Lesser Lights

She sees the panoramic view of the heavens, panning out the dots of lesser lights, pulling them to the edges of the sky. So much empty space filled with little lights. Darius curls into the nook of her side. She feels the cotton of her shirt pull away from her ribs as he inhales slowly. She pushes her head toward her chest to get a better look at her son. She lifts her head, and a few strands of grass fall from her hair; blades tossing themselves back to the ground. Darius shivers. His small body trembles in the space between her arm and her side. The dew is starting to collect around them. Darius manages to wrap himself tightly with the blue blanket beneath them, rolling himself up like rewound film. The pop of fireworks in the blanket’s pattern fold into wrinkling waves, a bunch and a twist of fabric.

She imagines Will pulling up on the cold asphalt driveway, blinding them with headlights. She is afraid that he might gripe that the nights were starting to get too cold for them to be outside. The commute makes him jealous of her position at home. The lab pulls him from the house for long hours, and she looks to avoid arguments where she can. She thinks that the spined fish give him enough to pick at, and the young ichthyologist needs to learn to leave things alone. She didn’t want to fight about the space above and below. The water and the sky each own different depths.

“It’s getting late,” she says.

“I don’t want to go inside.”

“Your eyes are closed.”

“I can still see the stars,” Darius says.

“From the back of your eyelids?” she asks, laughing.

“In my dreams.”

“Well, Big Dreamer, you can dream of them in your bed,” she says.

Darius doesn’t respond. Aster pulls her son’s limp body into her arms and stands up for the both of them. His arm flops as she walks toward the house. The whistle of Darius’ own snore startles him awake.

He looks up at the sky with a crinkled expression of confusion and doubt.

“Mommy?”

“Yes?”

“Are fireworks stars that got stuck in the sky?” he asks.

“No, but they should be.”

She thinks that life is clipped. She thinks, You can only capture so much in the winding roll of film before the whole world unravels into broken clips and snapshots of things that can never be permanent.

Aster gets stuck on the parts of Darius that are shadowed by Will. The way his hair curls. The way his tiny limbs stretch beyond her arms. Yet, she is glad that a small part of her curiosity, their curiosity lives in them.

She thinks of when she first met Will. She takes a deep breath and swallows. It is her favorite memory of them, and she is afraid to think about it, thinking came with revision. And revision meant that she would tilt the camera at an angle she didn’t want to see. She tries to keep it fuzzy, out of focus. Tries to remind herself to shoot the scene that’s in front of her, not behind.

***

Will’s shadow dropped in front of her place on the floor of the field.

She was startled. Blond curls fell into her face as he looked down at her.

“Didn’t mean to scare ya,” he said. Aster sat up and Will stood up slowly, unbending. She was surprised at how slender he was, willowy and waif. His dusty blonde curls were ruffled, more unkempt, and his checkered shirt was draped over his frame. The wind pressed in on the both of them, bending the grass around them.

He looked out toward trees crowded near a small river. The sun dipped its head into the lake; an orange glow wobbled over the water.

The sky was loud with orange and pink. Colors climbed the horizon while daylight tried to escape below the tree line.

“Wow,” he said.

“Nature has a beautiful design,” she said.

Will was silent. Aster shifted herself on the blanket and wrapped her arms around her knees. Had she said something wrong?

“I think of it more as a mix of wonderful chaos,” he said. “Scattered air molecules. Short wave lengths. Violet. Blue. Longer wave lengths crashing colors into the atmosphere.”

“I’ve never heard anyone describe it that way,” she said.

“No?” he asked and sat next to her, wrinkling a spot on the blanket.

She shook her head and looked at the darkening horizon.

“Where I come from, everything is made by the hands of God.”

Will cleared his throat. “People can study science and believe in God.”

“I know,” she said. She felt him tense up next to her.

“I didn’t mean to offend your faith,” he said.

Aster laughed. “Not my faith. My father’s faith.”

Will nodded and he relaxed.

“I’m Will, by the way. Will Zidon,” he said.

A slow smile stretched its way across Aster’s face. “Aster.”

“Aster, huh? That’s a pretty name.”

***

Aster sits on Darius’ bed, and she rubs his back. Kisses him goodnight. She sees the rocket ships on his comforter shoot towards his small body. The glow of sticker stars on his walls press out the night, and she hears the creek of old hardwood in the hallway.

She stands up slowly, trying not to shift Darius’ small body too much to wake him. Will leans on the frame of the open doorway and stares at the production of his wife and son.

When she turns around, she doesn’t fully acknowledge Will’s presence in the room. She went to stretching a hole in the cuff links of Will’s old checkered shirt. She expects an argument. Will notices her hands. He doesn’t make a sound. The silence between them is stiff.

“How was work,” she asks

“Your father dropped by.”

***

The crew is growing suspicious of Aster’s production. She tries not to lament about being a mother and boss. She tries not to burden people with personal problems they can’t understand. She puts her head down and works.

Aster stops to tweak the lighting. All the actors freeze in the frame of the closed rehearsal room. She ogles the room through the lens again. Zooming in. Zooming out.

The actors move in and out of the frame. The crew adjusts the lighting, and James moves just out of reach of the lights.

“James,” she says, “Don’t move out of the light.”

James stiffens. Aster sighs and motions for James to move towards her. She flips her hand, pushes it back towards him and puts her index finger up.

She hears a crowd of sighs, and everyone focuses in on Aster moving toward the red haired actor.

She pushes both her hands open, signaling to the actors to move, so she can make it to James. She tries to walk James through the dips and turns of the world she is blocking out. He stumbles as he follows her through the motions. He moves in and out of actors, walking down the fake cobbled streets. She gestures for the actors to get out of the way. But, they don’t take her seriously. Aster tries not to think of how her casting is off, and how it is throwing her vision by the wayside.

The DP tries to convince her to let James go, whispering in her ear. “Cut him.”

“Just nerves,” she says through the side of her mouth.

James stops and looks up at Aster. He looks down at his wrists. Aster follows his focus. She sees the close shot of his hands wringing the fabric of his lilac dress shirt. He breaks the fabric as he fiddles with the cuff links. She sees herself standing in front of William. Watches as he tears through his drawers and pulls out his checkered shirt and calls to her attention her nervous habit. She rubs James’ shoulders.

“Let’s take a five minute break,” Aster calls out to the rest of the actors. The whole room echoes with a groan.

Aster is still standing with her fingers gripping onto the poor boy’s shoulders. She realizes that they are too still, and she turns to see the dead space that the actors leave as they walk out the door. Useless action to point out, she thinks. She is lingering. Lingering on an amateur angle at which to view the world. Is she forgetting her rules of third, she asks herself?

***

She was shy of twenty-five when they first married and moved into their small yellow house. She could see the white porch that wrapped around the perimeter. She liked the surrounding deck and how it left a space for feet to tread around its edges.

At night, the glow of the outside lights reminded her of buttercup flowers, spread across a field, near an old farmhouse, a field that she and her father used to visit when she was young. Nights when she saw another world above the horizon. When she still saw the world without a film.

She stared into the open boxes that were placed on top of the mattresses. There were boxes scattered throughout the house. Will insisted on unpacking right away. Aster plopped herself down, bounced slightly. The boxes shifted, almost creating an avalanche of photos. She thought it was strange how life could be collected and jammed into brown packages. There were Clothes. Cameras. Some clippings of Will and Aster. Their faces smiled inside the frame. Aster was leaning her head on Will’s shoulder, draping him with the wave of blonde hair. They looked close.

Will pulled her out of the moment, curling his fingers into hers, filling the gaps in her fingers. His hands felt warm to her, but she was suddenly cold. She thought of what her father might say about them, about her marriage. She tried not to think. She stared out the window of the master bedroom and watched the grass spread backwards away from the house and toward a small drip of an oval pond. The pond was circled with drafts of snow and sealed with ice. The heater rumbled and blew the heat into the room.

She felt Will’s hand sliding away from hers, and she turned to see him staring at a box on top of the padded carpet. In black, hardly legible scrawl, was written Night Lights.

Her face was shaded with pink. He broke the tape and pulled out a blue bottle filled with Christmas lights. Yellow firefly stickers were placed here and there to show them flitting over the blue background of the glass.

“I don’t remember packing this. Why do we need—”

“Heirloom,” she said.

“There are multiple.”

“We might have children,” she said.

***

Aster stops wringing the cuff links and looks straight at Will. Will looks off to the side and stares at the small body of their son. He focuses on Darius’ chest rising and falling, lifting the pattern of rocket ships in the air and dropping them slowly back to earth.

“Did he say why he stopped in?”

“He said.” Will stops. “Why do you keep that thing? I thought it was broken.”

“Wait. He said what?” Aster asks.

Will shakes his head. He points to the blue bottle on Darius’ dresser.

“Oh,” she says.

Darius flips himself over in his bed and his blanket slides off his body and onto the floor. Will and Aster run as if their son’s life is threatened by the cold. Aster and Will bump into each other. Will makes it to the bedding first and grips the polyester fabric in his hands. He lifts the blanket to put it over Darius, but Aster grabs the top of the blanket and pushes it down so she is face to face with Will.

“What did he say?” she asks again.

“He wants to visit.”

***

They reconvene in the small space.

James stares blankly, reciting Vincent’s letter to Theo. She feels a sort of dryness, a breathless repetition.

His voice is flat when he says, “When I was in England, I applied for a position as an evangelist—”

“Stop, stop, stop,” she says, waving her hands. “Try again, but be more emphatic.”

“When I was an evangelist. Wait. No.”

The other actors laugh, but Aster turns to glare at them.

She sighs. “Let’s practice, so we don’t waste film.”

The other actors chatted away on the sides of the set, and Aster makes James read out loud from the script. Off camera, he spoke with a steady and lulling voice.

“Dear Theo, When I was in England, I applied for a position as an evangelist among the coal miners, but they put me off, saying I had to be at least twenty-five years old. You know how one of the roots or, foundations, not only of the Gospel, but the whole of the Bible is ‘Light that rises in the darkness’”

He stopped, and looked up at Aster. She nodded for him to continue.

“Experience has shown that the people who walk in darkness, in the center of the earth, like the miner in the black coal mines, for instance, are very much impressed with the words of the Gospel, and believe them too.”

“Wow,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. I just hadn’t known Vincent van Gogh was so religious, I guess.”

She nodded. “Extremely fanatical. Failed as a minister though.”

“Why?”

“Fired for being incapable of eloquent speech.”

“Seems kind of ridiculous.”

“Seems?” Aster asked.

“Okay. Is kind of ridiculous.”

“That’s more like it,” she said, smiling.

“So, did Van Gogh give up the whole God thing altogether? Or?”

“You’re walking into controversial territory on that one.”

“How so?”

“Some historians believe that he gave up his faith in the years between 1882 and 1885. Some have implied that his letters to his brothers have shown that he kept his faith. Others believe that he tried to seek God through his art.”

“What do you think?”

“Why does it matter what I think?”

“Well, you’re the director. You should know which side you’re on.”

“I don’t like being expected to be one-sided.”

“Forgive me. I don’t have a religious bent. I just think it’s difficult to have a vision with direction without taking a stance.”

“James.” She said, her voice rising, but the other actors, and the DP, were gawking at the scene in front of them. She lowered her voice and continued. “This is not the time or place to have this discussion. Besides, perspectives are ever shifting.”

***

Aster decided when she turned twenty to look through a different lens than her father. She was lying in the bed of her pick up truck, glaring up. She thought telescopes only helped you see things farther away, but you have to stop looking at some point. She still loved the rolling view of the heavens, stars pivoting past seasons, past days, but she hated having to leave the sky.

She might have admitted that all things burn out at some point, even the sky. In her mind, the glow of heaven crashed to the ground, and the constellations scattered in her eyes. She liked to hope that they wouldn’t fall in her lifetime. She was uncertain, but she lived with an opening perspective. She imagined the broken angles and ends of Orion, breaking at the belt. Three dots less of a starlit figure.

She shivered. November swallowed the heat. She was two towns away from home, close enough to turn back and far enough to keep her here. She was always turning back before she decided to turn away.

She imagined her mother, powdering her hands in flour. Fingers on the crimped crusts of pie. Her mother would stand behind the haze and heat of opening and closing ovens while her father waited at the dining room table.

His hands creased the ends of a newspaper, and he stared at the circles under jumbled words. His pen flickered, rattled back forth, clicked on the table. He sets his pen down and folded his hands under his chin and closed his eyes. She wondered if he still prayed.

She wondered if he still looked up and saw God in his work.

She couldn’t see. She remembered the empty space being more closed off. Heavenly bodies were yellow smudges, marked out by black smoke. Some were blue, too bright to her eyes. She wanted to look further and she wanted to look less.

Light was soft and light was harsh. It played at different angles. The moon’s strands were softer than the morning rays that poked through the open blinds of their apartment in the morning. She was more at home in the middle of the opening field.

When she left, she promised to keep contact minimal. She never told her father about Will, never told him that they were living together. Her father would expect a ring on her fourth finger. They would get there, but she wasn’t ready for that.

Aster felt the cool ridges on her back, and she thought of starting up the car. Thought of the assignments piled up on her desk, and Will waiting up for her. She sat up slowly and slid off the back of the truck’s bed.

She sat in her car. She leaned back into the cloth seats, damp with cold. The key pivoted, turning over the engine, and the draft of cool air, from the cold heater, made her rub her hands together. She imagined what film making might actually mean to her in the small scope of her life, whether dreams continue or fall apart.

***

Aster stared at her hands. Her father opened his eyes and caught her. She was silent, examining her folded hands. She felt like her life was folded in this moment. Folded in her hands. Her life perched up here with her and her father sitting on this bed. She thought about her life as a thumbprint, a wrinkle in her knuckles. Every individual print that specified who and what she would be. It’s funny how man tries to capture so much with his hands, but some people feel the need to close their eyes to do so. Maybe every blink was a snapshot, and closed eyes were the rest from the moments you no longer wanted to see, but wanted to hold in memory.

Aster was too busy staring at her hands to catch her father staring at her.

“How long have your eyes been open?”

“The whole time,” she admitted. “Do you have to close your eyes to pray?”

She looked at her father, unblinking.

“I suppose not,” her father said. “It’s just to show respect to God. It’s a common practice. A ritual.”

“What good are rituals to God?” she asked. “I don’t want to be a religious fanatic. I don’t care about these rules. I just want to know God.”

Her father swallowed, nodded. “God often rejected the Jews’ sacrifices in the Old Testament. God rejects ritual when it takes the place of Him.”

“How can you tell the difference?”

“When it becomes a motion of folding hands and bowing heads. When prayer sounds like a hollow breath of repeated words followed by an amen.”

“Do you ever feel that way?”

“I like to believe every man has his doubts. The smarter the man, the more room to doubt.”

Aster nodded. “Do you think God believes in science?”

“What do you mean?”

She tried again. “Are God and science in opposition?”

He sighed. “Science is a tool. What man does with it is up to him. What is important is that your beliefs don’t mislead your research.”

“Mislead your research?”

“Twist the facts.”

Aster unfolded her hands, and ran her hands across the bread spread.

“I’m leaving for college soon.”

“You don’t have to figure it all out at once.”

“Does anyone ever figure it all out?”

He put a hand on her shoulder, and he gave her a half hug. “Will you come home? For the holidays, I mean.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t promise I’ll stay in contact either.”

Aster’s father looked down. “Then, we have the sky. Never forget.”

***

Aster takes a deep breath and pushes out the air. She can’t handle confrontation. She never forces herself to do such things. She isn’t given the choice.

Aster’s father walks through the door, and Darius sits up in his bed. With a nod from Will, Aster musters up the courage to look at her father. She doesn’t recognize the speckled gray beard, and his sagging face. What surprises her is how he smiles at her son, like his skin is pulled up from genuine effort.

Aster holds onto the blanket tighter. She feels like a small child. She lets go. Everyone remains silent.

Aster and Will stay rooted in the center of the room while Aster’s father walks over to the dresser. She sees him reach for the broken night light, and he pulls it off the dresser.

“Mom, who is that?” Darius says, pointing toward Aster’s father.

Her father places an old, empty mason jar in place of the broken night light before he turns toward Darius.

“I’m your grandpa,” he says. “I came to fix your mom’s night light.”

Darius stares at the mason jar. “But, it’s empty.”

“Very observant, just like your mother. Do you know why it’s empty?”

“Because you haven’t filled it yet?”

“Precisely.”

Darius looks at Aster with a befuddled expression. Why this random man, whom he did not know, came to state the obvious. Will gives Aster a look as if he expects her to explain to Darius, but Aster remains silent. A smile pulls at the edges of her mouth.

***

Out in the field, behind her old house, Aster jumped off the porch and ran toward the light of fireflies. The glow of night hung on the wings of lunar moths. Her father looked up at the sky through a lens, and she wanted to see what he saw. She preferred the expanded view, rolling out in front of her as miles of yellow dots, dots that traced around Sagittarius, dots that pulled them together, in their place under an August sky. She could hear cicadas snap their wings. They broke her reverie with desperate buzzing that sounded like the fading heat.

Aster wanted to know more than one place, more than one spot in the sky. She wanted to know what it meant for the stars, to know how they felt bursting open together. How they could be breathed in one voice. The universe that came alive with a sentence, a sound. She was not sure whether to side with her father, or her mother. What it meant to question origin. All she wanted was to see what’s in front of her without looking behind.

She could never focus on one view. The multiple views collapsed and diluted her world, distorted the pictures with thoughts she refused to hear. She wanted to hear both sides and wanted to block everything out to hear nothing and no one. She always wanted it both ways without the consequence.

Her mother came out with an open mason jar. She grabbed Aster’s hands, made her chase the heatless light of firefly ends. Aster felt a tug, a jerk, and the burnt grass poked at her feet. She thought of the yellow field. The one that father used to chase her in. The one that made him look at the stars less, and made his lens focus back on earth. Back on her and her mother. But she was seven, almost eight. And childhood and adulthood were gaps that were never clearly measured.

She heard a snap. A frilled cloth rested over the top of the mason jar, and it was puckered around the rim by a red rubber band.

The little lights buzzed in agitation and excitement inside the trap. And she wondered what it was like to hold light, even if it was lesser light.