The stars are unkind

Her soul was agape, and it had many legs, and so it crept out through her parted lips, stretching them out like a doorway. She stared up into the sun, and raindrops pattered down her cheekbones in rivulets. Streetlamps roared their endless song, buzzing like a cicada storm, but Diane was beyond that, beyond the shadowcast bushes, and fused to the sand.

Diane’s soul sang brilliantly to that beating golden orb that heated her skin.Her atonal hum trickled down from her lips, pooled in her fingertips, and the shadows lining her neck increased, dug deeper. She knew. It was killing her, because she knew, and though she let her hands cup openly, lifted to that distance, the hum trickled between her fingertips and she clung to nothing at all.

She blinked, slowly, and it seared like sand grinding into an open wound. She forced her eyes agape, and her singing lowered. Her internal fire spewed flowerpetals free from her lips. They drooped. They rotted, they crumpled, they cast spores to the wind. They bloomed somewhere else.

The sun tugged at her, and her sternum jolted forward in her chest.

She concentrated that feeling, felt the geometry of it, where it was located, and intensified her singing, her tugging. Diane’s gaze became more fixed, intensified, and she leaned closer, towards that firelit giant. Diane’s eyes almost were averted from the earth, because her eyeballs strained, pleading, yearned for that sun, for its aching, fiery blue core.

She wobbled to her feet, jaw falling wider, the crest of her nose seared with sunflare, eyes bulging at her sockets as they pleaded towards the sun. The freckles spatting her cheeks swam, burned, spun. Diane listed slightly. She felt her whole body leaving the planet, drifting up through the spacecurrents, drifting like a feather, tingling and vibrant. Then, she was off. Diane didn’t feel the presence of the other one as his feet padded crudely, fumblingly, but not maliciously through the sands.

He tried to balance them, to step with care, but the crudely carved giant was obnoxiously thick at the limbs and wobbly at the neurons. He was gentle, but furrowed where it mattered, up there in his logic, so that every soft attempt was wrinkled, lined. Satarino was impervious to perfection, and every malstep made him want to cry.

Satarino sat down next to her, folding in on himself like a box, and tried to be quiet. Diane’s body jolted and jittered in place.

“Have they contacted you yet?” Satarino pleaded. His voice was like static grated against gravel slowly streaked against a chalkboard, but he tried to soften it.

Diane blinked, slowly, and said not a word.

“Any luck yet?” Satarino grumbled, low, ascerbic, gently.

Diane spasmed, her eye twitched, and shook. She was silent.

Satarino ground his sweaty forehead into the upper surfaces of his feet, which he’d curled into little fists. He raised his head, but felt the pressure of it rising, pounding, the solar waves crashing against him like a thousand tons of glass. Satarino felt his neck buckle, pressed his forehead down into his knees. He felt like he could collapse, in that moment, collapse into that center point of gravity in the centre of his chest. He could ide.

There was a sound. He managed to turn his head, swivel on an aching joint, and stared at Diane again. She was tapping her fingers, counting them against her ankle, because, in this state, she could never really tell how many there were. Satarino compacted even further, the whole pale lot of him crunching into a little ball.

“Please,” he drawled, yearning, and he really meant it, with every misconstrued feeling tied tight in between his tendons, with every childlike feeling fluttering in his heart.

She blinked. “It wants us to plead,” she managed.

“What does?”

“Wait,” she choked. Her chest ached, echoed with pulses from somewhere far beyond.

Diane perceived her body hurtling around their sun, dim, featherlike, and reeled back, pushed back on a string, then hung, tense, vibrating near the star.

She waited, frozen.

The tension pulled back, coiled, built; Satarino moved his fingers like fumbling caterpillars; released.

There was a rubber-band snap. Diane felt her body swing in a supermassive arc, fling itself into the stars beyond the sun, cast like a fishbait upon a translucent elastic string. She spun, hurtled, crumpled and unfolded, spun in aching, screaming pain through shimmering nebula. Fumbling fingers manipulated air beside her. Diane ached as her fingers splayed out into a multitude, forty of them, seventy five, and she really couldn’t count after that.

Diane hurtled through shaking, vibrating stars, stopped suddenly in a field of them. She was cast by Satarino’s line; he recoiled, stopped. Her body uncurled, became prostrate, became starlike, limbs and head extended, receiving.

She saw it, then. She saw for what her soul vibrated.

She watched the constellations, her vivid golden irises darted between them, pupils spinning through nebulae. They sharpened, settled, and vibrated upon the thing. Diane felt cold as she stared at a stellar body that was flickering constantly.

A dual star system was blurred with motion. Each star rotated the other, an endless cat and mouse chase; both whirred incredibly fast around a central point, spewing out a deep blue gas. A single black planet flickered, wavering in an irregular orbit, spewing about and around the stars and blocking one or the other variably. This caused that constant flickering.

“And what does it say?” Satarino scraped, as his fingers, his bumbling, meaty arms stilled. He didn’t mean to do it, he really didn’t. He was too big for his body. Satarino’s eyes shifted, rolled right to face her like wheels of granite.

“Fuck you, Satarino,” Diane hissed.

His head crumpled in. Satarino fought the gravity, but it forced him down to the sand, and he laid there, crumpled can, collapsed, she turned away from him, thrashed out across the sand.

“Fuck you,” she spat, shivered away, and sat cold, frigid, in the endless, ringing signal of the stars. Her fingers became logical, and Diane furled back into her body, uncurled like a feather, and panted softly in the rain and the cold.

“I’m sorry,” Satarino croaked, cried, sobbed.

“Worthless shit,” Diane snapped.

Satarino between sobs began to hum, the green-blue sky churning stars down like rockets. The lamps hissed, snared, zapped.

Diane felt that her breathing tract was closed. With effort, she let her windpipe unshut, and sneered at him, stumbling to her feet, fumbling over the sand like a poor paper origami, unable in her skin. She stared at the clumsy articulator, the deft puller of invisible strings, the clumsy, foolish, shitty navigator.

“What did they say?” Satarino hollered, bellowed between molten tears that heated his cheeks to sear. He was a glacier, melting ice.

“Do you fucking want to know, Satarino?” she screeched, every muscle vibrating, “Do you really want to fucking know?”

“YES, YES!” he bawled.

“They want us to die!” she spewed. “To press ourselves into the ground like casting into molds until our bodies meld and fuse into metal or shear apart, scatter to smithereens. They want us to shout into the winds that rip into us, Satarino! They want us to feel it choke us! Oh, Satarino, the stars are unkind. They will splay our brains out into gunsplatter, twist our nerves into cords, to pull them tight, to bind our muscles into knots and tug. To rip! To tear asunder!”

Satarino sobbed, pressed his meaty fingers into his eyes until he saw patterns. “I thought,” he bawled between sobs, choking on it, “I thought-”

“That’s what they want, Satarino. The stars are unkind. For us to bawl! To scream! To prostrate ourselves down and castrate every last fertile body, remove our organs of copulation. Satarino, they beyond our wall of stars, do you know what they want? We are only fever dreams to the stars. To unfurl the nerves from our skin like a tree.”

Satarino howled. The stars goaded him, chittering.

“Is that really what you wanted?” Diane screamed at him, standing with the wind whipping her clothes, wet, soaked in the rain as the fumbling man cried, and the lamps jazzed infinite static down at them,

“No,” Satarino scraped, dry-sandpaper voice among a trillion wet globs, “no, no, no-”

The stars were not kind.