Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  Marie had arrived on her own the first time. When I entered the parlor and saw her, I could only stop and stare. She was different. She had passed to adulthood and was no longer the girl I remembered but a young woman, her future unfamiliar to me. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked if I could touch the constellation of markings at her throat.

  “If you’d like,” Marie had said.

  I came closer, my fingertips grazing her neck. The pattern there foretold of a temperament that would remain steady, honest, and kind.

  “I don’t need these markings to know who you are,” I told her. “Even if we weren’t friends it would be clear. Even if you were a stranger.”

  “But we are friends.” She gently pulled away. “And we’ll never be strangers, Celeste.”

  With time, Marie began bringing Louise with her, a slight girl who’d earned a full scholarship to study history. She and Marie had met the year before, during a university visit. Louise proved herself to be trustworthy, a calming presence for the most anxious girls, so she joined in on our studies. We were Miles’s pupils, a small circle of women he could trust. We had to study in the evening, after hours, sometimes breaking our own rule by asking one or two girls to stay behind so we could read them.

  On a humid August night, we all gathered in the examination room. Two girls waited there for us: one from my Support and Action class, and another who took the Body and Mind class. One marked for abduction, one not.

  Miles looked at the two girls with disappointment. “This isn’t a large enough sample size.”

  “We have no way of knowing whether we’re being watched,” Julia told him. “Keeping even two girls late is enough of a risk.”

  My brother was holding a copy of the new addendum, which he rolled into a tight tube. “The whole point of this is to train others to read. It’s going to take forever at this rate, and we’re running out of time. My birthday is six weeks away.” He turned to me when he said this. We shared the same birthday. We operated on the same clock, our bodies ticking in the same rhythms.

  “Better slow than not at all,” Julia said.

  “Then we need to widen our reach and teach others,” he countered. “As many as possible.”

  At the time, Julia and I were Miles’s best students. Our mother, Marie, and Louise were also making progress. Angel, meanwhile, was exploring other roles in Julia’s business. Only days after Angel had passed out of her changeling period that summer, Chloe died, alone and in the middle of the night in the hospital. In the wake of Chloe’s death, Angel’s interest in interpretation waned, and she gravitated instead to the behind-the-scenes work. She made appointments, arranged our schedule, and kept our records in order in case we were audited. Julia told Miles not to push her, not to push any of us—that we each had a role to play.

  “We’re wasting time by arguing.” I gestured to the examination table, where the girls waited. “Let’s get started.”

  I began by reading the markings of the girl predicted to be taken. As usual, I felt compelled to close my eyes during the reading, as if I had to cut off one sense in order to bring the others fully to life. When I did open my eyes for a moment, I marveled that Miles was there, alive and next to me, and that we were working together as my juvenile markings had predicted. It seemed as impossible as the fact that our partnership, so newly formed, was already approaching an end.

  “You’re doing well,” Miles said, glancing my way. “I know this isn’t easy.”

  The abduction prediction was a complicated, subtle pattern with range. When I read juvenile girls, I waited to feel or not feel that tingling sensation. I waited for the hairs on my arms to stand up, for my breath to catch in my throat, but really I was waiting for the absence of these things, because I never wanted a girl to be marked to be taken.

  What I wanted, instead, was for the chart in Julia’s office to continue expanding as it had been for weeks: negative, negative, negative, over and over. In the last few months, we’d only found three additional girls marked to be taken while the negatives bloomed faster and faster. We attached new sheets to the chart every few weeks, taping it together until the data started running off the wall and onto the floor.

  Meanwhile, the summer turned over into September. Cassandra surprised me by sending a letter relaying her first week at university. “I hear you’re doing important work,” she wrote near the end, her only cryptic reference to why I might have returned home. I accepted this opening and replied at once, and soon we struck up a correspondence in which I revealed to her what Miles and I were up to.

  “I’m not surprised,” she wrote in another letter. “You always were made for great things, Celeste.”

  It felt good to have Cassandra back, especially as I was about to lose Marie and Louise as they prepared to depart for university. At their joint farewell party, Marie’s mother gave us each a handmade bracelet—to maintain our connection, she said. My bracelet was made of thin, soft strips of braided red and brown leather. I wore it on my wrist not only in honor of my friendships but as a reminder that Marie’s mother was not quite the person I’d expected. While she was well versed in the domestic arts and could make bracelets and her own clothing and five-course meals, she also had a subversive streak. She sent her daughter off to university with a girlfriend. She looked for ways to help Julia, Miles, and me. She was so much more than I’d ever imagined.

  Once my friends had left to further their educations, I remained behind with Julia and Miles. I conducted readings. I continued teaching behind the double glass doors. The days were ticking by, the sun rising and falling again, and October crept ever closer. October, the month of dropping leaves, wood smoke, decay. The month that would bring my brother’s final birthday.

  Course: Body and Mind

  Assignment: Fill-in-the-Blank & Short Essay Instructor: Celeste Morton

  Label the diagrams below with the appropriate prediction groups as outlined in Mapping the Future. Next, select no fewer than three (3) of these Mapping the Future. For every negative prediction, consider its positive. For every positive, consider its potential complications. Be creative. Consider not just what is marked on your skin, but what alternative interpretations might be possible. Imagine what it might be like if your body was not beholden to the future. Points awarded for creativity and imaginative display.

  1. ____________________________________________

  2. ____________________________________________

  3. ____________________________________________

  29

  On the third of October, I rose from bed, my body moving automatically as if pulled by an unseen force. I grabbed the package waiting on my dresser and went to my brother’s room. Miles was already awake and sitting at his desk, his hands folded over a wrapped package of his own. He was waiting for me.

  “Happy birthday,” he said, offering the barest of smiles.

  “Same to you.” I sat on his bed and we exchanged gifts.

  Miles went first, ripping open the wrapping paper. Back on the mountain, I’d made him a journal in bookbinding class. Every bit was handcrafted, from the paper, which I’d mashed in a pot, to the cover, which I’d dotted with wildflower seeds. I’d had a hard time deciding what to give him—no gift seemed appropriate for someone’s final birthday—but it felt right to offer him something that had the ability to grow.

  “You don’t have to actually use it,” I said. “You can tear the cover apart and plant it in the backyard.”

  Miles ran his hand over the cover’s embedded seeds. “It’s perfect.”

  It wasn’t. The handmade paper was rough and bumpy, difficult to write on, and he might not have time to fill the pages anyway.

  “Now open yours,” he said. His gift to me was a broad flat rectangle, like a book. I remembered the astrology book he’d given me for my sixteenth birthday. I still had it somewhere in my room.
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  I carefully peeled away the paper. I didn’t want to tear into it, to destroy what my brother had put together for me. When I finished, I was holding a notebook with a spiral binding and a worn cover of pale blue. It was instantly recognizable, as familiar as an old friend—the journal Miles had kept throughout our childhoods to map out my juvenile markings.

  I flipped through the pages, astonished. It was like looking at old photographs of myself, or reading my own biography. My childhood markings had once seemed unforgettable, their patterns indelible in my mind, but now they struck me as foreign and strange.

  I kept turning pages until I arrived at the juvenile pattern on my left elbow. Miles had sketched these markings again and again, drawing different lines to connect them as if to conjure new possibilities. The visual evidence of his obsession and his uncertainty.

  “Check the back,” he said.

  Tucked inside the notebook’s back cover were loose sheets of paper, mangled and torn but taped together in rough topographies. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but then I understood: These were the practice drawings I’d ripped to pieces before I left for the mountain two years prior. These were ravaged drawings that my brother patiently put together again, using transparent tape to seal the wounds.

  “I thought you should have all of this, especially after I’m gone.” He paused. “It always belonged to you, anyway.”

  I clutched the notebook to my chest. On this, the last of our birthdays spent together, we’d given each other paper. Paper like the tissue-thin pages of Mapping the Future. Paper like the drawing of my abductor sealed under my bed. Paper like the letter I’d written to Miles but never sent. Paper like the tarot card revealing the truth of my body and my fate.

  Breakable, burnable paper.

  * * *

  * * *

  In the backyard, my mother prepared a table for my birthday luncheon. She spread out a lace tablecloth, made a centerpiece of lilies, and set five place settings with a seating card tucked behind each plate: Celeste, Marie, Louise, Angel, Cassandra.

  I stood barefoot in the grass with my arms crossed, watching her.

  “I’d rather spend the day with you and Dad and Miles.” I had to hold myself back from pointing out this was our last guaranteed day together as a family. No one needed that reminder.

  “It’s your birthday, too.” My mother adjusted the vase of lilies, making sure it was centered. “You need time with girls your age.”

  I did miss the close company of other girls. My friends from the mountain sent me letters enclosed in pale violet envelopes, but it wasn’t the same. Since returning, I’d spent nearly all my time working with Miles and Julia. Even my visits with Marie focused on work. Now, with Cassandra, Marie, and Louise each home from university for fall break, my mother was convinced the timing was perfect for a girls-only birthday lunch.

  “They’ll be here any minute.” My mother checked the lilies one more time before letting her gaze rest on me. “You look lovely, Celeste. Like that dress was made for you.”

  I wore the blue dress she’d brought to me from her work with vulnerable girls. It was a dress envisioned and crafted as part of therapy, a dress of blues as deep and as complex as water.

  Aside from putting on that dress, I didn’t bother much with my appearance. I let my hair hang long and loose, and makeup wasn’t even a consideration—I wasn’t sure if I still had any, and I didn’t care to look. Trying to find an appropriate pair of shoes felt like too much effort, so I remained barefoot. Besides, standing directly on the grass, the slight chill aside, was comforting. It made me feel grounded.

  My friends began to arrive. Marie and Louise were first, carrying an overflowing bouquet of flowers between them. Angel was next, wearing a smart pantsuit that made her look older than her fifteen years. She gifted me a delicate silver locket, the space for a photo empty and waiting. I could already see my brother’s image there, miniaturized and hanging close to my heart.

  Only one seat was still vacant. I stood and paced, too nervous to relax, until finally she came. Cassandra. She stepped into my backyard in a fitted black dress, her kitten heels digging softly into the grass. She struck me as sophisticated, confident, adult. She was, I reminded myself, a young woman studying to become a doctor. She was going to live a beautiful life.

  Instead of the flowers or jewelry I might have expected from Cassandra, she held a wreath of ivy leaves.

  “Ivy for remembrance,” she said. “And some say for immortality. May I?” She lifted the wreath and gently placed it on my head, adjusting my hair under it. I stood perfectly still, unsure of how to respond, and grateful when Marie and Louise came forward to help.

  “Your hair has gotten so long, Celeste,” Marie said, moving it gently around my shoulders. “It suits you.”

  I hadn’t thought of my hair in ages, and I certainly couldn’t remember the last time I’d cut it. It was a part of me, but it didn’t warrant my attention—it just kept growing quietly in the background. Now I ran my fingers through the long strands and marveled at its length, its strength. How it would keep on growing even after Miles was gone.

  We took our seats, and my mother served us the food my father was busy cooking inside. Only later would I understand that my parents were giving me a gift. They were showing me that life would go on, that I needed friends and normalcy, and that grief aside, there was beauty in enjoying a warm autumn day with people who mattered to me.

  My mother brought out a bottle of dry white wine so my friends could toast my birthday. I kept sneaking sidelong looks at Cassandra until she met my eyes. She knew about Miles. She knew about my work with Julia. She knew, and yet she was so far away from me.

  “Marie,” Cassandra said, but her gaze was still on me. “Have you told Louise the story of the banner downtown? The one for the skin cream. Remember?”

  “No one could forget that banner,” Marie said with a laugh. In a flurry, she and Cassandra filled Louise in: how the banner showed a naked woman without markings, how the entire town erupted over it, how it was removed in only days. Louise sat listening with wide eyes. She was from a more cosmopolitan city, where she said such a banner wouldn’t be quite as scandalous.

  “Some people might have a problem with the nudity,” she clarified, “but not to the extent that it would be removed so quickly.”

  “It was a simple line drawing, not detailed or graphic,” Marie said. “Now I wonder what that was all about—why people got so violently upset.”

  But I knew. I’d had time to think about it on the mountain, to let the outline of that woman become part of my daily life.

  “It wasn’t that she was naked.” I watched the sun sparkle against my wineglass. “It was the fact that she had no predictions. Think about it. If you walk into a museum, every last portrait of a woman includes markings. Even statues have them, chiseled right into the marble. But to show a woman who is blank—that’s making a statement.”

  Everyone looked at me. I noticed Marie and Cassandra did not point out that my father had been the one to design the banner. We could have asked him what he’d done and why he’d done it, but I believed I understood better than he did. The implications of his work were so subtle that he probably hadn’t been conscious of them at the time.

  “It was a threat,” I continued. “A woman unmarked, a woman not restricted by either her own future or that of others. No one knew what to do with that.”

  Louise leaned forward, her eyes steady on me.

  “It sounds a lot like what you and Miles are doing with Julia,” she said.

  My friends and I sat in silence for a moment, contemplating our work as a threat, as a way to transform everything. We glanced around as if to pinpoint all that we might be able to tear down with our strength and our anger. The confines of my backyard, or perhaps the neighborhood, or the entire city. The sky, the earth, the whole of
the world.

  The Mountain School: An Origin Myth

  The girl returned to the mountain thin and shaken. Her sisters swarmed her, anointed her, fed her a soup of bitter berries and leaves. The girl felt the empty slice in her heart, how the wound throbbed just as surely as the stone that had been in its place, but she did not tell her sisters. This pain was hers to bear alone.

  For the rest of her life, the girl would feel apart. She lamented the stone in her heart, both its presence and its void. Sometimes she dreamed of the forest, of the smell of sweet decay. But on the mountain she was wild. She and her sisters taught one another, fed one another, and sparked blazing fires for warmth.

  Time passed. The girl grew older and yet she remains a girl, the youth of her sisters keeping the light alive in her skin. On her best days, the forest flows through her like wind and she understands her history, how she was born of rock and stone.

  On these days, she runs full speed across the mountaintop. From that height she sees it all: the great turning sky, the clouds rolling over themselves, the burning glint of sunset. From that height she knows her place. She is the world and the sea and the sky. She is cracked open like the rock that bore her, and the brightness that spills out is a gift she offers her sisters now and for all of time—luminous streams of loss and light.

  30

  Above our mantel hung a large metal clock in a starburst design. It had been a fixture in our home since my childhood, but on that night, when I sat with Miles and my parents in the living room, I couldn’t take my eyes off it, couldn’t stop tracking the minute and hour hands as they both edged closer to the XII at the top. Once midnight struck, we had no way of knowing how long Miles might remain with us.