Free fiction #186 – Robert Bagnall

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We Are All Made of Stars

Robert Bagnall

If I am cursed, at least I didn’t forget to demand eternal youth. Salt and pepper hair, but a baby’s skin. I am a million millennia old. For my kind, that is childlike. The reality? I am only just starting out, I have barely scraped the surface in pursuit of my allotted task.

But if you were to glimpse me—you waiting for the taxi as it pulls up to the rank, me getting out, brushing shoulders; sitting on the next stool in Starbucks, our hands meet when we both reach for sugar; in line behind you for nachos at the game, apologizing for bumping—you may guess my age as late-thirties, mid-forties, no more than a well-preserved early-fifties. The trick is not in what you see but what I am, just coincidence our forms resemble each other so.

But then, were you not taught to believe you were made in the image of others? Would you worship me if you knew? Deconstruct me, reconstruct me as myth?

My demand for release has been granted. There is but one way.

We are all made of stars. It’s not just a metaphor, a poetic analogy. It’s literal. Carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. The quarks, leptons and bosons within. And, within those, like Russian dolls, structure layered in other dimensions for which you have yet to find words, maybe will never find what it is there are words to attach to. It is much like living within a hall of mirrors, reality diminishing in staccato steps, getting ever further away, ever harder to grasp.

I exist at the heart of those matryoshka dolls, bang in the middle. Of a star.

I know. You thought I said I looked like you. I do. But only in that dimension. Concepts that are beyond you tend not to fit a fixed vocabulary. All I ask is that you understand there is such a thing as the incomprehensible.

Pick a star. Not just any star. One that exploded an age before any of you were born, smearing itself across the universe, a supernova sunset of bruise purple and sulfur yellow a dozen light years wide. And then drifting, coalescing, cooling, becoming… well, becoming everything.

My star, then, is a star that is no longer there. Think how far it is scattered. I can see it as ripples, a graduating, tapering smear in space. Imagine a shell-hole, galaxies wide, but turned inside out and upside down, star stuff scattered to its edges. I can sense it, taste it. I work within that smudge. Your world is within that smudge. That is the coincidence that has brought us together.

And now I must return to my star. That is my curse. I collect its pieces. I find it atom by atom, add it with shaking hands to a glass jar in my sock drawer. It’s half full now, up to the bottom of the red Pik-Nik balloon. I gaze at the contents through the misty, distorting glass. We are all made of stars, and this is my way of writing my history, my origin story, one atom at a time.

It is strange, but when I find a missing piece, I sense it as a color, furnace scarlet. You would regard it as a mild form of synesthesia. I do not have it with other things. Except with tarragon. That’s a deep turquoise, balanced precisely on a razor blade between blue and green.

How do I know it is from my star? Didn’t I explain that? It’s like an eighth sense. No, I don’t mean ‘sixth’. Sight, taste, touch… oh, never mind. You have not the words. It’s there in the vibration of the atoms. It is my curse. And my purpose.

At the incandescent center of my own star. Only then will I find release.

There’s a piece of my star in you. In the middle of you, there is the middle of me.

You won’t see me coming. I may be stranger who knocks into you on mass transit or the one-night stand that doesn’t work out. Perhaps I am the cashier who gently brushes your fingers whilst handing you your change. Or I could be the over-friendly salesman, a paw on your shoulder as he explains the optional extras. A street magician who takes you by the wrist and, moments later, hands you back your watch.

Think about it. Who preceded the slight stabbing pain in your side, the feeling of heartburn, the stitch? I will be back in my lair by then, tweezering the single taken atom into my jar. It make no perceptible difference but over time, over years, over decades, over eons…

I know what you are thinking. None of this makes sense. That is not how the science works. But consider your ancients. They stared up into the heavens and contemplated those glittering points of lights and saw there the shapes of animals and storybook characters sketched out. They watched the stars’ movements and read meaning into them, saw portents of plentiful harvests or blessed marriages. The stars told them to attack or retreat. They saw them as the movements of gods or mythic narrative played out as if on a stage.

Now think how similar you are to those, whose thoughts you find alien and laughable.

But you know so much more?

Really?

Yes, you have turned a few more leaves in the book of knowledge, but all it has taught you is the arrogance to believe that you are but a chapter from the end. That you will soon be able to put it back on the shelf and sigh, satisfied that you now know everything.

But you have barely started.

When I look up into the night sky, I do not see a moment of some long-gone present, as you do, or read implied meaning, as your forebears did. Take it from me, who is so different from you, when I say I find the augur with his entrails and the particle physicist with her cyclotrons and accelerators virtually indistinguishable. To me, one is just a footstep ahead of the other.  It’s just a question of where you stand to gaze upon the firmament.

July 26th, 2024

Robert Bagnall was born in Bedford, England in 1970. He has written for the BBC, daily and Sunday
newspapers, and government ministers. He is the author of the sci-fi thriller ‘2084 – The Meschera Bandwidth’, and the anthology ‘24 0s & a 2’ which collects 24 of his sixty-odd published stories. Both are available from Amazon. He can be contacted via his blog at meschera.blogspot.com

more stories here

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Also look out for:

Karl Dandenell’s Ruby, Throat and Gold – a dark fantasy about the arrogance of a usurper and the sweet revenge of a master of his craft.
Sean MacKendrick’s Keepers: mighty artwork designed to be seen from space -for a very good reason.
Kai Delmas’ Under Fire, Under Steel – robot armies and human dilemmas.
Lyndsey Croal’s – Space for One, a sci-fi tale about hard choices and living with the consequences.
Holley Cornetto’s The Orchard of Dreams, a wistful fantasy.

Or over a hundred and fifty other free flash fiction stories.

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