1 | P a g e The Flight Home 2 | P a g e Dusty glasses It might have been in the way star woke up, eyes shining and drowsy with the remnants of sleep, blinking glitter from her eyes. Soft. Like the thinnest strand of a brush dipped in oil and painting lashes on a canvas. Or maybe like the Aurora Borealis. Red, papery maple leaves quivering in the tip - toeing autumn breeze. Anaya could never look away. Or it might have been in the way she spoke, words gliding and tripping one after the other, like waves of a stream or red velvet, her voice taking Anaya to places she never knew existed. Purple skies. Shooting stars crashing into water bodies and turning everything into bright, shining sp arkles. Teal waters. Her feet dipped in the waters. Nichole’s feet dipped in the waters. Side by side. Comfortable silence. Aching red hearts. Or it might have been how star laughed, his chuckling and her snickers and her giggles and her chortles and sta rs titters; Anaya has detailed, labelled classification of all the kinds of sweet, sweet laughter of Nichole all piled up in the tallest bookshelf at the back of her head. But the sum of it all narrows down to Nichole grinning down at her (very shameless) dog. There’s a dimple in her cheek. Anaya wants to drown in it. 3 | P a g e “Aw”, Nichole says, patting Ampere on the head. He’s sniffing Nichole’s handbag as if Anaya doesn’t give him a hundred tons dog food and toys every day. Anaya glares at Ampere. “Here, baby , have these”, Nichole says, and takes out two biscuits that Ampere grabs instantly. As far as Anaya remembers, he had yapped at her angrily the last time she had tried giving him the same biscuits. “So sweet”, Nichole continues, and Anaya clears her thro at. Shameless is what he is. “If I was him, I would have woofed at you all day, honestly, Anaya, what kind of a name is Ampere?” Nichole snorts, but her eyes are gleaming and there’s a barely concealed smile trying to emerge from the sides of her mouth. It is a supernova explosion inside Anaya’s chest. Right. What was she saying again? “I said that Ampere is a fantastic name”, Nichole says, and Anaya hopes to God that Nichole doesn’t think she is a hopeless case because she keeps drifting away. Wait. Anaya peers at Nichole suspiciously. You see, Anaya had this brilliant idea that she could hold her dog and say, ‘I’m holding Ampere!’ and people would think she is in contact with current electricity but has somehow miraculously survived which does not sound that brilliant of an idea now that she ponders over it. Ampere is a good name though. 4 | P a g e “Are you writing something?” Nichole asks, and grabs the (embarrassing) piece of paper in Anaya’s hand. [Here lie the remnants of Anaya’s self - respect, she think s, reproachfully.] “We cannot accept what we don’t choose”, Nichole reads out. (Anaya’s face is in her hands.) “Deep”, star continues, and Anaya is not as shameless as Ampere, but she might be a twelfth of how shameless he is, so she parts two fingers t o see between the gaps of her fingers. “I think”, Nichole continues, and turns the page (here is where Anaya should have slapped herself. Hard.). He frowns for a moment and Anaya looks, transfixed, as her face turns a shade of magenta. “You think?” Anaya asks, throat clogging up at how beautiful she is, at the curves of her eyes and her nose and her mouth, like God was learning to write in cursive. Star looks like roman sculptures full of life, like a fallen angel - she is a poem, a shooting star that has hit the ground but hasn’t lost any of its shine, and oh, she is blushing, like a leaf bending its head in the wind. Nichole looks up back at her, mouth bitten cherry red, and says, “But what if choice does not play any role in it and neither are you sure if you can approach it or not?” The lock clicks open with a click. Anaya scrunches her nose and looks away; she has zero clue about how Nichole picked the funny thing from inside her and put it into words; she cannot even say it out loud. She wants to sm ile into his smile and run fingers damp with fresh raindrops over her lips, along the curve of her neck and press her mouth over the rises and dips of the universe that is stars body. She looks away at the windows; they are scattered with heavy raindrops, tumbling down, and leaving marks behind, like tears on a face. The room smells of pomegranates and books and coffee and lemongrass and sweet apples. 5 | P a g e Anaya looks back at Nichole. The room smells like golden sunlight too. Star is wearing a smart light bl ue shirt and black designer jeans that have the Canis Major sewed over them. Sharp, golden sunlight is streaming through the windows; the light that is born just after rain, dancing over her face. The shadow of her lashes falls over the rise of her cheeks, thick and hypnotizing, and his black eyes look almost light brown from the Sun. “Do you travel at the speed of light?” Anaya blurts out, stupid, stupid, stupid. God, she wants to touch and evaporate and bend her head to taste the curve of stars neck. Ni chole frowns, twists her lips torturingly and mumbles an “um”. “Because time stops when I see you”, Anaya finishes, and winces. Nichole is expressionless for a while, but then she bursts into bright, colorful laughter, head thrown back, her chortles comi ng out in beautiful, happy bursts, the line of her slender, curved neck exposed to the world. Anaya feels her neck getting warm, and she cannot look away either - she is sure she doesn’t deserve to see this sudden flare of brightness, spreading light and gi ving birth to something unidentifiable quivering in her heart. And then, she is laughing too, their sounds mixing like two lost fireflies coming together after wandering miles and miles of nothingness. 6 | P a g e Stolen wings “And what day is today, Ampere?” Anaya laughs, head turned to the sky. It is a fine day; the skies are cloudless, and the weather is sneakily cold - Anaya wouldn’t have survived without her bright red reindeer jumper and her green beanie. “Woof!” Ampere answers. “Absolute ly correct, today is fruit day!” she shrieks, the cold turning the tip of her nose red. She probably looks like a natural clown. Ampere yelps and turns round and round in five happy circles with a frisbee in his mouth. Anaya laughs, the lazy breeze cold a gainst her mouth, strands of her hair escaping from her band. Ampere is wagging his tail happily and Anaya takes off, fast, laughing harder as the two of them run back to their home. * Anaya’s door is decorated with a hand - made drawing of a stick figure human and a dog, both having wide smiles, with ‘Anaya and Ampere!’ scribbled messily on top. There is a navy - blue paw - print at the bottom of the page, too. She opens the door and follows Ampere in; everything is neat - too neat. Books are stacked immaculat ely, thick ones at the bottom and small, thin ones at the top; the glass wind chimes are spotless, the flower vases are full of water and well - orderly. 7 | P a g e Home bitter home, more like. Anaya feels a momentary flash of sadness, but she stacks it at the back o f her mind; it is for the later part of the day, for today is fruit day! She hums as she flurries about the kitchen hunting for fruits of all kind when the door behind her opens. Its Nichole. The walls crumble down. Nichole is wearing a black t - shirt wi th the name of some punk band Anaya is unaware written on it (the people on the shirt look punk), a faded blue jacket whose insides are made of thick white material, dark blue jeans and a bright violet muffler that clashes horribly with the outfit but look s so cute Anaya feels like someone is crushing her heart. Star is looking around, bewildered; they must make quite a sight - Ampere is all over the place, Anaya has a big pineapple in her left arm and a bunch of grapes in her right; she hopes to god that t here aren’t cherries or small berries stuck on top of her head. “You two are up to something every single day”, Nichole mumbles, her eyes dazed. Anaya gives him a winning smile rivaling all toothpaste advertisements and takes her arm and makes her plop d own on a seat on the dining table. Nichole huffs and sits down. Anaya tries to ignore the way her heart twists this way and that, like someone is using it as a prop for paper origami. A crushed paper heart. She tries to ignore how it would feel like to have Nichole sit right there every day after she came home after walks with Ampere, how star looks more perfect than anything her ‘perfect’ house could ever strive to be; he is like the stalk of a flower, beautiful and sublime and holding everything toget her - even the prettiest of petals are useless without star. 8 | P a g e “Pomegranates please”, Nichole says, eyes wide, as if Anaya is going to stuff her mouth with every fruit possible, and she is so cute Anaya is this close to swearing under her breath. “Coming so on Doctor”, Anaya salutes, ignores Nichole rolling his eyes, ignores the way her heart expands and constricts with endearment at how Nichole rolls her eyes, and picks the prettiest reddest juiciest pomegranate for Nichole. Ampere is smooshing his face int o Nichole’s thigh (there is no way Anaya will be jealous of her own dog) when Anaya comes back to the table. “This person”, Nichole starts, trying to break open the pomegranate. Anaya stares at her wrists; they look slender, and she is not thinking of pre ssing her mouth against the soft flesh of the inside of her wrist, right where her pulse is beating out the sweetest melody. Absolutely not. “Xe comes in and rants about world peace, family disruptions, problematic classmates, teachers who are jerks, gra bs a couple of tissues, and goes back out without listening to anything I have to say”, Nichole takes out a juicy translucent seed of the pomegranate. Anaya snorts. “We get money just for listening to people”, Nichole waggles her brows at Anaya, and Anay a grins back. What is she supposed to say? She would have paid millions of dollars to Nichole too only if she could say how she wants star to stay with her when her insides feel so empty she feels like it is eating her out from the inside, how Nichole’s pr esence feels like a healing ray of sunshine, how she wants to lie down with star atop big card and stare at cloudless skies and put her fingers around his wrist when star is not looking and share anecdotes and jokes only the two of them will know and drive and drive and take them both to noisy, relentless coastlines and push cheesy notes into stars bag and fall asleep with his head on her shoulder and remake the world and make it their own. She wants to carve words into his heart and give herself to star. G ive the world to star. “Haw - haw”, Anaya says. 9 | P a g e Nichole looks up at her from underneath her lashes. Anaya dies. She presses the pomegranate seed a bit too hard and it bursts, sending red, sticky juice flying into their mouth and necks; star winces at the spurts of pomegranate juice but then she narrows her eyes and pushes Anaya down into the soft sofa abruptly; Anaya gasps at her warmth; stars skin against hers, stars hips bracketing her own. She shuts her eyes, but then there is a brusque eruption of ano ther seed, and there’s sticky red fruit juice running down the side of her face. Oh. “YOU THINK YOU CAN WIN?” Nichole giggles, and grabs handfuls of fruit seeds; Nichole is laughing and pressing unrelenting sticky fingers against her face. It is messy and nerve racking in the quietest, brightest way, and there’s juice running down the gaps between their fingers, their cheeks, the side of their mouths and their necks and Anaya cannot stop laughing at herself, at star, at the quiet happiness slowly engulf ing them in its arms. She looks up at Nichole as she rubs a messy finger over a cracked piece of skin in her bottom lip, heart stuttering to a standstill. Nichole exhales and twists her mouth into a bittersweet shape. Anaya shuts her eyes at the intensity of it all, stars body on top of hers, her hands clutching fistfuls of the material of Nichole’s shirt, his hair falling like a curtain over his face, like it knows not everyone deserves to see how exquisite star is. Like it knows the pitiful beats of Ana ya’s heart. The material of the sofa smells of lemongrass and fresh rain and pomegranates, and Anaya pushes her face into it, heaving as Nichole climbs off her, unusually quiet. “Ha I win”, Nichole exclaims, happily, popping a grapefruit into her mouth. Anaya smiles into the crook of her arm. 10 | P a g e The lock and the key Anaya is gluing Ampere’s baby pictures to a scrap book, with his face on her shoulder. (Does he recognize himself? Does he think he is the human and Anaya is the dog in the images?) She l oves scrap books with the thick, shiny colorful pages - they speak of long - lost stories and restored memories, bright and colorful. Not like blank white pages. She feels like that sometimes. Like she is lying with bits and pieces of the blank white pages of her life in her hand. * Anaya disappears on cloudy Saturday. Her house looks t he same from outside, the scrawn y, hand - written paper hanging outside her door, flowerpots and books and accessories and instruments all arranged neatly; even her mailbox is tidy. There is just a single piece of letter fallen just outside her doorstep, looking it has somehow slipped out from an unclosed folder or perhaps slipped between clumsy fingers; and it would have probably stayed there had Nichole not come right throu gh that path to drop in a silly yellow dandelion that Anaya lit up whenever she was gifted with it. 11 | P a g e * Anaya, What are you doing? You do not talk, and you do not sing. I do not want you to stay in that disgusting repulsive nauseating queer locality, what with the absolute shameless ones. Come back. You never deserved it all anyways. Do you want your own people to be ashamed of you? You think that long haired person you talk to cares about you and your filth? Come back home if you want to be repaired. * “T here’s this story”, Anaya starts, looking ahead as she drives. It is a smart classy black convertible car, plus she has Ampere with her. “This guy is, let’s say, a shoe prodigy. Like. He makes his own leather and styles it on his own and makes shoes that last for more than five years if you wear the shoes every freaking day”, Anaya drones, but Ampere listens, tongue out and eyes sparkling with curiosity. “And this another guy is a regular customer of prodigy guy and buys a shoe from prodigy shoe - maker one fine day but then the shoe gets destroyed in seven days. Another guy is surprised so he goes up to prodigy guy and says, ‘Oi Mister your shoes are brilliant but what in the name of hole God is this?’ and prodigy guy frowns and takes the shoe and tries to fix it and tries and tries but nothing happens so you know what he says?” Anaya asks, and swerves round a curve along the road. “Woof?” Ampere asks. “He says, ‘Sheesh, I’m sorry Monsieur but some leathers are bad from birth. It’s integral. Cannot be repa ired.’” * The skies pour down on Monday, beating inexorably against the windows and the hood of the car. Anaya hits her fist against the window glass as the wipers stop working with a sickening mechanical sound. Ampere looks on, ears bent down. What if - what if even Ampere doesn’t want her? 12 | P a g e Anaya shakes her head, glass filling her eyes, glass filling her throat, glass filling her chest, she feels like her skin is too tight or too loose, it is always either dangling or constricting her throat, never enough, never right. Ampere whimpers softly and paws at her slowly. She reaches back for a can of his food and another can of cold, weird noodles that she once loved but now feels like throwing it all up and contemplates not eating at all for a while. But then Ampere sniffles and lays his head on her lap, so she eats, stuck in the middle of nowhere as the rain splatters from the outside, taking away any resemblance of quiet. She shrugs off her coat and opens her seatbelt to reach for her phone in her back pocket, that she had stopped using anyways. It blinks twice, and she would have switched it off, but she makes the mistake of opening it to the lone unexpected message glaring at her in the darkness of harsh weather. Nic: Come back home Anaya tucks it s oftly somewhere at the backseat of the car. * Anaya takes Ampere to all the places she had dreamt of visiting with... star by her side. But she forgets to look up at the sky on cloudless nights. Forgets to touch the foams the waves make on coastlines and be aches on warm, sunny days. Forgets to spot rainbows after rains. Forgets to write tiny notes on tiny papers. She curls her fingers around her own wrist, only to find she’s shaking. Like a volcano about to erupt. Or maybe the last brown leaf about to fall in autumn. She feels hot and cold all over her body all at once, her chapped lips quivering with unbearable what - ifs; she looks down and smiles as her tears wet the ground. They say that the earth accepts all her off - springs with grace, no matter how erro neous they are. She feels wrong. 13 | P a g e The phone blinks again. And again. And again. Anaya breaks the small jar of dandelions kept at the front of the car. * [ Anaya’s phone 17th September, Sunday Nic: are you ok? 18th September, Monday Nic: the skies turned the color of your eyes today ha look I can write better than you why are you the author stares 21st September, Thursday Nic: Anaya? 22nd September, Friday Nic: Anaya it is not the same without you 24th September, Saturday Nic: I picked dandelions for you weirdo vase Nic: you look like such a clown with dandelions stuffed behind your ears lmao 27th September, Saturday Nic: I miss your dog Nic: I miss your stupid words 28th September, Sunday Nic: come back? Nic: Anaya? Nic: I mis s you 30th September, Tuesday Anaya: why do you care? ] “Star deserves someone whole and beautiful, whaddaya say, buddy?” Anaya strokes the top of Ampere’s head as she parks her car at the back of a little cottage at the base of a hill. The hills rise wit h proud bosoms, full of flourishing flora and multitudes of birds and beasts. “I’m talking as if she ever thought of me as someone special”, Anaya snorts, and gives Ampere the side - eye. He is busy chewing on a bone. 14 | P a g e She shuts the door behind her and walk s up to the edge of the hill; one step forwards and she is going to fall into infinity. Ampere is cowering behind her; he’s scared of the height. “Look up, buddy, not down”, Anaya whispers, and looks up herself - the sky is cloudless again, full of diffused sunlight, warming their skins and minds, and Anaya forgets she exists for a moment, forgets her dog and human beings, the sun - scorched pebbles underneath her bare feet. It lasts for a microsecond. Her phone vibrates again. She shrugs and takes it out, j aw clenched. * Had you been a bird atop a hill who was looking down at the strange girl with a dog at the edge of a world looking up at the creator, you would have seen her head hand down suddenly like she has become lifeless, you would have witnessed her knees parting and hitting the diamond - hard stones on the ground, cracking her skin apart; you would have seen her put her arms around her dog and shake with uncontrollable emotions, with the weight of the world and realization, with the blessings of be ing bestowed with a mind’s eye. And you would have probably felt a tweak of something in your own heart too, but you would have gone about your way, not pitiful of the child of the humans because she is broken, but happy and peaceful in a quiet way because she too will learn to shape the world in her own little fingers. * [ Anaya’s phone 3rd October, Friday Nic: because its you ] 15 | P a g e Canis Major Funnily enough, the way back home is short. Not to mention the way Anaya doesn’t forget to look up at the sta rs. The seas crashing against the sand. The Earth laughing through its flowers. The clouds eerily resembling the shape of someone’s eyes. Anaya parks her car at the gravelly lonely place where it is supposed to be and gets down with her dog when - Oh. It’s Nichole. Star is standing stiff, her hands in her pockets, mouth drawn into a thin line. He is wearing a black hoodie and black pants and a number of colorful friendship bracelets around his hand. Anaya swallows, as if waiting for the wings to flutter out from behind Nichole. “Hi”, she says. Nichole stares at her, and Anaya feels like she can read every emotion creating a tornado inside her like a magazine. She does not look upset or angry, it is just a quiet kind of sadness slowly melting away, and Anaya feels like this is what she has been l ooking for all over the country, this is what she was trying to grasp and failing every time, again and again, like grains of sand through clumsy fingers. Her throat is clogged up. “Do you have any idea”, Nichole starts, and Anaya pushes down the emotions unfurling inside her momentously; this is simply not the time. But then, Nichole engulfs her, stars arms around her middle, their hearts pressed against each other, the warm skin of Nichole’s neck finally, finally against her mouth. Anaya holds star around her shoulders, a mixture of a cry and a laughter bubbling out from her depths. 16 | P a g e She came home. * “Nichole please one more cupcake please”, Anaya pleads, fake tears in her eyes. She is still licking off the remnants of the last pancake from off her finger s. There is nothing tastier than Nichole’s pancakes. Except maybe Nichole himself. But Anaya is not going to express this extraordinarily correct thought verbally. “Nuh I do not want you going to the toilet a dozen times in an hour again”, Nichole says, bu t he is smiling, softly. It sets a warm glow around the room, soft and calm and comforting like a blanket. Anaya wants to hold star and cry into her neck and run her fingertips over stars soft lower lip and watch star fall asleep and kiss the side of his j aw when he is asleep and put stars hand against her own chest to show how it is spelling out Nichole’s nam e , over and over again. “Anyways”, Nichole starts, abruptly , “good night”, she says, gently, reaching for the door. No. What if - what if Anaya was wrong all along? A great red dust storm rises in her heart and she sit s up, blinking rapidly. One last time. “Stay?” Anaya mumbles, fire sparking inside her. Nichole turns back and smiles. Her eyes are shiny. The End 17 | P a g e