Star Walk

The fence post digging into the backs of his thighs is the only solid thing he can feel. His hands rest uselessly in his lap, his feet swinging aimless over the laden tips of buffalo grass and the delicate, violet petals of alpine daisies.

Infinity stretches out above him. Stars glitter and glint in an endless maw of black. They cluster at a point on the horizon, gathering beneath the jagged silhouette of the pine trees and arcing up across the sky—a bridge that spans the earth from end to end.

It’s the edge of the Milky Way—he knows that—but she had another name for it.

He can’t bear to think of it, much less use it.

Her memory lives in everything he does. It sticks underneath his nails like needles, hunches at the fringes of the silences when he’s alone.

Six months and it isn’t any easier. Six months and the wound is still so fresh, so raw that it bleeds at the slightest nudge, spilling into every corner of his life like a flood. Sometimes he manages to tread water. Other times—in the dead of night when he reaches for her and the space in bed next to him is cold and empty—he drowns.

He stares into the sprawling light of the universe. He tries to find constellations because he can feel the riptide of grief dragging on his heart, pulling him downward into the claustrophobic pitch of desolation.

Hydra. Virgo. Cassiopeia. The Big Dipper. Cygnus.

“Who.”

He nearly springs from the fence, pulse hammering staccato as his head whips around to the post next to him.

A small, round figure crouches on top of the haphazard-cut wood—a smooth, slopping shadow that seems to turn, bobbing in his direction. Wide eyes flash in the starlight, catching and reflecting the glow of a million, tiny suns.

It takes him a second to reign in his breath, to calm the swell of fear surging through his veins.

An owl, he thinks, just a little owl.

By the time his heart slows its frantic pace he expects it to be gone—flying off into the darkness in pursuit of the field mice that make their home in the rolling meadows that stretch out languidly behind him. He’s spent a lifetime in these pastures and winding his way through the bordering wilderness. Owls were common enough but were predominantly skittish and quick to flight.

But even as the rush wears off, the raptor has yet to flee. It stays perched; head still turned at an almost unnatural angle toward him.

Slowly his eyes readjust to the dim light, letting him see the slanted, angular features and ivory feathers that are so distinctive he can’t mistake the species for anything else: a barn owl.

Her favorite animal.

He flinches internally, recoils from the reminder as if the image itself were a jolt of pain.

How many evenings had she spent with the window open, leaning out into the temperate night air and talking softly to any raptor that roosted nearby? He’d never counted because he was always lost in the feeling of her warm skin pressed against his arm as he wrapped it around her shoulders, the scent of her hair and the lullaby of her voice woven with the flutter of distant wings.

He forces his eyes back up to the sky—tries to find another constellation, a planet, something that will take his mind away from the presence that suddenly sits so heavily only a few feet from him. His ears strain for a rustle of feathers, for the relieving sound of his unusual company taking to the air and leaving him to the struggle of his sorrow.

“Who.”

Again, a single hoot. Not an overlapping song like he was used to, the kind of trill that echoed from the trees in the morning just before the sun rose or in the twilight hours after it set.

One syllable. One sound. One word.

It’s not a word, though. It’s just a noise, a form of communication that he’s posing in a way that’s meaningful to him, like shapes in the clouds or faces in tree bark.

And yet, when it’s repeated for a third time, he can’t help but hear a question.

“Who?”

Slowly his gaze falls to wide, dark orbs that peer out at him from beneath an alabaster crest—little mirrors that flicker with eternity.

Without his permission her name wells up in his throat. His heartstrings wind themselves taut, pulling his chest inward like the pressure might keep such a cherished and painful thing from spilling out.

He hasn’t spoken it since she died, since he whispered it over and over and over while he watched the life slowly leave her eyes and when it was gone, he didn’t dare say it again. To speak and to never hear her answer to it would make this nightmare real, the final nail in the coffin of death’s inevitability—and the crushing, unbearable gap between them would become so corporeal that he feared he would break beneath the weight.

But the owl is patient. It blinks once, twice, then cants its head to the side. The movement is so reminiscent of her that he’s taken back to the day they met, when she asked him if he knew how stars were made with her head tilted in playful curiosity.

“Who?” It asks again.

The sonant of her name leaves his lips, falls like rain and mixes with his tears as they drip over the buffalo grass.

“Who?”

He whispers it again, his hands closing into fists as he loses himself in his memories of her—the lilt of her laugh, the soothing touch of her palm against his cheek, the way her jaw would clench when she was angry, the light of her last smile.

“Who?”

He answers once more, louder this time, as he cries for the life they had, the life they planned and the dreams he would never fulfill with her. For the spare bedroom painted in eggshell gray down the hall with glow-in-the-dark planets stuck to the ceiling and the mahogany crib tucked in the corner. For the blueprints he kept hidden in the bottom drawer of his toolbox, with scribbled notes taking up every empty space for every time she told him something else that she wanted. For the emerald ring shoved in the depths of his jeans’ pocket that was never graced with the crown of her wedding band because the hourglass had already begun to run out of sand.

All these things swirl, rising together into a tidal wave that he’d managed to outrun since she closed her eyes for the final time. It crashes through him, washes over every place inside him that she touched. He sobs as the waves recede, leaving behind the delicate arches of her fingerprints beneath his skin.

The owl stays next to him, unmoving until finally he has no tears left and he sits there shaking and hollow.

Those big endless pools of mottled black meet his blurry ones. Somewhere in their depths he thinks he sees empathy, an understanding of grief that calls up her voice from the darkness.

“They mate for life, you know.” She gestures out the window, to the hollow tree where she’s seen them roost. “Barn owls. Just like us.”

He’s lost in the vision of her when he hears the stir of wings and suddenly the tips of amber feathers brush his cheek.

It’s a fleeting caress, but a moment suspended in time, the second hand of the clock balanced between one instant and the next.

Then it’s gone.

He throws his gaze skyward, to the silvery outline of an owl rising into the open maw of the universe, up to the long bridge of the Milky Way, and into the light of infinity.

Her voice is in his hear, this time, not just an echo in the back of his head.

“You know what’s up there, don’t you? It’s a path, not the edge of the galaxy. Someday we’ll walk it together.”

He closes his eyes, and he pictures her there—her back against the starlight, her smile wide and free of pain.

“It’s ok if you’re a little late. I’ll wait for you.”