Looking at the Stars

1.

My fingers played over the dents and the scarrings of the old table at Tina’s as I sipped the hot, rich coffee that kept the shabby little café afloat. I wondered what--or who--had made each scratch, each indentation. Sure, there were some names carved into it--testaments of boredom, nervousness, or just plain stupidity.

Frankie was here

Joanna + Tim 4ever

Calvin Meyers 1993

It reminded me of the ancient desks at my old high school--desks that were so old they had empty circles in their corners to hold ink bottles. They were a recorded history of wandering minds, first crushes, and peer rivalry. They disappeared my senior year when the school was remodeled. I always wondered what happened to those desks.

The tips of my fingers brushed a particularly deep dent and I looked down at it. This was an act of anger. Neither accidents nor quiet sadness would produce such a powerful blow. Had a couple fought at this table? Was this the work of a father’s anger at a child who was throwing his life away? Did someone find out at this table that a friend had betrayed them? I didn’t know, but I wanted to. I wanted to know the lives of the people who had marked this table with their thoughts and emotions.

I became aware of Tina standing next to me, coffeepot in her chubby hand. She was staring at me with an apologetic expression. “Sorry ‘bout the crappy tables, sweetie. I keep tellin’ Grant to replace ‘em, but he says as long as they still function as tables, there’s no need to waste any money on new ones.” I smiled at her and she glanced at my empty cup. “Refill?”

I nodded. “Yes, please.”

She filled my cup, winked a Tammy Faye eye, and walked back behind the counter, her gaudy pink uniform moving with her short fleshy body like a sea of bubblegum.

I ran my hand through my tangled hair and carefully tested the scalding coffee with my tongue. I took a small sip, stretched out my arms, and looked at the pig-shaped clock on the wall. Lily was late. She seemed to be late a lot recently. My mind flickered to a conversation we’d had a few days ago.

She was giving me a summary of an article she’d read in the paper about a badly decomposed body found in the janitorial closet of an office restroom. “The employees complained about a nasty smell and little noises coming from the locked closet. They thought it was a mouse or something, but it was the body in there rotting. Isn’t it amazing to think that while you thought you were alone in a stall, doing your business, there was a corpse just a few feet away from you?” She pulled a wicked expression as my face took on a look of mock horror. We both giggled a little. Then she got really quiet. Nothing seemed to keep her spirits up lately.

She’d recently spent about a week in New York showing her art. I knew something must have happened while she was there because she’d been acting sad and distant ever since she got back. Whenever I asked her about it, she changed the subject or told me she didn’t want to talk about it, which concerned me because we told each other everything.

I was shaken from my thoughts by the jingling of the bells on the café door. I looked up to see if it was Lily, but it was just one of the regular elderly couples coming in for an early supper. The old man was holding the heavy door open as his wife slowly shuffled in. He was wearing baby-blue slacks and a white polo shirt. She had on bright fuchsia pants and an equally bright floral print blouse. They both had delicate white hair that always reminded me of innocence. I always liked to believe that if you live to be a certain age, your childhood innocence returns to you.

The couple held shaky hands as they made their way to a table by the window. I watched as he pulled her chair out for her and then sat down opposite her. Such simple activities looked as if they required an enormous amount of effort from these frail, forgotten beings. I couldn’t help wondering what would become of the one who survived the other. Suddenly, the high suicide rates among the elderly made perfect sense to me. I lowered my gaze and took another sip from my steaming cup.

I was just getting ready to take my first drink of my third refill when Lily walked through the café door. Her dark hair was wild and unruly, sticking up at crazy angles. She looked around the little café until her huge blue eyes rested on me. Quickly and quietly, she walked over and slid into the empty chair across from me. I looked at the clock and then back at her. She opened her mouth, let out a sigh, and said, “Kat, I am so sorry. I didn’t realize how long it was going to take to close up the museum. People just kept wandering around after we were supposed to close, and we were all too chicken-shit to tell them to leave.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not like I’m never late for anything.” I watched as Lily fumbled through her worn, faded black backpack. She pulled out a rolled-up magazine and handed it to me. I unrolled it and read the name. It was called Mangle, and there was a picture of a bloody razorblade on the front.

“Look on page thirty-six.” I flipped to the page and read the ad.

ATTENTION ALL MANGLE FREAKS! MANGLE IS LOOKING FOR TALENTED YOUNG HORROR WRITERS TO SUBMIT THEIR POETRY AND SHORT STORIES FOR PUBLICATION IN UPCOMING ISSUES. WE WILL PAY $50 FOR SHORT STORIES AND $20 FOR POETRY. OUR EDITORS ARE VERY PICKY AND THEY ARE SICK OF CLICHÉS, SO NO VAMPIRES OR WEREWOLVES UNLESS THEY ARE USED IN A FRESH AND ORIGINAL WAY. E-MAIL SUBMISSIONS TO: [email protected]. WE LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU!

“I could always use fifty bucks,” I said.

“And your writing is so much better than the shit they publish in Mangle. They do chapbooks, too. I think you might have a pretty good chance of making some extra money. You should submit the story about the guy who uses aborted fetuses for meat in his restaurant. That’s the kind of story the readers would like.”

I was chipping away at the blue nail polish on my pinky. It was just one of a slew of quirky things I did while I was thinking. I was constantly submitting my stories to independent horror magazines. They didn’t pay very well, but my stories were everywhere and my name as a horror writer was really starting to stand out. I had a seemingly endless supply of stories-both already written and swimming around in my brain. Mangle must have been a pretty well-financed magazine if they were paying fifty bucks for a single story. Usually, magazines don’t pay more than twenty for a decent-length story.

Lily had swiped my cup of coffee and was sipping away as she carved something into the table with a ballpoint pen.

“So you think ‘The Back-Alley Special’ has a chance in this thing?” I tossed the magazine across the table.

“Sure. It’d be the easiest fifty dollars you ever made. It beats trying to get those assholes at the Black Dove to give you decent tips.” She grabbed my hand and looked at where I’d been scraping at the nail polish. “Why do you paint them if you just scratch it off?”

“I don’t know. It starts to chip off by itself after a while and I just kind of help it along. At least I don’t carve up Tina’s tables. What did you write?” I leaned over and read the words upside-down. I recognized the quote by Oscar Wilde: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. I looked at Lily, who was still sipping my coffee and looking out the window. “Let’s go home,” I said, “and look for something I can submit.” Lily handed me the cup and I took one last sip.

After I paid for my coffee, we left the stuffy little café and walked down the street to our apartment. The sun had just set and the sky still had hints of red and purple just above the mountains. There were a few stars beginning to appear in the darker regions of the celestial sphere. I looked up at them and breathed in the slightly chilled air. Autumn was coming. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lily looking at me. I glanced back at her and smiled. She tried to smile back and then looked ahead, not to the city but to her more distant thoughts.

2.

Our apartment was small and cheap, but we made it our own. We added drama to every room with flowing black curtains tied with strings of sparkly beads. We weren’t allowed to paint the walls or hang pictures, so we got some sticky wall-safe stuff and used it to plaster the walls with art and film posters.

Our bathroom was small and windowless. We just had a bare bulb in there because we hadn’t gotten around to picking out a light fixture. There was the generic toilet, tub, and sink. I livened it up a bit when I found a shower curtain that had an image of one of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn silk screens.

The kitchen was small and we had few appliances. We both loved to cook, and the only really nice thing in the kitchen was a set of knives Lily got me for Christmas one year. Those knives were sharp as hell. Lily told me that they’d been doing a demonstration when she’d bought them. She said they’d sliced through an entire watermelon like it was made out of butter, and they’d even cut through a metal pipe without damaging the blades.

Lily’s room was full of sketch books, art supplies, and her latest creations. It was tidy, but because off all the stuff in there, it had a cluttered feeling to it. Her room, like mine and the rest of the house, was decorated with dark flowing fabrics punctuated by rich jewel tones and sparkly things. It smelled like paint and jasmine incense.

My room was full of books. I had a milk crate full of notebooks in one corner of my room. It contained years of writing. Our computer was also in my room because I was the one who used it the most.

That night when we came home, we went straight to my room and dumped our bags on the floor. Lily helped me lift the crate full of notebooks onto my bed. I turned on the lamps instead of the overhead light because they gave off a softer light that didn’t glare. I liked my room to be all about ambience.

We each pulled out a stack of notebooks and started to flip through them. Their edges were worn and soft from being handled and shoved into shoulder bags and backpacks. My handwriting was constantly changing with my mood, so it looked like different people had been writing in the same notebooks.

I found some scenes for a short story I’d started writing during my senior year of high school. It was about a prostitute who would drug her johns and steal their teeth to make voodoo charms. The language was a little melodramatic, but the story itself had promise. I held the notebook out to Lily with one hand as I opened the next one with my other hand. “What do you think about this one?”

Lily didn’t take the notebook, so I looked up at her. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed with a notebook in her lap. But she wasn’t reading the notebook. Instead, she was holding my purple and black lace pillow in her arms like a doll and looking at a poster of Marlene Dietrich on the wall. She wasn’t studying the poster; it seemed as though she was looking through it. Her eyes were wide, and the lamp light was shining in them so that the tears welling up in them sparkled. I was afraid to say anything to her. I felt like I’d be waking a sleepwalker. So I just put my hand lightly on her bony shoulder and waited for her to snap out of it.

“Kat?” She still wouldn’t look at me. But her eyes were more focused. She looked down at the pillow cradled in my arms.

“What?”

“How long has it been since I got back from New York?” She fingered the lace on the pillow and a tear hit her hand. She didn’t wipe it off.

“About a month and a half. Why?” I knew she was about to let me in on this secret she’d been keeping. I turned my body on the bed so that I was facing her and not the wall.

“I think I’m pregnant.” Another tear fell and landed on the pillow. The little bead slowly soaked into the lace. We were both quiet for a few beats.

“Do you know whose it is?” I wasn’t implying she was a slut, and I was sure she knew that. It’s just that Lily, like me, wasn’t above the occasional casual sex.

Lily put the pillow back on the bed and turned to face me. She studied my face as if trying to decide how I’d react. Finally, she gripped her knees in her palms and said, “It’s Ryan’s.”

3.

Ryan. As long as I lived, Ryan would always be in my head. Sometimes, I still felt his thin spidery fingers on my skin. I'll never forget his white, androgynous face, his sensuous, bloodless lips, the severe hollowness of his hipbones, his strange hungry eyes composed of bruised shadows and glittering light. He was all angles and grace and intensity. I still dreamed of braiding his soft black hair, sweeping it away from his face, and kissing the back of his neck. And biting. Ryan liked biting. He liked to bite and be bitten so hard it would draw blood. I still had scars from sex with Ryan. He liked to push boundaries. He liked razorblades and candle wax. Silk restraints and tears. He was a master at seduction. He'd draw out the sexual deviant in every pretty girl or boy who caught his fancy. I dated him for almost two years. Lily and I were best friends even then. Lily knew everything about our relationship. Those were the decadent days of our youth. We were immortal. I didn't recognize that Ryan was getting worse until I ended up in the hospital. He seemed to build up a sort of immunity to pain. The number he got, the more extreme he had to go in order to feel any emotions at all. There was one night when he ignored the safe word and cut me too deeply. I found myself in the emergency room because I’d lost so much blood. I decided that I needed to get out of town and start living a life that didn’t include so much pain.

Lily came with me, and we’ve lived here ever since. I found a job as a bartender at the Black Dove, which was a nightclub mostly haunted by jaded young people with black clothes and hair that could be any color of the rainbow on any given day. It got me by while I tried to make a name for myself in the horror genre. Lily started working at a museum where they agreed to display her art whenever they had some empty space. We were both on our way to fame.

I remember hearing from a friend that Ryan had moved to New York. I thought nothing of it until we found out that Lily might be carrying his baby. She said he’d seemed really sorry for hurting me and he wanted us all to be friends again. I didn’t know if I could really judge Lily for falling for his deceptions. I’d done it for two years. This man was now messing up both our lives.

4.

We walked down the aisle with all of the pregnancy tests. There were so many to choose from-each professing to be the most reliable, the most accurate. I glanced at Lily, and her eyes were unreadable. The bright fluorescent store lights were giving me a headache and I was trembling. We were buying a pregnancy test for her, and I was the one who was freaking out. Later, when I asked Lily if she’d been nervous, she said she’d been numb.

We were sifting through all of our options when a middle-aged woman with a kitten sweatshirt and fluffy graying hair pushed her cart past us. She was looking at Lily’s pierced nose and my purple-streaked hair like she’d paid admission. Lily stared back at her, and the woman looked away, shaking her head. That pissed Lily off. She threw the pregnancy test down on the ground and yelled, “Do you have a fucking problem with us, lady?”

The woman flinched and continued down the aisle. I picked up the box and grabbed Lily by the wrist. Now all of the shoppers around us were staring. Mothers with children gave us hard looks for Lily’s language. Lily blushed and turned back to the wall of pregnancy tests. I relaxed my grip on her wrist and noticed that my fingers had left marks. She took a deep breath, grabbed another test, and started reading the box.

When we found the one we wanted, we put it in the basket and started walking toward the checkout stands. I stopped when we got to the baby aisle. There were diapers, wipes, baby lotions, powders, washcloths, and tub toys. I looked at the pregnancy test in the basket I was holding, then at Lily. She was trying really hard not to look at the baby items. I realized how uncomfortable I was making her, so I said, “Sorry, Lily. Let’s go.”

The checkout guy’s curiosity was less than subtle. He looked at the pregnancy test and then from me to Lily, as if he was trying to decide which one of us could possibly be pregnant and disapproving either way. He had short, dark curly hair and hazel eyes, and he stood about a foot taller than Lily and me. I read the name Hunter on his name tag. “Hunter,” I said, “we would appreciate it if you’d quit standing there with that dumbass expression on your face and ring us up so we can get the hell out of this store.”

He looked like I’d slapped him, and I felt a twinge of guilt. He was only about eighteen, and his reaction was probably not intended to offend us. However, he needed to know that it did offend us. After we got our change, he mumbled, “Have a nice day.”

When we left the store, we saw that the sky was cloudy and everything was sort of dull and gray. We were supposed to get snow today. “We’d better hurry if we don’t want to get snowed on.” I said.

Lily nodded. “You know, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d kicked us out of that store. Those moms looked pretty pissed when I said fuck around their kids. And that checkout boy looked like he was going to cry when you called him a dumbass.” She pulled her black coat tightly around her shoulders and a nervous little chuckle escaped her lips. “I’m glad it happened, though, because I needed a little comedy in there.”

“Yeah, I felt kind of bad for that guy, though,” I said. “He probably has to deal with bitches like us every day.” I looked at Lily and she smiled. It was good to know that even though we were going through some crazy stuff, we could still find something funny about the world around us.

5.

“What’s taking so long, Lily?” She was still in the bathroom with the door closed. She’d been in there for about five minutes. “How long does it take to pee on a damn stick?” I was pacing around our living room. I just had one lamp on in the corner, and the sequined throw pillows on the couch were catching the weak light and concentrating it into little dots on the wall. They looked like stars. There were thirty-six dots of light, and I knew because I’d been counting them while I waited.

I heard Lily’s nervous voice through the closed door, but she was talking too quietly for me to make out what she was saying.

“What?” I said.

“I said I can’t pee! I don’t have to go!”

I walked up to the door and pressed my ear up to its cold surface. “Stick your hand in the sink and run warm water over it!” I heard the water running and silently prayed that it would loosen Lily’s bladder. “Is it working?”

“Yeah, it’s working!” She sounded like she was crying. A few seconds later, she opened the door and came out with the pregnancy test in her hand. “We have to wait for one to five minutes.” We waited about three minutes before we learned that Lily was going to have Ryan’s baby.

We both just sat on the couch looking at the pregnancy test on the coffee table. Then Lily said, “I’m not going to get rid of it.” I was surprised-not because I thought she’d have an abortion, but because she felt she had to tell me she was going to keep it. I knew her well enough to know that although she was pro-choice, she could never have an abortion. She couldn’t even turn away a stray kitten.

6.

The months went on and Lily’s tight little tummy became rounder and fuller. We went to maternity stores and declared that all of the clothes were too hideously pastel. So we bought things like large, flowing black dresses and altered them to fit Lily’s still skinny body parts. “If I am going to have a fat belly,” she said “I’m at least going to try to make it look sexy.”

She seemed so much happier than she had been when she was keeping her tryst with Ryan a secret from me. Now all of our friends knew she was pregnant and they were as excited as we were. She told me she didn’t care if some people talked behind her back about the pregnancy. She’d just been worried I’d despise her for sleeping with Ryan. I didn’t despise her, but every once in a while, I got a strange twinge in the back of my brain that felt like annoyance. The problem was I didn’t know if I was annoyed with Lily for sleeping with my ex-boyfriend, or if I was annoyed with Ryan for seducing my best friend.

Lily developed a ravenous appetite, but she hardly gained enough weight. We ate at Tina’s almost every day. I had to be careful because I had no trouble gaining weight. We sat in that café for hours thinking of baby names. Our favorites were inspired by old Hollywood stars--Gene, Cary, or Olivier for a boy; Greta, Rita, or Tallulah for a girl.

I submitted the story about the voodoo prostitute to Mangle, and they asked me to do a chapbook. I was definitely on my way to becoming a successful horror writer. I guess I had the gutsy edge they were looking for. They even said they’d try to pull some strings with bigger publishers.

I’d usually go to Tina’s in the morning on my way home from work and grab a cup of coffee. The sun was usually up by then because I was also the temporary janitor. My boss liked everything spotless. I didn’t see why it mattered so much, since the people who came in were usually the type to revel in messiness.

One morning, when I went to get my life-saving coffee, I thought I’d walked into the wrong place for a moment. The walls had a fresh coat of white paint, the pig clock was gone, and all of the old wooden tables and chairs had been replaced with shiny metal ones. I sat down at the table that had replaced our old one, and ordered a cup of coffee from Tina, who was dressed in a nice-fitting forest green uniform.

“Do ya like it?” she asked. “Grant finally let me redo this place. I liked the old style, but everything was getting so worn out and shabby. I thought it would be good for business if I gave it a new updated look. Whatcha think?”

I looked around for a few minutes and forced a smile. “It’s really nice, Tina. It’ll take some getting used to--Lily and I have so many memories attached to this place--but I think we’ll be able to handle the change.” It was like our old table had met the fate of the desks in my high school. I’d miss exploring all of the marks people had made. It was like a public journal. A record of the lives lived by the people who had visited Tina’s. My stomach felt uneasy and I ordered my coffee to go. I just wanted to go home.

7.

The door to our apartment was open just a little bit. I quietly snuck in and closed it behind me. I could hear muffled voices in the kitchen. It sounded like Lily said something like, “It’s not yours.” My heart did a belly flop and I slipped my shoes off. I started to make my way, as silently as I could, to the kitchen.

“You’re lying. I know it’s mine. You should know that I never want kids, Lily. You should have gotten rid of it. Now I suppose I’ll have to.” I recognized his voice and my whole body went numb. It was so deceptively soft, so cultured and low and breathy. Ryan was here. Somebody must have told him that Lily was pregnant. My ex-lover was in our kitchen threatening my best friend. He’d been crazy as hell when I’d left him, and according to Lily, he’d gotten worse. I slipped into the tiny kitchen and saw Lily backed up against the refrigerator. Ryan was stooped down, cradling her swollen belly in his pale hands. She saw me and mouthed, “Kat.”

“I wonder if I could crush its skull while it’s still in the womb. That would be much less messy than trying to cut it out.” Ryan’s hands moved over Lily’s tummy, tracing the contours of the baby. God, he was looking for its head.

The only light in the room was from the window. The blinds sliced the kitchen into harsh strips of light and shadow. I could smell onions. Lily had been chopping an onion on the counter with one of my prized knives. The knife was completely covered in shadow, and I would have missed it had I not smelled the onions. I picked it up and wiped the onion slices off on my shirt. When I took a step closer to Ryan, the stainless steel blade caught the light from the window and sent a blazing glare that reflected onto his thin, long fingers. He stopped squeezing and prodding Lily’s belly and looked at his hand. Then he stood up and turned around, his black hair glittering in the fractured light.

“Kat!” he said.

“Ryan.” I swung the knife in a smooth arc and the tip of the blade hit the side of his neck. It swept through his throat and met little resistance as it sliced through muscle and ligaments. I thought I felt it scrape bone. They really were damn good knives. I felt the warm splatters of Ryan’s blood hitting my face, my shirt, my arms. Lily moved out of the way as his body slumped to the floor. The only sounds were Lily’s sobbing and the strange wet gurgles coming from Ryan’s ruined throat. He was still beautiful, even with his face covered in blood and the secret peek of his delicate, immaculately white spine glinting through the gore of his once flawless neck.

8.

The night the trial was over, we were exhausted, but happy. I was acquitted because I had been defending Lily, her unborn child, and myself. Lily was feeling uncomfortable. Her belly was huge, and she'd gone three days past her due date. We both crawled into my bed and fell asleep with my hand on her tummy. I'll never forget the dream I had that night as I slept with the soft stirring under my palm:

We were on the edge of a forest sitting on a patchwork quilt. The sun was setting and there was a little girl cradled in my lap. She was about three or four with dark thick curls. She had Lily’s eyes--bright blue and huge. Lily was sitting cross-legged in front of us, wiping something pink and sticky off of the little girl’s face with a paper napkin. When she was finished cleaning her face, she smiled and kissed the little girl on the cheek. Then the little girl climbed off of my lap and took my hand. I stood up, and we started walking toward the trees. Lily was still sitting on the blanket. She called out, “Kat!” I turned around. Lily’s dark hair was streaked with the reds and oranges of the setting sun. She stood up and said, “Don’t go too far.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll take care of her.”

The little girl smiled. “Kat will bring me back, Mama.”

Then we walked into the forest.