Judge’s comments:
Somebody once said ‘Perception is everything’, meaning (I think) that behaviour is driven by how we perceive our environment – and that our perception may be very different from objective reality. I like fiction that uses this gap between perception and reality; done well, it can transport readers into new ways of looking at the world, and thence into new worlds. An excellent way of exploiting the subjective-objective gap is to harness a first-person narrator who sees and responds to their environment very differently from the reader. (You are in their head; you are in their world; and what a very strange world it is!). And if, in addition, the narrator’s psyche is deliciously dark and savage and fragile and unpredictable, and if their story plays out in some lush setting infused with melancholia and the half-hidden memories of old violence – well, how can the reader resist? For all these reasons, I had to choose ‘The Star Eater’ as the winner of this year’s Spencer A. Parker Memorial Award. Congratulations to Alexandria Britten!
– Marc Joan, author of Hangdog Souls and previous winner of the Spencer A. Parker Memorial Award
Last night, Jonah ate a star in my dreams, and I watched him do it.
He stood in an ocean of grass, a dark field of infinity. The wind of the blue night pushed the uncut grass west of him. They glided like pacific waves but never reached me—south, where I stood in an ocean of water, where my waist was hugged, wet and gentle.
In his cupped hands, a little star levitated. The light of it kindled the green in his eyes to glisten like two emerald stones. All around him, millions of stars watched with squinting gold lights. We shared an eagerness, me and the stars, all wondering why he had one of them in his hands. Was it stolen, but how? Jonah was only a man, not a cosmic God who could pluck a star from the sky as easily as plucking an apple from a tree. Or maybe he was of the cosmos, an emperor of the Milky Way and he’d taken the moon too. Maybe the moon was hiding. Maybe it knew what Jonah would do. Rather than watch along with the stars, it closed its eye. I should’ve done so too.
Jonah then opened his mouth wide and stuffed the star into him, his cheeks ballooning into a soft sphere, glowing redly in a way that should’ve burned him, but it did not. He swallowed it so humanly, a visible starlight glossing down his throat, but when he looked south, I did not see a human. I saw a godman that could have anything he wanted.
Starry screams erupted from above me and the sky revolted with a million arrows of shooting stars falling onto him. His body flayed into death, godman no more, and the grass ocean tasted blood for the first time.
Jonah opened his mouth wide and stuffed the eggs I fried into him. He was not in a grass ocean but in our kitchen, so alive, so far from the stars.
My glare across the worn antique table was sword-like, and like a sword, I wished to cut him open, make him bleed so the kitchen floor could taste blood for the first time. The golden blue encaustic tiles were older than us–Jonah thirty-seven and I, only twenty–and they’ve tasted a lot of things. Spilled apple juice and forgotten bread crumbs. Footprints from three generations of French Creoles. The little legs of spiders and roaches, mice too. Jonah’s blood would be a new flavor, bring the baroque patterns back to life after decades of only being a trampled path. No longer a strip of beauty to be gazed at for two seconds, but tiles to be avoided, tiles made of blood. Jonah’s blood could be so special.
He bit into his bacon, the sound of rock-eating, and then smiled at me. He liked doing this. To him, smiling was a simple way of saying I love you. No woman could see Jonah’s pink lips turn gold. Only I could and it made me the unluckiest woman in the world. The unlucky Odelia.
But I saw opportunity in his smile. There was a friendliness in it. It told me I could ask for anything I wanted, so I did.
“Can I go out today? I’ve been stuck here since we got married four months ago. I’ve been good too. Haven’t you noticed, Jonah? I don’t get myself in trouble. I stay here all day and wait for you to come home. Today, I just want to be able to see something different than this house.”
I stole Jonah’s smile and the softness in his eyes. I watched them hardened. I watched them avoid looking at me. “Maybe another time, Delia.”
Another time and another. I waited for another time every time he told me to, but another time never came. Another time just meant to wait for the next time for him to say another time. It became his favorite thing to say after he watched me fly out of our bedroom window in his dreams. We were both dreamers you see.
“You can watch me. I promise I won’t leave you.”
A string of red ants traipsed into the portal arching in the blonde wall, specs of grits on their backs. Away and away…
“How can I watch you if I’m working? What about those puzzle boxes I bought you? You can play with those if you get bored.”
“I don’t want to play with puzzles.”
Jonah sighed like a father instead of a husband. But a sudden thought popped his green eyes open. They glowed as emeraldly as they did in my star dream. The memory of it goosebumped my arms.
“What about coloring books? I can pick a few of them up from the store after I get off if you want.”
I caved back into myself. “Never mind.”
“Maybe you can invite your mother over. When’s the last time you talked to her?”
“I don’t want to talk to Mama. Mama doesn’t do good by me.”
She helped with my abduction. She gave him my hand when I wasn’t looking. She caught the hunter’s prey after pretending to be its friend and handed it over to him. I, the deer, the prey. Jonah, the camouflage, the hunter.
Jonah found my face in his hands and kissed me all over as if I were a star to him. Would his kisses open? Would he stuff me into his mouth? My face wiggled out of his hands but his hands needed me in them so he united us back together. He told me I’d never know how much he loved me and I was his Creole beauty, kissing the words into my ear before he left me in my golden cage, uneaten.
He left a shard of strawberry jam toast on his plate too, and it unveiled a truth to me. I’d never be the perfect wife Mama taught me to be. The night Jonah kneeled on the ground, Mama used the next night to preach to me the philosophy of how to mother a man, how to be a good wife. I was taught the easiest step was to cook him a breakfast so good he’d leave nothing on his plate. I failed every morning.
The strawberry toast twirled in my hand, the gaze of the sun giving it a bloody gloss through the windows of the cosmic kitchen. I brought it into my mouth, beneath my teeth, and did not taste jam but a piece of Jonah.
“Mama, you told me to be a good wife and to keep his house clean and his stomach fed. You told me not to make him angry and if I did then to apologize quickly and never let it happen again,” She took shape in the empty space of the kitchen. “Don’t make Jonah regret marrying me. I should do all these things because I’m lucky to have Jonah. My lucky star. My lucky Jonah!”
“Mama, what would you say if you knew Jonah ate stars in the dark?”
Jean Arceneaux, Jonah’s great-grandfather and a Frenchman who gave his final days to the lowlands of Louisiana, built a Queen Anne in a vast field guarded by elder oak trees to fulfill the childhood dream of his wife, Paulette. She wanted a Victorian palace to exist for herself and the children of her children. An estate immune to the doom of a hurricane’s eye, devoted to old Gothicism with paintings of dead men and women pierced into the ribs of the house.
The Queen Anne was willed into Jonah’s spoon-fed hands after the announcement of our marriage. The day we moved in, my finger pointed at the blue skin of the house peeling away, telling all who witnessed it that healing was begged for. He asked me what the new color of the house should be. I said black because I wanted it to look like a castle for a vampire, but he told me no. He always told me no without explaining why he decided on no.
I was hopeless during my first days at the ancient house. It was so large that it felt impossible to lick every part of it with my rubber gloves. It took me two weeks to learn how to peel away the dirty layers in a timely way. Another two weeks to learn that I hated the house. Another to learn that a bayou shimmered in the faraway backyard forest. I only discovered it after I could no longer stand to listen to the heartbeat of the walls that thumped every day at noon. I ran out of the estate, south and south until a northern ocean waved at me.
This became my new life, crisscrossed in the uncut grass while I watched the water tell me stories. My friendship with the bayou gave birth to little questions that fluttered like wild birds, hundreds of them. If I were to put my hands into the water, would I be pulled with it? Would I find what swayed beyond the bayou, beyond the rivers it came from? Would I find where it ended? Every hour, a hoard of pelicans soared above my head and I wanted to fly with them, into the water worlds and discover secrets I wasn’t meant to know.
My fingers braided into prayer, and I spoke to the god of the bayou I created in my mind. Tell me, tell me! But the only answer I got was a finger wrapped in Spanish moss pressing to hidden lips, breathing the sound of shush into my ear. Little Odelia, you have no business knowing the secrets of my bayou!
“I can tell you any secret you want.”
My eyes opened from prayer to find the rejection of the bayou god’s wishes, a woman. She stood against a lemon sky that squeezed between the dark fingers of the bald cypress trees, a goddess amongst a mortal, an answer to the unanswered. She was close enough that I could see black curls pirouetting at her shoulders, a ruffled dress beetling at her waist in a fall of white. But far enough where I could not know if she had moles or freckles, sapphire eyes, or ones bright with jasper. She was of a silent rage but I heard her. She was not screaming but I heard her screams. She was not crying but I heard her cries.
I stared at her for so long that time lost itself between us. I was afraid to blink. Would she disappear if I did? I blinked once, twice, three times and she did not move. She was still there and I was still sitting in the grass.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
Wind brushed me, brushed her, brushed the world behind the cypress trees. North and north!
“Where do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“I’m not good at guessing.”
“Guess!”
“Somewhere far away. Far into the bayou, maybe. Did I guess right?”
She smiled. “What secret do you want to know?”
“Where does the bayou end?”
“Before I tell you, I need to know if you’re good at keeping secrets.”
Jonah gripped my bare breast once, squeezing it as if it relieved him of some stress. He was inside me but it felt more like I was inside him, that he’d eaten me and there was no way to make me full again, no way out of him. “I know we’re not married yet but don’t tell anyone. Let it stay between us.” I listened to him like I always did and did not question why he’d eaten my body after only knowing it for a week. I kept our sins in my memory and the other thousand sins that not even God knew about.
“Yes. I’m good at keeping secrets. I have no one I can tell them to.”
“The bayou ends where the stars go.”
“Where do the stars go?”
“Their home. The land of the stars. That’s where the bayou ends. But only people they like can go.”
I imagined myself walking into the bayou until my skull was swording the water like a gator’s head. I’d swim until the water opened to a land that spread so far that it’d never ended, lands Jonah would never see. It’d be my little secret and I’ve already proved so many times how good I was at keeping secrets!
I ascended from the grass, up and down, my eyes polished from the gleam against her words. “I want to go! Can you take me?”
“You have something they don’t like. I can’t take you until you’ve gotten rid of it.”
My feet settled back into the grass. “What is it that I need to get rid of?”
A sudden silence struck her, as if an invisible hand held her mouth, breathing do not tell her into her ear. You’ve already said enough! Bayou god, is that you? My invisible hands stretched to the woman, made the powerful hands powerless, and then she opened her freed lips, breathing, “The Star Eater,” into my ear.
The stars coupling with the yellow sky gasped. I gasped too.
“Jonah.” His name on my tongue sparked a flame against it. I swallowed, thick and burning. Jonah, is this what you tasted when you ate that star? A world of fire eating you inside, tearing you apart until you were so close to the threat of becoming ash? Only ash.
Her break from me was sudden, and our first conversation ended. Her head moved with the wind of the water, pulling north, to the place where the stars went. I smiled a real smile. God of the Bayou, you can’t shush me anymore. I just learned the secrets of your bayou!
Every day at noon, the touch of fingers laced into my hands, wet and gentle. They pulled me out of the Queen Anne and into a tiptoe trip to the bayou. She’d always be there waiting for me, the both of us under the shower of trees. This became my new life, crisscrossed in the uncut grass while I looked at the woman whose legs I never saw. Sometimes she wouldn’t speak to me at all and only watched me. We were always in a staring contest and we both won. Sometimes she did talk but only to counter what I told her
“Jonah is going to start teaching me how to be a woman soon. He said I’m too childminded.”
“How can he teach you how to be a woman if he is not one himself?”
“I don’t know how he’ll do it but I know he has a plan. He always has a plan.”
She hated Jonah’s name, the punctuation of it, how airy it felt against the tongue. I was told to never mention him again but I never listened because I knew she was the only one who would listen.
“I didn’t want to marry him but I had no choice.”
“You did and you chose wrong.”
“Mama told me if I didn’t marry him then I’d be stuck with her for the rest of my life. But now I’m going to be with Jonah forever.”
“She hates you.”
“I know. I don’t think Mama wishes I was born.”
She was nameless too. I told her mine but she already knew it.
“Odelia sounds like a white flower.” She said.
“I’m named after my Papa. His name was Odelion. He died on the couch when I was six. Mama told me not to tell anyone I saw blood on his chest.”
“Mama hated Papa too, didn’t she?”
She did this a lot, know everything about me even though I knew nothing about her. It was as if she knew me before I knew myself, as if she knew who I’d be before I was born. She looked my age, but she felt wiser, wiser than any elder or priest. The more I talked to her, the more I thought she could walk on clouds if she wanted to. Her existence felt wrong but right enough that I wanted to be her. I believed she could frighten God if they ever spoke to each other.
One evening the sky behind her spread into a pink dust, the violet clouds floating, the stars hiding behind them. They always watched. Always listened.
“I have to leave. Jonah will be home soon. He sold property in New Orleans with his father today and I know he’ll be hungry. But you already know this, don’t you?”
The woman departed from me without a goodbye, our conversation ended again. Her reflection in the mirror wrinkled the water floor and her white dress swam against it, and I wanted to swim too. The mud rose between my toes in my descent into the bayou. She looked at me and frowned. We were two skeletons living in a cimmerian pool.
The blur on her face eclipsed every feature. Even so close to her, I could not tell if her nose was wide or small, if her lips were full or thin. But I did see her eyes and how they were not sapphire or jasper because there was a universe in them. I saw tiny stars in the void. What were their names?
“Did the star that Jonah ate have a name?”
She stepped back from me, back and back until her eyes were not sparkling. “It was too young to have a name. That’s why he ate it. It was the easiest to take.”
And she was gone again, her head slithering so far away that I started to lose her and even wondered if she’d drowned but she hadn’t. Each time she left me, she reached the end of the bayou and walked on a land that harbored a star door. When she opened it, she found palaces made from a million suns staring down at her, so bright God would squint if He gazed upon it. In the starry world, she was a queen, the stars collecting themselves in a glistening crown above her head. The black lands stretched into celestial realms still waiting to be seen by me! One day I’ll be able to walk through the star door and run up the dark hills with the woman by my side, our feet beating against an unknown planet. I will taste the burn of the stars on my tongue, the pelt of their fire on my flesh with stardust on my dress, as they’d clap for us while a rain of golden glitter fell from a berry blue sky.
If Jonah knew of the woman at the bayou, it was a choice of his to never speak of her in front of me. There was always a war seething into the hills of his pale face, facing a foe I never saw but I knew there was only one possible enemy. Did he want to slay her? Did he want to embrace knighthood? The same way it was embraced when he defended me from his mother’s sword nail? He was a long shadow in front of me the first day we met, my last day, and the armor of being the first son was a powerful steel. It shielded me from the right accusations of me stealing out of his mother’s garden.
Mama was hired to clean his rich parents’ castle of a house and she’d taken me with her. I hopped from bush to bush until the honeysuckle shrub winked at me. They looked like jellyfish made into flowers so I picked out eleven ocean pets and gave them names before I squeezed their jelly onto my tongue. I ruined the shrub’s beauty, imperfected the perfect, and Jonah’s mother would never forgive me just like she’d never forgiven me for being a shade too brown. I couldn’t remember all of her insults but I did remember how Jonah’s eyes watered into love the moment he saw me. There was nectar on my tongue when he gifted me with a heart-shaped locket that was bought for another woman. He asked me how old I was, nineteen then, and the man in him howled.
The perfect age, he told me.
The perfect man, Mama told me.
I slashed the locket from my neck and tossed it into the sky, the edge of it forming a crescent sun in its descent into the water.
“It’s good that you got rid of that.” Her presence popped into my vision.
“He’ll probably notice that it’s gone. He likes it when I wear it.”
“You should stop doing things that he likes.”
“But Mama said I won’t be a good wife if I don’t do what he likes.”
“You don’t have to listen to her.”
“But I do. Mama told me if I don’t listen to her then I’ll get myself in trouble.”
“In the place where the stars go, you can’t get in trouble.”
“Then take me there. Please,”My eyes glazed. “I don’t want to be with Jonah forever.”
“You can’t leave yet. You have to get rid of him. I’ve already told you this.”
“But you didn’t tell me how I’m supposed to do that.”
She was silent for a long while. “Think of what Mama used to do.”
Everything around us listened. The grass spider that raced across my toes. The black swallowtail that fluttered past my ear. The floating turtles and water moccasins and the bluegills and alligators. The cypress trees listened too. They all asked, what did Mama used to do?
I gave them no answer and left them to let their minds wander about Mama’s secrets. I was the secret bearer. It was what I was best at, and no one would know the million secrets I knew. They were mine, the only thing in the world that belonged to me.
I caught Jonah smiling too wide one night, his head cradled against the arm of the velvet green couch, his eyes pointed up at the ceiling. It was a jester’s smile, one that might’ve made him rise up into a dance with the sway of bells in the living room air if I wasn’t watching him from the corners of the hallway. I knew he was thinking of his star-eating ways and how he took joy out of splintering the bond between me and the stars. It was his greatest accomplishment.
And to stop me from ever walking through their star door, he reminded me of what I was—a wife first, a dreamer last—by inviting his family over for a random dinner, and obedience was to prepare the house for them. I shampooed the pine floors with disinfectants that smelled like lemon and buffed every window clean before I opened their wings to let the outside breathe its earthy scent into the house. I freed the olive damask walls and the mushroom lamps from dust bunnies. I caught them lathering up the legs of the Louis XV console that kneeled beneath the filigree wall mirror, so I swatted them away too because Jonah’s mother was a germaphobe and she’d spot any mistake just as she’d spotted his mistake in marrying me.
Her eyes were greened with envy the night she watched her son glide me across the marble floor for our first dance, my wedding dress itching my waist like thorns. She introduced him to a girl during the reception who looked more like them—a mixed creole, almost Passé Blanc—something she did throughout the entirety of Jonah’s three-month courtship of me. But he never fell in love with their pale skin. He never wanted to eat them.
Before the white Volkswagen took us away, Mama whispered to me that I needed to prove my love to him even though I had no love to give him. When our bodies were wet against each other, I imagined my nails clawing into my chest and pulling out my heart as a gift to him. It breathed wildly, bloody heart droplets ruining our white sheets. “For you”, I would’ve told him.
“For you, Odelia.” Jonah’s father handed me a bouquet, a lavender ribbon wreathing around rosemary, columbines, violets, pansies, fennel, rues, and a lonely daisy. All stolen from his mother’s little garden, the woman that hid behind her husband, so much younger than him, so much anger sizzlingoff her. She could not melt her husband so she decided to melt me instead.
The dining room popped with creole faces, pop after pop, with each chair filled in and a glass bowl of gumbo in front of every member. Jonah’s parents, his twin sisters, his four uncles and their wives, and Jonah himself all involved themselves in gossip. A cousin created an outside child with a family friend, the lightest scandal to exist in a family like Jonah’s. The greatest scandal of all was him giving me his last name.
The morning before our wedding, I eavesdropped on a conversation between one of the twins and an aunt, both debating the strangeness of our union. We were all in the courtyard of the Cathedral and I hid behind a chosen column to listen, staring above at the spider-webbed roof.
“Isn’t she a bit too young and a bit too strange?” The twin asked.
“I think all of us think this, but you know Jonah likes the younger girls.” The aunt responded.
“But out of all the women he could pick, why her? She’s not our kind of creole.”
“Well to Jonah, she’s the kind of woman he wants. Maybe he’s a little strange too on the inside.”
A hundred eyes watched us when we were declared married under the clouds of God. I saw past Jonah, past my veil that gifted me the eyes of a ghost, and gave all my attention to the Virgin Mary colorfully glassed into the window, silencing the claps and the smear of Jonah’s lips against me. I was bludgeoned with guilt but no blood left my body.
“Eat, Delia.” Jonah’s voice hid behind the chatter of his family.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You will be later tonight.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. I’ll take you to New Orleans tomorrow if you behave.”
“I don’t want to go to New Orleans!”
The heat of his large hand clutched the thigh beneath my skirt, squeezing it and commanding me. To forgive himself, he soothed his fire against the flesh. Up and down.
“Eat, Delia. Ma is going to notice and I don’t want her embarrassing you. You know that she likes to find any reason to attack you.”
I took the spoon and flooded it with gumbo before I plunged it into my mouth. I ate in likeliness to a person who hadn’t eaten in weeks. Barbaric in a way that placed me in a different time. I was a warrior having his last supper before marching into battle to be killed by a spear. I ate until every eye was on me. Until Jonah was the embarrassed one.
He lifted me out of the chair and locked me in our room, the darkness riding on my back, the taste of gumbo on my tongue, the heat of his hand still on my thigh. The light glowed like white mist under the doorway and it told me to come to it. The mist brought the sound of Jonah’s family into the room. What’s wrong with me? Am I sick, psychotic, or stupid? Do I need to go to church to seek guidance from God? Am I possessed?
Jonah’s great-grandmother was in the room with me. I turned to the ghost and asked, “When you were my age, did people think you were possessed too?”
Jonah told me a secret. He was in the kitchen and I was in the hallway, both of our backs glued to a wall that kept us from seeing each other.
He told the house phone: “Something is wrong with Odelia. The house is always filthy now. She doesn’t cook for me anymore. Even her appearance is messed up. Her hair is never done. She wears the same clothes every day. Never showers. I don’t know what to do, Ma.”
And,
“She’s always at the bayou talking to herself. I swear she’s losing her mind.”
And,
“I knew she was a little strange but it never bothered me. I thought I could change her.”
My name was Strange before it was Odelia. When I was a girl, a pastor told Mama I was strange and needed prayer, possibly an exorcism after he caught me trying to bring life back into a dead raccoon—a raccoon that he claimed was dead because of me. But that was before the pastor knew Mama was even stranger and forbade her from entering the Baptist doors again. I’d scare the little girls with my stories of the ghost heroes that saved me from the ghost villains and I never knew what a friend was because of this. Mama said my imagination was dangerous but she had a dangerous imagination too. She once convinced herself that my cat Illian was sent to our cottage to spy on her. I watched with raw and red eyesas she put the orange feline into the ground. She told me a dog ate him, but I saw no suggestion of that. All of Ilian’s fur was stitched together, no blood. But his green eyes were open, and they told on her.
Did my eyes tell on me? Jonah would probably say, “Yes, Delia. They do! They really do!”
By the bedroom window, I sat in a theater box and watched the stars perform a play. They gathered together to create a deity sinking a sword into the see-through chest of a starman. Both of them were strings of golden fire gleaming against the dark heaven. Only I could see the constellation. It belonged to me and me only. I couldn’t wait for the days when a thousand star stories would be written for me, each night a new and brighter tale.
I tried to wipe away my smile with my hands, dragging my lips down but my smile kept rising. Rising and rising until it rose high into the sky and caught the stars’ attention. They started to laugh and I laughed with them. My ears were volcanic.
One of the stars was kicked from heaven for laughing too hard, falling through the dark clouds as Lucifer once did before time. Bringing the light to earth, bringing the light to me, telling me to make a wish! But before I could, the bed behind me screeched while the fallen star shattered the earth’s shell and cometed into the dark world beneath ours, greeted with the smile of the devil.
Jonah and I held onto each other with our eyes for so long that we became two statues in a shrine of darkness. Who’d come in and find us as stoned lovers? His mother or Mama? Would the tragedy of it all turn them into stone too? I think to stop this from happening Jonah forced his flesh to come back to life before he buried himself under the cotton duvet. A boy hiding from the monster in the shadows. He probably prayed for me not to join him in bed so I didn’t. I kept my place at the window and continued to watch my star stories.
Jonah widowed me before he died. The diamond locked on my finger lost its light, drunken by his refusal to be around me. He woke up before I did and slipped into the outside world I was forbidden to see. He kept his hello-kisses to himself and returned to the Queen Anne hours too late. Our room only belonged to me now, his body resting in another coffin far away from me. I was not bothered by this change because it gave me wings and like a bat, I flew behind the curtain of the night forest to visit the bayou. Before Jonah would’ve stopped my flight into the shadows but we slept in different coffins now, remember?
She was there. She was always there. The great distance between us made her white dress appear as a candle floating in an abyss but when she blew into my ear with her voice, I heard the fire in her words.
“Are you ready to go?”
“Yes.”
“But you have not done what you’re supposed to do. Why do you lie when you say you’re ready to go?”
“I’ve spent so much time daydreaming about going to the land of the stars that I’ve delayed actually going to it. I’m a silly girl, you see. Just like Mama always says.”
“The stars will close their doors soon and you’ll be stuck here forever! Is that what you want?”
“No! Please, no!”
“Then stop daydreaming and exist in reality! Only in reality!” She bared her teeth at me before the lips around them lifted into a smile too wide, inhumanly wide. A chorus of laughter came after but I did not laugh with her. Her body crumbled, her spine pointed into an arch, her fingers spiraling.
“Star eater, star eater, star eater,” A song without any other lyric except, “Star eater, star eater, star eater!”
Her long-nailed finger pointed at me, wet and trembling. “O’ Delia! Your unlucky star! Your unlucky Jonah has done something terrible, and the stars will never forgive him! O’ Delia, your unlucky Jonah must lose all of his luck before you can become lucky Odelia.”
I saw Jonah eating the young star again, how it screamed under his sharp teeth, how it wanted to be freed from his bite.
“He’s a monster.” I said.
“He must go. Forever.” She told me, still far away.
I looked at the stars above me and found them nodding. Yes, yes, he must go. They whispered together like a chant of a million sizzling snakes.
My last meal was the bowl of gumbo that made Jonah’s cheek blush a child’s embarrassment. I couldn’t remember if it’d been days, weeks, or a month since that day, but it felt like a memory from years ago. I was not hungry but there was a thirst drying against my tongue, a vampiric kind of thirst, the thirst that killed men if they did not drink. I walked on the encaustic tiles and they begged me for it, but I apologized. It was all I could do.
“You must understand. It is not you who gets to taste Jonah’s blood for the first time. I’m sorry you will never know a different flavor than being walked on.”
All around me were the taunt of Jonah’s footsteps, slow and cautious, in rhythm with the grandfather clock mocking us in the living room. He walked around the house as if he was hiding from something or someone.
At the head of the antique table, a shard of strawberry toast was abandoned with a kitchen knife next to it, red jam smearing against the metal. Before the kitchen could be used as Jonah’s hiding spot, I stole the knife and ran up the dark staircase with the echoes of boots chasing after me. We were in a sprinting contest with each other and I won the moment I got to the door before he did. But after the click of the door from the outside, I accepted I’d lost and I’d been sealed. We were racing for two different things.
If he looked at me now, what would he see? A woman in the image of a demon? Sharp horns with sharper teeth? His mother probably told him to send me back to hell but there was not a hell wide enough to hold all the fire that swayed within me.
I crawled to the window, curled the curtain slightly, and stared into the forest at the side of the Queen Anne, the night before still lingering in it. At the head of the house, the iron gate piked with iron fleur de lis opened, Jonah breaking through it. He looked into the trees for so long that I wondered if he saw the woman drifting from tree to tree. His boot stepped forward but a sound stopped him. He peeked into the window above him and found me tapping against it, tapping against his fear of me. This summoned him back into the house but not back to our bedroom.
All day the house groaned under his footsteps. He walked everywhere, seemingly back and forth, but never by our bedroom door. He attempted to once, his feet marching up the staircase but they stopped suddenly and they did not move for a while. I imagined his face, how it whitened at the sight of the door, bible in hand, cross around neck. His boots descended back to the first floor and I was left to listen to his walking for hours, walking as if it would give him the solution to fix me. My poor Jonah…
Finally, he came to the door after the sky blackened and opened it with a speech he’d rehearsed a thousand times. The edge of the knife in my boot nipped at my ankle.
“Delia, this ends now.” He glared at his feet where he found me bowing before him.
“Jonah-”
“I thought I could fix you. I was warned of your sickness but this is a burden too heavy for me to carry now. I’m taking you to a place that’ll help you in the morning.”
“Let me show you something first.”
“No. I’m done with you.” His voice was without love. I’d taken all of it from him, but I doubt it ever existed.
I reached for his hands, our wet palms joined together. “Let me show you something. It’ll be the last thing I’ll ever show you. Please, Jonah. Please, please, please.”
I pulled at the last of his affection, it was so tiny that it would last for a few seconds. “What is it?”
I pointed at the window behind me, smiling wildly. “The bayou. There’s something in the bayou. I’ve been hiding it from you for a while now.”
He frowned. “There’s nothing in the bayou, Delia.”
“Yes, there is! There’s always been something in the bayou! Let me show you and you won’t have to worry about me. It ends now. Yes, everything ends at the bayou.”
I guided Jonah to the trees, into the wind of the blue night with a door closed behind us. He wanted to pull away but there had to be some curiosity that allowed him to follow me. Maybe Jonah was a weird kid too. Maybe we were more alike than we realized! Did ghosts talk to him? Could he breathe life back into dead animals with a secret word? Could he see his great-grandmother in the shadows? Oh, I wished I had asked these things before! I knew nothing about him at all. He knew nothing of me. Jonah, why did you marry me?
Mama, why did you make me marry Jonah when you were a horrible wife too?
Papa Odelion wasn’t the only man I found with blood on his chest. I discovered my stepfather dead at the kitchen table, his flannel a wet fabric of red. The next one was in the hallway, his body crumbled against the scarlet wall like a teddy bear sitting down. Mama’s new husband was probably lying on a floor with a dark pool of blood haloing around his body. She’d remember I existed and I’d have to hear another lesson about how to treat men. But Mama didn’t know her philosophy was a dead philosophy. She didn’t know that in a few moments, I would be flying with the stars.
The oak trees watched me take Jonah to the water, their heads turning as we passed them by, frowns on their trunks. The stars were out, whispering to each other too. It’s him, yes, it’s him, yes, yes, it is. The woman was waiting for me with a smile but Jonah ate it when he took me from her.
“No, let’s go. I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”
I tried to break free from him but his grip was tight and desperate. He wouldn’t let the water woman steal his Creole beauty, his golden prize, his “Delia!”. He thought saying my name would snap me out of my trance like a magic word but he didn’t know I’d already said my magic word. His emerald eyes bled away, two rubies glaring the gaze of hate at me. We’d both become wild animals, both snarling at each other. We were two wolves fighting in the night. The moon’s eye watched us along with the stars.
I reached into my boot and turned the knife into a shard of strawberry jelly with a piercing kiss into Jonah’s heart. I gave him another kiss and another, for all the kisses he’d given me. These sharp kisses turned his white blouse into a thick sea of blood, the first and last plague. He ran away from my knife to stop the sea in his chest from spreading, to stop the possibility of him drowning under it, the possibility of death. No sound came from his opened mouth. Not a whimper. No scream. The shock of witnessing his blood swallowed his voice completely. Another thing swallowed him too.
His focus on the sea gushing out of his heart made him victim to the bigger and more violent monster. It was too late for him to notice the ocean of grass he stood in, that dark field of infinity, the uncut grass gliding around his trembling legs. It was too late for him to notice that his red hand against his strawberry chest could not stop the coming blood water. The stars did not revolt, only watched him collapse to his knees as if he was seeing a holy shape behind the moon and the stars, something bigger than life but not too big to hide from a show of death. Jonah looked at me—south—with a true gape of betrayal before he went to sleep. Godman, no more, and the grass ocean tasted Jonah’s blood for the first time.
“Good night, my Jonah. My unlucky Jonah.” I said.
And the stars above me sang, screamed, cried, and laughed the same thing over and over. Star eater! Star eater! Star eater!
The knife fell out of my hand and it was graceful in its descent into the deep of the grass water. The bayou hugged my body when I slid into it, wet and so very gentle. A smile was on my lips and it only widened when I felt the cushion of her lips on my cheek, love beating through me for the first time. Hand in hand, we floated into the waiting darkness ahead of us. We swam and swam until we were two gator heads swording through the water to reach the place where only the stars go.
Above us, the stars still cried: Star eater! Star eater! Star eater!
Alexandria Britten is a writer and a proud Louisiana native. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University in 2022, studying Creative Writing and English Literature. Her favorite genres are fantasy and southern fiction with a nice combination of gothic horror. In most of her work, she uses Louisiana as her setting which allows her to depict the Louisiana Creole experience and the complex dynamics that exist within the community. She loves vampires, dragons, magic, writing, and her Siberian Husky, Dakota.
Punt Volat 