—WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 

 

 The New Dark

 

        after Charles Simic

 

 

The stars know everything, even that there’s a sluiced tear in your heart, and that you will die before we turn twelve.

But the stars are secret-keepers, the very best kind, which is not always optimum, for I won’t learn any of this until after you’re dead.

Tonight, though, we sit on the roof, a pair of ragtag twins. Even up this high, on rusted trailer tin, we can hear the bull thrashing around below—swooped flings, and crashes, and shattered glasses, ridiculing and annihilating the things he professes to love. 

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if there had only been one of us?” you ask, in your quavering, almost-grown-up-girl voice.

I have, of course. A million times. “I would have wanted it to be you,” I say.

You kick my lower shin harder than you mean to, all heal, hangnail and callus. “Because you wanted me to live in torment, listening to this,” you say, slapping an open palm downward, “dealing with this shit?”

“Come on.”

You take a drag from one of Mom’s Tareytons, blow a funnel toward the Canis Major Dwarf, and hand the bone-dry butt to me, so I do the same, puff, inhale, exhale. You’re older, brother’s big sis, so I’ve always followed your lead.

“Life is cool, but it’s also bullshit, you know?” you say, facing the aurora borealis, the moon’s half-face shadowed over one cheek. 

I kick a pine cone into the dusk, boot it all the way up to Venus, Jupiter or Pluto, toward every real or excommunicated planet, and because gravity isn’t a thing there, the cone never falls back, but just disappears in the plum, dust-colored air like a last wish that never gets granted.

You haven’t told me, but I know. I have ears, it’s a trailer we live in. Plus, we’re twins, and that is its own unique taxonomy.

“This is going to sound super corny, but I think you’re going to do some really great shit when you’re older,” you say, your chipped fingernails clicking, cigarette butt fading into twilight ash.

Quickly I say, “What? Like, without you? But what about you?”

You chuff, half-laugh, as if caught in a vise, like an axe blade scudding off a boulder. “Be real. Always. You and me, we don’t have anything, but we’ve always been honest.”

That’s what I should have said, what I wanted to say, but you beat me to it, like you beat me being alive by nineteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. 

The night is leaky black. A roadkill crow.

For some reason, I feel brave enough. I reach out and take your hand, and hope to hell you can’t feel my stampeding pulse, or shaking fingers, though I know you can.

You take it, like a handout, and squeeze softly.

In the distance, a star nods off, looping glow, a yolk smear over your savage-looking blonde shag, and it’s as if you’re an angel sitting next to me, both real and unreal.

“You’re going to be astronomer when you grow up, just like you said,” I say, because I need to say something, and because I actually believe it for once.

You puff, suck, exhale, puff, suck, inhale. And then the moment turns into a charcoal smudge, same as the smoky trailer below

A deer tiptoes out of the brush, and then one more.

“You see that?”

Both lift their snouts toward the tree that grows the bad apples. They each rip one off, then spit them out, trampling away in the new dark.

 “Hey,” I say, straightening stiff, “you know you can tell me anything.”

“God, really?”

Below us, inside our trailer, the bull overturns a table, or sofa, or a life, like it’s something meant to be destroyed and punished, as walls collide.

You hold a finger to your lips, and then to mine. 

“Shhh,” you say. “Look at that star,” you say. “Right there. I mean, really, really look at it. I think it sees us back.”