Who: Cricket (polnoch); mentions of The Boogeyman, Urania What: Response to this, some gratuitous exposition because hi my name is Catwo have we met? /shot Where: Wherever The Boogeyman happens to be boogieing When: Backdated FOR FOREVER to somewhere in the neighborhood of November 12th, around sundown Warnings: General creepiness? Note: I want everything here, please and thank you. Also gratuitous chop chop chopping up of a Sylvia Plath poem.
She drowses through the afternoon like a child or an old woman, tucked up under an afghan that hides nearly all of her away but her closed eyes and shocking hair, her little sock-clad feet. She does sleep, and she does dream, domesticated nightmares at best. The sort of dream that curls around the psyche and purrs like something that knows where the jugular is but has decided it would rather nap with its head tucked warm against where the heart beats in its cage of ribs, that is the sort of dream little Cricket is prone to when she slumbers so peacefully.
The clockwork of the world continues to wind today toward tonight, and afternoon slowly bleeds into evening. All encompassing sleepiness gradually transmutes into partial wakefulness. The little feet twitch, draw up under the blanket that hides the rest of her. Little fingers knead with claw-like delicacy at the fabric of the couch as her shoulders flex and stretch. When she emerges from her cocoon it is with a yawn so large that her eyes are squeezed shut and her whole face is little but neatly tooth-ringed maw for a long, lingering moment.
A few lazy little awakening noises drift through the dim air. She can hear her most favorite of the young creepy crawlies moving about another room with the usual brand of stealth trademarked by things that go bump in the night. These two do not move with the silence of the grave, oh no, but with the quiet of something breathing slowly and delicately down an unaware neck, with the quiet of the unknown and uninvited backseat passenger rising upward to be glimpsed in the rear view mirror. This is the quiet that says you are standing at the head of your funeral plot, just awaiting an oh so gentle shove (ashes, ashes, we fall down dead). It is with this calm wrapped 'round her that she moves, when she moves.
Cricket does not rise to greet the remains of the day as the dying sun drops like a candle drowning in wax, closer and closer to disappearing. She near-slithers off the couch instead, dropping to her hands and knees in a too-quick motion as she fumble-falls with gleeful grace toward the homey shadows instead, hair falling in and around her face. The sun catches the redness of it against her white, white dress. The last rays of the sun paint the lowlights of her hair like blood against her white, white dress, her white, white skin. The rays of light catch her changeable eyes and her delicate little lip curls, the girl risen to a crouch in the gold-limned room for just a second, all arms and legs and spider-balance (daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through) before she turns her back on the sunset and slinks off. Even back then, old man, even when she was maybe a daughter maybe a princess, even then the sundown was not her time. It was a brighter sister that closed the gate after he gave up his jealous grip on the sky and let the night-things out to roam.
Only in the darkness did she ever know her father (he may not have been her father; she may never have cradled the dead, dropped daughterly kisses and tears atop his head; this may all be so much delusion), as he slowly expired with naught to comfort him but the ring of her arms and her lips pressed to his brow (Daddy, lie back now. He bit her pretty red heart in two with his pain, every single damned night until she pulled it out herself and left it behind as she shimmied down from the stars to the swamps, where her nights could be her own. Is this how it happened? Perhaps she tumbled and fell instead, dragged down by her heavy heart. Perhaps she shattered when she landed and the dark things built her up built her up again, stuck her together with glue. Either way, daddy, she's through and your light-fingers in her hair are less than nothing). But the things that Cricket knows in the light are rare indeed, and if somewhere Daddy stirs in the mists and mysteries that litter her mind like so much detritus cast into a swamp then she is content to let her subconsciousness' creepy crawlies stopper up his mouth with their legs and lips.
Pancakes. It is decided. She moves on her hands and the balls of her feet toward the kitchen, a grotesque mimicry of a monster-child with her little socks scuffing the rug, with her little curling fingers that are mostly bone. Standing to gather things from cupboards, there is a hint of the sky-princess in her grace and in the curve of her neck but when her rustling about coaxes the other from his room there is nothing young enough for that story in the old-woman eyes that meet his. Breakfast? It is sundown. Cricket awakes with the nightmares.
This is not a replacement daddy, not even the littlest bit. She calls him daddy, sometimes, with that twist to her mouth that heralds amusement for once simply resting on a bit of word instead of a pinch of pain and a half-twist of mayhem but it has the flavor of a joke to it at the best of times. He could call her babushka and be more truthful, but it is the twisting of the actual that interests them. Partners in crime when they intersect, the old nightmares and the new intermingling oh so prettily to spray-paint trauma large and bold beside terror and distress throughout the darkling hours. Kindred spirits, daddy, she had said to him once in early afternoon when he arrived at a small-town library all neat shirt and courteous smile to retrieve his little girl. She had been reading Anne of Green Gables, perched forgettable and oh so polite in the corner of the children's section, and she quoted it at him with perfect darling daughter poise as she stood, rearranged her clothing carefully with a pretty little deliberateness. Ice cream soda?
In the ice cream parlor she had sipped her treat as her little feet swung merrily, unable to quite touch the floor, and her little girl voice had belled out precious and precocious, words just out of the hearing of the soda jerk as he cleaned the taps. She told him all about the children she had seen, curled up so discrete and neat, for it was daddy dearest's turn to pick their fun.
She is older today, old enough to reach the stove and wear a dress fitted through the hips, though she may well be a handful of years younger again tomorrow if that is the game they choose to play. It's all a matter of perception: something in her is always young, something in her is always old. The little mortals can only see one bit of her at a time. She simply adjusts what piece of her that is, while The Boogeyman watches and understands.
There are so few who really and truly understand, these days. In the middle of raising a bite of pancake from plate to mouth, she pauses. Her head tilts, birdlike. A moment's worth of scrambling and she is back, sharp teeth working at the neglected bite of pancake as she opens her pilfered laptop. She forgets things, sometimes, loses them in the lattice-work of her mind and then trips on them at odd times. The god-journals are one of those forgettable things, which is why she only reads Urania's post several days after the Muse sets the words down.
She reads it twice through, quick and then slow, then drags her fork across the plate and listens to the screech. She draws her feet up and tucks them under her, rests her elbows on the table and looks at the words on the computer screen again, blank-eyed with memories that might or might not be real (it doesn't matter if what makes you up is false or fact, in the long run, just that it is there inside you and shapes you. And when you are Cricket's age it is all the long run, finish line closer than it ever has been but still out of reach). She thinks on sisters, as she absentmindedly finishes her share of the pancakes. She remembers what might have been.
She remembers arming Utrennyaya, the warrior sister, and standing palm to palm with Vechernyaya in the shadows of the palace as they watched the Day Star ride off to battle, but in this memory she does not remember her own face, or what she wore, or why there was a battle. She remembers testing the links of the hell-hound's chain as he lay quiescent, lulled into peace in their presence through an eternity spent chained together, him to the star and they to ensuring the security of his chain (and they were chained to the stars in turn, of course, for they are stars. Even now Cricket is silvery and slight in the darkness, Midnight Star walking the world). She remembers dancing but she remembers it as if she watched from a distant star. Three slim figures cavort in the palace that is the sky, one sun-bright and one moon-bright and one precisely betwixt and between. She remembers her sisters' maybe-children by the moon. She does not remember her own. Midnight is ever-untouched.
She thinks, if she squints and holds her breath, that she can remember what it felt like, having sisters and then... not. Not having, that she is familiar with (though Lady Midnight thinks of Lady Midday, opposite and adored, and perhaps she is not truly sisterless after all). She knows how that feels, in the chest and in the head. Something like an amputation. Phantom pains. Storing up stories to tell to ghosts and memories.
Cricket dances, some nights. Barefoot, she sways. Hands held out for no one to hold, she bends and twists and leans up toward the stars. She wonders if Urania will do the same. She finds herself telling The Boogeyman about the nebulous Before, about her lost sisters, and traces the breaks and fractures and inconsistencies in her own account with fingers that accuse the world as silently and pointedly as only a broken girl can. She expects no reckoning, for there are no moments of clarity for those that dwell in fog and at crossroads.
There is a necklace, in her ever-present backpack. It is made up of deliberate, stick and ball charms strung on a simple chain. Cricket bought it at a craft fair three summers ago. The lady had explained amino acids and molecular structure to her, had told her that the jewelry spelled out 'i am star stuff' because what made up humans and what made up stars was the same at the base and heart and fundamental core. Cricket had smiled up at her sweetly and slipped it around her own neck. Some of us more than others. The fair had moved on without incident, for Cricket had danced the night away, the necklace glinting in the moonlight.
Since that night she had kept it tucked away, the star child and the terror child co-existing peaceably enough for the decoration to be unnecessary.
She mailed it off to Urania the next day. No note, for there was no need.
Sisters of a sort can be chosen just as almost-fathers can be, after all (she pictures her dark-shining self, one hand out to her golden half, the other extended to Urania. What is broken can be rebuilt aslant, not better but not worse. Different, different is the thrum of America, is the song of this still-new world, and Cricket ended her story by tossing her head back and laughing like the antique lace-covered killing knife she is, sweet as starlight and harsh as nails).