Nova
Posted By aderkatch on February 18, 2010
I remember a white candle, as tall as a marble column, melting in the evening and slowly sliding down her hand and her wrist the way ice cream did when she wasn’t paying attention. And from the wax beads of pearly sweat, hot from the glorious flame, kisses of pain made her eyes shutter, but she would try to hide that from me. She would just hold my hand firm in hers and lead me through the dark, and I would worry. Maybe she could feel my hesitation in the way I walked behind her, dragging my feet along and looking back at our little house, so she told me not to be such a wimp, promising that we would be back by curfew. I asked her why she brought a candle because I thought it made more sense to bring a flashlight, but she ignored me and pulled harder on my arm.
“What if Mom finds out?”
“And just who do you think is going to tell her?”
“I’m not saying I’m going to. But what if she finds out?”
“I don’t plan on doing it, so if you won’t, then I don’t think she will find out.”
I just wanted to go back. As much as I liked looking up at the stars and eating blueberries on our porch at nighttime, I didn’t appreciate the dark all too much, and even though Casey said that she had a surprise for me, I was still nervous as we went farther and father down the hill and the gold light from our parent’s bedroom became noticeably smaller and smaller to my eyes, almost becoming kind of like a star of its own. The most familiar star to me, despite the fact I knew all the constellations by heart – Cassiopeia the queen, the dog Sirius, the twins Castor and Pollux made up Gemini, the Southern Cross, and over there was the swan they called Cygnus – if I didn’t know them all, I sure knew a lot, but so did Casey. Once we were down the hill, well into the valley, I gave up hoping we’d make a sudden return home, I realized I was committed to this adventure one way or another, but that didn’t mean I liked it.
The dark hairs of the field, the grass, felt cold and slippery, and I wasn’t wearing shoes because I never wore them in the summer, unless I had to go into town, in which case I would throw on sandals and a baseball cap. Casey had on a plain t-shirt with some old jeans that she folded a few times at the bottom so she could show off her ankles. She finally let go of my hand and told me to keep up, knowing that I wouldn’t dare – at this point – run back home on my own, out of fear of getting in trouble with Mom, or worse.
I started to look out across the way at where the trees were thick and I couldn’t help but think about bears. A month ago Dad had said he saw one or two passing through our backyard when we were out at school, and when I asked him why he didn’t shoot at it he told me that there was no need to, bears were harmless if left alone, that and the fact that it was illegal to shoot at them in our county unless you were in immediate danger. I didn’t understand that kind of thing, it didn’t exactly make sense to me why we had to wait for the bear to get all riled up while in the meantime he could just go strolling behind our house if he felt like it.
“You think there’s bears around here?” I asked my sister.
“What?”
“Bears. You think there’s bears down here.”
“Could be.”
“Serious?”
“Yea. Could be. This is the woods, kid. What do you expect?”
“So then… what are we doing walking around by ourselves. In the dark. With no guns…or, or anything?”
“Don’t worry so much. I told you I had a surprise for you. And look, this is the just the way it’s gotta be. If you’re so scared, look at the stars, see if you can find something new.”
She reminded me that I had no idea what this surprise was after all. Casey went and told me when I was watching TV that we were going to go for a walk after dinner, and that I shouldn’t say anything to Mom, and to wear only dark clothes. So we had dinner as usual after Dad came home, Casey and me helped Mom with the dishes, and when he was done eating Dad went to the Club –cause it was a Friday– to play cards with the other wide-jawed and thick-shouldered men in our town. Mom would go upstairs and read some of her book, because she loved all the books Oprah recommended, and that made getting birthday gifts for her really easy.
Usually, this would be the time Casey and I would go outside and lay on our backs and she would tell me which star was which, just like Grandpa did when he taught her a couple years back. But he passed away not too long ago so he couldn’t get around to showing me like he showed Casey, and I think she knew that I wanted to learn, so I was excited when she sat me down one night and started to explain to me how it all was. She said Grandpa’s favorite constellation was Orion because in Greek mythology he was a mighty hunter Zeus had put up in the heavens, and when it came to finding the other constellations, it was through the hunter that you could find almost all the animals. That same night I learned that the light we see from stars is millions and millions of years older than us, and because those bright orbs are so far away – a kind of distance that is almost impossible to imagine she told me – by the time we see them explode and become supernovas, they’re not even there anymore, they’ve become clouds of space dust that no one from Earth will ever see again.
Thinking about that made me get goose bumps up and down my arms, it made me feel small, and unimportant, but Casey went on teaching me everything she said she knew. Although, after some time, there wasn’t much more she could show me. I would answer all her quizzes without a second guess, so she stopped asking me what was what, and so we stopped spending so much time outside. I think maybe she got bored of it, because she couldn’t play teacher anymore. Instead our evenings evolved into her going to her own room and listening to CDs, while I would read comics. That was it.
One night, though, I knocked on Casey’s door and asked her is she felt like going outside for a bit with this dumb smile on my face, but she looked at me, pulled one head phone away from her ear and said that she didn’t see the point. I told her there didn’t have to be a point. But she just put her earpiece back against her head and stared past me, until I left the room. I had a hunch why she didn’t want to go with me; I could see the bored look in her eyes, and the eternal sigh that was painted onto her expressions. She was always playing the role of older sister, of teacher, she liked it, and the idea of us being on the same page for anything didn’t sit well with her. When she realized that there was nothing new to point to in the black expanse above our heads, it made her bored, and when she was bored, she withdrew.
“Helloooooo? Listening at all? Have you heard anything I’ve said?” She was shaking me by the shoulder.
“Huh?”
She was fierce in the way she looked at me, as though I hit my head very hard.
Casey sighed, “I want you to wait here, you got that? I want you to stand right here and don’t move from this spot. I’m going to go away for a little while but I promise, I’ll be right back, you got that?”
“Where you going?”
“Doesn’t matter. I need you to promise me you’re not going to run off while I’m gone.”
“But what if a bear comes by and decides he wants to eat me.”
“Don’t worry about the bears, I’ll scare them off.”
“How? If you’re gonna be off somewhere.”
“Trust me. Now, you promise not to go anywhere.”
“Yea.”
“Yea, what?”
“Yea, I promise.”
“Ok, good. Now I’ll be right back, don’t you worry.”
She was still holding that big column of wax in her left hand and I could see a warm glow of light covering her face as though I were looking through a jar of honey. She left and walked up the hill across from where I was standing and in only a few soft steps she was gone from sight, her and her gold flame, and I was alone. Alone in the dark, beneath a sea of flickering candles, none of which I could grab at and use as a guide if I needed to. I didn’t even really know where I was at that point, figuring she had left me somewhere far, far away from the main road. Was she mad at me? Why would she abandon me out here with no clue as to how to get home? She said she would come back, and she made me promise not to go anywhere, but was she really going to come back? Why bother making me stand here? Why couldn’t I go along with her, wherever it was that that she went? And how was she going to scare off a bear? With what, her candle?
It wasn’t quiet because there were nocturnal chirps coming from everywhere all at once, but it didn’t’ make me feel any less lonely. It seemed like Casey had been gone for so long, and I wasn’t thinking about crying, it just sort of happened so I decided to sit down. If I was going to cry, I would do it sitting down, because there’s no sense in standing around feeling lost in the dark and crying at the same time. The bottoms of my feet were very wet after walking barefoot through all the grass and the bug bites started to itch. I let my head drop, and I was going to keep it down because I didn’t want to look at the stars or anything like that, I wanted to forget I was out here in the first place. I wanted to forget about Orion, and Supernovas, and Casey, and even Grandpa. They weren’t going to save me from the dark, black abyss. I was just a kid crying somewhere in the center of nowhere, and no one would care enough to find me.
A sharp howl erupted out of the chorus of cricket, a terrifying high-pitched shriek that sounded completely alien to me, and it came from above my head. A streak of light was sailing farther and farther into the sky ripping apart the abyss, screaming and screeching, before finally disappearing in the blackness as though it never happened. A solitary moment of silence followed, brief like the breath of a child, I sat there looking upward bewildered, frozen in panic, and from the lungs of the sleeping night a shower of silver fire exhaled. It was as bright as a million torches, an explosion in the sky, raining down and suddenly disappearing. And there was another. And another. And soon the breaths came one after the other, illuminating everything. And it was beautiful, because that was the only word I could think of – just beautiful.
“Never seen fireworks, huh?” Casey said as she sat down beside me, and joined me by looking up.
I was transfixed from the green, red, and gold showers falling down to Earth in the distance. All I could do was shake my head.
“I know they’re not like real stars,” she began, “But I thought that it would be nice for you to see something…something different.”
More missiles rose in this direction and that one.
“And unlike those supernovas we talked about, what you see is what you get.”
I turned to her, and she had her arm around my shoulders, and she was smiling for once but still giving me that same look, the one where she thought I had hit my head really hard. And all I could do was wipe my wet eyes and my wet face with my t-shirt and nod back at her. I didn’t know how to say.
There were flashes, and then there was nothing, and then flashes, and then more nothing. And then, it all stopped at once. The heart stopped, and there was no more breathing. And in the dark we both just sat there, and waited a little while as Orion returned into full view. Casey got up slowly and removed a small flashlight from out of her pocket and offered me her hand so I could stand up.
“We should get going. Mom’s going to be real worried. She’ll probably kill me.”
I followed behind her.
“Casey, where those yours?”
“Not…exactly.”
“Then how did you get a hold of fireworks?”
“I sort of stole ‘em.”
“Oh.”
I waited a little before I asked her another question.
“So does that mean you’ll get in trouble?”
“Probably.” She said. Looking back at me with a smirk.
“Oh.”
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