A short story by Wes Blake

Photo by Rachel Mondal.

Ceiling Stars

By Wes Blake

Jamie awoke on the couch and walked into her bedroom, leaving her dad asleep on the other side of the couch and the TV on an endless loop of 90s music videos. She lay in her bed and looked at the glowing river of stars on the ceiling. She had stuck them there about seven years ago, when she was 5. She wondered if they would ever lose their light. They seemed stubborn enough to keep it forever. She wished she would have put them in some order. At least maybe the Big Dipper and Orion. But she had been too young and didn’t know their shapes well enough.

She thought about the open field by the pin oak and cedar trees where the gray squirrel rested. It would be dark and have its own stars if it wasn’t too cloudy. It would be cooler there now. She thought about where she would go tomorrow. Her dad would leave for work soon. Before dawn. And she’d have the whole day to herself. First, she’d sleep in as long as she could. Then she’d have cereal. Then she would be free to go wherever she wanted. Maybe she would go into the lowlands­ — beyond the loblolly pines and the bend in the road on Oregon. It had been a while since she’d gone so far. But if she left early, she could go as far as she wanted. She hoped it wouldn’t rain tomorrow. She looked up at the river of ceiling stars again. She thought they seemed duller than they used to be. Were they losing their glow? Real stars lose their glow too, don’t they? She thought she’d seen something about that on TV. But it took a very long time for real stars to lose their glow. If real stars take such a long time to lose their glow, then she was sure that ceiling stars held theirs awhile, too. They’d already lasted this long. She tried not to worry about the future of the ceiling stars. She wondered what it would be like in the lowlands. In the woods by the river. There was something about the place that made her feel afraid. Like all the dogs that people owned there were meaner. She would bring the pepper spray that her dad gave her. She’d have to remember. She hoped that she’d remember. She sighed. She hoped that her thoughts would stop soon so that she could sleep and not be so tired tomorrow. She hated the feeling that stuck with her the next day when she couldn’t sleep. It was like the feeling of newspaper against your hands except it was on your mind. And you couldn’t get rid of it. You just had to not pay attention to it. But it would still be there. Like a heavy cloud in your brain.

She heard the low sound of music coming from the living room. Whose voice was that? Was it Pearl Jam? No. Alice in Chains, she thought. Layne Staley, who her dad said was a better singer than Kurt Cobain. Was that Layne? She thought so. It was almost too quiet to hear.

The room was filled with late morning light when Jamie opened her eyes. There were no direct sunbeams coming in the window, so it was not yet past noon. She listened for the sound of the TV. Her dad must have turned it off before he left. He would have left for work before dawn. Jamie lay in bed and waited for the grandfather clock to sound. Maybe it would be a new hour, and she wouldn’t have to walk into the other room to know the time. Grackle called outside her window. The light seemed bright, and she didn’t hear any rain. She didn’t remember hearing any rain against the metal roof in the night. She listened to a car moving on the road outside. She was happy to have the day all to herself, but as she listened to the quiet in the trailer, she felt lonesome. The grandfather clock bells rang, but it was not a new hour. She only heard one melody ring out. It was 15 minutes after something. Ten?

Jamie sat at the kitchen table and squeezed honey from a plastic bear over her Cheerios. She had been right about the time. The digital clock over the oven now read 10:50. She brought a spoonful of cereal to her mouth. She savored the smooth feel and sweetness of honey on her tongue. She looked outside the sliding glass door onto the wood deck. Sunlight streamed through the window and painted half of the table a brighter grain of wood. She sat in her wood chair against the walls so the light wouldn’t be in her eyes. The crunching of the cereal sounded as loud as a fire engine inside her head. Her eyes scanned the kitchen counter for evidence that her dad had eaten before work. She did not see anything. She knew there would be fresh coffee grounds in the trash can. And she knew that he would have filled his green thermos with a new cup of coffee before walking out the door. Jamie eyed the wood starting to splinter on the surface of the deck. She was too tired to look beyond the deck and consider the distant tree line, the overgrown lawn, and everything that lay beyond it. She only wanted to worry about her bowl of cereal, her plastic honey bear standing in late morning sunlight on the table, and the wood grain of the deck just outside.

After the cereal was gone, Jamie scraped her spoon along the bottom of the bowl, gathering up all the honey that had sunk to the bottom, like a search crew looking for a drowned body at the bottom of a river. Jamie thought of the Kentucky River and wondered if there were catfish as big as dinosaurs in the deepest places. After a couple of drags along the bottom of the bowl, the spoon was not bringing up any relevant amounts of honey. She let her spoon rest in the bowl, submerged in milk, and looked past the deck at the tree line. A robin landed on a honey suckle branch that grew over the fence, and Jamie heard the engine of another car on the road. It looked too bright outside. And hot.

After washing and rinsing her bowl and spoon in the sink, Jamie filled a glass with tap water and sat down on the couch. She turned to the local channel on the TV. It was the only channel that came through clearly. She wanted something on that she didn’t have to pay attention to. She wanted to stay in the cool, dim trailer for a while because once she left, she knew she would be gone for a long time.

Images of local newscasters holding microphones in different outdoor locales around central Kentucky flashed across the screen, and the volume was a low murmur. Jamie sat the glass of water on the end table at the right of the couch, where her dad sat his beer cans, pulled the blanket over her body and stretched out on the couch. It was starting to get cloudy outside. She’d wait it out before getting too far gone and caught in the rain.

Jamie was dragged into a dream like it was a strong undercurrent she couldn’t escape. She saw a mansion on a hill made of gray stone. It almost looked like a modern castle to her, but it was just a big house. It was night and landscaping lights spotlighted the windows.

She was inside the gray stone house, and her dad was drinking a glass of scotch, laughing. A big group of people, friends, were around, but her dad was the center of it all. She noticed him limping, unable to put any weight on his right foot. She looked closer and saw that his foot was gone and two tendrils that looked like small ropes drug along the floor beneath his pant leg. Her dream self was not shocked or afraid of this. In the dream world, this was normal and had been this way for a long time. No one was shocked by it. She understood that this was a progressive injury, and it would kill her dad. But it had been ongoing for a while in this world. And everyone was used to it. There was a dark space of time, and then Jamie found herself again outside of the gray stone mansion in the night. The bedroom window at the far left of the house was spotlighted, and she knew that had been her dad’s room. It was empty now, and her dad had died. An image flashed before her mind. She saw his body, bereaved of spirit, laying on the ground by the river. The rope-like tendrils made up the whole of his body. But it was still him. These ropes had always been there. Inside him. And they were inside her, too. She floated thoughtlessly through another space of time. Then she found herself limping. Favoring her right foot. She looked down and saw her right foot had started to disappear. And the rope tendrils were there, hanging from her pant leg, brushing along the floor like a mop. She knew her foot would disappear completely before long. And then she would disappear, too. Or, at least, all the parts of her that were not the ropes would disappear.

Jamie awoke on the couch and stretched. A game show was flashing from the TV screen. She remembered her dream suddenly. She thought of her right foot and knew it was okay. The feeling of the dream stayed with her. She wished she could keep the memory of the dream but lose the feeling of it. In the dream, her dad had been wholly himself. At his best. She could tell by the muted light coming from the crack in the curtains in front of her, and by the light coming through the kitchen from the deck door, that it was still overcast. That it could rain any time. Maybe she wouldn’t leave the house today at all.

After sitting on the couch with the feeling of the dream, she had to get up and walk through the kitchen to the deck door. She looked at the sky. It was full of clouds, but it may not rain. She decided she needed to leave the house.

Wes Blake is the author of PINEVILLE TRACE, an award-winning novella-in-flash from the University of Indianapolis’ Etchings Press. His fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, storySouth, and Untelling, among others. He is part of the visiting faculty at the Bluegrass Writers Studio MFA program at EKU and lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky, with his wife, cats, and the 100 trees they planted. Learn more at wesblake.com or follow him on Instagram at @wesblake_.