same demons that now paint the sky above her head. Faced them with his fists, not guns. Not poison-darts of Ambien, Lunesta, Xanax. Not anymore.

TEENS ON OVERDOSE.

Better: WARNING: UNSTABLE GROUND.

Fighting leaves lover exhausted, dirt on his chin and fingers still shaking. Instead of curling into her spine he would sit on the couch, child tucked close to his chest. Together they watch Dirty Dancing and she pounds a little fist against his sternum.

NO HOSTILTY ONCE DUST SETTLES.

Closing her eyes, she tries to concentrate. Needs to conjure up the dream-house to enter. It appears frame by frame: white painted fence. Red door, wooden swing. Volkswagen van parked caddy-corner to the garage. Clear windows and toile curtains dusting the top of the kitchen sink.

There's a wrongness to it tonight. The angles are off. One of the shutters is hanging by its hinges. The grass in the front yard has gone yellow.

Cautious now, she climbs the front step before remembering: the key.

Don't come back, on Monday, whispered in her ear. Bury the key.

It's easy enough to imagine the front porch steps out of the way. She sinks to her knees among the cobwebs, splinters, black earth, and digs. Pushes her fingers in up to her knuckles. An ant swims over her thumbnail.

The key is gone, the key is gone – where did she leave the key?

She frowns, squints. Tries to place the front porch steps and level ground and key in proportion. It should be...here.

Her fingers come up empty, palms smudged with dirty stains.

"Looking for me?"

Lover. She scrabbles back on her heels. "Where are you?"

"Leaving, Jo." There isn't enough of his face left to see, but his eyebrow hangs, a thick black streak, over a cluster of stars. His ring rests on the mailbox. "You'll see. You'll see."

"Child – where is child?"

"Oh, Jo." A breeze whispers at the base of her neck. "You'll see. You'll see."

Snow trails from the sky. Fear jumps down her arms, she lets the dirt fall through her fingers, struggles to stand. "Don't bring the walls down!"

"Jo, my Jo." Snow hurls down harder, white and blinding, furious cold against her skin. "Don't lock up what you can't see."

Blinded, she sinks.

One eye opens. Awake.

#

October 31st. HALLOWEEN BASH ENDS IN TRAGEDY.

From the local paper: HIGH SCHOOL SAYS "BOO-HOO," NOT "TRICK OR TREAT."

That was the morning she just -

Stopped.

Forgot to wake up for class in the morning. Disappeared from among the throng at the bus stop, red coat absent (draped over the bottom of her bed) and boots unseen. Coffee no longer rising from the percolator. No gentle footsteps on the bottom of the stairs or orange juice droplets in the fridge. The space she pushed against to create her own slice of air pushed back, into the room she had occupied, as seamlessly and quietly as if she had never existed at all.

And that - that is what she feared.

That the moment she stopped breathing is the moment she remembered she no longer needed to.

#

"Oh, love."

He's crouched in front of her, one hand curved around her thigh. Fingertips pressing into the back of her knee. Cold.

"How'd you get such a nasty scrape?"

For a moment – she softens. Allows the gentle brush of his skin on her skin and his eyes, open and broken-beautiful, to distract her. But his smile is lopsided. There's a tattoo on his shoulder she doesn't remember. A star.

"I can't – I shouldn't." she scrabbles back. Spine pressing against the toilet, ice and bone, throat closing. "I can't breathe."

"Don't try to shut down your memories, Jo." he cups her face. "Darling Jo. How else could I get inside your mind?"

Eyes shut, she wishes him away. "I'm sorry."

"You said that."

"I am."

"How tragic," he says. "You're so tragic, Jo, dearest. You wear your wounds on the outside and your weapons on the in."

Flicking her knee, he bends closer. Breath quick, a harsh cutting, blood on his fingertips.

"What'd you choose for me, in the end? Spikes or stars or broken glass? Eyes or ears or lips or tongue? Or did you leave me beautiful, dearest, just like you wanted me?"

Pain cramps her calf. He's digging into her skin, and all of her is trickling out over all of him, crimson splotches on the bathroom floor. Wasps set fire to her nerves and steel snaps the stitches of her careful façade.

"I didn't I swear. I wouldn't I didn't I swear."

"Let me clean your wounds." Lover shakes out his hand and stands. "I'll help you, Jo."

"No." her voice is a rasp, trapped in her chest. "Leave."

"Fine."

Dark red footprints slog across the tile. Halt at the door.

"Jo?"

Only a dream, only a dream. She draws her heels in, tucks her chin to her chest, muffles, compresses, ignores.

"You'll miss me," he says. And vanishes.

#

On Thursday she wakes from a horrifying dream.

Kneecaps – broken raspberries – shoe treads – gone.

Last night she tried to find him, the house, child, anything. There's nothing left, nothing lucid in her mind, and she doesn't understand why. If this reality was hers to construct – this dream, this house – why has it gone missing?

Child. She misses standing in the doorway of the living room and watching child's soft, lovely face in the blue-glow light. The half-moon fingernails and whorl of blonde hair. Inevitable as her regret, a knot clenches deep in her stomach. Remember.

She lines up the bags, tries to remember who belongs to what and which goes where. Perhaps they're all hers, for tonight – not borrowed plastic pieces of other people's lives. Sweat drips down her back. Anxiety beads on her temples.

Altercation on Parson's Bridge.

police say breaking point reached

case closed on hallo-mystery

"Stop." Jo pinches her lips shut with two fingers. "Not at fault. Not at fault."

From the hallway, the percolator beeps. She starts, heart jumping inside her ribcage, a powder shatters across the floor. When she sifts through the chaos to find her weapons of chosen destruction they have dissolved.

She looks up. The plastic bags – empty.

A chill trembles at the top of her spine.

Turning around, she searches the dim, but only moonlight inhabits her cold, empty, upstairs room. His imprint still pressed into the rumpled sheets. Her own pillows, scattered across the floor, because since he went missing (missing?) she doesn't touch the things that illuminate his memories.

"Oh, Jo." Powder stirs, crumbles between wooden floorboards. "This is the wrong day to die."

"How do you know?" she's shouting and her face is hot, tight, tears and snot on her nose. "This is my day, I choose the day, you can't – can't take this day from me, Skye, can't –"

The ghost of a breeze sweeps her bangs from her forehead.

"Not today, beloved. Rest. Wait."

He leaves, when he leaves, in the clear-as-glass moonlight.

#

Their first encounter was messy. Painful. Sweat, stuck to her collarbone, blood, left behind on the sheets. Skye insisted it was an accident – "It doesn't count if you didn't mean to, love" – but every night his low, rapid breathing haunts her.

Her father would be ashamed. He cleaned the bottom sheet out without comment, the scattered socks in one hairy hand, but his eyes – she remembers his eyes, that September night. Heartbroken.

Her parents held to the notion of waiting. Not falling astray, not crash-colliding into potential mistakes or misendeavors. She lost faith when they called lover a fleeting occupation. Couldn't they see he was her heart, her whole heart?

Told lover this, hands on her hips and nose stuck in the hair. He laughed, took off her shirt. Recited his virtues while his teeth scraped the inside of her elbow, the upraised veins of her forearm.

"I can be a better person, if you'd like that," he said.

She gripped his hair, smiled into his grey eyes.

"I think you're just fine."

Then came child. The announcement, the nine months, the screaming, the panic, the pain. "Think of your future," her father said when she dropped out of high school. "Baby, think of your future."

"He's all right," she said. "So am I."

Lies, lies, lies.

No one told her how exhausting it was, two o'clock mornings and twelve o'clock midnights. All of a sudden her party friends were ditching school to join bands and fake out gangbangers, her preppy friends applying to college, while she changed diapers, registered for classes online.

"It's not supposed to be that hard," one of her relatives said. "Really, if you have a support system, Jo, it should be easy –"

But they weren't there, as a support system, and her mother wasn't there, as a matter of principle, and her father worked too much as it was.

So lover kept loving her. Child kept crying, vomiting mashed strawberries.

Jo wept.

#

She built the house in the winter, when child was eight months old.

"Now I can always keep you in mind," she told lover, and he zipped his pants, told her not to let the milk sit out on the counter.

Valentine's Day: Sweethearts & Scandal

local couple protests domestic

disturbance report

The anger grew like a beast inside of her, wild and unchecked. Not like child had grown: soft, pure, gentle. These kicks bruised her ribs and cut her knees out from under her.

"You said we'd be fine, someday." from the breakfast table she accosted lover, spoon dripping orange juice onto the table. Hair wild and dark around her face.

"We'll find our someday." He tried to kiss her trembling mouth. "Jo?"

"Stay the hell away from my someday," she said, and left to check child's breathing.

#

It happened by accident.

"He slipped," she would insist, but her father was the only believer.

"He couldn't have," they all said. "A bright mind, a star, what promise, what potential."

Hands tucked together on the bridge, cold fingers wrist-to-wrist. Together, watching the water turn deep blue as the sun blew sallow above.

"Don't break, Jo."

"Don't – shatter."

#

Knees tucked to her chest she shakes back and forth. Her hair is a livewire of tremors and her knuckles are the purple of stolen promises.

The school. Somehow, the school. Bathroom stalls loom around her, silent white ghosts that witnessed love and loss and –

Lover.

He sits on the lip of the sink, baby tucked close to his heart. Wearing the grey Henley, stripped socks, hair crumpled, darkness around his eyes. His edges as transparent as the dream house.

"Don't cry, Jo." He kisses child's forehead. "Your skin is colder when you cry."

Paralyzed, she reaches out. Empty air. Plaid skirt sharp on her knees. Tile ice on the back of her ankles, and she can barely remember the taste of him – cinnamon, salt.

"Why'd you leave the house?"

"Why'd you build it, my dear?" lover's face, green-tinged in the fluorescent flicker. "You can't hold me in a house of memory when your memories are in your house and your mind is here, and you? Vanished altogether."

Mouth on her palm. Cinnamon, salt.

He disappears.

#

September: both eyes open.

Awake.