Body of Stars by Laura Walter (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

simple line drawing, not detailed or graphic,” Marie said. “Now I wonder what that was all about—why people got so violently upset.”

But I knew. I’d had time to think about it on the mountain, to let the outline of that woman become part of my daily life.

“It wasn’t that she was naked.” I watched the sun sparkle against my wineglass. “It was the fact that she had no predictions. Think about it. If you walk into a museum, every last portrait of a woman includes markings. Even statues have them, chiseled right into the marble. But to show a woman who is blank—that’s making a statement.”

Everyone looked at me. I noticed Marie and Cassandra did not point out that my father had been the one to design the banner. We could have asked him what he’d done and why he’d done it, but I believed I understood better than he did. The implications of his work were so subtle that he probably hadn’t been conscious of them at the time.

“It was a threat,” I continued. “A woman unmarked, a woman not restricted by either her own future or that of others. No one knew what to do with that.”

Louise leaned forward, her eyes steady on me.

“It sounds a lot like what you and Miles are doing with Julia,” she said.

My friends and I sat in silence for a moment, contemplating our work as a threat, as a way to transform everything. We glanced around as if to pinpoint all that we might be able to tear down with our strength and our anger. The confines of my backyard, or perhaps the neighborhood, or the entire city. The sky, the earth, the whole of the world.

The Mountain School: An Origin Myth

The girl returned to the mountain thin and shaken. Her sisters swarmed her, anointed her, fed her a soup of bitter berries and leaves. The girl felt the empty slice in her heart, how the wound throbbed just as surely as the stone that had been in its place, but she did not tell her sisters. This pain was hers to bear alone.

For the rest of her life, the girl would feel apart. She lamented the stone in her heart, both its presence and its void. Sometimes she dreamed of the forest, of the smell of sweet decay. But on the mountain she was wild. She and her sisters taught one another, fed one another, and sparked blazing fires for warmth.

Time passed. The girl grew older and yet she remains a girl, the youth of her sisters keeping the light alive in her skin. On her best days, the forest flows through her like wind and she understands her history, how she was born of rock and stone.

On these days, she runs full speed across the mountaintop. From that height she sees it all: the great turning sky, the clouds rolling over themselves, the burning glint of sunset. From that height she knows her place. She is the world and the sea and the sky. She is cracked open like the rock that bore her, and the brightness that spills out is a gift she offers her sisters now and for all of time—luminous streams of loss and light.

30

Above our mantel hung a large metal clock in a starburst design. It had been a fixture in our home since my childhood, but on that night, when I sat with Miles and my parents in the living room, I couldn’t take my eyes off it, couldn’t stop tracking the minute and hour hands as they both edged closer to the XII at the top. Once midnight struck, we had no way of knowing how long Miles might remain with us.

“Nothing is going to change after today,” Miles said. “You know that, right?”

My parents and I nodded. We understood that lightning wouldn’t strike our house at midnight. No alarms would sound. The stars would stay out, and the sun would rise again in the morning. He was right that the larger world would remain the same.

“Tomorrow,” Miles continued, “we get back to work as usual.” He looked at me as if awaiting confirmation.

“Of course,” I told him. “I’m ready.”

I was, in fact, already picturing the long line of girls waiting for their readings. We could tell those girls so much about their lives, but we couldn’t tell them enough. Not yet. It would take years for the addendum to finally be published, and even longer for the stigma surrounding abduction to begin to fade. We were yet further removed from the first returned girl being admitted into university, or from the father-daughter inspections falling out of favor. At the time, I could only hold on to Julia’s metaphor of the tree, a concept that remained so present and alive in my mind I could hear the rustle of wind through leaves whenever I closed my eyes.

“It’s almost midnight,” my mother said. We directed our attention to the clock despite ourselves. How indebted we were to time.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Miles repeated, but his voice broke on the last word.

My father put his arm around my brother’s shoulders. My mother held my hand. The clock struck midnight, and nothing changed. And nothing would be the same again.

*   *   *

The next day dawned warm and humid, and I woke up sweating. I remember the salt on my skin, how my hair stuck to the back of my neck. I remember almost everything about that morning and the strange hours to come: how my brother knocked gently on my door, how he nudged it open and peered inside, how he asked me to join him on a walk.

He led me through the outskirts of town, cutting through alleys and backyards, moving farther and farther from home. We walked together mostly in silence. I could feel an energy coming off him—anger, maybe, or resentment, or grief.

He cut to the right, taking us into a park.

“Where are we going?” I asked. His legs were