The Stars That Bind Us

by Gemma Church

My husband said I was an idiot to visit The Dust Gatherer. I didn’t listen. My arms ached with emptiness. I longed to see Patrick’s baby blue eyes again. 

I found The Dust Gatherer on a rocky outcrop when we stopped in the Oort Cloud, sitting in a tarnished titanium tent, her long fingers resting in her lap. 

She didn’t speak. She knew why I was here. But I couldn’t stand the silence.

“Can you do what they say?”

She sighed, resigned to the same question everyone asks. Of course she could. 

I passed her Patrick’s umbilical cord, now purple and shrivelled. She weaved it between her fingers and began to knit the fabric of space and time with fast hands, mimicking the atoms of Patrick’s genetic code, pulling in fragments from long-gone stars. 

“We’re all made of stars,” I quipped, trying to ignore the pinching sensation as my milk came in. A pulsating light became a beating, chambered heart that grew tendril capillaries, veins and then arteries, weaving around fragile bones and organs before his black skin grew and shrouded his body anew. And there he was.

I cried. He didn’t. He looked up at me with the dark, unblinking eyes of the cosmos. He wasn’t Patrick. But he was all that I had now.

We left the Oort Cloud the next day, the second repopulation ship destined for a small planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. They said the journey would take eight Earth years and this time would give us the opportunity to build our community.

I tried.

At the start of our voyage, the other parents offered me sweeping reassurances of “he’ll get there” and “children all grow at different rates” and “did you know so-so’s daughter didn’t speak until she was four?”

But I saw how they stared at his skin when I first learned to bathe him. Skin so very black, swathed with scatterings of white freckles.

When my boy was five, the other parents started to shuffle away from us. Those that did speak to me offered shards of advice like “have you tried speech therapy?” and “maybe a formal diagnosis would help?” and “what about the isolation chamber? Say he can’t come out until he asks?”

Eventually, they stopped talking to me altogether. But I heard their whispers behind my back about all the things I was doing wrong and “wasn’t it a shame?” and “if he was my son, I’d…” and “she’s smothering him, no wonder he doesn’t speak.”

But my boy did speak. They just didn’t know how to listen to him. Every night when the lights went out, he pressed his face to the ship’s windows, opened his mouth and sang to the cosmos.

And the cosmos sang back. Billions of stars resonating with the same pitch and tone as my boy’s calls, telling him to come back to the place where he belonged.

But he belonged to me now. And I wasn’t going to let my boy go. Not again.

My boy did end up in the isolation chamber, but I didn’t send him there. After finally learning to walk, the ship’s officials caught him climbing into an escape pod. He slammed down the hatch and refused to come out. When they pulled him out, he screamed and bit and attacked the guards, snapping their fingers and clawing at their eyes.

It was the longest week of my life without him. I didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and worried my fingernails until they bled.

When he came out, he was calmer but worryingly thin. They said he hadn’t eaten anything all week, refusing to leave the window with his body stretched out across the glass, talking.

“Talking? But my boy has never uttered a word in his life.” 

The slack-jawed guard shrugged. 

When I demanded to see the security footage, I saw my boy singing his songs, his tiny body pulsating and shining with the light of the stars. Where his white freckles were, tiny shafts of light pierced through the thin material of his boiler suit. 

And as he sang, the glass shimmered and shook, four panes of inch-thick glass flowing around his body like the ocean, ready to let my boy swim out into space and dive into the centre of the bluest stars. 

“You have to let him go, he’s not Patrick…” 

My husband’s words after the incident with the escape pod. The man who promised to love me until death do us part, now asking me to part with my son.

“That’s not our son.”

No, darling, that’s not your son. My boy is made from stardust.

My husband and I never spoke again. 

When we left the Oort Cloud, it took the ship one earth year to accelerate to near-light-speed and, as we approached our destination, it would take another year to decelerate.

My boy sensed the change in the motion, refusing to leave the window in our quarters. He refused food and then water. Eventually, he refused my touch.

I watched, helplessly, as his body collapsed in on itself, his particles pulling closer as his skin stretched across his bones. 

He sang to the stars every moment of every day now but as we pulled away from the outer reaches of space, his freckles no longer shone. His cracked lips withdrew across his gums. And his songs became screams that grew louder until we were moved to the lower decks where we couldn’t disturb anyone.

The solitude calmed him, a little, and screams were soon replaced by his star songs once more. But still, he would not eat. Would barely drink. Still, he refused my touch until he started to spit and claw at my face whenever I came near.

The violence towards me escalated but I managed every scratch, bite and blow as best I could. After he broke my nose, I began keeping my distance from him. He was too strong. Too angry. I stayed in the corner and closed my eyes, listening to his singing and the stars singing back. 

Finally, I knew what to do.

When his eyes were closed, I took my chance and pounced, putting the chloral-covered cloth over his open mouth.

Then, I picked my fragile boy up in my arms and carried him to an escape ship. 

“Where shall we go?” 

He just smiled and pulled down his shirt, pointing to the cluster of freckles to the left of his sternum.

“Of course,” I said, remonstrating myself for not noticing sooner. His freckles were not a random swirl of imperfections. They were a perfect map of the cosmos. I set our course for the cluster of stars above his heart.

We flew and flew in the escape ship, his hands clasped around mine in the cockpit as he pressed his nose at the glass, his black eyes sparkling, his dry mouth open, singing. 

I set the trajectory for a pair of binary stars, so blue and bold with the gravitational pull to slingshot us both in that new-born cluster forevermore. 

As we got closer, I curled my body around him and we lay on the cockpit’s cool glass floor, nose touching nose as I breathed in the tiny atoms of him. 

“We’re all made of stars,” I whispered, wishing someone could have seen what I saw, as the blue starlight reflected in his eyes, his baby blue eyes, and my star boy sang and sang and sang.