Dried-Up Stars (Lightning Bugs in My Stomach)

“Have you cried yet? I’ve only cried once.” My sister Thea’s speech is precise, like she’s not been wandering her mind across the sky. She’s poised against the brittle trunk of the only tree in the graveyard. She holds the end of a chewed lollipop stick with one hand while she flicks off the sweat gathering in her eye bags with the other.

“Mm.” I bat at a lightning bug flying too close to my ear.

“It was at their funeral.”

A particularly brutal thrust of the shovel. The outside air should be refreshing, but it’s 10 p.m. on a sweltering August Saturday night. I need to slick sweaty hair off my face constantly, and I can feel every string in the muscles of my back. They are so tense that I fear I will snap like a rubber band and unravel.

“I would’ve appreciated your support.”

“Mm.”

“Did you see the house?”

“Mm.”

“I wish it wasn’t so hot.”

The night air is damp and swarms with insects. I play grave robber by the light of the stars and lightning bugs. I want to respond to her, but I ate too many seeds, and there is a sunflower growing in my stomach pushing upwards through my throat. There are petals in my teeth, and bitterness on my taste buds.

I want to respond to her, but I ate too many seeds, and there is a sunflower growing in my stomach pushing upwards through my throat.

I risk a glance at Thea and see she won’t leave me and my flower be. She scratches her mangled lollipop stick across the ground and stirs dry dirt into the air as I inhale, exhale, tilted over my shovel.

“Do you think it hurt?” I ask. I’ve wondered since I heard about the fire from our aunt Marcy. I don’t know what answer I prefer.

The lollipop stills. She grinds it into the dirt like a cigarette butt.

One of the bugs lands in the hole I’ve been digging and flashes its abdomen above what I now see is our mother’s shiny mahogany casket. I feel the flower head bursting between my teeth until I am throwing up.

“Oh my god. Have you been drinking?” Thea rises to her feet suddenly. The movement rocks my stomach like I’m at sea.

I shake my head, but all that achieves is a wash of white across my vision—the stars streak across the sky like comets—I am swimming through paint.

When Thea was seven, she caught a star. (And now, when I close my painted eyes, I feel its fire reaching through the jar to my palms.)

“Your dad and I used to spend hours catching stars. You can hold them for a few moments,” Aunt Marcy had said, “but you have to let them go. They belong in the sky.” With her watery hands, she tilted one of the jars, and the star floated passively—like a mote of dust, out to join the other flashing green jewels in the bushes, the trees, the sky.

I pictured our father with a fragile glass vase or a thin-stemmed champagne glass chasing stars around the backyard. His image ran with a furrowed brow and down-turned lips: the only expression I can see him wear.

I pictured our father with a fragile glass vase or a thin-stemmed champagne glass chasing stars around the backyard.

I never caught one.

The next morning, I woke to someone—Thea, I guessed, from the pitch and pace of her breath—shaking my arm.

“Go away,” I grumbled into the scratchy mattress of Aunt Marcy’s guest room. A couple of years later, after too many last-minute drop-offs from our parents at her place, she invested in proper mattresses and bedding. But for now, we had a couch and a yellowed mattress that smelled like mulch and cigarettes.

Thea, ever petulant, shook me harder. A sigh drew from deep in my body. I wished, for just a second, that I was with our parents at the lake house they were staying in. But Aunt Marcy was fun, and Thea let me have the bed because she liked the novelty of the couch.

When I finally opened my eyes, my gaze fell onto a jar from last night, one with a cheesy red-and-white-checkered ribbon tied around the lip. Instead of a flickering light inside, there was a dried bug carcass bouncing from wall to wall.

I pushed her and the jar off the bed. “Stop showing me that. It’s gross.”

Tears clambered out of Thea’s eyes as she cradled the jar like a teddy bear. “You’re so mean,” she drawled out between sniffles.

 “Dammit, Thea. C’mon, you don’t want to wake up Aunt Marcy.” I grasped her clammy arm to take her outside.

I biked to the funeral of my parents after finishing my sketch for a client. It was an average too-hot August day. The wind racing me to the graveyard eroded me. By the time I shakily got off the seat, I felt brittle and small.

The wind racing me to the graveyard eroded me.

I sat in a claustrophobic chair under a plastic tarp as people left like ants, dutifully scooping handfuls of dirt from a wheelbarrow to my parents’ new home. I was in the back row. The sweat from my ride mingled with the sweat from people looking at me through sideways glances.

Thea, now 20 years old, shuffled up to the hole with bright red boots. Her black acrylic nails scrambled through the dry dirt. She tried to meet my eyes. My sunflower had already started to grow, though, so I stayed rooted to my chair and looked away. I was too focused on detangling leaves from my intestines to notice her start crying as she tossed the dirt onto our parents’ caskets.

She called me the following Saturday.

My mother harvests the stars from the trees. I sit on the shaded balcony overlooking Aunt Marcy’s garden. My mother says she’s making a pie. She has the crust prepared already, she says, because she’s hosting a garden party soon. White lace-trimmed gloves with delicate embroidery loops and quaint little buttons up the side pluck the stars from their stems. Does it hurt?

My mother harvests the stars from the trees.

My mother calls me down from the balcony. She wants me to plant some seeds in the garden while she finishes the pie. I’m in the garden now. I don’t want to help. I shovel the seeds into my mouth—I’m always a disobedient child. I can’t swallow them. I don’t want to eat them. I don’t want to eat them.

“Careful! Don’t move too much,” someone says.

My head feels like someone drained all the fluid from it. I strain my eyelids to open them and see Thea leaning over me. Lightning bugs flicker around her head. She’s slowly trying to feed me warm water from the crinkled plastic bottle in her bag.

“Please—” I continue.

Thea shushes me. “I have good news for you,” she says. “We got it open.”

I sit up more against the tree trunk she’s posed me on. “You—” I clear my throat. “We did?”

A sharp smirk overtakes her otherwise gentle face. She hoists me up and leads me, arm securely around my waist, to the grave. She’s pried off the top half of the coffin as much as possible and now points her phone flashlight into the opening. I gently kneel and peer inside. It wasn’t an open-casket funeral, and I can see why.

Our mother’s pink skin clings to her dead flesh in veins and waves. The burnt clothes that remained on her body were removed before burial. They did not bother to redress her. Her naked arms rest over each other like a vampire—her favorite white gloves rest atop. They are pristine. I shove one arm into the opening to rest my hands atop hers. This is the first time our bodies have touched in five years.

In a few hours, Thea and I will purify the gloves in the fire they should have been consumed in. But right now, Thea curls up next to me in the hole, and I pretend to feel our mother’s heartbeat in her hands.

Seven-year-old Thea only stopped crying when I told her we could have a funeral for the star. We burrowed through the ground with a quickness fueled by wide-eyed belief in the strength of our four hands. Something in my chest squeezed so tight that I felt nauseous.

The same early morning wind that flailed wisps of Thea’s bedhead stirred fresh dirt into the air to tickle my nose. Birdsong breached the sound of rustling leaves. Thea fiddled her dirty fingers between each other before reaching out unsure arms. The thing in my chest felt like it was bursting. I flung myself forward to meet her arms across the shallow grave and its barrier burst—dozens of seeds scattered from the explosion and buried in my stomach lining.