Look up to the sky on a moonless winter night in North America. Find Orion’s Belt, three in a row, perhaps the first set of stars you were ever shown. See if you can spot the constellation’s bold, reddish Betelgeuse there over the belt.
Now widen your lens and look above Orion. To the left, you can see Gemini. To the right, you might recognize Taurus; it claims ownership of the Pleiades—that gaseous nebula where the Seven Sisters were born.
You can find them because once, when you were a young child, someone much older than you extended an arm towards the night sky and said, “Look up—those little white lights are called stars. They come out when it’s dark. In the old days, sailors used them to navigate their ships at night. In even older times, people found patterns—pictures, really—in those stars, and they made up stories about how the universe was born. Now, do you see that very bright star, maybe the brightest in the sky? Its name is Sirius, but a lot of people call it the ‘Dog Star.’ So, do you know what you do when you see a very bright star in the sky? You make a wish.”
And you did.
And you do.
∙ ∙ ∙
Julie knows the constellations and their stars. She knows them well from the hours she has spent staring at the New Mexico night sky and translating that sky to canvas. She is staring at these constellations right now, but it is not dark outside, and she is not painting in her studio.
She is in bed, the first to wake as the sun fades up and in through the window blinds. Horizontal lines of blush-blonde light coax sleep from her eyes, and she watches them crawl across a periwinkle wall. Will hated periwinkle, she thinks. She follows the lines, one by one, over a framed photograph of the couple in Paris, over the jewelry box that guards their wedding bands, over the dresser drawers full of his old t-shirts. She wears them in warmer months when she paints.
These lines of light, brighter with each minute, inch down the wall and wave over the bed’s comforter. One of them runs parallel to her boyfriend’s spine as he sleeps on his side, blankets tossed off on a frozen February morning. It reveals patterns, constellations—a near-perfect map of the galaxy—that she has never noticed before.
Julie has a boyfriend. Boyfriend.
Four years single at 59, she did not want—and does not know how she ended up with—a boyfriend. The word is ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as calling him her lover, or her old man. These things may be true, but the words are annoying. When she introduces him to a friend, she would prefer to say, “This is Kurt,” and let their behavior indicate the nature of their relationship to others. After all, she has a dog—the one that’s snoring and sandwiched in between them right now, on her back with her paws to the ceiling—and it’s not like she goes around saying, “This is Pigeon, my dog.” Some things should be self-evident, and in the absence of good words, best not to use bad ones.
Julie reaches back to the nightstand for her glasses then looks with clarity past Pigeon’s nose to the line of sunlight on Kurt’s back. She once described him as “slender,” but she took it back; skinny was accurate, almost scrawny in this light, and now she looks past his angular shoulder blades and the small knots of his spine to explore this map of the night sky on powder pale skin. It’s not an exact map, but it doesn’t seem wrong, either. It’s as if her understanding of the galaxy is off by a few degrees, but the winter constellations are all there. First, Orion—always Orion—then the twins, and the bull, and—
I’ll be damned, she thinks. Jesus, would you look at this.
She is wide awake now, propped up on one elbow and surprised that she’s not at all surprised by what she sees. This revelation is just the latest addition to a growing catalogue of signs and data Julie has collected in the last seven months that suggest Kurt is a different kind of… man? Not man?
Alien? No way, not possible—is it?
He looks like a man, acts like one for the most part—a very nice one, she’s sure of that—but if Kurt is a man, he’s an odd one. She scans his skin for stars while scanning her recollection: He never had a cup of tea before we met. I gave him his first glass of wine. He swears he has never taken—or needed or wanted—a pain killer in 30 years. Or a sick day. Thinks a simple cough drop is “strong medicine.” Doesn’t have or want a cell phone—pain in the ass. No car, just a bike and a bus pass. Have never seen him yawn, have never heard him fart—
Julie finds the Dog Star right where it should be on Kurt’s back, and her heart quickens. She reaches over Pigeon’s nose to touch the freckle and does what she has always done when she sees Sirius in the night sky. She makes a wish: Make it go away. Today should not be Pigeon’s day to die.
Julie pokes this Dog Star lightly, then harder, until she feels Kurt stir. She moves her hand across Pigeon’s belly as he rolls over towards them.
“Pigeon, why is your mom poking me?” he asks and does not open his eyes. Pigeon stretches, looks at them both and opts to put one paw in Julie’s face while giving her morning kisses to Kurt.
“Did you know that there’s a map of the stars on your back?” Julie says.
Kurt turns his face away from Pigeon’s tongue. “Say what now?”
“Your freckles. You have freckles all up and down your back, and they actually line up in constellations. Did you know that?”
Kurt opens one eye. “No, can’t say as I did. I’ve never seen my back.”
“I’m not kidding about this,” says Julie, rolling him onto his back and climbing over Pigeon to straddle him. “I need to see your front side.”
“Damn, Julie, if you wanted to jump my bones you just had to—"
“Damn your bones, old man. And Jesus, damn the hair on your chest. I can’t make out what’s going on here, but I’m going to bet any money—”
Kurt whispers a soft shhhhhhh, pulls her down and wraps his skeletal arms around her back. Julie considers how strong he is for a man with no discernable biceps. Alien bone power, she thinks.
“I can prove it to you. Roll back over on your stomach,” Julie says and wiggles out of his hold. She grabs her phone from the nightstand, snaps a photo of his back, then climbs beneath the covers next to him, coaxing Pigeon to the foot of the bed. Two fingers enlarge the image, and she swipes each set of freckles into focus. “Do you see this? This is your back. Here’s Gemini, sort of, and this would be Betelgeuse above the belt, and look—Sirius is over here. You see it, right? Tell me that you see this.”
“It’s just freckles, and it’s just the light, and Julie, can we not start the day this way? This is not what this day is supposed to—”
“Then you need glasses. Why don’t you have glasses?”
“I don’t need glasses to see little dots on my back.”
“Mister, you are 58 years old, and I don’t care if you only eat carrots, there’s no way you don’t need reading glasses.” Julie opens her news feed and clicks on the first story. She places the phone six inches from his eyes. “Read this, please,” and Kurt recites the text without hesitation or error.
“Stop,” Julie interrupts. “Okay, that is… amazing. That’s more than a little weird. I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again because, yes, sometimes I think you might really be from another planet.”
“No, Julie, I was born right here on Earth.”
“So you say. But maybe you were just left here on Earth by the mothership. That’s what they did with Superman, right?”
“Julie, I’m from—”
“Oskaloosa, Iowa, except I think you made that place up.”
“Well, that would be a pretty big disappointment to the 10,000 good people who call it home.”
“So maybe Oskaloosa is a real place, but I bet that’s not your real home, is it? I mean you are not a normal man, Kurt. You say you’re an only child and your parents still live there. You say you haven’t talked to them in 30 years, and that’s why you can’t show me one single photo of you as a kid. You say—"
“Jesus, Julie, where exactly do you think I’m from?”
“From one of those freckles on your back,” Julie says—and then wishes she hadn’t. She stands, throws her flannel robe over her shoulders, and sits with Pigeon at the foot of the bed. “I apologize. I’m an idiot. I heard those words come out of my mouth and that’s crazy talk.”
“Yep. Kinda sorta.”
“Then just humor me for a moment,” she says and rubs her temples. “My head—it started spinning all over the place when I saw your back. And I thought it would be amazing if it really was a map—like it’s there so, I don’t know, that the aliens would recognize you if they came calling one day. And listen—and I swear if this is true—I would be completely cool with you being from some other planet, and you could tell me what your mission is. And how maybe you’ve got special powers you could—.”
“And are you looking for a particular set of special powers?”
“Oh, hell yes. Yes, absolutely. I want medical powers. Healing powers. Animal juju. Because I want you to make her tumor disappear,” she says and rubs Pigeon’s thigh. “Please. Put your hands on it, make it go away. Or maybe phone home to the mothership for a little help on this one?”
∙ ∙ ∙
Every morning of life with Pigeon includes a simple question: “Want some breakfast, girl?” It’s part of the ritual that Julie and her dog first shared with Will, then by themselves, and now, on weekends, with Kurt. For a dozen years it included toenails clicking on the floor, wide eyes glued to the bowl in Julie’s hand, and 15 inches of a wild tail flapping in every direction. But Pigeon does not want her breakfast this morning, and she has not wanted it for several days.
Kurt sits in the far corner of the room in a straight-backed wooden chair, next to the kiva in which he has stoked a morning fire. Above him is a canvas that Will painted years ago—a thick oil impasto, an abstract storm of monochromatic blues. Kurt once told Julie that the painting made him sad for a man he’d never met, and sad for her. Now he watches Julie watch Pigeon. “I know you know what people say about this, Julie. They say when your dog won’t eat anymore, you know they’re ready to go. You know you’re doing the right thing.”
What Julie knows is that she did not want a boyfriend, and this relationship was entirely Pigeon’s fault. The girl had made a break for it one day—the only time in her life she chose to slip out the open front door while Julie retrieved the mail—and she moseyed down the road to the Texaco station. Walked right up to Kurt who was putting air in his bike’s rear tire. He had to convince a stranger to let him use her cell phone to call the number on Pigeon’s tag. Sometimes Julie thinks it wasn’t Kurt who brought Pigeon home as much as it was Pigeon who brought Kurt home. It was a gift Julie didn’t want but Pigeon wanted her to have: a boyfriend. This boyfriend.
Julie opens a cold jar of organic peanut butter and muscles out a teaspoon of the paste. She uses her fingers to fold in the white powder from two capsules of gabapentin—Pigeon’s medicine—then sits on the Saltillo tile floor and lets Pigeon lick her fingers clean. “Show him you’ll still eat, right girl?” Julie says. “You’re just a little trickster.” She kisses Pigeon’s head and takes her time to inhale as deeply as she can.
“Trying to eat that peanut butter always makes her look like she’s laughing,” Kurt says.
“Stand up for me, sweet girl.” Julie slips one arm under Pigeon’s belly to pull up her hind legs. She puts her other hand, fingers extended, over the tumor that has overwhelmed her dog’s right hip from the spine down her thigh. The skin is stretched so thin that there is no more fur, stretched over hot and hardened blood vessels that have grown to the size of half a cantaloupe. Julie kisses the mass, and, just as she has done every day for six months, says, “You’re getting smaller. You are disappearing. You’ll be gone soon, and you will never come back.”
The vet had called it a subcutaneous hemangiosarcoma, and an early diagnosis did not improve the prognosis. The “cure” would have been brutal—amputation, extensive radiation and life in the Cone of Shame. “For what?” Julie asked the vet. “Maybe a few more months—maybe a year? That’s no way to live. I won’t do it to her.” The vet said she was relieved to hear it, but Julie felt she’d answered too quickly. A boulder of guilt filled her stomach. She wished that Will was there to share it, or make it disappear along with their dog’s cancer.
Julie had missed watching Will paint. She missed his barrel chest—its length and its girth—and the way his arms were too long for his torso. She missed his opinionated rants and his proclamation to anyone who would listen that, “At the intersection of Art and Commerce, there is always a fistfight and Art walks away with a bloody nose.” She missed him every day, but until the day of Pigeon’s diagnosis, she had not needed him. And that’s why later that afternoon, while Pigeon napped on the sofa, Julie went searching for Will in the only place she thought she might still find a trace of him: his study, a tiny room on the far side of the house behind the garage. She had not crossed its threshold once in the four years since his death. It was sacred ground, a tomb she meant to leave alone, but tombs are where we go if we need to visit the dead.
She turned the knob; the door’s hinges groaned and resisted. She watched dust particles hover and cloud the marmalade light streaming across his desk from the window behind it. She sat at the desk in the room’s only chair and took in each wall. One of her paintings—a snowy Chicago cityscape—hung directly across from his desk, and she was ashamed that she had forgotten it was there. There was a cork board to her right on which Will had tacked sketches, now yellowed and curling at the edges. Framed photographs hung on the wall to her left. She recognized his parents, gone now, and his sister and brothers and their children. There was a large photo from their wedding, an informal portrait of the happy couple; she thought it sucked the air from the room. She scanned all of the photos for Will’s face and noticed for the first time that, in every shot, he looked past the camera, or away from it, as if his attention was always elsewhere, beyond the immediacy of the moment.
It broke her heart.
Julie looked at the desk in front of her, a deep scarlet-stained pine. Nothing was on it save for a coaster, a pen, a green glass banker’s lamp, and a small bowl of paper clips. One clip had been pulled apart and rested next to the bowl. She thought the desk was unnaturally tidy, save for this one paper clip. This is too clean, she thought. Too clean, like he knew to leave it this way.
She dropped her forehead to the front edge of the desk and ran her hands over the pine surface as if they were running over Will’s body again, with purpose and care and a longing she had made herself forget. She ran her hands over the desk until her right fingers felt a line in the wood, then several lines. When her index finger caught a splinter, she lifted her head to look.
Julie pulled the short, gold-beaded cord on the banker’s lamp, and its hazy spotlight revealed words scratched into the desk. Words surrounded by a messy heart, etched in the sweet way that elementary school boys and girls use paper clips and compass points to leave messages of true love for a classmate across the aisle. Words carved with an urgent affection that seems everlasting but always fades when stripped and sanded to dust by a nameless janitor over summer vacation. Words like these: Julie, I wish this was enough. All the love I’ve left in this world is yours. – W.
Now, her cheek still resting on Pigeon’s tumor, Will’s words flood through her when Kurt intrudes to ask, “How can I help you? What can I do?”
Pigeon limps across the room and places her head on his knee.
You shouldn’t be here, Julie thinks but does not speak. You don’t belong here. You wouldn’t be here if Pigeon hadn’t dragged you here like another lost dog. She watches Kurt lay his hand on Pigeon’s tumor. She watches Pigeon lean into him and rest.
Then she says, “Thank you.”
∙ ∙ ∙
The breakfast dishes are done except for the mug of coffee warming Julie’s hands. As she does every morning, Julie looks eastward out the kitchen window, down and over this little town of Tesuque and up the mountain into which Santa Fe’s ski slopes are carved. She and Will and Pigeon left Chicago nine years ago for this place. They came for the art; his paintings already hung in one of Canyon Road’s exclusive galleries, eight miles south in Santa Fe, and now hers were there. They came for the land and the air and the colors, and now she painted the stars and the night sky in black and white. Will came for the clean dry snow—nothing like the grey, wet blankets of a Chicago winter—and Julie came because she hoped that the invisible weight wrapped around her husband would be lifted by this same light snow.
Her focus narrows when she hears a rubber duck squeak, one of a dozen dog toys littering the small patches of snow dotting the yard. Kurt tosses it to Pigeon who stands beneath an old cottonwood. Julie remembers the first autumn in this house, remembers laughing at Pigeon diving for a toy hidden under the cottonwood’s fallen leaves, remembers thinking that those leaves looked like lemon slices. Today, Pigeon picks up the toy, biting down on the squeaker again, and again, and again, and she ambles across the brown yard to drop it at Kurt’s feet. They repeat their game, and Julie absorbs Pigeon’s indifference to the mass on her hip. It slows but does not stop her, as if it was just a heavy backpack she couldn’t put down. Something to be tolerated but otherwise ignored. Pigeon does not let cancer define her.
Bravo, Julie thinks. Bravo, girl.
Kurt and Pigeon are by the coyote fence, by the post that used to sag away from the house and threatened to fall over from years of neglect until Kurt came along. “Let me fix this for you,” he’d said a few weeks after Pigeon first brought him home. Julie turned him down, and then turned him down again—she would not be beholden to anyone in exchange for their kindness—but he persisted and swore he could fix it easily.
He brought his drill one day, along with a single long bolt, two screws, two L-shaped pieces of metal, and a wrench. He mounted those pieces on either side of the top of the post while Julie and Pigeon played, and within minutes the post was upright.
“What, exactly, did you do here?” Julie examined his work.
“I fixed your fence,” Kurt said. “It won’t last forever, but it’ll last awhile. I could repour the concrete for this post some time, maybe for a few others, too.”
“I don’t understand,” Julie said. “I’m looking at this fix—it makes no logical sense. If something is leaning away from you, I’d think you have to pull it towards you to get it upright. Or, I don't know, prop it up from behind, right?”
“That’d work I suppose.” Kurt put his tools back in their box and rolled down the sleeves of his plaid flannel shirt.
“But that’s not what you did here. You didn’t do anything like that. I’m pretty smart, and I can’t figure out what you did here.”
“I applied tension,” Kurt said and waved his hand in the air with a flourish, as if he’d fooled his audience with a magic trick.
“Yes, but in the wrong direction. You didn’t go back-to-front or front-to-back. You went—what? Side-to-side? This doesn’t make sense. This is like—this is like alien engineering or something. You’re not from another planet, are you?”
It was the first time the thought had crossed her mind.
Kurt laughed and kissed her forehead before heading up the yard to her house with Pigeon at his side. He turned back to say, “You should’ve seen how we built the pyramids.”
Now Julie looks out her kitchen window, past the upright coyote fence, past the town, and up the side of the opposing mountain. It hasn’t snowed much this year, but skiers want to ski. Some take their first lesson and swear off the sport forever, just like she did in their first winter here. Others are experts at navigating the higher trails. More than a few of them regularly sail past the very tree into which Will chose to fly.
∙ ∙ ∙
“I never knew a dog named Pigeon before,” Kurt says. “It fits her, but I don’t know why. What made you think of it?”
The three of them walk past her studio—she has not crossed its threshold in weeks, and she wonders how many tubes of acrylics are now ruined from weeks of freezing nights and warmer days. They walk up the dirt road behind her house, and Pigeon weaves around the sage brush dotted between the road and a dry arroyo. Her tail goes up at the sight of two prairie dogs, and she lopes towards them before they disappear into their burrow.
“It’s the way she walked as a puppy. Like a pigeon. She looked like she belonged with them in Chicago, she had this odd little strut,” Julie says. “And whenever we came across a flock of them on the sidewalk, she wanted to join them, or play with them.”
“Like those prairie dogs.”
“Exactly. And that’s the thing. If she’d been born here, and we’d seen her interact with prairie dogs first, we might’ve named her Prairie. Pigeons, prairie dogs, squirrels, rabbits—she doesn’t discriminate. She couldn’t care less. She’ll play with any kind of creature.”
“Even aliens.”
“The only alien around here is a tumor,” she says. He slips his hand into her jacket pocket and locks his fingers in hers. Julie does not understand why his hand feels like home. She wishes she was indifferent to his touch, but each time he holds her hand she flashes back to the first time, sitting in that astronomy lecture. She remembers closing her eyes and breathing slowly while the voice of someone talking about nebulae faded to silence. She remembers something warm taking its time to seep through her veins, and when she opened her eyes again, she was back among the living.
“I watch you with Pigeon,” Julie says. “I watch her with you, and I don’t pretend to understand what I see. Never seen anything quite like it. She’s nothing but love, and she loves you so much. More than anyone else.”
“I think she loves her mama more than—”
“Whatever. I don’t care. She trusts you, so I trust you. She chose you, and I don’t believe she could make a bad choice.” The wind over the hill picks up, heading east, and Julie stops to crunch a patch of snow beneath her boots. She chooses her next words carefully. “I’ll ask one more time because I have to, and then I won’t ever ask you again. If you might possibly have some sort of special skill, some sort of gift, some way to make her… better—” Julie does not care that her words are absurd, and she does not look at Kurt.
“Oh, Julie. I don’t know how—"
“Okay. It’s okay,” she nods and drops her head on his shoulder. “I know. I just wanted it to be true. I just wanted—on the off chance you were, you know—I just wanted you to do some Starman magic right about now for her. Don’t worry. I won’t hold your humanity against you.”
They watch Pigeon take her time at every sage, every rock, every patch of snow she passes. She stops to leave her mark on all of them as if to say to every animal that will follow, I was here, don’t forget me.
Julie decides that she will spread some of her dog’s ashes here.
∙ ∙ ∙
Pigeon lays on an overstuffed caramel-colored easy chair by the front window. It is the same chair in which she once sat vigil for months, looking out at the dirt road, waiting for Will to come home. Now it’s draped it with an old quilt that once served as her bed when she and Julie spent long days together in the studio. Every fourth square is a worn, regal sunburst that lends Pigeon the bearing of a queen holding court, taking in the room around her with kind, tiny nods. Julie sits in front of her on the floor. She fingers a rip in one seam of the quilt that will be her dog’s shroud within the hour.
A pickup truck rolls past the window, too quickly for the road’s particular ruts and rocks. Loose stones smack the truck’s undercarriage, popping like corn kernels in the microwave. They blow dust up and across the hillside’s quaking aspens, towards the sky where the afternoon sun is interrupted by cumulus clouds huffing eastward over the house, over the town, over Will’s mountain.
“It’s almost 4:00,” Kurt says.
“Come sit with us,” Julie says.
∙ ∙ ∙
There is paperwork first, and the payment, and then patience in the room. It happens quickly but does not feel rushed. The vet tells Julie the facts of it all: two shots, drowsiness, death. Pigeon’s eyes will not close. Her tongue may hang out. She may “evacuate” whatever is in her bladder or bowels, so the vet will tuck a pad under her hind quarters just in case.
Julie is not in her body—she hears these facts as though they are coming through the whitewashed walls around her and echoing off of the tile floor beneath her—and she only returns when the vet says what Julie did not even know she needed to hear: This is the right time. The tumor is so large it could burst any day, and Pigeon would hemorrhage—it happens all the time. What you’re doing—this is love.
Julie removes the frayed collar from around Pigeon’s neck because she knows she will need it to resurrect the tenderness of her dog’s fur, the tone of her bark, the tug on her leash. She rubs her cheek against Pigeon’s face because she can’t let herself forget these whiskers and inhales because she wants this musk to sustain her.
She whispers thank you, thank you, thank you. They are nose-to-nose until after the first injection when Pigeon lifts her head to look for Kurt, and Julie pulls him down to huddle together in front of the chair. Pigeon pants and fights off sleep. She moves her head in between theirs and rests it on their shoulders like connective tissue that links a body’s bones. Julie whispers: This is family. When the second needle empties its cure, Pigeon locks her eyes with Julie’s, and they stay that way until she rests her head for a last nap.
Julie has no idea if this death has taken five minutes or fifty. She watches the vet fold the quilt over Pigeon like she is wrapping a gift. She watches Kurt deliver this gift to the back of the vet’s SUV. She watches as Pigeon is taken away.
∙ ∙ ∙
Kurt stands in the shadow of the door, as if to give Julie as much of the room’s oxygen as possible. Primal tones come in spasms, heaved from her gut, heaved out her throat. Her face and eyes burn from salt, and she might drown from mucous in her nose. She gags, and lines of saliva fall to the floor. She rocks back and forth on her elbows and her knees until she tumbles to one side as if struck down by a flooding arroyo.
Kurt crosses the room and takes two pillows and the throw blanket from the sofa. He places one pillow beneath her head on the cold tile floor and the other beside it for his. He lays the blanket over them, asks her to blow her nose into the sleeve of his shirt, then folds her into his chest. Julie does not realize that he is crying as well, crying because: Yes, this is family.
∙ ∙ ∙
Kurt turns on the kitchen light and puts the dishes away in silence. He puts the pillows back on the sofa. He puts Pigeon’s medicine in the hall closet. He leaves her toys where they are.
Julie stands at the door to Will’s study with one hand on the knob. She turns it half-way and then lets it go. She rests her head on the frame but does not go in.
∙ ∙ ∙
Julie sits outside on the deck, wrapped in the sofa’s wool blanket. She breathes in the steam from a mug of peppermint tea that Kurt has made for her. He adds pinion logs to the chiminea’s fire a few feet away, and as the light catches him from below, Julie is struck by his angular jaw and hollowed cheeks, an awkward and curious beauty.
“You must have things you want to get back to now,” Kurt says and sits beside her. “It’s been awhile since you’ve painted.”
“I suppose so,” Julie says. She wonders how she might paint him, or more precisely, paint about him. When Will died—when she finally returned to her studio with Pigeon on the quilt beside her—she began painting soundwaves and particles, first in tight clusters, then dispersed. A year later, she began to paint the solar system, and then distant constellations and slices of the night sky. Each canvas chased after a dissipating energy she could not let go of; they were iconographic love letters scattered out to the Universe, intended for an audience of one who was no longer alive to see them. Now she wonders if she is capable of painting for, and about, the living.
“Thank you for letting me be here,” he says, and Julie believes this is the kindest thing she has ever heard. The pinion logs crackle and hiss and smell like incense. A screech owl trills nearby.
“You must have things to do yourself. Maybe head on up to that home planet of yours?” she says.
“Nope.” Kurt shakes his head. “I am an earthling, through and through. I am bound to this blue marble. But I confess, I do feel like a kind of alien in this world.”
“I don’t think you’re a kind of alien, Kurt. Just a kind alien.” Julie sits high up in her seat. “No, wait—I take that back. That’s not what I mean to say, and I want to say this right. You are not a kind alien. Not at all. You’re a kind man.”
She locks her fingers in between his, and they watch sparks fly out of the chimenea and climb into a moonless February night.
“There was always too much city light in Chicago to see a starry sky,” Julie says. “First time I saw stars was on a third-grade trip to the Adler Planetarium. I made my parents promise to take me someplace over the summer where I could see what stars looked like for myself, but instead of taking me somewhere they just sent me away to a loathsome camp.”
“I saw lots of stars in Oskaloosa. Yes, indeed I did. I don’t remember how I learned the constellations, though. Probably Boy Scouts.”
“Of course you were a Boy Scout.”
“Listen up, I was an Eagle Scout.” Kurt laughs, and Julie holds on tighter.
“I knew Orion’s belt from forever,” she says, “and I could sort of find the two Dippers, but I didn’t really learn the constellations until after Will died. I will always wonder if he’s out there somewhere. I will always wonder if, after I’m dead, some particles of our respective, I don’t know—energies—will cross paths. Or if I’ll be out there and feel Pigeon pass through me and we’ll know each other.”
“Is that what you think happens when we die?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t have the words—or the colors—to describe any of it. Nobody does. But we all keep trying.” Julie does not feel lost or lonely. She points to the sky. “See the Dog Star up there?”
Kurt nods. “That proud chest of Canis Major.”
“Let’s make a wish,” she says.
Jean Synodinos is an emerging writer from Austin, TX where she lives with her partner and their peckish but beautiful “schnusky.” Believing that every creative itch deserves to be well-scratched, she is also a painter and performing songwriter. Find her at jeansynodinos.com or on Twitter @jeansynodinos and Instagram @jeansynodinos.
Photo by juergen.mangelsdorf on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND