He loved those stars. The fact that he could just watch them for hours and never get tired of the sight, it baffled him. They baffled him. The stars seemed to always be beckoning him, calling him outside even while the sun reigned over the sky. The fact that some were dead but still shined sometimes mesmerized him, other times angered him. "Why can't humans be like you?" he would he would often ponder, speaking to no star in particular— just to the multitude of them. "Why can't we not be pure like you? Why can't humans learn to shine on others, and not themselves?" While he envied the stars, he loved them just the same. He envied their ability to never end, even when they were over.
He hated the prospect of his life ever ending, for he loved his life. he loved the simplicity of living with his daughter and a dog named Percy. Alexandra loved her father and never questioned his love for the stars, though she too envied them. She envied the love her father had for them, feeling that her father sometimes invested more emotion into the stars than he did his own daughter— but she continued not to question.
Years passed and Alexandra is now twelve. She is mature beyond her age since she's learned to take care of herself, being because her father's love for the stars has become an obsession rather than love. All night he sits outside drawing the stars, and all day he waits for their return. Like the daughter Alexandra is, she brings him food, begs him to come inside until she's screaming, sobbing, asking if he's really even alive anymore, but the only answer she receives is his trailed-off mumbling and a pencil held in a shaky hand, vaguely pointing towards the sky.
A year has passed. Alexandra hates the stars. She, like her father, speaks to the stars, begging them to give her father back. She'll yell at the stars, sob to them, trying to bargain with the things, but she gains no answer.
Her father lives inside now, but it is no longer her father; it is a man she has come to know less and less about the more she lives with him. Alexandra does not go in his room, for she knows what awaits her in there. He is in there— that man she no longer knows. He ran out of paper, as well as the patience to find any more. So he now maps the stars on his wall. He ran out of space on his wall, and continued onto his ceiling. Alexandra often hears a dog-like shout and a thud, knowing he tried to reach to far or something of the sort. When the man finally ran out of ceiling to map the patterns of those extraterrestrial beasts, he began to cover every surface; dressers, mirrors, the floor, his quilts, his own body. His arms, legs, torso, face, hands are all covered in those patterns of stars she hates so much. In an art museum, This man's room would be admired. In Alexandra's eyes, it is her father's graveyard. Alexandra often wonders what she did to deserve this, or whether if it is her father's reward. "Perhaps the stars saw how much he loved them, and took him to live with them. . . and left this man as his replacement," she would think. It is at the age of fifteen that she too has become obsessed with the stars, consumed with her hatred for them.
And he hates them too. What was once a simple question, he now screams at the stars, asking why they won't bestow their pureness on humans. He begs for their mercy, for their recognition. Thoughts rampage through his ransacked mind, belittling whatever humanity he has left. "I have devoted my life to you, and yet you still won't let me be one with you? Why won't you accept me? Have I not done enough?"
He can't stand to look at his daughter, for he can't stand the look he gets in return: a look of fear, of anger, of depression and long lost hope.
So they live on either sides of the house. And what do they do there? They build their hatred of the stars, asking the same question: 'Why?'
Alexandra had no idea the man on the other side of the house died. Nor did she ever realize, nor did she care, for she too had become consumed with the stars and her hatred for them. As a girl, Alexandra had wanted to follow in her father's footsteps until her last breath; and to her misfortune, that is exactly what she did.
YOU ARE READING
They Were Beautiful
Short Storyshe had always thought bright things, which were simultaneously destructive, were weapons of war, or natural disasters. lightning, nuclear bombs, fire, any of these would've made sense to her. but not the stars; she would've never suspected the star...
