Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

I can't forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light, and stars fell…

Inevitable intersections, convergences, the crossing of ancient, invisible paths: 1799, 1833, 1866, 1867, 1966, forever and ever, and the lion swats at glittering baubles hung for its or no one else's pleasure.

… and stars fell…

Mobile Commercial Register (Nov. 13, 1833)-"Last night, or rather very early this morning, the vault of Heaven presented a brilliant spectacle, differing from any we have ever heard of. We regret that our slumbers were so heavy as to prevent our observing it, but a great number of our acquaintance were roused by their servants, to whom it had imparted no small degree of alarm. Meteors of the description commonly termed falling stars, but of unusual splendor and magnitude, were seen shooting in every part of the heavens, in every line of direction below horizontal. Some from above appeared descending, (but as is usual in the same phenomenon as it ordinarily appears in single instances) they were generally extinguished before coming in range with the level of the earth. Hundreds were seen darting at the same moment. Their vivid corruscations continued for hours, and only ceased when the light of day compelled them to hide their diminishing heads, so that for any thing we know to the contrary, they may still be disporting in the upper air.

"Philosophers have not been able to offer any plausible theory in explanation of the description of meteors. To say that they are electric, or that they proceed from the spontaneous combustion of inflammable vapor, is only to evade rational enquiry by the employment of learned words. Before either of these principles can be admitted as sufficient causes, it must be shewn in what manner electricity can be accumulated in an atmosphere pure and dry, or what there is in such a region of the air as to develope explosive gas, or to ignite it after it has been produced. We believe it is admitted that no branch of scientific investigation so completely puts the ingenuity of philosophy at defence, as meteorology."

And some smoldering something flashes swift across Mississippi and Alabama and marsh-grey Florida skies, one more momentary inferno in a burning dawn, the blink of a million frightened eyes, and it plunges sizzling and sputtering into a deep black pool. A splash and charcoal wisp of steam, and the waters take it down into the soothing, fishsecret silt, the slime and a blackness not so perfect as that former, lost Paradise, but the pain that seared away its soul is cooled, and in a hundred years it will hardly remember the lion's paw, the flames, the fall, the innocent eons of weightless vacuum before gravity's deceiving pull.

I never planned, in my imagination, a situation so heavenly, a fairy land where no one else could enter, and in the center, just you and me, dear…

November 13th, 1833, and for seventy years nothing and no one looked into the pool but soulless alligator eyes and wild cats and the Indians who were afraid to stare too long into those murky, unmoving depths. A stain on the land, a seeping hole in the leprous skin of the swamp, blue lights above the waters on a long summer's evening, and Apalachee mothers told their children about the demons from the moon, the starfall whisperers below the water.

"At night there, something uncanny happens: the water burns."

Infinities away, the lion closed its sleepy eyes and opened them and closed them again. And again. And again.

The world turns.

The water burns.

My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight, and stars fell on Alabama…last night.

Knuckles like a hammer on the door, flesh and bone on wood, and "You do exactly like I told you," Mr. Jube says. Glistening beads of sweat on his brow, sweat hanging like dew from the end of his nose. "Tomorrow mornin', I'll go into Milligan and buy you a whole bag of them green jellybeans." And Dancy nods her head, but he doesn't see, is already reaching for the doorknob with unsteady hands, and whoever it is out there knocks again, harder than before, and the door shudders on its hinges. She imagines that she's holding a crooked, long hickory stick and carefully draws the number 95 in the sand at the edge of the lake.

"Just hold your horses a goddamned minute," the old man croaks, the knob turning in his hand, and he opens the door.

And Dancy sees the eyes and forgets all about the numbers, 95 erased with the toe of her boot, smooth sand like brown sugar, and that's as far as she goes; there's nothing out there but the eyes, twin balls of the deepest, the most vivid blue she's ever seen or imagined, roiling, pupilless eyes that shine bright enough to blind and somehow give off no light whatsoever. Blue eyes bulging from the fabric of the night, and Mr. Jube takes a small, hesitant step backwards and looks down at the floor between his feet.

Don't you scream now, girl, Dancy thinks in the old man's voice. Don't you dare start screamin'. She tries to look away, look down like Mr. Jube did, tries to bow her head so there's nothing but her shoes and the floorboards, the spilled jellybeans, but she can't-not for all the tea in China, all the love of God-and her heart skips a beat as those blue eyes narrow down to suspicious, angry slits and glare past Mr. Jube directly at her.

"Who's she," the thing on the porch growls in a voice that is thunder and wildfire and the buzzing wings of poisonous red wasps. Movement in the darkness, and Dancy can see that there's more to it than the eyes, after all, that it's pointing towards her.

"She ain't no one," Mr. Jube says. "Least ways, no one you got to be concerned about."

"You know the rules," it growls, eyes swelling wide again, eyes big around as oranges, and the dark around them flutters for a moment and is still again.

"Yeah, I know she ain't supposed to be here. I know ain't nobody supposed to be here but me. But it just kinda happened, and there ain't no use worryin' over it now."

"Dancy," the thing purrs. "Dancy Flammarion," and the sudden, hot trickle down her thighs as she wets herself. She bites at her lower lip, bites hard until there's blood and it hurts too much to bite anymore, but she doesn't scream.

"She ain't gonna tell a single living soul what she's seein' here tonight," the old man says, and Dancy realizes that he's pleading for her life. "She knows better. She knows what would happen if she ever did."

"Does she?" it asks, blue eyes swirling, restless, disbelieving. "Does she know the rules?" But it stops pointing at her, and the jointed thing that isn't an arm melts back into the blackness.

"The day you were born," it says, and some of it flows across the threshold, sticky, tar-baby shreds of itself to lap about Mr. Jube's ankles. He takes a deep, hitching breath and stands absolutely still. "There were tears the day you were born, Dancy Flammarion. There are tears in your mother's heart every time she looks at you."

"I have the riddle," Mr. Jube says.

A black tendril wriggles noiselessly across the pine boards towards Dancy, its ragged tip end rising like the head of a coachwhip snake, serpent head pausing a few inches from her boots, and she smells dying fish and mud, peppermint and curdled milk.

"But who's going to cry the day you leave?" the thing at the door mutters in its thunderstorm, insect voice.

"You listenin'?" Mr. Jube says. "You know the rules. I only have to ask my riddle once."

The tendril hovers a moment longer near Dancy's left foot, indecisive, reluctant, and then it slips back across the floor, flows away and leaves behind a glistening slug trail on the rough wood.