Light from Distant Stars

by Shawn Smucker

  “I guess I’ll see you around,” she said.

  “Come over again sometime,” he blurted out, not sure where the words came from, and she grinned.

  “See ya, Co,” she said over her shoulder. She rode south, and he watched her carefully as she appeared and disappeared, in and out of the streetlights.

  He stared south on Duke for a long time after she was gone, and even though he was freezing cold, he waited as long as he could before going back inside.

  thirty

  A Letter

  December 5, 1989

  Dear Co,

  Well, little brother, who knows what 1990 will bring around for us! We’re only a few weeks away from a new decade. I guess we have a lot to look forward to. I miss you.

  So what was this, our fifth or sixth Thanksgiving apart? I stopped counting after the second one because it was too depressing. Ha ha. Mom did the now-normal rotisserie chicken for the two of us, candied sweet potatoes (which is one of the few really good things she makes), green beans, and donuts for dessert.

  She’s really fallen apart. I mean, not in presentation—she still dresses real sharp and I can’t remember the last time I saw her without makeup on—but more in general life skills. She never cooks anymore. The microwave is king in this house! Ha ha. And I think she might be smoking! Crazy, huh? I can’t be sure. I haven’t seen her do it. But some evenings she “goes for a walk” and comes back smelling of more than just the city.

  Mom, smoking. I know it’s hard to believe. I might as well have told you she was doing hard drugs or stopped reading the King James Version. Ha ha.

  She doesn’t go to church anymore, so I don’t go either. Sometimes I wonder if she still believes in God. That’s a strange thing to wonder, I guess. I still believe in God even though we don’t go to church. At least I think I do. I still pray anyway, and I guess I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t still believe at least a little bit.

  Okay, so I have to ask you something. Mom said that Dad told her you have a girlfriend? Come on, little brother! This is the kind of stuff I don’t want to hear from Mom through Dad! You’ve got to keep me in the loop! I demand you tell me in your next letter! Ha ha. Of course, we both know Dad’s not doing so well, so maybe there’s nothing to it. Anyway, let me know.

  Gotta go. Love you.

  Yours,

  K

  thirty-one

  The Beast Comes to Visit

  December of 1989 would always remain in his mind as a month of eternal gray, a month of things hidden in shadows. He was fourteen and finding things out, fourteen and seeing his father for the first time, or a kind of father he had never known before: a human father, a failing father, a rock-bottom father. It was a month of cold rain, and sleet when it was colder, and sometimes wet snow that melted on the sidewalks and sent ashy water down the gutters, half freezing where it sat in puddles. There may have been a few days of blue skies in that long-ago month, but Cohen would never remember them.

  Yet there were things like blue skies: the letters from Kaye that he read over and over, kept in his pocket until the paper started to wear thin and the penned words blurred, fuzzy and memorized. And bike rides with Ava, laughing all the way down Duke to the empty ice cream shop, or sitting out on the sidewalk talking until the streetlights flickered on and she would jump on her bike, proclaiming her parents were going to kill her for being late yet again. No one died from being late more times that December than Ava.

  But the days of that month continued, deeper and darker, and still there was no sign of Than or Hippie. Or the Beast. Every day as Cohen walked to his middle school in the city, he looked for them. Down every alley. Through every window. In the back seat of every passing car. Even with Ava he sometimes felt distracted, looking over her shoulder.

  At night he drifted through the house, lonely and awake, peering through the windows, into the city, aware of the bodies in the basement waiting to be embalmed or buried or, somehow worse, cremated. On some nights he felt independent and strong in his solitude, a boy making his own way in the world, and on those nights he slipped quietly from one level to another, from one room to the next. But on other nights, on most nights, he felt lonely, like the last person on earth, and every noise was a body resurrecting. His parents’ separation nagged at him like a small lump under the skin, the kind that grows so slowly you don’t even notice until one day you bump it and realize it is tender and has taken on a life of its own.

  The knowledge of the gun in the air vent of the mobile home also made him uneasy. He stared into the middle-of-the-night shadows and wondered again where Than and Hippie had gone. He hoped the Beast hadn’t gotten them.

  One day in mid-December as he walked home, he saw them.

  They stood across the street, nonchalant. Than kicked at a crack in the sidewalk, scuffing his shoes. Hippie gazed up at the pale sky, scanning for something. Always looking, always watching out.

  Cohen jogged over to them. “Hey!” he shouted, waiting for the light to turn. Than looked up and when he saw who it was, he rolled his eyes, shaking his head in exaggerated fashion, but Hippie gave Cohen a smile. He wanted to preserve it. He wanted to see her smile all the time.

  “Hi.” She waved shyly, her hands in fingerless, navy-blue mittens.

  Cohen looked up and down the street and ran across, his backpack heavy on his shoulders. “I live right over there,” he said, pointing at the funeral home.

  “The funeral home?” Than asked. He might as well have said, “In the dumpster?”

  Cohen shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” Hippie said. “That’s cool.”

  “You want to see inside?” Cohen asked, wondering immediately why he had asked.

  Than tried to feign indifference, but Cohen could tell he was intrigued.

  “Sure,” Hippie said.

  “What are you guys doing, anyway?” Cohen asked as they walked slowly through the afternoon.

  “Same old thing,” Than said.

  “The Beast?” Cohen asked, lowering his voice.

  Than wrenched his mouth and rolled his eyes again, as if Cohen couldn’t possibly understand the weight of what he was talking about. Cohen glanced at Hippie to see if she found him as annoying as Than apparently did, but she was staring at the sky while they walked. His eyes caught the narrow line of her neck, the softness of her jaw. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, and narrow lines of blue crept along like streaks of minerals in rock. She looked at him, and he quickly looked away, turning red, trying to think of something else to say. But nothing came.

  Cohen stopped in front of the funeral home. He cupped his hands against the dark glass and peered in.

  “No one’s there,” he said, relieved. He looked over at the other two, wondering if they’d lost interest, but they both seemed eager to go in. He pulled open the door only part of the way so that the chain of bells hanging inside wouldn’t do their loud dance. Than went in first, then Hippie. Cohen looked over his shoulder and followed them inside.

  The air in the display room, the main area of the funeral home, felt fragile. To the right was a closed set of double doors that led into a small chapel. It mostly went unused, since nearly everyone in town attended church and had their funerals at First Methodist or First Baptist or Saint Thomas, but every so often someone came in who didn’t have a church, and they needed a small space for a funeral. So Cohen’s father would hand him a list of things to do: dust the wood in the room, wipe off the small pulpit, vacuum the carpet, brush off and arrange the chairs. The smell of wood polish always took him back to The Day He Saw His Father Cry on the Altar or The Beginning of the End or The Day He Shouldn’t Have Picked Up That Sock.

  When he turned to say something to Than and Hippie, they were gone.

  “Guys?” he hissed, not wanting to shout, not wanting to attract his father’s attention if he was upstairs in the apartment. “Where are you?”

  He walked away from the chapel into a disordered group of coffins, some ope
n like the mouths of clams, some closed, some standing up against the wall, some stretched out. He looked under them and around them and behind them.

  “Than, this isn’t funny,” he whispered as loud as a whisper can go. “Hippie? Where are you? I hope you’re not hiding in a coffin—I don’t think you can breathe in there.”

  He was crawling under a few coffins along the wall, pulling back the heavy drapes to see if the two were hiding there, when he heard a sound that made him freeze in place. The discordant clanging of the string of bells over the front door. Someone had come into the funeral home.

  He quietly shifted behind the curtain, drawing the heavy fabric around him as slowly as possible. He tried to hold his breath, but that didn’t last long, so he measured his breathing. Long, slow, still inhale. Long, quiet, controlled exhale.

  Something grabbed his hand and he nearly screamed. It was Hippie. She was already there, hiding behind the curtain. He looked down at where their hands were joined. It was exhilarating—her white skin was cool to the touch, smooth, and soft. He looked up at her face to see if she was as enraptured as he was, but she was peeking out from behind the curtain, her eyes wide open. She looked at him, and he could only see half of her face. The other half was hidden in the folds of the curtain. But he knew what she was mouthing to him.

  “The Beast,” she said silently, exaggerating the movement of her lips, her tongue. She said it again. “The Beast.”

  They both looked out from behind the curtain. At first Cohen didn’t see anything different about the room. There were the coffins and their corresponding shadows drifting through the legs of the narrow tables that held them up. A long line of slanting light came in through the front door. All the way across the room, the doors that led into the chapel were closed, the lights off.

  In the far corner he saw something moving, something gathering, shifting into shape, the way spilled metal shavings will congregate in the presence of a magnet. Whatever it was in the corner, the shadows in the room leaked toward it across the floor, sliding along, in no hurry whatsoever. The shadows themselves were moving. Cohen felt a strange ache in his chest, a deep breathlessness, and a scream formed in his throat, a scream he wouldn’t let out, so it sat there and ached. The drawn shadows left behind a dull, shadowless room, but somehow this didn’t make the space brighter—it simply meant there was nothing to contrast the light. Everything had turned a thousand shades of gray, and it felt like an old black-and-white movie.

  The shadows gathered in the corner and took shape, and the Beast rose, the top of it brushing the ceiling, swaying back and forth as if looking for something. Or someone.

  Cohen glanced over at Hippie, his eyes wide. She returned his gaze, the whites of her eyes shining. She squeezed his hand harder, now with both of hers, but he realized she wasn’t afraid. She was tense and alert and every muscle in her neck and shoulders and face was on edge, but she wasn’t afraid.

  “Where’s Than?” he asked soundlessly.

  She shook her head, a series of back-and-forth twitches. She didn’t know.

  But in that moment they both saw him.

  Than was halfway across the room, crawling under one of the coffins on his knees and forearms. He looked like a mountain lion dipping under a fallen tree as it approached an unsuspecting deer. His knit cap was pulled on tight, and some of his hair leaked out the sides in a wild fringe. He moved without making a sound.

  Cohen and Hippie didn’t dare move. The Beast shifted toward the chapel door, and even though it didn’t have an identifiable face or eyes they could see, it seemed to pause by the crack in the door as if it was examining the chapel.

  Than looked over his shoulder at Cohen and Hippie, raised a single finger to his lips. Shh. He crawled farther forward, came out from under the coffin, and rose silently to his feet. He crept toward the Beast. It turned. Than shouted and ran into the darkness.

  Before Cohen knew what he was doing, he had clawed his way out of the tangled curtain and followed Than. Hippie was right behind him. The Beast turned on all three of them, growing, pulling in more darkness, roaring. It was the sound of a forest fire rushing through the undergrowth, a hissing, spitting, rumbling sound.

  The Beast tossed Than aside, and he floated through the air before slamming into the wall. He slumped into a huddled, motionless mass. Hippie pulled her way past Cohen, stopped, planted her feet firmly, and raised both hands. At first Cohen thought he saw it stagger, diminish, but if it did, it only lasted a flash of time.

  The Beast seemed to laugh, and it was a laugh that shifted into anger as it rushed at Hippie. Her head spun as if she had been slapped, she flew to the side, and her head cracked against a coffin. The Beast turned.

  Cohen felt the blood drain out of his face. He thought he might pass out, but in the overwhelming intensity of the moment, he felt a rage rising. It was a rage born from every other intolerable aspect of his life: his parents’ separation, the parts of his new life in the city that he did not like, his father’s increasing distractedness. Everything he hated stood there in front of him in the form of that darkness, and he sprinted toward it.

  The Beast consolidated into a denser substance, lower, even more sinister. It threw itself at Cohen on his first approach, and he felt his head snap back, felt his body soaring, felt the carpet on the floor as he burned his way along it on his back. He lay there for a moment, certain his neck must have been broken, but as he felt the fibers under his fingertips, stared up at the bottom of a coffin he had slid under, he realized he was alive. He could move. He wasn’t afraid.

  Cohen lurched to his feet again, raced at the Beast, and paused outside its grasp. It swung and missed. Cohen drew back his hand and aimed, but as he threw his fist forward, the Beast struck him again. His jaw made a loud cracking sound, and one of his back teeth dislodged with a sickening creak. Again he was on the floor. Again he stared up, this time with the warm taste of blood in the back of his throat.

  From his spot on the floor, moving only his eyes, he looked over at Than, who still hadn’t moved from where he lay against the wall in a heap. Hippie was on her back, unconscious. The Beast moved toward her slowly, savoring the stillness of its enemies. It leaned over her and roared again, and this time dark strands of shadow leaked from its unformed mouth, dripped down onto the floor beside Hippie’s face like veins of mercury. Hippie still didn’t move. The Beast drew closer to her face.

  Cohen looked around for something he could use as a weapon, but there was nothing. He sighed. Hopeless. Determined. He stood on shaking legs and ran at the Beast. It never saw him coming.

  He gathered himself and jumped onto what seemed to be its back, put his arms around the amorphous head, and squeezed. It roared and thrashed, and Cohen squeezed tighter. The Beast rushed backwards, smashing him over and over against the wall, but still Cohen held on. It jumped and his head hit the ceiling. It fell and rolled over on top of him—his ribs creaked under the strain and his breath was wrung out of him, but still he held on.

  The Beast slowed. Rolled onto its side. Cohen squeezed hard one last time, and it stopped. That was all. It stopped. The shadowy essence of it that seemed to be constantly swirling turned motionless. Cohen closed his eyes, gasping for breath, and each breath shot a searing pain from the bottom of his rib cage up under his arm. His face felt inflamed, burnt. He raised one hand up, his fingers brushing swollen cheeks. He swallowed a thick wad of phlegm and blood.

  The Beast stirred. Cohen sighed. He had nothing left, nothing remaining to fight with. He wondered if this was the end, and deep inside, under the ash of his disappointment at life, a small ember flared up. An ember of relief. The end did not frighten him.

  But it was not the end. The Beast, instead of turning on him, moved in crawling fashion, oozed along the carpet, and dissolved in the afternoon light that came through the glass door. One moment it was there, the next it was gone.

  Cohen had never felt this way before—joy and pain, relief and terror. He rolled over t
o reach for Hippie, to bring her back, to help her.

  But she was gone. He looked over at the wall. Than was gone too.

  He rolled onto his back and wept, not at their absence but with relief that it was over. He lay there for a long time, until the gray winter sky faded and dusk coated the glass door, and the streetlights slowly turned on, one after the other.

  thirty-two

  The Sleeping Father

  When Cohen crept upstairs after dark, bruised and aching from the Beast, he found his father asleep on the sofa. There were cans on the window ledge above the couch and a lone glass tumbler on the coffee table with a thin golden skin coating the inside. Cohen limped over and picked it up, hobbled to the kitchen sink, and turned it upside down. Only a few drops fell out, but it gave him a certain satisfaction, emptying the glass before his father could. He moved to put it down, but he was distracted, still trembling, and his hand hit the faucet, knocking the glass into the sink where it shattered with a sound that split the air.

  His father moaned from the sofa. Cleaning up the glass was the last thing Cohen felt like doing, but he thought if his father came into the kitchen in the state he was in, he might very well slice himself open. So he carefully pushed the shards into the corner of the sink with a towel, bunched everything together, and threw it in the trash, towel and all.

  The air in the apartment was cold and thin, like the atmosphere at the top of a mountain. Light shone through the windows, pale and anemic. He wondered if his father had turned the thermostat down again. He was always complaining that he was hot while Cohen walked the house in layers, trying to stay warm.

  Cohen went to the bathroom and cleaned himself up, washing his face with icy water, putting a bandage on his hand, and swishing the blood out of his mouth. He reached gingerly inside and felt the tooth, one of his molars. It wiggled. He groaned. It would have to come out. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and leaned against the wall. He reached in and pulled on the tooth. Once. Twice. Again. Finally it made a grinding scrape and he felt a snap as it gave way. The pain made his vision cloud over.