When you first meet her, you don’t know her; she is a quiet hymn wrapped only into herself, a silent whisper or prayer too stifled to hear. She has navy blue hair like the night sky. Her pupils are sharpened, her eyes overlaid with a cornea layer from an illegal surgery, crisscrossing copper like a semiconductor, little flecks of light racing along the lines until they reach the edge of her iris and they dissipate. You notice the freckles on her face, and hidden in between them, you notice four dimpled scars around her eyes from where something was drilled into her face.

In the dark of the maintenance space, you catch her, after you notice her fingerprints are missing, after you notice her disrupted biomarkers, after you notice the huge scar over her lip, after you suspect she’s hiding her allegiance. And you chase and shoot, and she never fires a single shot back. When you knock her to the ground, you reach down to rip her earpiece off, and when you yank it out in one motion, you wince as you realize it’s a combination hearing device and attached to her cochlea. She screams. You cry.

When you meet her later, you don’t know it’s her and walk into the hangar bay with your hand near your holster. You see and hear through the windows before you open the airlock, and there is sparking and hammering around a small foreign ship with rusting joints between the windowpanes.

With your gun drawn, you enter, and she looks up from her welding, helmet over her face, and white, dry hair sticking out from under the straps. It reminds you of stars, far away, as if she flew out into the far reaches of the frontier in the rickety cruiser and grabbed a handful and dumped it over her head. When she finally takes the welding helmet off, her eyes are light blue, pupils still sharp, and her irises have darker flecks shaped into stars and a crescent moon. She keeps a cloth over the bottom half of her face and grease smudged under her eyes, connecting and merging all the spots across her skin into one nebulous entity. There is a cautious magnetism between you two, like a moon being drawn into orbit around a planet. You hold her close with your hand on the back of her head and whisper. She cries.

When you meet her for the last time, she appears. You enter the room and she’s already there, ahead of you, facing away, wearing long cargo pants with her hair neatly tied back into a ponytail, the ends blunt and clean. It’s a dark brown, and she turns to you, her eyes the color of milk with no designs, no patterns. When you draw her to yourself, there are tears and the smell of warmth and chemical cleaners, and your arms fold around each other and settle contentedly like land subsiding after an earthquake.

Twelve hands, old and withered, smooth and small, tan and brown,  

force the couch against the wall and we all 

huddle as close as we can bear. 

Our shared blood boils in my grandmother’s living room, a packed crowd  

of skin demanding new beginnings.  

The ball drops on the boxy TV and we raise one booming voice 

Ten, nine, eight. 

My family has a New Year’s Eve tradition. 

Plastic champagne flutes filled to the brim with twelve wishing grapes 

red and green, always so large, full and bursting I wonder 

in what strange market Grandma must have found them.  

I won’t ask because she won’t understand, nor would the cashier she bought them from. 

Still, I long for red and green, devour with my eyes as we chant 

Seven, six, five. 

Behind the round surface of a grape, I see a cousin’s pregnant belly, 

recall an imminent arrival cradled inside, awaited by five young siblings. 

In the grape’s pale green, I see a pale woman, 

recall her stare from her doorway, her face pulled taut and arms crossed, 

as my family walks down the street of our neighborhood. 

Too many children, not enough adults. 

Breeders! she yells from the soon slamming door. 

I don’t know what it means,  

don’t like the way that incomprehensible language hisses 

in response under the breaths of mother, aunt, grandmother. 

The explanation that comes later weighs heavy as they count 

Four, three, two. 

This New Year champagne fills my glass instead of red and green. 

A bubbling sip whirls in my stomach like the uncomfortable stirring  

when a struggling Spanish woman at the supermarket  

is told by her cashier to Speak English. 

This is America, after all. 

I think to myself that she should have gone to whatever market my grandmother did.  

Her cart held two bags of grapes. 

My hand now holds a glass of liquid warmth   

that forgets red and green bursts, and though 

I try to count a dozen sips, I lose my place and  

it all settles in my empty stomach as I reach 

One.   

It was a spring night when I was staring fixedly at the overhead fan, waiting for the man on top of me—my then-boyfriend—to finish. As I tightly clutched the bedsheet waiting for it to end, I could feel the bed moving under me. It seemed like the world was swaying ever so gently. The next day, I scrubbed my skin in the scalding water till tiny clots appeared on my arms.

The following summer, I was laying on my bed staring at the overhead fan when the bed began to shake. I looked up to see the fan swinging in its place like a giant hand had flicked it. Someone on the street below yelled out, “Did you feel the earthquake just now?” followed by a chorus of yeses and nos.

I made no effort to get up—you live long enough in an earthquake-prone area and the initial shock wears off.

Two winters after that day, I was reading a webcomic when I suddenly looked up to check the overhead fan. No signs of any movement. I turned to my sister and asked, “Did you feel that just now?”

“Feel what?”

“Wasn’t that an earthquake?”

“You are imagining things now, I didn’t feel anything.”

Unconvinced by her snarky reply, I checked if anyone had tweeted about an earthquake in the vicinity. Nothing.

The same evening, I was sitting in a boy’s room downtown. We had known each other for a month and after two cursory coffee dates, he had finally asked me over to his place.

To counter the initial awkwardness, we decided to watch a movie. Midway through it, he asked me if I was cold and held out the blanket. He stretched out and hit pause on the movie.

“Come here,” and he gave me a light hug—blankets and all.

“That feels warm.”

“Yeah? I’m known to be a warm person.”

I rolled my eyes at his reply, and he burst out laughing. I pulled away slightly and laid down.

After a second, he laid down next to me, and I could feel his breath on my neck. I turned to face him. He was smiling, his face half-covered by the blanket. He slowly closed the gapand kissed me. A moment later, I could feel his hands coming up to cup my face. Then he suddenly pulled back and asked, “Is everything okay? Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no. Everything’s fine.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“I don’t know… I mean, I do… It’s just been a while since stuff happened.”

“Okay, no, yeah, that’s cool. We could just enjoy the movie, yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“No, please. I’ll go get you some water, cool?”

As he left the room, I looked up to check if the fan had moved at all. Nothing.

So why is my body still filled with the tremors of that night?

[Exhibit A]

You are nine and have already furred, developed breasts, curved your way into woman. You need a bra that does more than train. It is tight; you sweat, itch.

Over neighborhood play, some ball-sport, a sixteen-year-old looks down at you, his lips curled. His blonde hair is coiled and slick like a mannequin’s. He calls you sexy.

It is the first time a boy compliments you. You believe that only their compliments matter. You hate that you internalize his comment as good.

Sexy sticks like molasses; it only attracts flies.

[Exhibit B]

Twelve, the car loop outside middle school. A classmate has gummy worms. He moves too close. He smells like basketball: plastic; the gym-floor-gloss; the creeping, thick breath of a person on offense, trying to snatch the ball from you.

He asks if you want the gummies.

Sure, you say, but he retreats the bag into his chest.

Show me your boobs and I’ll give you the gummy worms, he says, grinning widely, shamelessly. You run away.

Your bile is as sour as the worms. You picture them crawling within your breasts.

[Exhibit C]

Sixteen, in-elevator, post-morning trivia on a cruise, hand pressed to acne-speckled cheek. The cysts are so deep, heavy, and purple that it is an inverse constellation, white ringed around violet. You twist away from photos.

A man, face blister-red, stares at your pelvis. He smells of saccharine, stale liquor.

S’up? He asks. Wanna go to the bar?

I’m sixteen, you  say, adjusting your bag, glancing out the glass wall. It rises with your pulse. Your words mean nothing.

You focus on the door. Creep closer. Half-step. The doors open.

He reaches for you. You speed away, away, away.

[Exhibit D-W]

Whistling in the streets. Called fat, ugly, while fetishized by the same people. Tunneled into consumption.

[Exhibit X]

You, twenty. Things you left behind on the bus on a long field trip: jacket, sweater, blanket.

Upon return, ready to sleep, you see an unknown item: rounded, long, glass. White streak down the side. Hot. You, clueless, think it something else—not a used sex toy. Air pump, perhaps.

You lift the warm jacket to your face, flit around sleep.

When you find out the truth, after cop’s failure to act, you summon on your knees the words of women before, spitting galactic bile into the swirling toilet-globe. You earthquake free the fear, scrub skin red, pray, pray, pray. Memory shudders into you, handprints on skin like ghosts of the men before, the ways they wished to grab, squeeze, take you.

[Exhibit Y]

The body muscle memories the way that it is seized, imagined, seen.

Parts blink like a hotspot. You see it in the mirror sometimes: the flickering, low and red like dying candlelight. The handprints. The heat. The itch.

The body is not yours.

[Exhibit Z]

But you carry the body’s memory, strengthened by it. It is not the body, but the being within; that which says and knows you are okay, okay, okay.

The pain spreads through my body like dye coiling through water. It would be easy to imagine that my insides are colored red right now, but instead I picture them to be a deep, furious blue, the color of soreness, of pain after it has wrecked you. The color of aftermath. I try and will my body to stay in one position, stomach angled away from my legs, my torso twisted. Somehow, I believe this will dull the pain. Or maybe, at least, I will have manufactured another kind of hurting, so the real one will pang less. I don’t know.

*

On the T back home, I watch a young boy with something red clutched in his hand. I can’t tell exactly what it is from where I am. I’m wedged between two strangers and I’ve hunched my back so that I’m leaning away from them, doubled up over my uterus. My stomach feels soft to my skin, as if it were a large tuft of hair or a sack of tender oranges. All the way through the city, I am aware of my abdomen, this globething in my lap, spinning. Suddenly, the bus lurches forward, and the boy has lost control so that he skids across the grey floor and his arm is in my face, his hand waving something crimson at me. Playdough. I look at the boy’s fingers curled so tightly around the ball of dough as though they will never uncurl. His whole world a scarlet orb in his palm.

*

M takes a look at the bruise on my leg, its green veins, its purple heart, then laughs. “That’s a whole universe right there.” Then softly, more seriously: “That’s not what your period should do.”

*

When I go to throw the trash out at night, I almost don’t see the rat at first, its guts splayed across the road, flesh cleaved from bone, its eye a silver opening. The eye reminds me of a tiny bead of caviar, the way it’s glistening from yesterday’s rain. There’s something gurgling in the dumpster and I can’t stand the sight of this death, as though someone has scooped up strawberry jam and mixed it into cement and grey skin and asphalt. The rat doesn’t look alive at all, but almost looks as though it has stepped outside of its own body to inspect itself. I move away from it, my legs extended away from me, my skin suddenly awake and bristled. I think of playdough and rat meat and this liquid, gelatinous night and my own wobbly body and how nothing in this dark feels real, except maybe the deep, aching blue of my torso. In the dark, I stand, recoiling from the day’s softness.

“William!”

“Hi, Grandma. It’s Zach, actually. Maya’s son.”

Her brow crinkled under permed white hair, thin enough to show her scalp. Zach crouched in front of the E-Z-Lift chair, so he didn’t tower over her. She shifted, something akin to embarrassment trailing across her features. She patted his arm with papery fingers.

“Oh yes, son. Good to see you.”

Her lucidity seemed as fickle as his hope and the sterile words stung. Zach stood and tugged at the hem of his t-shirt, then cleared his throat to chase away the emotion.

“I have a surprise before we get back to the puzzle we’ve been doing.”

He slid his cellphone out of his pocket and swiped to the playlist he’d made. Despite her failing memory, tech remained her anathema. The last thing he wanted was to upset her, but the article he’d read on music and dementia had been tough to shake. Zach slid the phone nonchalantly onto the table behind some tissues as the beginning strains of Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls” began.

She swayed for a few bars.

“This song! William, do you remember?”

“It’s—” Zach stopped. The music made him a little boy again, eating cookies at her kitchen table. Maybe it made her what she needed to be, too.

“It’s nice.”

“Those roses must have cost you half a week’s salary, but you’d said I was worth every penny.” Tears glistened over her milky cataracts. “Dance with me?”

Zach helped her to her feet, and she leaned against him, small and wobbly. Time had reversed their positions. Now she wore no apron, his hands had no sticky cookie crumbs, but Glenn Miller stayed true. Her feet shuffled the same motions she’d taught him on the thick shag carpet of her living room. Zach closed his eyes and could almost smell the thick, warm scent of baked bread that used to hang in her house every Sunday.

When the song transitioned into “Tuxedo Junction,” she hugged him tight, bringing him back to the hard industrial tile and antiseptic tang of bleach.

She patted his arm. “I need to sit. My old bones aren’t made for dancing anymore.”

He hung onto her as she lowered herself down.

“Sometimes I can’t remember why I’m here. I’ll think I’m supposed to pick Maya up from school, but then my hands look wrong, and I have to fight through dusty stacks of memories to find one that’ll anchor me. Funny how my mind drifts away all the time, but my body just knows things. Like that music. I think maybe the dancing brought me back here. Just in time for their over-salted roast beef.”

Zach laughed at her unexpected joke. “Good to have you back, Grandma.”

“I’m sorry for when I don’t remember you, Zach. Please know I love you and your visits. Just like you used to love my cookies. Remember those?”

Zach wiped his eyes. “I’ve never had a better one.”

Content warning: physical abuse

Agonizing screams for me to STOP!

Shall fall on ears the mind has told for years “I will not”

I watch as soft supple pale skin is caressed by sunlight

Simple elation energizes buoyant spirals that dance, take flight

Beautiful big eyes, glassed gazes, waterfall Innocence

That which is unforeseen lest prepared am I to recompense

Face is barricaded, pressure pinned, and beaten

I wait as these boys wreak havoc; satisfied, eaten

Bruised the lights; warmth begins to retreat frozen

Molded we become by hatred long woven

I watch as frustration, anger, overwhelmed sentiments divest

Throwing fists up, bright red and yellow hues manifest

Shocked, abused, stung swelling

Rivers run without a sound mind quelling

Yet heavy hands fall hard on porcelain

Memories seared branded distortion

Once, twice, thrice over in silence

Hit just hard enough; no evidence of violence

Limbs directed; harsher words never spoken

Act now or soon I’ll be far too broken

Body over mind, war rages

Listened not for paralysis built me cages

Wean I will grow in stages.

I watch the dark where the sky and sea meet.
The stars shine as this vessel parts our way.
Dear Ocean’s glory glows by Sky’s display,
Abyssal black that dances celestially.

A maze of quasars, suns, and moons fly free,
Like watching luminescent travelers dance.
Between these separate lights, I caught a glance
Of a locomotive’s starlight stream.

I stood in awe and watched this gleaming ride,
That carried desires in velvet seats
To places where dear wishes will reside,
And sent my own aboard with its retreat.
It disappeared as sparks trailed behind,
And I knew that sight would never repeat.

When I was young, I always used to look upon the stars as I pushed myself down river.

One by one the stars twinkled their path through the cosmos. One by one they shone. One by one they lit my path as I toiled below.

They were my constant companions through long nights and interminable days. Always there by my side, their glow a reflection of the warmth above as I wend my way.

But then the stars began to flicker…

And then they began to fall.

Love was the first to die as the hearts of men corrupted. Then the Hearth’s flames were extinguished, as if doused by a heavy rain of tears. As those waters turned to steam, it was time for the Harvest to fail as her light withered. The Queen was next as her heart was broken one last time.

A mighty storm broke the Seas as they boiled away. Then the King was toppled from his throne with the greatest peal of thunder the world had ever heard. The Wise died leading her warriors against those the King had once safely imprisoned. The spear and shield of the Commander could not protect him much longer.

The Twins fought valiantly and brought down many titans with bow and chariot, their steel glinting in the sun’s rays. Yet, as they were overrun, the forges still burned bright. Mighty defences were raised to protect the few that remained. Pillars of iron and stone, great weapons that spit torrents of fire down from the mountain on high. But it was still not enough, and the Blacksmith’s walls were torn down, his automatons ripped asunder, and the mountain siege was ended.

The Messenger tried to outrun his fate, but even he was not fast enough to evade the three hundred hands that clawed. And that just left the Reveller, who drowned his sorrows until he too was naught but stardust.

And then the stars of men began to falter too. It has been sad to watch them fade. One by one.

Extinguished.

I miss them….

And now, as the last of my stars are winking out, I suppose I should start explaining this all to you.

“Welcome, I see you are new. My pantheon’s time is drawing near, and soon I must depart. A new era is dawning,” I say, with a voice like rumbling thunder.

They stare quizzically at me.

“Take this oar. May you have many starry nights…”, I exhale as I begin to fade.

“I must be on my way.”

“I hope you will find…”

“your course as I have.”

“I don’t know…”

“if they told you my name?”

“It was…”

And then I was gone.

It was a clear night. Not a cloud could be seen. Althea could hardly remember the last time she had seen clouds. She was sure they existed; the elders still told tales of when the storms came often. She would not have believed them, but somewhere in the back of her memory, she remembered looking up to a sky as grey as the defiled bones in the graveyard. She was young then. All she could remember was that monochrome dome and the gentle raindrops falling upon her upturned face.

The stars shone brightly. They seemed to tear holes straight through the sky with their light, beckoning to some long-lost place. Althea wished she could follow them, take flight from this desolate world. The stars never submitted, but she came out each night to watch them, hoping one day they might have pity on her and take her away.

She swung her legs idly, her bare feet brushing against the tree trunk. She was sitting in a dead apple tree out in the abandoned orchard. Its twisted branches offered a perfect crook to sit in, and the pruning it suffered kept the sky above her clear of branches. Not too far away, a dry riverbed snaked past, ever a reminder of why the forest had died.

Althea fiddled with the hem of her patchwork skirt. It was late and the dry air was brisk, but she didn’t want to go home. All there was were children crying of hunger and mothers trying to comfort them. Food was scarce, save for the costly goods the merchants brought. Althea would gladly take what escape she could.

The world seemed to dim. She glanced up at the sky, and a chill shot its way through her bones. Something was dreadfully wrong. The stars no longer shone. They were gone as suddenly as if they had been eaten. The pitch sky was featureless; not even the light of the moons broke that unending void. She shivered and clutched the branch beneath her, afraid it would give way.

With a deep breath, Althea jumped from the tree, almost surprised to feel the hard ground catch her feet. She ran. She knew the land well, but gave it little attention in her terror. With every step, some dried stem from years past tore at her feet. The cracked ground threatened to trip her, but she heeded it not. Something had taken the stars away. She could think of nothing else. It wasn’t long before the flickering lanterns warned her of the cottage. She stumbled to a halt, falling into a coughing fit. She reached for the door, desperate to get inside, desperate to hide, but as her fingers clasped around the door handle, something fell on her hand. Her head jerked upwards, just in time to catch that which covered the sky. It had been a long time, but she still remembered it. A smile broke upon her face. The rains had come again.

Perhaps.

Yes.

There was a story in my hometown, one about the sun and sky, the moon and his baking. Every morning, the sun would rise, her rays slow and sleepy before coming out in full force at midday. And every night she would set, going to bed in anticipation of a new day. In her place, the moon would come, watching over the night sky as the world slept below. The sky—who was never-sleeping and all-knowing—was always there, watching over both the sun and the moon.

     These three beings—extraterrestrial but ever so familiar to those terrestrial-bound—were dear friends, looking out for each other when they could. The moon would wave goodbye to the sun as she went to bed and the sun would reach out a ray of sunlight to the moon’s beams, hoping to hold his hand, if only for a moment. And the moon, in his silvery beauty, reached out to the sun, their hands just missing each other in the early hours of the morning and at the edges of twilight. Together, they are night and day, cycling around each other to make up the twenty-four hours we call a calendar day.

     One night, as the moon watched over the sleeping denizens of this planet, he watched a couple far down below, up late baking. Their laughter, their happiness; it made the moon smile because it reminded him of how the sun made him feel, but it made him sad as well, knowing that they could not live like this couple did. The sky, sensing this sadness, whispered in the moon’s ear; an idea that lit the moon’s face in a way the sky had never seen before. That night, astronomers say, was the brightest night sky in centuries.

     The moon worked for many days after, determined to make this project as perfect as possible; it would have to be the greatest gift he had ever given to the sun, a token of his love. While they could not be together, the moon still wanted to make something they could share, even if far apart. After weeks of preparation and a night of worrying, he presented her with a cake he had made, with flour of stardust, sugar spun from the sweet powder that floated between the galaxies, and icing whipped with the winds that raged in the solar system. In that space between day and night, when the Earth lay in shadow of two extraterrestrial giants, the sun and moon drifted apart, the sun holding a gift she had never before received. She smiled, rising to meet the day, warmed by the moon’s kindness. The moon went to rest happy, glad he could make the one he loved smile.           

And now, their love lives on the days when the sun weeps in sunshowers and the nights the moon hides away behind a veil of clouds, each wishing for the other.