A Girl, Watched By Stars

At the top of the highest pine, hands stuck with pitch resin and raw from rough bark, she watched for the stars. The last of the day’s thunderclouds were passing over her and towards the east, and in the late dusk she could just barely make out their lines and undulations as they passed. Way off to her right there was a silent clammer of lightning that turned the purple, black, and grey into white and blue and then was gone again.

When her eyes flitted back forward, there were the stars. The tails of the clouds passed, and each bright point flickered into view like beans falling out of a bag and scattering before they settled. They pulsed and vibrated in their spots, and she knew that they were very far away but still imagined that if she stuck her finger out and touched one, it would stick, and pull away with her hand like honey. The stars bounced and laughed at that thought.

There was no reason that her parents could think of to believe her that she spoke with stars. They wondered if they’d let her be too independent and imaginative, or if her diet was lacking. Her mother sent letters to an address that her own mother had given her, where she knew that a society of doctors and specialists would seek out an affliction and answer. Occasionally she would receive an answer, calling for tinctures pressed to the face, or once, for the girl’s bedroom ceiling to be smeared with black creek mud. As far as her parents were concerned, these invisible specialists had solved the problem, because they made the girl realize that it was easiest to keep her relationship with the stars silent and secret.

She would go to the pitch pine at dusk, and would climb, and every night she would try to say something to Venus as it appeared first. Venus never answered, but she mentioned the happenings of the day to the planet and waited for the others.

“I put a worm onto the vine at the back door and watched it choose the leaves over the rough stucco and a bird came and took it in the end.”

“We love that.” They said when they had spilled out into sight.

The girl told them all of her most mundane acts and observations, and the stars thought it was all thrilling because their lives were all spacious gases and rushing, immense speeds. She told them about rubbing her finger across wet stones, and asking the boy down the street if she could touch his cleft lip, and how the dog’s pelt was light underneath but dark at the tips and stuck into clumps at the tips but not the base, and they were happy and confused and interested with her.

One night she said she had met someone that was very different and exciting, and she had been waiting more calmly for the stars to spill out. Her hands were calm and she rested lightly and deliriously on the boughs.

“If I take his hand he squeezes it and smiles at me and uses the flat of his thumb to rub lines on my fingers, and I think I’m like the worm on the stucco and he’s the bird.”

“We really love that.”

The girl was adamant and routine with her appointments in the pitch pine. She discussed her heartbreak, and finding new space to love again. When she started working in a little shop near town making plaster stamps, the stars listened to her describe the woodgrain patterns she carved so that they could stamp reliefs onto fake wood products before painting them. They heard her talk about her passion for the work, and for her new husband, and for her community. She would always be glad to hear them tell her that they loved it all.

On the day that she turned thirty-two, her husband arranged for a crew to come to their house and run wires across the stucco walls, long worms of electricity that came from the dam on the nearby river. The crew manager smiled a huge, fake smile under his thick mustache, and explained how to push the switches for the lights and change the bulbs and not be confused by or afraid of the hum they made. She thought that she saw a mosquito land on his open eye while he smiled and spoke, and thought his face would break if it were plaster. He finished explaining the electric lights and left.

That night she sat in the pitch pine, looking across the field under the purple clouds, and seeing her home with the strong, yellow light pouring from each window. She waited for the stars to spill out like every other night, but thought maybe she’d just admire the long trapezoids of light that her windows left on the field grass, and liked that if she leaned to the east just right she could see the bright points of light in the kitchen chandelier. The light was steady, unmoving, and constant, with no flickering or vibrating or jittering.

The girl sat and watched her lights for a while until she wondered why she was up in this pitch pine above such an inviting sight, and descended to the field and across to the house. She didn’t look left or right, just kept her eyes on the light and made a straight line for them.

She didn’t notice that the turgid clouds had passed, leaving a night sky that was now naked, but newly and forevermore motionless, and empty of celestial bodies.