The Weight of Stars

by Tessa Gratton

  Freyrsday is the Day of Satisfaction, and I eat well. These celebrations are rich and full of history, of hands clapping and raised voices. Preachers talking of the earth and love, of fertile imaginations and fertile bodies, of responsibility and good works and family; all as if it is fun, is delightful, is everything a body could need in this life. They preach under tents, they preach in million-dollar, state-of-the-art temples. They preach on television and in the halls of Congress.

  But on Sunsday, I am never full.

  • • •

  To be fair, because I answer to the god of justice, I have tried everything under the triple heavens to fill my craving. Sex, drugs, dancing, liquor, racing, murder, women, orgies, high magic, and pain. If it can be done with hands or mouths, I’ve tried it, with my own hands and with others’.

  Not with children, though, or my Mother Loki would destroy me.

  I was a monster in Frankland two hundred years ago. In Deutschland, I was the Big Bad Wolf. I was hell hounds and black dogs, and I bathed in the blood of virgins. Here in the United States of Asgard, I am the scourge of cattle, now that the bison are gone, and I’ve been told my appetites hold feminism back. I say I’ll eat anyone who can prove it.

  It’s harder in this age of camera phones and twenty-four-hour media access. Used to be I could terrorize a village for months, and the news spread only to the local king or chieftain. A hundred miles away, nobody knew I’d been on the prowl. Now I have to watch myself and try not to let them catch me on any camera, not connect this girl’s face with the monstrous wolf Fenris, who crouches at Tyr’s side during Bright Home celebrations. It’s happened, of course. If you look, you can find Glory Lokisdottir in grainy interweave videos, or the blur of my motorcycle. You can find images of my mouth painted like wine or purple hellebore, bold and livid, or my eyes darkened with thick liquid lines, smeared green and glittery like a mask.

  Without the makeup, I am nearly invisible.

  • • •

  Today Jenny Calsdottir speaks of compassion in the face of anger, forgiveness and communication in the face of hatred. It’s a lesson needed these days in New Asgard, where Odinists and Freyans split Congress in two with nary a friendly word between them, and their stringent, narrow messages are repeated again and again by pundits and in headlines. Jenny tells us it is the angry few at either end of the spectrum who perpetuate the myth that we are a people divided, that the truth is most citizens wish for strength and loyalty and love to bring us all together. Perhaps she is right. She says we must see the good in others, seek the truth of god in our brothers and sisters, even if it is hard—no, especially if it is hard. That is our mission. We pray to bring out the god in ourselves, and we reach out to find it in others.

  I think, I know where Baldur’s godhood resides, and I want to eat it.

  I stand up and stalk out into the atrium, around to the little bathroom beside the stairs. Straight-arming my way in, I splash my face with cold water. The shock cools my temper and washes away the disgusting odor of urine and mold and bleach. It’s not even a dirty bathroom. But I prefer the great outdoors for such ablutions.

  Padding down to the basement, with its yellowing tiles and old metal chairs and pressed-wood tables, water-stained ceiling and paneled walls, I aim for the kitchen, where Renee Anning is arranging donuts on long plastic trays. Her thin fingers are encased in latex gloves, her mouth covered by a breathing mask, her twisted hair in a net. She still smells like stomach acid and anti-bacterial wash, and I know she’s dying. I remember when most people died before they were even forty. Silently, I pull gloves from the cardboard dispenser and help her. She smiles at me and doesn’t notice my bare feet.

  Singing and the echo of keyboard and tambourine sink down from the sanctuary. I hum along, and Renee joins me. I want to say something about death and illness, about gnawing pain, but women these days are not as inured to the gruesome aspects of death as they used to be. That new Valkyrie is right about one thing: New Asgard has forgotten the ugliness of the world; its people build walls and stories up around it and pretend they’ve evolved.

  Baldur helps them do it.

  I tear a donut to pieces and stuff it in my mouth to hide the evidence.

  Disliking having to hide my strength by taking just one tray at a time, I scowl as I lay out the tables. Renee pours herself some burnt coffee in a Styrofoam cup and brings me another. I take it, grateful to have the harshness to hold under my nose. I sip, letting the coffee scorch my tongue and terrorize my olfactory nerves, if nerves are what I have.

  I sit on an orange plastic chair and cross my legs at the knee, breathing deep of the coffee smell, trying to be calm, to not drag my anger at Baldur, my hunger, into this basement. Kids rush past, parents just behind, and the hall fills with high chatter as everybody grabs donuts and coffee and lemonade. They’re smiling, mostly, shoulders relaxed, women clicking toward the tables in decent heels, men unbuttoning suit jackets and loosening ties. Here I sit in a skimpy halter and jeans that show off the cup of my ass.

  Jenny touches my bare shoulder. “Glory,” she says.

  I use my real name because it’s common enough. I tilt my head and know my hair brushes her wrist. Her smile is small but genuine, and worry clouds her brown eyes. Because of the coffee, I only get a whiff of deodorant-blocked sweat and delicate jasmine perfume. “Hi,” I say, showing all my teeth in a smile.

  “What’s wrong?” She slides into a crouch, knees demurely together under her violet striped dress.

  “Wrong?”

  “You don’t have any shoes.”

  I grimace. “I left them when I ran away from….” I shrug.

  She pats my hand and uses me as leverage to push up.

  Jenny is in her forties, married, with three kids. She preaches full-time and has published two books about prayer and modern life. I read one of them and ate the other. Hanging from a delicate chain on her neck is a tiny gold crucifix with that dying god Christ and, behind it, a sun charm for Baldur: the Risen Son, the Risen Sun—many a Biblist’s favorite pun. I like it, too. I like it because I like anything that makes the world bigger instead of smaller, and that’s what Jenny preaches.

  But today, bigger only feels emptier. I think about Baldur ignoring—no, worse than ignoring, not even recognizing—the suffering around him, or the shadows. The sun is in his eyes, and so it is all he sees. “I saw Baldur,” I say abruptly.

  Jenny pauses. “You saw Baldur?”

  Heads swing toward us, donuts half chewed, coffee unswallowed. A little girl in a flouncy dress skids to a stop in front of me. “Baldur!”

  Working my jaw, I nod.

  “What was he like?” It’s Jenny, calm and curious, voicing the question in everybody’s eyes.

  “Just as you expect. Beautiful. Friendly.” I shrug and fling up my arms exactly as a teenager who’s caught in a trap by her parents might.

  They wait expectantly.

  I lean forward. My thighs stick to the plastic chair, and the waistband of my shorts pinches my bellybutton. I’m sure anyone who wishes to is filing the shape of my tits away for private time. “The sun made him obvious,” I say. “It loves him as much as he loves its warmth. As he passed, people stared, smiled, felt better about their lives.”

  It’s working here, too, even once removed. They smile around me, imagining him as they’ve seen him on TV but right before them. One or two even touch their hearts, like the old man on the boardwalk.

  I dump my coffee in the trash and head for the door, performance over, but the clicking of Jenny’s heels gives me pause. I smell dead mice behind the disused heating vent next to my bare feet. Leaning there, I turn to her. She touches the small of my back.

  “Why did seeing him upset you?”

  Her breath smells like old toothpaste and lemonade, a better addition to her perfume and sweat than sour coffee would have been. She thinks I’m a Lokiskin orphan, raised in a city home with others like me, parentless, searching, not quite a woman. It’
s not unusual for girls with snake tattoos to end up with the Sun.

  “He didn’t see the shadows.”

  The preacher tilts her head. “He focuses on what’s bright.”

  I nod. “If you don’t shine, he won’t see you. He is not a seeker or a teacher, like you say he is, like your dying god. He doesn’t want to lift you up—us up. He doesn’t care if we evolve into better women and men. He doesn’t want to save us or change us.”

  “We have to save and change ourselves, Glory,” Jenny says calmly.

  I laugh. It is a deep laugh, deep as my sister’s gullet.

  Her smile is patient. “It is possible to change, though I can hear you don’t believe that yet.”

  “Some things don’t change, Jenny.”

  “Like the gods?”

  “Perfect example.”

  “They don’t have to change in order to mean something to us, or to help us. Remember what I told you when you first came here? That we pray to change ourselves, not our circumstances. So it is with the gods. They can hear us if they choose to, but we only need to hear ourselves.”

  The ideas long to comfort, but I’m one of those unchanging things. My hunger will never diminish until I devour the sun. Until the worlds end and we are reborn—if we’re reborn. “Baldur could do much to change our circumstances,” I push.

  “But if he fixed our problems for us, we would not learn.”

  “What if they’re problems he created, or the other gods?” I lean nearer to her. “What of the divisions you mentioned today, in Congress? A word or two one way or another from the Alfather or Freyr the Satisfied would go a long way.”

  Jenny shakes her head. “I disagree. We know what Odin or Freyr would want, if we think about it honestly enough. They are what they are and always have been. This is about us deciding for ourselves, as a people, how to move forward. Some will win, some will lose; some will not care, some will care too much. Each of us, individually, must find clarity and truth and then act upon it. We must reach out and help our fellows find their own truths, whether they align with ours or not.”

  “You give humanity too much credit,” I say bitterly. I have seen it. I have been there for the rise and fall of empires. The falls begin this way, usually: factions among the people, divisions among the leaders, crowding and intolerance and violence.

  This is how the gods rose, too, to the top of the nine worlds. But there are so few of them left now, it’s harder to start wars.

  “I give you credit,” she says. “And if I give it to one, I give it to all.”

  My hostility crumbles under the beam of her sincerity.

  If I ate her, would any of this generous spirit sink into my blood? “You remind me of him,” I mutter.

  Her unplucked eyebrows lift. “Him?”

  “Baldur.”

  The smile that lights up her face makes her seem even more like the god of luminosity. I honestly cannot remember ever feeling so radiant myself. I cannot give off light, because I am a sucking, starving black hole. I sniff long and deep: I smell her flesh, the dead skin on her scalp, the hairspray holding her soft waves behind her ears, the nail polish remover still clinging to her cuticles, the chemicals of her lip gloss, the turning silver in her ears, flecks of dry blood, hormones sliding out of her like heady perfume. I want it all. My lips part, my tongue presses against my teeth.

  Jenny Calsdottir’s dark eyes flicker, and she falters back a step.

  Snapping my mouth and my eyes shut, I press my fingers to my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, harsh and wolflike.

  I don’t wait for forgiveness or any response. I go out into the sticky afternoon, thick with people and traffic and humidity, thick with smells, all of them unnatural, manmade, chemical and electronic and plastic and loud. Hot oil and alcohol, yeast rot and mold. They burn through the air, coating the sweet late-summer-cloying-flowers smell, destroying the first curling-brown scent of autumn.

  I walk. I stride long and hard, bare feet slapping the concrete. My glare drives any company away and I continue on, through the daylight, past the avenues and sparkling city fountains, past condos and libraries and an asphalt university. Past hospitals and militia stations, car dealers and movie theaters and broken-windowed elementary schools. I smell gunpowder and sweat and moldy siding. I smell charcoal and dead fish and pigeons. I smell rats and bats; I smell dog skit and dogs, piss and sewage and stagnant water. That is the city to me: layers of smells driving me on and through. It used to be I could get through a city, one side to the other, in minutes. Now there are rings of metropolis surrounded by lesser city and suburbs and sprawling neighborhoods like rabbit warrens but smelling worse.

  I land on a street where the buildings lean toward one another, where cars go slower on shiny rims, and my glare attracts one in every seven people I pass. They see me, and gasp or drop open mouths, and once or twice, a man follows me a few paces before his senses get the better of him.

  This place is mere miles from the church, but it might as well be a lower world.

  I wind along brick streets through the bluffs to the river and the warehouses slick with evening and abandonment. Shattered windows, caved-in roofs, death soaked in from when men packed pigs here, from when they drove cattle through for slaughter, for passage up the river.

  There are people here, too, the kind who make me hungrier because they are hungry and let it show. Near the church, near the shiny metal skyscrapers, out near the honeycomb mansions, people are starving, too, but they hide it behind masks; they hide it behind convertibles and big-box stores. They hunger and imagine if they ignore it, the hunger will go away. Fashion and prettier friends and status and designer drugs will help them step over the gaping hole. But here where there is less to covet, less to long for, simply less, you can’t hide the hunger, and it burns in the eyes; it shows in the cheekbones and the color of your gums. It shows in your reaching fingers and addictions.

  The sun slides away, sick and yellow, and I hunt.

  I find bangers and thieves, flower girls and runners and people just trying to survive. I find boys hunkered down in shelters made by bridge eater trolls, built of old iron and broken cross beams. I find twisting graffiti of the New World Tree and the Norns who keep your Fate. I find runesign and broken swing sets and sunken apartments where lights begin to flicker on and shadows move inside as families gather for scant dinners, for yelling and probably cheating, a few of them for love.

  And there I find it: a glowing blue arrow.

  My hunger is huge, and I lean in against the rough brick wall, fingers on elaborate gang messages I don’t understand, and lick the blue paint. It is new. It smells fresh and tastes like acid.

  Rave.

  No matter the time, no matter the social divisions, there are always parties like these. The rich and the poor have found ways, together or separate, for as long as I remember. As long as there have been drums and drugs and bodies to touch.

  Now my smile is a smile of love: I adore humanity for this.

  The raves are one thing this modern world does better, for now we have gel lights and surround-sound, strobes and DJs and every kind of liquor under the sun. We have body paint and glitter and leather straps.

  I could go home for some of that paint, for a dress made of sequins and dreams, but it won’t matter in the end. What matters is the sweat and the dancing.

  • • •

  The rave is in the basement of an old brick building, a cannery with the bones of old machines and shredded conveyer belts, swathed in darkness and flashing shadows. You only have to follow the acid blue arrow, around the side, through a narrow metal door, down rough concrete steps. Here are men with wicked or senseless or panting eyes and women to match, the gut-aching throb of bass vibrating the rusty metal banister. My bare feet crush against crumbles of rubble and brick, shuffle through glass and metal shavings, shed hair, dropped hairpins and buttons, through sticky spilled Vodka Cranberries and spit and gum.

  I smell it all, and my to
es stick and slide. Were I other than the Fenris Wolf, it would be intolerable.

  But the pounding music, the vibration of my hair follicles and thrumming of my blood, the wild layers of filth and frenzy, laughter and sighs and ragging moans, make the danger come alive and burn.

  They don’t card me or ask for a cover; they only back out of my way.

  I dive in like the people are warm ocean waves and I want to drown.

  This is what the party is like: green and purple spotlights, glow sticks and splashed liquor, cheap beer, cheaper boys, girls in skirts and a stripe of a top, neon hair, shoving and screaming and skull-filling music.

  If only it would fill my stomach.

  But it’s close.

  I throw out my hands and whip my head, I jump and fling myself. I do not drink; I do not put any dissolving pills under my tongue or snort powder into my nostrils. I only take flesh in my hands: hips and shoulders, necks and fingers. I howl and laugh, I snarl, I snap, I put my mouth to other mouths and taste the depths of tipsy and the edges of trashed.

  I spin, I climb, I am a sucking black hole drawing light and pulsing music and the girls and boys and darlings-in-between to my center.

  They reach for me, groping and clinging, clammy fingers and sweaty palms, teeth and tongues and hips and arms. They can have a piece, any one of them, a taste, a touch, a kiss, a strand of hair.

  It is like being worshipped, like the sun on Baldur’s mouth, perhaps. But this is hunger.

  Living, breathing, screaming, sweating hunger.

  All that is missing is that sun.

  The taste of his heart.

  The hot, hot, decadent, syrupy blood and muscle. It is the sun, my sun, and I need it.

  I am pulled and I go with them, some girls and a boy or two, stealing me, taking me up and over to a sofa, soft as velvet and smelling of honey soda and sweat and sex stains. They have their mouths and hands on me; they could eat me, and I could let them.

  My hunger is silver, painful steel.