179 Intensive Literary Fiction Project: Paper Stars

Faculty Mentor: Michael Gills (Honors College, University of Utah)

The evening newscasters chattered away about the upcoming election and what it might bring. It felt ridiculous to Marty. November felt years away, yet everyone was already so fixated on it. There was talk of adding another stop on the train line (where would there be room? The bottom of the lake) and a corny advertisement for Disney’s newest film Brave that would be coming out that summer.

It was a quarter moon. A waning quarter moon. Night by night the shadow was creeping across devouring the light that it clung to. Her roommate freshman year had been a Wiccan. She had collected plants and rocks and taught Marty all sorts of things about energy and the earth. She had told her that the new moon symbolized rebirth and a new beginning. Maybe it was just her pessimism talking, but the way Marty saw it, it was more ending than beginning. Where exactly did the line lie between those two things?

Marty wondered just how far the sound of that tiny, sputtering radio reached.

Somewhere just feet or maybe even yards away from them was the outer edge of their sphere. If an outsider standing just on that other side were to look at them now, they would hear no radio, only see the pathetic forms of an old woman at the end of her life and a young woman with no clue what to do with hers. They would see the coon hound that pranced between them in his haze of joy and optimism, allowed only by his unawareness of the nature of the world. Maybe that stranger would see in the yellow glow of the porch light, a scene of domesticity and peace, rather than the depressed air that always seemed to follow those two. Mourning was supposed to be a process that lessened and eased over time, as the loss lost its haunting grip on the people who were left behind. That kind of mourning was the kind that fit into the nice, linear boxes of the stages of grief like it’s supposed to.

Within their glob of light and evening news and buzz zappers and energetic dogs existed a different kind of grief. The two of them shared the grief of Prometheus. Day after day, their grief persisted, chained to rocks of their own design while it tore at their guts only for them to heal and be wrecked all over again by reminders of times gone by. Marty was bleeding now.

The Eagles were here. Catherine was healing, the scar tissue weaving over her organs and drawing them close to her chest. It was unclear which hurt more.

Catherine stood, her moccasin slippers making little noise as she gathered her mug and switched off the radio.

“I’m going to turn in dear. Try not to stay up too late.” The distance from her hand to the latch on the door was mere inches, but her movements were sluggish by default, and moments before she could grasp it, she was stopped.

Chessie’s deep, booming bark echoed with its full force across the span of night. It was not a startled reaction or a friendly greeting, this bark was reserved for one set of activities alone.

This bark went that the hunt was on.

Catherine turned, too slow, to see the dark shape of the dog rocketing from the porch. Outlined in the fading patches of moonlight dashing into the night was a retreating tail stripped with dark lines of black and lines of vibrant white.

A raccoon.

Catherine may have a strong grip on her tongue, but she still felt the strong urge to curse.

She turned her body, slowly. Too slowly. In her mind she was halfway across the yard with a hand gripped on the dog’s collar and pulling him back to the house. Her body though, stumbled as she tried to move, the red mug tumbling from her hands as she steadied herself on the door frame. It shattered across the faded wooden blanks, the yellow and green chunks of the unfinished soup dripping through the cracks. Pills clanged around in her stomach, her metal knee creaked and groaned, and Catherine Fallaway went nowhere while the last part of her husband she had streaked far away to wear she could not reach.

She felt the sting in her throat and in her eyes that alluded to the bone-deep sobs that had tore through her on the day that they wheeled his body away.

A loud thump and shout dispelled it before it continued to build to a breaking point. “Chessie!” Marty moved, faster than she could, more than she could. The dog’s name pierced their golden dome like a battle axe. Marty tore across the dirt, her bare feet immediately stained with the soil, leaving clear footprints behind. She showed no signs of stopping or slowing even when the dog gained a considerable lead. Within moments she was more a part of the horizon than of her home.

“Mary Ann, stop!” Unknown terror pushed the hoarse shout from her throat. Marty was too far gone. She couldn’t hear her, or if she did, she chose not to listen. Within seconds the raccoon, Chesapeake, and her granddaughter had disappeared into the edge of the Aspen grove, leaving her standing by herself, shaking on a porch dripping with cheddar broccoli soup, her golden orb completely shattered.

She could feel the blood beginning to slick the bottoms of her feet. Within minutes of her tearing through the forest, her heels had sunken into the ground, smashing what was left of the catkins and giving way to jagged chunks of sandstone and dry, brittle twigs. She had become too accustomed to city life, her feet were not as tough as they had once been, and soon she had collected deep gashes and scrapes that would take weeks to heal. Cold sweat clung to every inch of her skin, and for a frantic moment, she felt like every pore was bleeding in her own pale imitation of Gethsemane.

“Chessie!” She shouted into the dark vat of night again, ignoring the burning building up in her lungs. “STOP!”

Her voice sounded shrill as it rang back at her, bouncing around the pale, ghostly trunks that surrounded her. She squinted past maniac tears at the dark shape she had been chasing for the last mile, hoping for the love of God that it was still Chessie. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she knew that if she stopped running for a single moment she might collapse to the dark floor and never stop shaking. She was not a runner, she had no stamina, and the only thing that was spurring her on was the distant, coppery bark that reached back and grasped her every other minute.

What was she doing?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t fucking think.

She ran and ran and ran and panicked and ran and cried and ran. Another bark, to the right.

Marty swerved like a drunken driver, only barely missing an aspen, her shoulder was whipped by one of the low-hanging branches leaving the tree quaking in her wake.

“CHESSIE!” She shrieked again, the name now sounding foreign and imaginary in her mouth. Her pace was slowing, which meant that the gap between her and the dog was only Widening.

What the HELL was she doing?

Even if she was at the height of her stamina, there was no way she could catch a young, athletic coon hound with prey in his sight. Even as the wind whizzed by her ears, rushing like a chaotic river, she knew it was not enough. She couldn’t make out her dark blob in the sea of dark blobs ahead of her.

The pale light of the moon blotted through the thick cover of trembling, sand dollar leaves above her, splattering across the ground like police sirens pounding against apartment doors. Marty gasped audibly, making her exhausted lungs work overtime when something thin and sharp sunk up into the soft meat of the arch of her foot. The sudden onslaught was just enough to uproot her footing, her foot hanking around an ankle, arms windmilling before she was sent skating down onto the mound of dirt below. She skidded, the rough edges of the catkins sending her body sliding a few yards before her momentum scattered.

Every speck of oxygen left prattling through her body was ejected, and probably a few years of her life along with them. Everything stilled.

In 10th grade, Mr. Carpenter had made her read The Lord of the Flies. He had been appalled when he had seen her reading list and had marched her down to the library and shoved the beaten paperback into her confused hands.

Read it well.

She had, and then she had read it again. And again.

Three times in total, she had fallen into the war-fraught jungle of death and danger and division, three times, only to be left each time watching a gaggle of little boys standing on the beach looking immeasurable small as they were surrounded by the real soldiers.