The Stars from the Stairs

Sarah stood on the stairs, trash bag in hand, staring at the stars again. Another day ground down to the nub. A black bag filled to the brim. An evening blossoming into full dark. Another day turned to could-haves and maybe-should-haves. 

But here she stops. It’s different tonight. The orange glow on the horizon is no metaphor. Bags are packed, the car gassed-up and ready in the driveway, nose out to a street buzzing with the noise of neighbors’ generators. Each one a helicopter idling in the yard. She doesn’t have one. An avoided expense. An avoided complication. Just an avoidance maybe. Her house is dark and too warm for blankets. No sleep anyway. Not for her. She’s never been so conscious of the direction of the wind.

Tonight, her house is a mystery of candlelight and LED flashlights. The kids, the stars in her life story -- they must be, right? Of course. They’re pirates sailing the couch through an archipelago filled with shark infested reefs and her best cushions crashing against the dark shores of the kitchen floor. LED hurricane lanterns held high against the dark unknown. Imaginary X's marking the spots where dead men’s chests wait patiently for discovery by six and eight-year-old cut-throats. The twins are bloodthirsty tonight.

She faked a laugh as she served room-temperature SpagettiOs to three hungry sea dogs. A joke about booty. Not her taste in humor. But their taste in ship’s rations. A bead of sweat dripped down her spine. That wasn’t what they meant by crying with laughter.

She clicks off the flashlight’s pale blue beam to get a better view of the stars glowing overhead. Orion is a jewel-encrusted caricature. Is that his sword? She never noticed it before. This was the sky of Homer, of Scheherazade. Not of her time. The Milky Way is almost obnoxious in its insistent intensity. Is she falling into it? Careful, a real fall waits inches from her toes. Ten stairs down to a yard as crisp and dry as the saltines she shoved into her go bag. She prays they go uneaten.

She holds onto the moment. A delicious stillness fills her, her eyes filled with the light of a million million stars glimmering through an eternity of nothingness, of everything ever.

She is the star of her own life, is she not? Or is that just selfish? A modern conceit maybe. A peculiar delusion bred of too many generations manifesting their destinies. She’d heard once that everything she takes for granted was born in dying stars. Out there. The stars are the stars of this universe. Maybe.

Maybe her kids will sail out there some day. Ships like submarines in an endless ocean of vacuum, sails filled by radioactive winds. Are they exploring or escaping? Maybe not their first close-call by then.

How can something so clear and bright be so utterly out of her reach? Harder to see the pine trees bordering the yard. Just black silhouettes. Nothing has depth. No. Behind the trees that orange glow. Is it brighter? She can smell it now. She used to love the smoky aromas of fireplaces blazing in the neighborhood. Families home for the Holidays and all that. What is it now? Death knocking. If not that, at least the end of something.

She needs to get back to her phone. Why did she leave it inside? To get away for just a moment. A moment of normalcy on a too-dark night. You have to take out the trash, don’t you? They could be gone for days. Or maybe...

She clicks the flashlight back on. The beam catches a pair of low yellow eyes staring back at her near the whispering trees. Another raccoon, hungry for the bounty clutched in her left hand? Raccoon booty. That joke was kind of funny, really. No, the neighbor’s cat. She should call them. They need to get her inside before it gets any later.

She descends the stairs, literally a return to Earth. In a way, her stilted house is in an extremely low orbit.

Her flashlight is the Eye of Sauron, scanning for the raccoons she knows are out there. When was the last time she watched an adult movie? Not that kind of movie. Wow, that booty joke’s got legs, she realizes. The kids were right though they didn’t really understand the joke themselves. She chuckles and it almost makes it to her lips.

She saw a skunk in her yard once, smelled it a few times since. Do they eat trash like the raccoons? She hopes not. And the news said to watch for animals escaping the flames. Refugees from the forest making their own journey into unknown territories. Do they pack up their kids too, or just run for their lives and hope for the best?

She used to think hope was a positive force, a guiding light for a life of endless possibilities. But maybe she’d just been told to think that on the way to the mall. She probably read it on a billboard. Suddenly she’s overcome with a desperate yearning. A desire to wander through air conditioned shoe stores and pre-bankruptcy book stores and to browse sunglass kiosks, maybe stop for a giant cookie or a frothed orange smoothie, or just to smell that new clothes mall smell. So much is already gone, progressed into non-existence.

Hope is a dim star now, she thinks. A distraction, maybe just another delusion. She can’t help it, but man that’s grim. She’s got kids. She has to do better. They have great senses of humor, as much potential as she had when she was sailing her own parents’ couch. They’ll get their degrees and good jobs and reliable cars too, won’t they? Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll get shiny new spaceships instead. Maybe.

She’s between her house and the neighbor’s now. She looks up as if from the bottom of a steep canyon. The sky is a narrow band of twinkling light. Now it’s becoming obscured. Clouds scuttle past. Are they clouds? The smell is stronger now.

The trash is in the can, and she knows what she needs to do next. Time for a quick inventory of the pictures on the walls. There’s still room in the trunk. But she doesn’t hear the sirens yet. Maybe there’s still hope.