Mother of Stars
Iron is the death of stars, and I am hungry for blood. I am the hunter of creation, the shadow that births the light. I am showered in the entropy of ages as I stretch my limbs across a night windowed in glass. The humans are asleep. Now I must begin. The Earth is in the shadow of the vacuum as I sink through it and into the dark. I slip into a form made from skin and sinew, for my true immensity cannot be held by this terrestrial charnel.
A child is crying. A car pulls into a driveway. I pass a woman waiting at a bus stop. She raises an eyebrow at my borrowed face. Is it too familiar? Then her cheek lifts, eyelashes flicking, and I remember: this thew of flesh may elicit pleasing sensations in humans. I gape a toothy grin and continue. She is not the right one, and I must be very selective.
My skin is tight with waiting. I breathe stardust into the meat of me and know I am larger than this body. The sweat from my brow is proplyd as I cross the street to the darker sidewalk. In shadow, Iāll scarcely encounter an unqualified potentiate. This tightness of form is barely tolerable. Tonight, I have viscera, but I am of the universe. Older than creation, more immense than galaxies: I am the harbinger of suns.
The birth of stars is a violent riteāfusion ripping through silence, searing light spilling from the wound. I have seen galaxies bloom from such destruction, their fires kindled from the blood of a flesh-bound host. A Mother must be this flesh. It is her body that must shatter, her veins that must brim with molten light, her voice that will fracture the quiet of the void with the first exultant scream of beginning. The sacrifice is singular, absoluteāa furnace consuming her flesh to forge the luminous seed of a thousand suns. And so I hunt, searching the fragile edges of this night.
My steps do not fall as I turn down an alley. Damp with decay and the stench of countless liminal lives, the drip of condensate echoes on the walls. Heat radiates from the street, air trapped hot in the crevices of asphalt. The amber glow of a lit cigarette and the pulse of a single beat of meat quicken my step into the corridor.
She is ample, plump as a pear two days past ripeness. The musk of her body fills me. She has been living in the wet of this alley for one hundred days. Her matted hair has not seen soap or comb since the last full moon. I breathe her in as my body counts the scents and sees the moments of her. Moving quiet as my tendons allow, I put my body behind the metal housing of an HVAC unit. For several moments, I watch. Her fingers work at peeling the label from a glass bottle, her nails blackened with grime. She hums and spits, the tune fragile and deliberate. Each peeled strip of curling paper falls like a wilted petal to the pavement. Bottle clean, she lifts it to her lips and drinks the last bitter drop, her throat bobbing with the effort. With reverence, she cradles it and stares at the shadowed end of the alley. This world was not made to be kind, and she has not seen kindness. Her spine is bent with a convexness that speaks her shame. And yet, the lines of her face are deeply creased with smile and laugh. As I dissolve my skin into the breeze, I wonder at her smile. At her song. She is Anna.
When she was a child, her skin knew cuts, tears, and bruises. She was loneliness. Her mother sold candy and popcorn from a cart at the county fairgrounds in summer and knit socks at the community center in winter. They rented a room from a large man with a cruel hand. When the man came to their room at night, she closed her eyes and imagined her feet in cold, wet grass until he left.
Now I am the drift of air, not made of meat and bone, and I wrap myself around her. I let her lungs become me, and I refresh her heated folds with my coolness.
When Anna first bled between her legs, her mother put poison in her veins and wished to leave this world. Anna slept because her mother did. When she awoke, a man with a brown mustache told her she had a new family. She looked and failed to find her mother in the clutter of strangers in their room. The mustached man said her new family would love and care for her while her mother received treatment at a facility called Shattuck. The word treatment was strange to her then, but in the years to come, it became an unwelcome familiar.
Anna breathes me into her lungs, and I am scented with carcinogens and oxygen. I am in her blood. The cigarette in her lips drops ash into the hot wet of the street, and she grinds it with an idle toe. A cadenced thrumming in her throat gives me pause, and then delight, in the keening hum of a song she sings deep from her chest.
Oh the summer time has come
And the trees are sweetly bloominā
The wild mountain thyme
Grows around the bloominā heather.
As she grew, so did her sadness and the hollow it filled. She bought and was spent, her body begging for her motherās poison. It smelled like love; it filled her with bliss and bile, and it emptied her cup of despair. She ached for it. Her body felt hurt and empty but for the pain and need.
And she sees beauty in shadowed things. Cotton drops of color in the night when light does not obscure the arms of the galaxy. I watch her memories of quick laughter and long hugs; moments of frenzied clinging to a lover. And I know: Anna has a love of night and laughter. Her heart flutters in me at the sound of giggles from the street as two young women skip-walk across the alley. She smiles at the memory of childhood playmates and chuckles with the thought of it.
She is the one.
As I set my intention for her fate, she squeaks, āOh!ā In her mind, she turns to greet me. Lips forming words aloud, she says, āIāve waited my whole life to meet you.ā
āHow do you know me?ā I no longer have a mouth to speak, but I make the question known.
āI saw you in my motherās eyes when I was young, and in the hands of cruel men.ā She laughs the words from her belly, and I shake with the joy of it. In all my centuries of hunting, I have never felt the warmth of human joy, or smelled the fetor of a laughing mouth.
āDo you know what comes next?ā
A snort, a shake, a giggle. āI never know what comes next!ā She gestures to the sweating corridor of her current occupation. āOr Iād be somewhere with more walls and less rats, wouldnāt I?ā She sighs, a knowing exhale, stomping the ash remains of her cigarette with finality.
āThere will be pain.ā
āThere always has been. But hurt is the crucible of change, and God, am I ready to be something else.ā With it, she claps her hands, the sound echoing loud in the quiet of our conversation.
What strangeness, to be a hunter with willing prey. For the mouse to greet the owl with a welcome heart. Unpracticed hesitation stays me as I search for how to act with such unexpected game.
āI would hear the rest of your song.ā I brush gently in her chest, as a fish through reeds. Anna breathes deep, filling her lungs with warm air and resolve. Though her hands tremble, she moves her tongue to sing:
I will build my love a bower
By yon cool crystal fountain
And āround it I will pile
All the flowers oā the mountain.
In her veins, I become hot. I pull the teeth of me across her wet, pink thew and let myself burn hot like coals aflame. Her scream fills me as it expands her lungs, and I melt her flesh from inside.
Will ye go, lassie, go?
It must be this way. Stars are born from heat and blood.
And weāll all go together
To pick wild mountain thyme
Globs of skin melt-drip from her bones and land sticky on the pavement, quivering still from the boiling blood of me.
All around the bloominā heather.
Her body drops heavy to the ground and roils with my fire.
Will ye go, lassie, go?
She heaves an agonal cry, and then is silent.
Glittering softly at first, the corpuscles in her skin bulge large and fat with light. Now we are fully entwined, and I can hear her star stuff sing. Not the song from her earthly throat, but a yearning for the vastness of the universe. Lest I be consumed, I must leave her soon. Her spirit is escorted to the heavens on one of my many backs and made ready for her offspring.
My hunt is done; now I become witness.
I wrap myself around a pinky viscera from her corpse mound and become flesh again. I push my lips around hers, as her body shines an offal disco. Pulling away, her pores widen with streaks of light. In a single splash, a wetness of glittering light and blood sprays geyser from her split legs, and explode the sky in a thousand glistening specks. Pinpricks of light glow in a thousand colors against the black sky in a final heave of heat and energy.
It is done.
In the cosmos, her radiance unfurls, spilling golden and crimson tendrils across the black expanse. From agony to rapture, the detritus of space collapses into her and explodes with bursting mass and cosmic fire. Her heart is a singularity, a churning vortex of energy and gravity, devouring all that draws too near, and birthing brilliance in its relentless hunger. Around her, new stars ignite like lightning, their waves tracing the curves of her boundless form. She is creation in its most raw state, a tapestry of beginnings woven from endings. An end to ends. The Becoming.
I stumble backward as the last few waves of formation pulse from her spent mound of flesh. Recovering, I gather her humble remains and belongings to bring as offering. I would see them burned under the light of her children.
I am the hunter of creation, the shadow that births the light. And now, she is the Mother of Stars.