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It was a precipitous night--an o’erhanging Eve, if you will. And on the uncertain, celestial edge stood the pair whom the world and its eyes had coerced into this haphazard position. Emily Wong and the self-proclaimed Singer of Galactaron stood here now at the mundane apex of a hill that glowed yellowish-gold with the petals of thousands of dandelion blooms. Both figures observed the star-speckled sky up above: five eyes entranced in a tentative prayer for absolution, a reaction. Explosion.
Emily made one of her hands a fist, and quietly detonated her palm. She didn’t bother to imitate the noise, or break her staring contest with the sky, but Singer caught the pantomimed pandemonium in his triple-peripheral vision, and gently took hold of Emily’s wrist. He sensed her arm stiffen, and the acceleration of her pulse, and guided the extended arm to the ether, until her hand--forming a perfect and painful right angle--appeared to balance the black beyond effortlessly. At least, that’s what Emily made of it, and of course she’d think herself Atlas at a time like this! Singer, meanwhile, perceived the gesture as a salutation--a “high-five” if you will--to the universe.
If they were to die tonight, he believed, the least they could do was say goodbye to everything Else.
Emily’s fingers resisted and curled--chipped blue nailpolish and all--into a resolute fist, which she stole away from Singer and drew toward her chest (pulse to pulse). It was this sacred, in-reverse explosion she resolved to save until it was too late. Like the finale to a firework show. Or the Big Bang, which, unbeknownst to us: the aftermath, could have very well been the apex of a prior universe.
“Lo siento,” Singer said, his hand on the spoke of his Neutral mask. In this brief caesura, he debated whether to switch to an alternate face--Angry, Sad--so as to empathize with Emily. What a strange word that was… Empathy. A ludicrous, abstract concept above anything else. Singer indeed felt, as he’d proclaimed, but his perception and expression of emotion was inhibited significantly by his design. By no fault of his own, he could not “feel” the way humans did. The way they expected him to…
But Emily had asked nothing of Singer; no such thing, in her midst, as emotions that he didn’t understand; no demands for him to don a mask which he hadn’t yet earned. No, Emily had asked nothing of him. Not until now, anyway.
“Could you please give me some space?”
Her companion lingered on his Neutral mask, before switching to Happy instead with the knowledge he could make the best of the heavens before impending atmospheric collapse. Singer reached for the sky directly up above, sensed the sharp recession of blood from his splayed fingertips. They closed around something ephemeral, fleeting, and when he retrieved it, a nanoscopic fraction of the sky presided somewhere in his palm. He offered this to Emily, and for a miraculous moment she considered taking it: a miniscule recollection of snow, of an innocent time…
But winter was subsumed by a merciless star, and the lake had melted long ago; they’d been drowning for weeks in the runoff of rain.
That infinitesimal speck of starstuff disintegrated in Singer’s hand, and as Emily braced herself against the glittering wrath of an apathetic canopy of stars, her friend took notice of a disparate bloom in the grass: a fluffy white sphere nestled among the flowers. A moon flanked by so many suns.
“Look,” he spoke upon a sine wave of sound. Emily paid him no mind (she couldn’t bring herself to anymore). It was this unspoken rejection that compelled Singer to revert to his Neutral face, and his stance was rigid as he turned to face Emily.
“Look at wǒ.”
Emily rotated incrementally towards him, but only with her face; like a sliver of the moon’s visage aglow in the night sky, it was enough for Singer to remember his hands.
Congregation of shame fear resentment and love flashed across Emily’s dark brown eye, and this acidic mixture accumulated and spilled over as a singular drop of rain. A clockworklike click: Singer wore his Sad mask, and the tears were carved into his face. But these were intentional, intricate scars, whereas Emily’s were hot and raw: corrosive. Recklessly, erosion.
A planet of water; a people of tears. Singer had yet to find a face for Fear.
“Will it regen again, Emily?”
Static pulsed through the air when he cut through the sultry silence. She turned to him abruptly now to find he had switched back to his Neutral face; Singer was eyeing her--presumably--pensively. It was that expectant expression that spilled sublimating dry ice on the smouldering stage of her psyche, as if the ensuing smoke would deter her mind from the encroaching flames. As if her lungs could pretend in tandem with her mind. How strange this was… she used to get a kick from the spotlight; now the faux fog was enough to freeze her on the spot.
There was a script burning somewhere behind her; there was a floral prop she had neglected to retrieve. There was a friendship inside of the fire (I thought you would be safe in there). There was a stone in her hand and a floating window. There was applause in audience absence. There was a note she could never quite reach: Out of sight, out of mind, out of range. Emily was out of time. So she took in a futile breath and improvised.
“I don’t know… what you mean?”
Singer turned his palm to the sky with some hesitancy, as if expecting a piece to melt off and drop into his hand. It wasn’t often she misunderstood what he said, albeit a word could indeed harbor countless meanings, each dependent upon context and culture. Not to mention that a mispronunciation could incite further confusion. But that which Singer had offered to her--a kindred query, if you will--denoted the falling of rain. And mayhaps this Emily understood, but the exigence of such a question was lost on her. What good is rain, she thought, to plastic flowers?
“Qīnshí,” he said, as if her eyes spoke louder than her lips.
“... Erosion?”
“Sí, it… eclipses? Transforms pétra.” He reached and grasped the invisible stone in her hand. “It will sculpter this into something… qítā.”
“Maybe over the course of a million years,” Emily scoffed. “Maybe after all of the flowers die out.”
“Maybe before.”
“Maybe NEVER! Maybe it’ll never rain again!!!” She tore herself away from Singer, dropping the invisible stone among the flowers underfoot. Harboring a scream, she crashed to her knees so as to retrieve what she’d lost (Can’t lose anything else! I refuse to lose anything else!!! Losing intangible things hurt the most; because it was so hard to find them again).
“天哪!” she exclaimed, hoisted back onto her feet by invisible strings. She shot a disdainful glance at the puppeteer camoflaged behind the sky as she stumbled into Singer’s arms; her hands bore Earthen remnants of an uproot unfulfilled; the sunny flowers she had sought to desecrate transformed--eclipsed, before her eyes!--into a summer-bound sky of soft lunar skeletons.
(Is this what I’m fated to become?!)
“Nay,” Singer said. “You are Sol.”
“But you’re wrong; I’m the rocks, and the rain--”
“And the flowers.”
(Maybe that’s all the Earth is…)
Emily stood on her own feet again. “What’s gonna happen to us?”
“Je ne sais pas,” Singer tilted his head, before kneeling to pluck a soft moon from its stem. He offered this to Emily, switching then to a face with which to greet the sky. A face Emily could not see.
“Make a wish!”
“On the dandelion or on the stars?”
Singer paused in his praise of the heavens to lower his head, and Emily was startled by the blank slate of his visage. Contemplating, he put his fingers to his chin, then dropped the flower (which Emily hastily caught) as he twisted the spoke of the mystery mask until it detached from the box on his navel. “Lún dào nǐle.” (Emily didn’t let him so much as drop this. Soon enough, she found herself holding a disembodied piece of her friend. She felt quite sick, and clumsy, suddenly, as if she’d damage the mask--scathe emotion unmade. Oh! but what did it matter? They were destined to die anyway!)
“Now there are deux… hm, two.”
“More like a folie à deux.” It was funny to her though; somehow she could face him when he didn’t have a face, for the place which that in her hands once concealed had become devoid of a mask altogether: Nothing but negative space. Singer was capable of drastic change at the flip of a switch, at the switch of a mask. Emily oughtn’t feel so rigid in comparison to him, but she felt nonetheless: unaltered.
“What am I supposed to do with these?” (In one hand she clutched the mask spoke, in the other the drooping dandelion, which had lost some wishes in the exchange.)
“Thávo̱: bury--no… semear.” Singer reached over and plucked a sole seed from the moon in her hand, and then held it up against the glittering starscape; a gust of wind sent it drifting, and Emily watched, entranced, as it crossed the shimmering abyss. What it resembled… was unmistakable. “We’re going to… plant a shooting star?”
“Sí.” Singer pointed to the mask in her hand.
“So… I guess this is the seed?”
“Und stem, und… yuè.” With one finger, he gently tapped the puff of the dandelion that Emily held. She couldn’t help but sigh in exasperation.
“This is ridiculous. What’s planting a mask in the ground gonna do?” (Singer receded slightly, as she thrust the spoke into the Earth) “See? Nothing changed! Except now you’ve got one less mask you could’ve carved into a feeling, or something. Put on your face and face the facts: the Landmine Operation’s gonna happen regardless of what we wish! And I… I’ll be stuck here, in the mess that I made because I so badly wanted you to see something good. When the flowers were bright yellow Suns. If they’d been moons at the time, maybe you would’ve seen through the lie. Because the moon shows all of its sides--cratered and callused across.” Bitterly, she remarked, “The moon doesn’t make flowers grow.”
She glared furtively at the mask in the ground, pretending it was a flower, or some stagnant star. Emily tilted her head, arching her body with it, until her balance was wonky and she couldn’t help but stumble to correct. Her face flushed with embarrassment and threatening fresh tears. Fighting the urge to cry out, to water the Earth with her eyes, Emily covered her face with a mask of cold hands--the only certain thing that she could hold. No threat of hers falling off, or sticking out of the ground on a spoke in a faux floral imitation. And yet, even as she held fast, it would change at the whim of her every emotion; switch involuntarily.
The phases of the moon are discernable, numerical, cyclical. They’re something we can name, and put a face to (thanks to paradolia). But little do we recognize the Sun as a tumultuous, shifting creature--blossoming burns and sweet scars which caress its smouldering surface, before the skin seals itself and they seep evermore into the soul.
Light and shadow share a duplicitous dance--each encumbered by the temporal tangibility of its effervescent existential fabric. Obfuscation and illumination are but two sides of the same face--well, coin. Each is, in essence, a projection--illusion!--and each eradicates the other in a quiet massacre of night&day.
Celestial bodies cannot bleed in a corporal context, but they crochet themselves unto unsuspecting irises--as retinal imprints, enchanted skybound sparks. Around the campfire, we warm our hands, orbiting light and heat as our Earth does the Sun. But what orbits us in the still summer night--each other’s faces? An enlightened neighboring visage? Non-sense! Faces cannot warm! Why is the miniscule moon held in such high regard as the Sun?!
Singer met Emily’s eyes through her knotted fingers. And the moon is not a red-blooded creature, but he felt a fire crackle in his clockwork heart(h) nonetheless. And this kind combusted deep within the ribcage of Emily Wong, its embers echoing into her mind and sparking something back to life. An innermost flame, profound in its own right. A feeling a face could not simply convey. Not if the visage were carved by a conscious and cautious craftsman. Nay! only the hand of Entropy itself could so chaotically--care[FOOLL]lessly--sculpt the erotist’s expression of come-bind in-sanity!!!!!!!!!!
The static in their souls resonated within the sky--overcast and operational. Neither party dared look up for fear of what they’d see; each favored the familiar comfort of the other’s eyes, aching for the touch of a hand wherein flowers could grow. A green and rubbery stem was woven firmly between Emily’s fingers--so intimately intertwined that it should induce perception of organic unity. Maybe she’d find a bouquet in her bones; roots where there ought to be veins. Or maybe she was the nurturing Sun, toward whom all flowers angled themselves. There was a time long ago when she longed for luminosity alone; by Singer’s side, she’d observed the life cycle of a star through the mirror over her bathroom sink, and himself, the phases of the moon.
( WE ARE NOW ON A CRASH COURSE )
A hand extended itself to them both, and this came uninvited. The neglected party somewhere in the sky waveringly admonished the still/silent slice of soldeuxdinous folie. To such an extent that it slithered away, hanging its head. Screaming out in arches and choking on a voice of its own.
WE’LL
HAVE A
S
T
O
R
M
NOW.
YOU
MUST STAND
ASIDE,
OUT
OF
D
A
N
G
E
R
!
They say lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, and they are beyond incorrect, but for all intents and purposes, I would like to wager the existence of a rarer kind of strike: that being the jagged, solitaire impact whose target is shared betwixt the two unstriken victims of its strike. For all intents and purposes, I could perhaps plunge a stingray barb through the focal point of my forehead, presumably rendering my self inoperable, and by extension, the two of my eyes. In one hit!! And a hit neither of said eyes took!!! Ergo, while the twofold strike of lightning is far from impossibility, a scarcer occurrence is the two-birds-with-one-stone phenomenon. Only the stone doesn’t hit the two birds; rather, the powerline they’re perched upon. That whence both creatures refused to depart, for fear of the impending Sky.
Emily Wong didn’t wake for some time after that. Who can say what she dreamed in the liminal intervals timespace allotted her mind. Who can say if Singer dreamed at all--if he had yet learnt to emulate the Earthly ritual of Entropy: infinitation in the dark. A softness befell both of them in lieu of the lightning; subsequent to staggering Sun, a soft snow of moon-dust sugared waning planet below.
She opened her eyes and recalled a time of First Contact.
Singer discovered this snow was not cold and fleeting, but rather soft/lunar--
Heads stung by Earthly impact became parallel again as the pair rose to their grass-stained knees.
“So what now?” Emily rasped. Singer tilted so as to see her through the mask which--miraculously--remained upright between them, with a gaping, jagged hole in its center, a cave of stalagt/stalagm/ites carved in the fraction of a second!! And it was an emotion nonetheless--one which scorches and scars all the same. Like the spindle of a spinning-wheel, or mayhaps a candle set ablaze, to prick oneself upon the wick of this is but a promise of both ecstasy and grief.
Emily peered through the hole in the face in equal parts horror and affection for it. Almost, she too was entranced by the emberesque glow of its many sheer spikes--of a violent, inverted flower. Singer, too, was compelled in this way: to reach within, and to retrieve
“哎呀!!!!!” Emily saw stars! And moved as if to pull her hand away! And Singer only did the same! BUT ALAS!!! Both of them were ensnared in the two-faced Mask of star-crossed devotion!!!!!
And was it love??? Was the mask merely love??? NAY!!!
Indeed, it was in fact a little emotion we puny humans call L O V E. An emotion hastily, desperately scrawled in one n{EGO}tiation of terms!
And as both simultaneously tried to extract themselves from this painful equation, they also held fast upon the others’ wrist--whom they’d clasped in a starving effort to reach that which they’d seen through the singular Eye/Mouth of the mask. It was a tug-of-war they had stumbled into; it was equilibrium they had achieved. A folie à deux: to corrode and create: masochistic sadism: a madness best shared--
“It’s raining sunshine,” Singer observed. And indeed, the starstruck glow of the mask sparkled in the gleaming tears of Emily. Her eyes stayed set on the soft lunar snow. The wishes that rained upon them, clung to skin/to the blood on their hands/intertwined.
There was something Midas-ian in how gold flowed from Singer’s pricked fingertips onto Emily’s own scarred skin. There was yet absolution in his touch: only affirmation.
“It is finito,” he said.
And as soon as his voice cut through her frozen fugue, Emily felt herself thaw with laughter. Laughter in the face of nature’s flaw/of her own scattered sins/of her flowering lies/of the fate and the friendship she’d sowed. As a means to repent, or rebel? Who could say, who could say…
“Look at how selfish we are! So many things we could ask of the suns… of course we both wished for snow.”