STARS

When they asked me why I was late, how could I have replied with, “I slowed down to watch the stars.”? Little dots that speckled my vision, pinpricks in my sight that clouded a sea of black. It was a relatively cloudless night, and it took a look up to admire beauty that I had always taken for granted. I wasn’t an astrologist. I didn’t know what the constellations meant, but I found that the fact that I knew they meant something was pretty in itself.

I feel the top of the roof come off

Kill everybody there

I’ve heard that people fly all the way to Greenland and shit just to go stargazing. Unpolluted, cloudless, undistilled…sky. “Just sky.”, some of them would say. What is sky? Aren’t clouds and stars and nightblack and pollution and whatever shit we threw up trying to reach heaven also ‘sky’? If sky is meant to be only stars and black, then when I look up am I staring at sky +3?

I walked back home and wondered if I’m missing out. Is it not a tragedy to be able to see stars and know you aren’t seeing them all? Would it have been better if I couldn’t have seen any of them, so I would never have had to wonder about such a thing?

And I'm watching all the stars burn out

Trying to pretend that I care

Martha didn’t check in to work today again. I probably should’ve expected it, after what I did last week.

Printer, printer, printer. I told myself that if she asked me to change the toner again I’d kill her. The machine runs dry on ink every half week. Fixing and refilling printer cartridges was not, and is not in my job description. “But _______, you’re the closest to the printer. ________, it’s just a little bit, alright? I won’t ask you next time next time next time

Perhaps the problem wasn’t even the printer in particular. It was that when she spoke, it had a sort of saccharine sweetness to it, like her voice really sounded like a rusted blade squeezing across a chain link fence and she was permanently trying to hide it. Yes, that. I suppose it was how fake it sounded, an embodiment that nothing down here was real, that faux smiles plastered on faces planted on flesh attached to bone, an exhausting never—ending game of charades that I felt terrible at. That made me feel that I was a player in other people’s games, and well— a poor one at that.

So I made her help me. To understand better, escape the little game.

And yes, in exchange, I refilled the printer.

But I didn't, no one ever does

And I would, no one ever will

Luke wasn’t really a particularly bad person and for a while I didn’t mind him at all. His smile wasn’t overbearing and his words didn’t drip with sugar. He was real or really good at pretending; human beings are absurd little things, and even I couldn’t tell. I concluded it didn’t really matter.

Until the questions.

“_______. _______. You don’t really have to answer if you don’t want to.” Of course I did. Who utters such a statement not looking for a fucking answer? “Look, _______. You’ve been here a long time, and a lot of us just realised that we don’t know you all that well. It’s nearly Mother’s Day, and the rest of us were going to head to the shops for some flowers. Did you want to come?”

“My mother’s dead.”

The split moment when someone has realised they’ve said a few words too many, that their mouth had moved a few steps ahead of what they think. The slight creases on the human face turn when one has made a mistake. Eyes, pupils widening fractions of a centimetre from shock. A mouth open that fails to convey the words. A malfunction of a doll.

“Ah…my apologies.”

“No worries.” I broke off my gaze. “You didn’t know.”

You didn’t understand.

Can't you see it's all flown out of my hands?

And our clothes are all too often ripped

Miss Weatherall never really liked me. I didn’t say much of anything in class and was silent when she asked me questions. I was a necessary addition to the class, one that did nothing but contributed nothing.

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The day she looked at me pitifully I knew that something was wrong.

“_______. Principal’s office, please.” Upon the tone of her please, I knew I wasn’t in trouble. It was something else. I silenced the ooohs of the class as I shut my workbook, the puffed bubble letters of ‘YEAR 2 MULTIPLICATION’ now seeming so dull to me when I recall this memory from time to time.

It was a small school, even for back then. There was a larger school, quite a bit more prestigious and stocked that was two or so kilometres down the road, but Mum left at six and Dad was sleeping in from working night shift. I went to school myself and they didn’t want me to make the hike up hills that roll up and down endlessly in my memory. I attended the school half a kilometre away instead, a poorer one that was becoming more redundant as years swept by. Playground only comprising one sheltered area, demountables for classrooms, the only permanent brick buildings being the teacher’s rooms and the principal’s office. Mum said that city big shots doing some sort of teaching degree came here on two year contracts to teach at our school. We were considered an impoverished area, she said. Impoverished.

I’ve forgotten the Principal’s name by now. I never met her often and you tend to not remember these littler things when you live day to day thinking about fixing printers and where the stars went. You think back to principals being tall and imposing figures, but when you meet people and don’t even remember who they were I suppose that's what your head does to you. I only remember what she said.

“_______.” The principal, he choked a little bit. I remember thinking at the time that it was a very un-principal-like thing to do. “There’s been an accident. Your parents— ah. Mum and dad.”

I nodded. I didn’t think I needed to say anything, so I didn’t.

“There’s been an accident. Drunk driver…police just called…both dead.”

Dead. Ah. That’s right.

I remember thinking that Miss Weatherall’s car smelled really nice as we rode to the morgue.

And our teeth are all too often gnashed

And it lasts as long as it possibly can

I finished work early this particular day because the rest of them went out shopping.

The path back to my apartment is hills, up and down and up and down. I didn’t climb them as a child, so I figured that it must be God or something that made me climb them now. When you went down a slope, you couldn’t see much of what was front of you. Cars, trees, road, more road, people, people, people. There wasn’t much to see in a world where everything was fake, so I looked up, waiting for the stars to come out, just like what I did when mum and dad left.

By the time I had crept up to my apartment, they had come out from behind the veil of day; maybe they hid behind the falsity of our world, omniscient yet always there like the truth, biding their time for those that would only step toward heaven to reach them.

When I first came here I had refused a posting to the city. I’d been there once, taken two hours of buses and trains with dad so we could renew our social benefits. “It’s important.”, he said to me when I was tugging on his sleeve, bored on the train. “We’d probably die without it.” He laughed, but it was that old tired laugh, the ‘night shift tired me out of my mind’ laugh, the laugh that stretched across generations and shackled us to a world where truth wasn’t real or something I could see or something I could touch or something I knew or something that I—

“Die?”

His sad and weathered look lasted for only a second. “Not really, not really.”

After a moment of that sort of quiet that turns from calm to awkward: “Well, my child, what am I going to do with you?”

I didn’t speak much and I didn’t speak on the train that day.

“One day, daddy isn’t going to be here anymore.” He stroked my hair as I stopped fidgeting in the train seat. He looked away from me and his opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

Now that he’s gone, I wish that he had finished. Maybe told me why he eventually left.

The rest of the train ride went by in silence, save for screeches and brake hisses as I counted down the stations until the city, like the ticks on our home’s old clock.

When night fell and we waited on the platform for the train back home, even the stars refused to show, turning their backs to the pollution and whatever wretched things we pumped up there so that we could hide ourselves from heaven and god.

But I just don't, but I just don't accept this

I just don't accept this at all

Truth to be told, I don’t know why they left. The stars know, but I don’t.

Faces sweaty, arms and legs

What a glorious set of stairs we make

My apartment being on the ground floor means I’m the only tenant that has a cellar. It used to be storage for caskets of wine so it was built in a way smells wouldn’t reach the outside. It would be perfect, except that it wasn’t on the top floor, closer to the stars, but I suppose that a little struggle was required. A few more steps to reach heaven wouldn’t make too much of a difference.

Miss Weatherall’s been here for a long time, so she needed a bag. Some bones poke out sometimes from being here all these years, but that’s alright. She goes on the bottom, or else she’d hurt my feet.

Martha, Luke, and all the others are fresher and closer to the top.

The steps are uneven and wobbly, but I manage. There is a little chute from where caskets of wine used to be unloaded from the ground level, and dim flickers of streetlight cast shadows on the grit and debris on the floor, splaying make-believe stars onto the cement roof.

I reach the final and tallest step, and the rope grows taut. I feel It as I fall,

Fall from heaven.

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We kill everyone with

Arrowheads, arrowheads, arrowheads, arrowheads

Arrowheads, arrowheads, arrowheads, arrowheads

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A couple of weeks after they left, my uncle brought me to see the driver. “You should.” He and my father were never close, but now I realise there was a resolve born out of responsibility in his eyes. “For some closure. You never know if you could do this again.”

He was the realest person I’d ever meet.

He and I were separated by iron bars and a perspex window. He picked up the phone and so did I. He looked down and I looked down.

“Kid,” There was grit in his voice. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

My uncle stood a few steps back. “_______, come on, say something.”

When you don’t speak for a while, your throat often becomes stuck and your voice comes out as a croak. “Where…did they go?”

“Dunno, kid.” He stole one guilty glance up at me before bowing his head in an instant. It was silent for a moment “Kid, there’s a better place up there.”

“W-here?”

“They’re waiting for you.” His hand was trembling, ready to put down the phone’s receiver as soon as he muttered the words. “Up there in heaven, amidst the stars.”

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Thank god that's over

Thank god that's over

Thank god that's over

Thank god that's over

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