The stars are falling.
They are falling, and Lucy is amongst them, and nothing she can do will ever change that.
It is sad.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ says her father. ‘I’m here. I’ll catch you.’
Lucy is three years old and her father’s arms are wide. The water of the pool spreads broad and terrifying. The space is vast, and she is so tiny.
And all the while, the stars continue to fall.
So many of them, streaming, twinkling one last time, then winking out forever in the vast darkness.
‘We are not tiny, my girl,’ says her mother. ‘We are exactly as big as we need to be.’
Now Lucy is about to take the podium, hands clenched tight, terrified of standing in front of all the other students. She has always felt so weak, so insignificant. Her mother always told her this isn’t so, and Lucy tried her best to believe it.
Hadn’t she always tried?
Pushing back as hard as people pushed her, never giving up, never.
Yet the stars still fall.
And now she finds that her mother was wrong, all along.
Lucy isn’t big.
Not at all.
It’s the darkness which is big – endless – and with every star that falls, it is bigger.
‘Pulse is rising,’ says a voice from the darkness. ‘PET shows metabolic rate through the roof.’
‘Good thing we started already,’ comes the reply. ‘Doesn’t look like she’s got long left.’
Lucy tries to ask her mother what’s happening, then frowns.
That can’t be right. Her mother? Her mother is dead. Dead and buried; Lucy remembers the funeral, the wet grass, the crowd gathered.
She sees it for a moment, feels that same ice-cold dread which is also – guiltily – utter freedom.
You are dead, she thinks. Free at last.
Then the stars fall here, and the scene is wiped away.
‘Help me, mummy,’ says the little girl. ‘My knee!’
Lucy blinks. She is in a place which is no place, crouching beside a girl with a face she should know.
‘What is it, love?’ Lucy asks.
‘It was Henry,’ accuses the girl. ‘He took catty. And then…’
Lucy realises the little girl is Laura, and at the exact same moment that she remembers her daughter – her birth, her childhood, tears and trips to school and beach holidays and ice cream, growing up and boys and bad mistakes, moving out and rows and recriminations, make-ups and grandchildren, and all of it – at the exact same moment, the little girl vanishes, replaced by a sad, tired woman in middle years.
‘She barely knows me,’ says Laura, and the stars fall faster than ever.
She shudders, and passes into darkness.
‘That’s it,’ says the bland voice. ‘First wave synched and mirrored.’
‘Just in time,’ replies the other voice. ‘She’s fading fast. Think parietals have gone.’
‘Left or right?’
‘Both.’
The first voice grunts.
‘That didn’t happen in the mice.’
‘I know.’
‘Not in any of them.
‘I know.’
‘I wonder…’
And for an awful moment, Lucy is back in her body.
The light is too bright, the air is too still.
She wants to breathe, but her lungs won’t move. She wants to scream, but her tongue is dust dry. She wants to speak to the figures looming over her, to tell them she is not dead, that they have to turn all the machines off and let her go, but there is a blank place in her mind where her words should be. A dark cloth covers all her mind, has laid thick on her for so long. And how long has it been there? For years, she thinks, and yet why has she not noticed it?
And then she realises that she does have her words, after all.
So many words, sparkling and clearer than they have been for as long as she can remember.
She has her words, it’s just that they are somewhere else.
Her lungs burn.
‘Let go, little one.’
It is her father again.
Lucy is sitting with him, watching the bright place where her body is dying.
‘But… but I don’t want to go,’ she tells him, then she starts to cry.
Behind her in the darkness, the stars are falling once more. Only, now they are falling up.
The sky is brightening. A million stars, a billion, shooting and streaking, faster and more brilliant than she ever thought possible.
And in the room where the air is still, her body cannot breathe, and the pain in huge, and Lucy cries and cries and cries.
‘You remember Theseus, don’t you?’ says her father. ‘Well, it’s like that.’
Lucy watches as the room fades to black.
The stars are so bright.
And suddenly, she understands.
She sees it all: her life, and the lives of her children. The time she spent, every moment – every gleaming smile and every broken heart – every instant, sparkling in a star above her head.
‘He had a ship,’ says Lucy, and she sighs, and her strands of digital consciousness expand, stretching in their new silicon skin, pushing, testing their bounds, their horizons.
She is so big.
So old, and so fresh and new at once.
‘Done,’ says the voice, and though it is still carefully modulated, Lucy can hear the excitement in it now. ‘Mirror up and running. I can see… Oh, it’s beautiful.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ corrects the other.
‘Yes, of course. And the…ah, the subject.’
‘Gone,’ says the other. ‘Metabolic rate close to zero, and cooling fast.’
Yes, thinks Lucy. Yes…and no.
She is the ship of Theseus now. Does it matter what wood the planks are made? The ship is the ship is the ship.
‘Can she hear us?’ says the first voice.
‘Lucy?’ says the second. ‘Are you there?
Amongst the blazing of a million unfallen stars, Lucy smiles.
She has also built a ship.
Where she will sail… Well, that remains to be seen.
Jamie Brindle writes tiny, strange stories and occasional long, strange stories. He has been writing for 25 years, and thus far no one seems to have been able to get him to stop. He lives with his beautiful badgery wife and three small, hyperactive children. He works as a GP. Limited NFTs of his work are available at Cargo. Find Jamie at @mazeman11 and www.jamiebrindle.com.
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash.
The story behind the story
Jamie tells us: “I wrote this story in response to a musical prompt given to me by my friend Jack Sharp, who is the frontman of folk/psych/rock band Wolf People and the creator of side project Large Plants. We were playing a game where he wrote a 30-second long piece of music, and I wrote a short story to go with it, and then he wrote a second piece of music in response to a separate story I wrote. So sort of cross-medium artistic mucking about!”
enjoyed it 🙂