Catch A Falling Star
First published Feb 2022 in ‘Stardust’ from Hammond House international. A collection of shortlisted and winning stories from the Hammond House International Short Story Prize. This piece was Highly Commended.
Catch A Falling Star
By Sam K Horton
We flew together, my sisters and me. Or brothers. Whichever you prefer it means little to us, little to me. We tore through the stars like tailor’s scissors and left the black cloth of the sky flapping in solar winds. We had travelled this way since the beginning. Seven spots of light each enough for the other held together with the force of our love. It was only one stop of many, your Earth, a tether for our slingshot race around the galaxies. I cannot remember who was the first to look down. We had no sense of ourselves then, one looked and we all did, I cannot remember if the first to look was the first to fall.
I have to admit, there was something about you.
Small and angry you glared at us as we passed, as if you could stop us, should you wish. And though then you were fewer, and we less keenly observed, still you were enough to turn our gaze towards you. To remember you.
There was anticipation on our next approach. Years had passed and there were more of you. Some of you looked at us through finely turned glass, saw the fire in our tails. Your interest caused our first sister to leave. Remembering you as we approached, she slowed enough to fall. Red hot and howling she hit the atmosphere and for the first time we understood ourselves to be not one but seven. It was painful, this understanding. No sooner had we learnt the concept of the individual we were taught the concept of loss. Though we could feel her, still. Could hear her as she passed through that membrane of gas and air, and we knew that we had lost her. That it would be a one-way trip. Once she had gone, there was a greater space between us. A loosening of our bonds.
She fell into a churchyard and splintered a tombstone. She lay cooling in the grave-mud when a passing mourner found her and, reaching out, burnt his hand. He pulled it back as though from a snakebite. Being a god-fearing man, he called the priest who scurried out of his church like a mouse from his hole, eyes pointed heavenwards and keen to get back. White surplice flapping in the breeze he had stood and looked at my cooling sister. Had seen the pitted surface that shone like polished lead and still sizzled in the earth, just a little. There was much discussion. Though it was quickly agreed she had some celestial meaning there was dispute over who had sent her. Whether she was cast from the clouds our hurled out of the fire. To be safe, our sister was taken by the priest back to his church, chained to the floor with iron and doused in holy water. And over time was visited by local men and women who knew something special when they saw it. People who stroked our sister’s cheek and asked for favours. She granted each, as best she could, but not a single visitor freed her however many husbands she brought home, how many harvests she saved. She stayed there, chained in that church, for thirty years. Until they tore it down, burnt the roof, and left her buried there in the rubble the body of the dead priest next to her. She lay there with his bones and simmered. Then, hundreds of years later, they built a carpark over them both.
She lies there still - an inch of her visible on the surface, lost amongst the asphalt, chains long rusted but concrete holding fast. When it rains, she looks to the priests’ old bones and tells him she tastes heaven. And she should know, she’s been there.
When we next passed by you, we six that remained, there was a tension amongst us. Our usually smooth path around the stars had been fractious, shaky. Tempers had frayed. I had deliberately ignored you as we approached. You the cause of this trouble who had taken one of our number away. Still more of you crawled on the surface now and even from here we could smell the gunpowder. I had hoped that we were done with you, but we were not.
Our sister waited until the last moment that she could before she fell, hurtling towards your surface and burning deep into the stubble of a cornfield. She was turned up years later, breaking a ploughshare and causing the field hand to curse. But his swearing stopped when he picked her up, felt the weight of her, saw her shine. He carried her in his pocket to remind him that life was heavy, but sometimes magical. Two years later he apprenticed to a blacksmith and seeing her chance our sister suggested that he forge her into a sword, nudging the thought into the apprentice’s head until he spoke it like it was his own. She was a fierce beauty. Wavering lines ran down her blade, a little bit of starlight trapped in them, and she cut like it was a kindness. It was not long before he found himself a world away, knee deep in mud and freezing, flinching every time the hot lead of a musket ball seared by. She served him well, our sister. She saved his life time and again and when the war was done she hung at his belt and waited for the next one to arrive. Who would have thought she’d have such a bloodlust within her? I don’t know where she gets it. The next war came, of course. And the next after that. The Apprentice was now a captain and renowned for his skill, his bravery. Known too for his love of his sword, leading the charge with her, the sunlight arcing off the metal like a comet tail. Our sister hung by his side until his death, a cannonball tearing a hole in his chest that neither man nor sword saw coming. She is laid on his breast in a coffin in a tomb and even now, after all these years, I can still hear her. She lies in the dark and cries out for blood.
Our third sister was cause for argument. Soon after her descent two scholars arrived on horseback, mouths flapping. They had plotted the arc of our sister’s fall, watched her light split from the rest of us – by now it seemed a given we would lose another sister to you, it was only a question of who would fall - and had been present as she crashed through a turf rick, setting the peat turves ablaze. At first the pair ignored her. They had come with minds made up and were not in the market for stones. They knew full well that stars became jellified when loosed from the firmament and set to scraping up algae and thick wet fungus. They had brought a pouch of golden coins that they pushed into the jellied mass they had collected, waiting for the coin to dissolve. As they waited, they argued. The taller was sure the jelly was unneeded effluence ejected from the stars, not the star itself, the other took the opposite belief. A passing man, trundling a cart behind him said it was known to all that the stuff was star shit, and they were better leaving it well alone. Unified briefly in their dismissal of this the two went back to arguing. Although, our sister noticed, having switched sides of the debate. Our sister was collected as an afterthought. Placed in a saddle bag with jars of mucus, the regurgitated remains of frogs and what was clear, even to our sister, were dead jellyfish already rotting on their journey from the coast. she travelled back with them to a laboratory they called home. On arrival, each jar was labelled ‘Stars’ and placed on a shelf. Our sister was employed as a paperweight, spending her days listening to the arguments of ignorant men who were searching for the heavens in fungal spores when the answer was sitting there on the table. She watched as they tried to turn lead into gold and laughed at them. At their shortsightedness. Why focus on the immutability of one rock into another when their entire world, each particle of their skin, held the memory of space, the taste of stardust? On their deaths, each within a heartbeat of the other, our sister watched as their relations threw jar after jar of rancid star-rot into the river. Our sister was collected from the desk by a curious niece, who saw the truth of her, and our sister taught her everything she knew. When the niece died, our sister and her student’s papers were collected and sent to a museum. She sits in a box and waits to be discovered once again.
Our fourth fell into the ocean and nestles in the crook of a dead sailor’s arm on the seabed. She speaks with the fishes and trades the mysteries of sand for the secrets of the stars. It would be easy to feel betrayed, but really, what would any of the parties involved do with the information?
Our fifth blazed brightest, though she was the smallest of us. Barely bigger than a twinkle of a star at dusk, no bigger than a sigh. Her falling hurt the most. One minute she had been there, sparkling at my back as he had always done and then gone. She hurtled like a bullet into the soft skull of a calf, emerging newly born from its mother who died from the shock. As she lay nestled at the base of its brain my sister imbued the calf with the gift of prophesy and the power of human speech. Because she could. People flocked, of course they did, to hear the calf speak. A ‘Mooncalf’ the called it. The cowherd that stood ready to raise it had known a good thing when he saw it and began to charge entry the very next day. It advised on the best time to buy or sell stores and grain, helped gamblers clear their debts. They toured the country our sister and the calf. Bouncing along rough roads in a wagon painted with the calf’s face, surrounded in stars and lines of text that proclaimed the veracity of its gift right next to the price of admission. The King saw it, once. The calf helped him choose a wife and he paid twice the amount asked for.
They were famous.
Which was fine, for a while. I do not know if it was the calf who grew bored or our sister but suddenly the fortunes told were not always the fortunes asked for. Love affairs were ended, wars begun. And then one day the calf stopped foretelling anything but the day and manner of the asker’s death. Perhaps the pair had had enough of the touring. Perhaps they had noticed that however much money the cowherd made they still slept on dirty straw each night, ate the same mash of old hay and vegetables each morning. The tour ended soon after that. The appetite faltered. Despite repeated revisions on the side of the wagon the cowherd found there was no price low enough to entice a man to learn the bounds of his life. So, home they went. And languishing in a dark stall back in his familiar barn the calf who knew the future ate hay and focused on growing into a bullock. One day six men came, dressed in black, and asked him who’d be next on the throne. The calf thought for a moment, then told each in turn which gibbet they’d hang from, on which day, and what the weather would be doing.
The cowherd found the calf the next day, eyes wide open and dead as a doornail. He’d wept, for a moment, then stopped and dried his eyes. At least he’d seen it coming.
The cowherd sold the calf to the university, where his head was severed from his neck and placed in aspic. It was said about the place that his gift was intact and that if you pressed your ear up against the glass then he’d tell you where you were going. The doctors and scholars had no truck with this of course, he was just something to be labelled. But that said, between then and now, somebody took him out and sewed his lips shut.
Our sister doesn’t mind. When the staff are gone, and the moonlight shines in through the window she counts off the days until she’s free. She feels sorry about the calf though. He was worth more than that.
Our sixth is buried deep, twelve feet shy of a fault line and every night she teases it and tries to make it shake. She always was trouble, that one, but I missed her when she fell. By then we were not speaking, barely together at all just two lost lights hurtling through the darkness. I am the last of us. I am the largest by far. I have lived these years looking through each of my sisters in turn and I have seen you. All of you. Every time I pass, I have edged a little nearer, looked a little closer. And as I leave and go on my way and pass by countless other stars and planets, I wonder why my sisters each chose you over them. Over me. So, I am coming. I have tried before. But each time I have lost my nerve at the last moment, passed you by. But I am ready, I do not know if it will hurt when I fall from heaven, but I am willing to find out. I am coming.
Sorry.
END