Quite So Many Stars

A Short Story by Shuvam Kabir

The lawn had gone all to hell. Like the finger of God had carved a green swath through it. But it wasn’t God’s lawn, and it wasn’t the old man’s either – it was mine now, and I aimed to teach it hate.

The cultivator was a damn nuisance, weighing 40 pounds and making a deafening roar. But it’s angry churning blades tore the earth and the weeds up easily, dragging me in its wake. Our old hill rose up behind me, behind the pale hulk of the house (my house, I suppose). In this early autumn evening, the scraggly trees edging the hill were dank black silhouettes against an orange sky. Above even them, the hill’s peak wreathed itself in a peculiar thin mist. There was a view of the heavens up there, on the rare nights the fog descended, and the hilltop poked through.

I fought the cultivator, or it fought me, chewing at the dirt, the grass, the weeds. It bit deep and drew mud. As I push-pulled it in streaks across the lawn, the green and brown were torn together into a flat, fertile plain. My father had had many great laments in the tail of his life, this damn lawn being among his last. The weakness had crept in his limbs slowly and infected my state of mind in the months since he’d passed. So it’d been maybe a year since the lawn had seen its last leveling.

Now, salt stung my eyes, and I cursed it and God and myself at the end. I was fair to wheezing after my hour of wroth. But the lawn was in its primordial state now, ready for grass sod, or maybe a rock garden, some small pretty thing that wouldn’t make my eyes and nose itch just to look at. I was near to deaf once I switched the cultivator off.

I heard the noise then. A yelping or crying. I couldn’t rightly call it a voice, the way it drilled through the tinnitus and burrowed deep. But it called.

I was on my hands and knees in the mud I’d made, picking through leaf litter and wriggling upturned worms. A strange tenderness overtook me as the dirt birthed those two gaping maws. I dug gently, unearthing the point at which they joined like branches of a tree. Then the wriggling body came after, and down I stared at the two-headed creature cradled in my arms.

*

After the old man had died, I’d sterilized the place and pushed all the furniture to the corners, baring the center of the study, the living room, the bedrooms. That meant there was plenty of space to set up the cage and some cardboard. I’d kept gerbils when I was little. A mouse, too. After a bit of archeology, I’d found one of the old cages in the utility room, disused corners birthing dusty old treasures.

She squirmed in my arms and went to yelling as soon as I settled her into the mildewy nesting scraps at the bottom of the old gerbil cage. She was almost the length of my forearm and couldn’t move all that well. I wasn’t sure if she was just weak or dazed from being near buried. She (they?) had the shiny, fleshy quality of an afterbirth, with only a thin gray frizz of fur. The left jaw chewed on a bit of shredded paper. The right head was larger, more fully developed, while the other head was more like a growth, jutting out at an odd angle. Both heads rooted through the scraps, eyes still closed. Still a pup, it seemed.

And all the while the screeching echoed off the eggshell walls of my father’s house. I thought of the dismembered worms in the dirt outside. I considered them, and an old shovel and a cardboard box, and the soft broken earth outside, and a violent feeling in my stomach stopped me from considering more. Instead, I pried a bit of scrap out from beneath her jaw – the left one, the runt of the two. I palmed the whole of her, warm. Both jaws gaped open and screeched. The larger head mouthed at my finger.

I pulped an old honeydew squash together with some milk and strained the mixture through a cheese cloth as I cradled her in my arms. She didn’t strain or fight like I’d expected her to, but she wouldn’t bite at the cloth either. I offered it to the runt-head, but that one didn’t so much as nibble. I squeezed down on the cheesecloth, trying to dribble some liquid onto either snout, but she swiped sightlessly at her faces. The descending sun warmed my back through the grimy window, and still she screamed.

I’d taken my time those last few months, deciding whether to purge the house of the old man’s presence, or turn it into a museum of him. Eventually I did what we did for my ma (which was maybe more than he deserved). I threw out some of the old furniture and folded what was left into the corners. Having sterilized the house, my plan was to drag in some cheap new stools, an armchair he would have liked. Maybe mount his old trumpet on a plinth on the wall. Pretty little things I left unfinished. We’d done the same for ma, and it was harder for me then, but the old bastard had been there. I realized, at the time, that it had mattered.

Now, I never really forgave him. He’d had hard hands, and I felt them a little too often for us to ever be friends. But after ma had passed, he withered away all of a sudden. Became a jawless, frightened little thing. And frightened of what? Of me? Of his own weakness? Of the trembling silences that became our shared daily bondage? I fed and watered him, cleaned his ass towards the end. He’d warble ‘good morning’, and I wonder if he feared me answering. I preferred to remember his hands, his hard hard hands, because it hardened me a little too. Hardened me to the little thing’s crying, and crying, in my arms.

(There was something I wanted to say to him, or maybe something I had said. And because he’d made of me a polished stone, it was buried so deep I didn’t know the truth of it. I think Ma would have lasted if it weren’t for him.)

I realized then that she was quieting. She was still in my arms, docile. The doubled jaws were gasping open now, breath drawn deep like a bellows. One jaw fought for air, then the other. Then she belted out a quick staccato screech with her runt-head. Another deep breath. A scream.

Outside, the sun had set, and the fog descended off the hill to lap at my windows. I dug some of the pulp out of the cheese cloth and tried to get her to lap it off my hands. I offered it to the larger head, who snubbed me, then to the runt-head, which bit down hard on the meat of my finger. I yelped and cursed her and God and myself at the end. And her breath was going, great labored bellows working ever harder to sustain her. I saw that both her eyes were open now, four great pale blinking orbs. This strange freakish thing, no polished stone.

I looked out the window to the dimming silhouettes of the scraggly trees, and above them the hilltop, breaking upwards to poke through the fog.

*

(Did I ever say it, or did I mean to say it, before the old man passed?

What I try not to remember were those nights towards the end where we sat together, just watching the TV. Me at the foot of his armchair, his gnarled hand resting on the back of my head.)

*

Out in the breeze, and the dark, she was a fighter, those twinned staccato barks coming more frequent. She wove a little symphony for me, as I tore up the hill, and the brambles tore at my shins. The tall trees were deeply shadowed now, and my going kicked up the fog. Up past an old treehouse, up off the winding path, up the steep and muddy grade, past the last curtain of trees and into the starlit clearing at the hill’s very peak. And she was silent now, breath-full, jaws no longer struggling to bite the air. Was it the cold, or the pale celestial light, that drew these silent breaths deep into her? The crackle of broken leaves, the rustle of trees edging the clearing. I gathered her into the crook of my arm and angled both sets of freakish eyes towards the great arch crossing the sky. I bathed her in it, and knew that on this night, at least, no other creature would taste so much of the breeze, or see quite so many stars.

**