The Search for a Silent Star

by Russ Bickerstaff

 

Stars always seemed so quiet and serene before I started working the job. They hung out there in the multi-dimensional web of everything as these massive forces of tremendous energy. Thinking of them as anything other than the most powerful forces in the galaxy never would have occurred to me. If someone had told me that I could expect to be spoken to by a star at some point in my lifetime, I would have told them that I wasn’t that interested in pop culture. Once they explained to me what they really meant I would have naturally assumed that they were joking with me. No one ever speaks with stars. They’re not sentient. Even if they were, they don’t have anything to talk with. They’re just massive spheres of plasma held together by their own energy. They wouldn’t have any way to speak even if they wanted to.

 

It was explained to me during training that stars do have identities. They are sentient. Evidently a huge mass of plasma that has a mass of over 2 nonillion kilograms while burning with a surface temperature of several thousand degrees Kelvin due to overwhelmingly intense nuclear reaction in its heart somehow comes to have some kind of consciousness. Who knew?

 

Stars never seemed to be thinking about anything that they could communicate in anything other than heat and gravitation, but we had come to find out that their deep connection with the origin of energy meant that they were capable of manipulating matter in subtle ways. So they could communicate directly with us by manipulating our own brain chemistry. There are those who have called it telepathy. They can communicate with it quite well.

 

Evidently the reason why stars never talked to us before wasn’t because they couldn’t. Stars never talked to us before because they didn’t feel the need to do so. They simply never thought it was worth their time. This perspective might seem kind of elitist at first. Shouldn’t they at least say hello? Honestly, though, compared next to our lifespan, theirs is impossibly long. It’s not that they didn’t have anything to say, they just didn’t have any way of relating to us. All this changed, of course, when we learned enough about them to be able to enhance their lifespans.

 

Our technology had allowed us enough of an insight into physics to be able to take note of something that was going on in the heart of our favorite star. Between that and the fact that it and our favorite planet (the one we come from) was in danger of getting sucked into a black hole. Our survival and its were very, very important to us. So we made a point of learning how to avoid just such a disaster. We harnessed various forces and hauled the thing (and all of the planets in it) our of harm’s way. Somewhere around the time we started moving it away from danger, it woke-up and started talking. It hasn’t stopped since.

 

Once we had made absolutely certain that our own star was perfectly okay, we let it settle down. Not socially, of course. (Once you start a star talking it will not shut up.) But it looked stable enough to make everything feel comfy. We were assured another few billion years with the star, we started to realize that it was going to be climbing into all of our minds and talking to us telepathically all the time. There were those of us who didn’t mind, but for the most part we just decided it might be best to back off our home world and find someplace that has a sun that still thought of us as being socially undesirable.

 

It’s hard enough finding a star with a planet that has the right kind of environment that doesn’t already have intelligent life on it. Finding a star at the right point in its life that can safely live without our intervention for a few billion years is always kind of nice, but people tend to flock to those planets and rather quickly overpopulate them. Invariably all the extra traffic to the planet will get the star talking to other stars about us. Inevitably there’s that moment when the star finds out that other stars think that we’re cool and that we can help them out and everything and they start talking. After a few centuries it becomes apparent that they won’t shut up and again we have to go out and find another place.

 

Stars have a tendency to only talk to those that are really close to each other. So the best bet for remaining anonymous in the long run when moving to a given solar system is to juggle the stars before you get there. They’ll send people like me in ships that look nothing like ours dressed as anything other than our race in the interest of getting them fooled for long enough to pull the sun out into some comfortably remote star. Then we’ll start to move-in with our real colonization ships and settle-in. It’s worked quite well so far as I understand it. There are colonies on a number of different planets that have passed the usual span of time it takes for a star to start getting chatty.

 

This, of course, makes the work of star haulers like me very desirable. While the work I do is desirable, it’s scarcely easy work. You start hauling a star and all of the planets around it through space to a cozy little corner of the galaxy and it starts trying to start-up a conversation. You try not to encourage it all that much, but it’s always there. It’ll talking to you telepathically whether your awake, asleep or in forced chemical hibernation for the long haul. I try my best to be polite, but it’s really nice to know that I’m not acting as any kind of ambassador. So I can have conversations with these things, but I don’t have to like it. Being unpleasant to a star is actually one of the few things that’s entertaining about the job.

 

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Russ Bickerstaff is a theatre critic and aspiring author living in Milwaukee, WI.

 

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Tender Things

by Joe Cavano

 

He positioned himself across from her on the other side of a small ravine. He was safe for now. She was busy collecting delicate, white flowers from a plant they’d discovered a month ago but had yet to learn the name.   

           

She waved from across the chasm.

 

He hated himself for making her part of it. He should have ended it before it began. He should have tossed his half-eaten, egg salad sandwich back into its brown paper bag, rose from the school cafeteria table, and been on his way.  

 

The girl took her time arranging the pretty flowers into a lovely bouquet. Then she rubbed her hands together to brush away the soil. He wondered if she was sending a message: I’m wiping my hands of you.  

 

He almost wished it were true. It would make things easier.

 

He watched as she made her way to the ravine and began to descend. Half-way down, she lost her balance and slid toward the bottom. He considered helping her but changed his mind. He still hadn’t decided what he’d say when she rejoined him.  

           

The instant she hit bottom she righted herself and began to ascend the other side. She had long, tanned legs and a pretty face. He could see why others might find her attractive. 

           

It was her idea to spend the day together. “It’ll be fun,” she’d said. It might have been too, if she hadn’t started kissing him. He didn’t feel anything for her that way.  

           

He was staring at the ground rehearsing what he’d say, when he felt a pair of hands place something on his head. She’d fashioned a crown of white flowers. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, as she sat beside him. “I’ve decided I don’t care that you’re not experienced.” 

           

The boy felt his face flush. “I’ve been with plenty of girls.”

           

“Then why are you so apprehensive? What are you afraid of?”    

           

He’d blurted it out before he could wish it back. “I’m not attracted to you.  I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. Not even a little.” He was surprised how fine he felt after he’d said it.

           

“Why do you call then? Why keep asking me out?”

           

The boy shrugged though he didn’t mean to. “You’re a nice person. I thought we might become friends.”

           

An instant later, she’d ripped the crown from his head and flung it. “Asshole.” Then, she jumped to her feet and began running. He could hear her sobbing as she disappeared.

           

He felt like sobbing too. He wasn’t sure why. He walked over to where the crown lay and dropped to his knees to retrieve it.  Every flower had been crushed. All that remained was a twisted mess.

 

"Such a tender thing,” he murmured, as he attempted to fix it. “Such goddamn, tender things.”    

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The author is a fellow traveler on this lovely green-blue planet we still call home. Oft-published writer, former secondary school and college teacher, jazz pianist and exceptionally well-travelled and companionable, his writing has earned several awards in a relatively brief time. Still, like Woody Allen, his one regret is that he is not somebody else.

 

His recently completed short story collection, "Tracings,”  will be sent packing and looking for a new home shortly.

 

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What Happened When the Rodeo Was in Town

By AJ Kirby

 

I’m not small-town stupid. Get that out of your head.

 

Nor am I old-wifey.

 

But I do believe in dreams.

 

I dreamed about Sandie; I couldn’t get back to sleep after.

 

Dale drove me into town. Kept asking me what was wrong, woman, but I didn’t rightly know. Way I’d been thinking though, the dream had to mean something hinkey in Sandie’s marriage. In our town, men wore ten-gallon hats for smart. There was space for folk to tie up horses outside the bank. Indoors, men still behaved like they were outdoors. Treated their women like branded-livestock.

 

Not Dale: some.

 

At work my fingers trembled as I counted dough.

 

I couldn’t meet Sandie’s eyes.

           

Everything else was normal behind the counter of National Chartered. Time was money Samuels kept saying. But time wasn’t money, money was. We had to be careful counting it. A lot of businesses were on the brink even though the rodeo was in town.

 

Monday was the busiest day: all the Main Street stores brought in their weekend takings. Sandie and me counted it; deposited it in the vault.

 

Sandie was always quiet when she counted. After the dream this seemed ominous.

 

I tried to fill the silence with scuttlebutt.

 

Samuels coughed; nodded to the National Chartered Ten Commandments above my desk: THOU SHALT WORK PROFESSIONALLY AND QUIETLY..

 

I got back to it, counting like a librarian, licking my finger every few turns. Sandie counted hers wearing a yellow thimble on her finger. Even in a dustbowl town like ours wearing a thimble was backward.

 

Sandie lived in what Dale called the Back of Beyond. With her husband Ted, who she claimed was a head honcho in a ranch in Texas during summer. Convenient: meant she never had to lug him along to any of Samuels’ company-bonding nights at Bob’s Burgers.

 

I stayed late, hoping to catch Sandie. To talk. Not interfere; just check whether she feared for her life in the Back of Beyond. But she slipped out while I was in the bathroom. I was set to call Dale for my ride home but something stopped me...

 

Samuels was otherwise engaged and there was Sandie’s desk just waiting for me to have a shuffle through.

 

Maybe she kept a diary.

 

Somehow I managed to knock the framed photograph of Ted off her desk. Near screamed when it smashed, but managed to hold my tongue. I reached down for it. Back had fallen off the frame. When I tried to put the photo back, the paper felt too thin for photo paper. I flipped it over and I saw Ted had been cut out of a magazine.

 

Sandie had broken Samuels’ first commandment. All bank tellers shalt be happily married. Otherwise, Samuel believed, the women would be open to a ‘planned seduction’ by a wannabe thief wanting into the vault.

 

Course, I should have had a word with Samuels, but… Well, he once said something big-headed to Dale at one of the bonding nights and… I decided to handle the situation myself.

 

What I wanted was for Sandie to confide. Break down: tell me about how Ted was a figment of her imagination; how she’d always been jealous of me and Dale.

 

That night Dale did his best to prove there was nothing to be jealous of, rolling in late, three sheets to the wind.

 

I had the dream for the third night running. There was a man behind Sandie. Wearing a bandit-mask. All you could see was his eyes, dark as a starless night on the prairie.

 

Next morning I went straight to Sandie. I wasn’t sure she’d agree to a meet, but she did.

 

At Bob’s.

 

Despite everything, her face shone like gold. After a while she grasped my hand across the table. Told me it didn’t matter any more; she’d met someone. From the rodeo. A regular cowboy.

 

I tugged my hand away, told her Samuels will fire you. Told her she couldn’t trust anyone at the rodeo; that she needed someone solid like Dale.

 

She just smiled.

 

I walked out before my mouth caught up with my brain and I could tell her what I really thought.

 

I was late the next Monday. Dale couldn’t get the Ford started. Nor himself, truth be told.

 

When we hit Main, it was cordoned off; bathed in lights from police cruisers.

 

 

Samuels collapsed on the curb; head in hands.

 

Dale and me stood behind the police-tape. When they led out the cowboy in cuffs there were cheers from the townspeople; boos from the rodeo men. A couple those uncouth fellers muttered it was all a frame-up: their man was innocent.

Sandie was led out last, her face black from run-eyeliner. She saw me in the crowd; hung her head. Despite myself I felt a rush of pride: I was over here and she was over there.

 

After the trial everyone was sorry to Sandie’s face but called her the worst kind of fool behind her back. She got a severe reprimand from the judge; the boot from Samuels.

 

Her cowboy got a ten-stretch.

 

Couple of the businesses on Main got taken to the cleaners. Quite a bit of money had been counted and somehow in all the commotion, it ‘rode off into the sunset’. Nobody could work out where the cowboy had stashed it and his were the only fingerprints in the vault itself after Sandie had let him in.

 

Sandie met me one last time in Bob’s.She was going on a trip, she said.

 

I asked her if she’d learned her lesson.

 

She smiled, all cocky-like; handed over her thimble. Said I might need it if the going got too tough.

 

Said I didn’t have to use the thimble just to count money.

 

I think she wanted to tell me something else, but right then Dale honked his horn. I knew better than to keep him waiting.

 

I left the yellow thimble there, fingerprinting the plastic table; went back out, into the near-deserted parking lot. The rodeo had left town and all was very, very quiet. ‘Cept for in my dreams.

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AJ Kirby is the author of the novels When Elephants walk through the Gorbals, Paint this Town Red, Bully, Perfect World and Sharkways. His short fiction has been published across the web, and in magazines, anthologies and literary journals, as well as in three collections: Trickier & Treatier, The Art of Ventriloquism and Mix Tape. He was one of 20 Leeds-based authors under 40 recently shortlisted for the LS13 competition and his novel Paint this Town Red was shortlisted for 2012’s The Guardian Not the Booker prize.

 

All of his books are available for purchase on his Amazon Author Page. He reviews fiction for The New York Journal of Books and The Short Review.

 

In addition he undertakes Red Sportswriting, as a regular contributor to The Republik of Mancunia and Stretty News blogs. He has written two books about Manchester United: The Pride of All Europe: Manchester United’s Greatest Seasons in the European Cup, and Fergie’s Finest: Sir Alex Ferguson’s Greatest Manchester United x11.

 

He blogs here: http://paintthistownred.wordpress.com/ And his official website is here:

http://www.andykirbythewriter.20m.com/

 

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