Stars

A Story by A.K. Rohner

She is his day and night. His blue and black. His light. What would he do without her?

I stared at the sky, and it was beautiful. The darkness was spotted with stars like a pleasant sickness. I wondered how such speckled spectacles could amaze such small and insignificant creatures as ourselves.

I looked over at her, her smile wide and stunning. I’d read somewhere in the jumbled mass of the tools our otherworldly devices provided that the blue color of the sky was a reflection of the ocean. Such a random, unimportant fact that lodged its way into the pile of rubble that was my thoughts. If that was the case, I thought, then surely the sparkling stars reflected off of her eyes.

The sheer determination that always peeked through her blue irises astounded me with every breathtaking glance I selfishly took of them. Her smile made my own awaken from its long slumber, and the unworked muscles groggily tried to match the strange contortion of her mouth that was the “smile”.

Yes, it hurt, but I enjoyed the feeling of tiredness in my already sore muscles, keeping my wildly over the top smile towards the sky, as if expecting a deity to spot my yellow beacon of happiness among her white one.

I couldn’t resist. I needed another look, another glance, another beautiful, breathtaking, stomach wrenching, panic inducing look at her.

Her beauty was unmatched, but her smile...she’d sheathed it, like she was afraid that someone would blind themselves by the sharpness of its quality.

But I needed to see it.

I reached a careful hand towards her, worry encouraging my heart to skip a beat. As soon as I made contact with her smooth skin, it crumpled. It was like poking into a solid wall of ash.

Yes, ash, that was it. There was a hole in her arm now, the flakes of such a small spot of her beauty had been compromised and was now floating amongst the wind. I stared worriedly at her, but she simply stared back, her smile gone, the spark in her eyes smothered out.

So that was where the ash came from.

I could do nothing but watch in horror as she slowly flaked away and blew away in the wind, those sad, empty eyes staring at me right until the moment they joined the rest of what used to be her perfect body.

I was alone on the cold grass, the darkness suddenly terrifying, like all of the monsters in my imagination had escaped and decided to successfully carry out their missions of destroying me.

But I didn’t care. I simply looked up at the sky and watched each and every star disappear, dying away like she did. I felt their breath, the breath of my nightmares, my monsters, out from under my bed, out from my fears and my mind, ready to tear.

And that’s exactly what they did.