The Storyteller

by Aaron Starmer

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Did you see the paper?” There was no need for formalities. I guess that’s how far our relationship has gotten. I guess that’s how far it’s going to get.

  “Why would you do that, Glen?” I asked. “Why would you read my diary?”

  There was a pause. “So I could do something nice for you,” he said, in a voice so clueless to his violation that I knew this was the end of things.

  “There’s nothing nice about violating someone’s privacy,” I said.

  “But did you see the paper?” he asked, in that same voice.

  What was he even talking about? Honestly, I didn’t care. “All I see is that I don’t know why I got into this relationship in the first place. I’m sorry, Glen, but it’s over. It never should have started.”

  I hung up.

  AFTERNOON

  Did you see it? Did you see it? Did you see it?

  Did I see what?

  Did I look out the front window and see Dorian Loomis walking down the street with Fiona, his hand on her shoulder? Did I see the two of them alone, sharing some private words, a conversation I’d never be able to hear?

  I did.

  Did I see a team of police and dogs out in the swamp behind my house, poking around past Frog Rock, searching for clues and appearing to find zilch?

  I did.

  Did I see my brother, lying on the couch on his side, looking bewildered? Did I see his eyes go wide when I asked him if there was anything I could do to help? And did I see my reflection in his eyes, my face crinkled with worry, when he replied, “Absorbing them all was a terrible idea, wasn’t it?”

  I did.

  EVENING

  After lunch, Mom told me and Alistair that we were all going for a drive and we followed her to the minivan, where Dad was waiting with thermoses of hot chocolate.

  Out of the neighborhood we drove, past the news vans and cop cars. Through town, past the Skylark and the memorial tree. To the countryside, where fields crusted with snow looked like big sheets of blank paper.

  I figured we were going to an early dinner somewhere, because no one was in the mood to cook today, but then Dad said, “Have Mom and I ever showed you the place where we met?”

  “You mean you two actually existed before we were born?” I said.

  “Barely,” Dad said.

  And Mom said, “Aww. Still so sweet.”

  Then Dad pulled us over to the side of the road next to some farm that looked like any farm on any road out of town. He cut the engine, which cut the heat, which was okay because we were all bundled up anyway, and Mom started pouring the hot chocolate into short plastic mugs.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  “Fine,” Dad said. “This is it.”

  I rolled down my window and stuck my head out into the frigid air. It was dead silent. It was almost dark, but there was a rind of color on the horizon. “This spot?” I asked. “This is where you met?”

  “This very spot,” Mom said as she handed us our hot chocolate.

  Alistair leaned over me and peered out of my window too. “It’s … stark,” he said.

  Dad looked back at us and smiled. “It was even starker then. I was twenty-four and still in grad school. Sometimes I’d go for long drives to clear my mind, and on one of those long drives, on a cold winter day like this one, I ran out of gas. At this very spot.”

  Mom picked up the tale from there. “I was twenty-three and I had my first job,” she said, “which involved driving mail from the processing plant in Ontonkowa to the post office in Thessaly. Not a bad gig for a kid. And the reason you two exist.”

  “Really? What about the stork and the cabbage patch?” I asked as I rolled my window back up.

  “That came later,” Dad said with a chuckle. “Your saint of a mother—”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “She saw you on the side of the road, picked you up, and drove you to the gas station, and you fell in love and lived happily ever after.”

  “Hardly,” Mom said. “You know me better than that.”

  “As I was saying,” Dad went on, “your saint of a mother has always abided by the tenets of the United States Postal Service, and that day was no different. She slowed down, but didn’t stop. The mail can’t be late, after all.”

  “What?” I hooted. “Mom! You didn’t stop?”

  She shrugged out a good old-fashioned, Eh, whattya gonna do?

  Dad passed his hot chocolate back to Mom and then he blew into his hands to warm them up. The breath snuck out of the cracks between his fingers and made extra, wispy little fingers in the air. “What exactly was it you shouted at me?” he asked Mom.

  “‘Plan ahead next time,’” she said with a smile.

  “And you just left him there?” I asked. I’m not sure if my lip curled in disgust, but Mom certainly recognized the sour look on my face.

  “Oh, he was fine,” she assured me. “Someone helped him out a few minutes later.”

  “That’s right,” Dad said. “A kind old man who was on his way to do some ice fishing. He had a gas can and gave me a gallon to get me on my way. Poured me a cup of coffee from his thermos for good measure.”

  “Sounds like you should have married that guy instead,” I said. “Jeez. This isn’t a romantic story at all.”

  “The romance happened soon enough,” Dad said. “I topped the car off in town and since I needed some stamps, I decided to stop by the post office. I figured if I saw your mom there, I could give her a piece of my mind.”

  This time my lip didn’t curl. It probably quivered a bit, though. ’Tis a foolish endeavor to cross Mom. “You didn’t,” I said.

  “I did,” Dad replied. “I stormed in there and shook the room with my hollering.”

  “And what did she do?” Alistair asked. For most of the story, he’d been staring at his hot chocolate, but now that he looked up, he appeared as invested in the tale as I was.

  “I did my job,” Mom said. “I sat in the back, sorting mail, trying to ignore him.”

  “Except!” Dad said. “She’s forgetting one thing. As I was on my way out, she jogged up and slipped me a note. It read—”

  “‘Forgive me,’” Mom whispered in a very sweet way. “‘I get off in an hour. If you’re still around, please let me buy you some pie.’”

  “And you took her up on the offer?” Alistair said.

  Dad shrugged. “I like pie.”

  “So first date was at the Skylark?” I asked.

  “Hungry Paul’s,” Mom said with a little tsk, tsk, tsk. “Everyone in Thessaly knows Paul’s has better pie.”

  Alistair nodded knowingly.

  “Why have you never told us this story?” I asked. “You tell us every story.”

  “Oh, I’ve told you it before,” Dad said. “Multiple times. Maybe you just weren’t listening.”

  Maybe. It’s possible.

  “Or maybe you forgot,” Mom said. “I don’t think we’ve ever brought you out here before, though. We wanted you to see this place.”

  My window was starting to fog up. The sunlight was gone. Everything was melting into the darkness. “Ain’t exactly Paris, is it?” I said.

  Dad chuckled and said, “No. It ain’t. But it’s where this family got its start. A barren field, a cold day, an empty tank, a snide comment, and a slice of pie. And now that we’ve shared something with you two, we want you to share something with us.”

  Mom cleared her throat and added, “There are no police. No doctors. There’s no judgment. All Dad and I need is to know what’s going on. We need something, because we’re not dummies. We realize there’s more to the story of Fiona and everything else that’s been happening. Can you give us something? Honest. True.”

  I wasn’t sure what I could give them. Maybe you, Stella? That scared me more than Glen or Mandy or even Alistair seeing you. What would Mom and Dad think of their weird little daughter after reading all of that?

  Luckily—or unluckily, depen
ding on how you look at it—Alistair saved me from saying anything.

  “It’s all my fault,” he said.

  I expected my parents to object, or at least Dad to object, but they didn’t say a thing. They sipped hot chocolate and waited for Alistair to elaborate. So he did.

  “You’ve given me a chance to tell you all something, and I’m going to take it,” he went on. “Because this will probably be my last chance. Because things are going to change. Soon.”

  “Change how?” Dad asked.

  “Me,” Alistair said. “Soon I’m going to be different. Maybe I’ll be the kid you once knew again. My old self. Maybe things will be like they once were. I don’t know. What matters is that I’m going to finish things.”

  “Finish things?” Mom asked.

  “I brought Fiona back,” he said plainly. “Problem is, she’s not Fiona anymore, is she? Not totally. I did my best with what I had to work with. But it took too long, and my best obviously isn’t good enough. I want to bring Charlie back too. I want to bring them all back. There’s only one other way I can see to do it now. But it’s dangerous and it’s cowardly, and it might mean we have to start things over.”

  “Fiona came back on her own,” Dad said. “From wherever she was. Don’t blame yourself for that. Don’t blame yourself for whatever happened to her. You are not a coward, and there is nothing wrong with starting over. We can all start over. Together. As a family. Consider this the moment that we start over.”

  “You were kids once, right?” Alistair asked. “Before you met each other on the side of this road?”

  “Of course,” Mom and Dad said at the same time.

  “And I’m sure you lost something when you were a kid,” Alistair said. “A pet. A friend. A grandparent. Something that made you hurt more than you’ve ever hurt, or made you question everything you know about the world and how it works.”

  “We all experience loss,” Dad said. “As kids. As adults. It’s never easy. It’s part of life.”

  “I know,” Alistair said. “That’s the point. But when you’re a kid, it’s different. You lose something and then there’s this hole inside of you and you want to fill that hole, but you don’t have the experience or wisdom to do it. So you ask for answers. From the air, from the clouds, from the stars, from anyone who might listen. And when voices finally respond and promise that there’s a place where you can get what you want, where your wishes can come true, then you go. You go to that magical place and you stay and you create and you try to heal. You fill that hole. Which can be brave. Which is important. But while you’re there, you realize that what you want and what you need are two different things. And that’s when you’re done with the place, and you leave for good. But leaving for good means you forget the place even existed at all.”

  “What are you telling us?” Mom asked.

  Alistair took a deep breath and said, “The place does exist. It’s as real as anything. Maybe even realer. Maybe you’ve even been there, all of you. Only you don’t remember. And now … and now … I’m putting that all at risk. Taking a chance. Because I don’t know what else to do.”

  His voice slipped away and Alistair put a hand on his brow.

  Fog now covered every window, because of all the breath, and enclosed in the cold, dark shell of the minivan, we only had one another to look at.

  “This has gone too far,” Mom said. “This is why Dr. Hollister is so important, this is why … I don’t want to upset you by saying this, but you’re scaring us, honey.”

  He was. Yes, I was scared. But I also understood what he was talking about. Some of it, at least. He was talking about Aquavania. Still, there were so many questions, so many things I didn’t understand. Like what exactly happened before he shot Kyle, before that first time he went to Aquavania? What led to all of that? And what exactly happened all those times he went back? What exactly did he do there?

  Alistair ran his hand across his face, and then looked at me with something close to sympathy. Or maybe it was a confused look. Was it possible that he was even more confused than I was? I don’t think he was signaling for me to help him, to save him, but I wanted to save him. I wanted to be more than the big sister who just stands by and listens and loves.

  “Have you ever thought about telling your whole story?” I asked him. “Everything that’s gone down in the last few months? So people can understand it a bit better? I can help with that. I can write it down, or put it on tape. If you tell us exactly what happened, maybe we can understand better and maybe we can help.”

  “It always helps to talk things out,” Dad added. “Always.”

  Alistair lifted his head and whispered, “Maybe I’ve already talked it out. Maybe I’ve already told my story. Maybe now that it’s told, I don’t want to think about it anymore. I’ve absorbed everything I can. It’s time to let it all go. I’m ready to forget.”

  No one responded. Maybe we were all ready for the same thing.

  THE PHOSPHORESCENT WOMBAT, PART V

  Luna floated alone in dark nothingness. There were no broadcasts from Earth. There were no books on tape, no voices to keep her company. Nothing but the noise of outer space.

  They say that outer space is quiet, and it is, to human ears. But Luna didn’t have human ears. She hardly had wombat ears anymore. Her body had evolved to receive not only sound waves, but radio waves, light waves, all varieties of waves. With all those waves zipping about, outer space is noisy indeed, but when Luna floated past Pluto she didn’t yet have the ability to interpret the meanings of all those waves. That would take time.

  Time she had.

  Decades went by. Centuries. Luna was the same shape she’d always been—squat, round, and wombatty—but she was brighter than ever. She was as bright as a comet. Brighter, in fact. She was a celestial object now, though the diameter of her glow was still significantly smaller than the diameter of a moon, planet, or star.

  Her brain kept on being bombarded by waves, and the waves eventually made more and more sense. They told stories, in their own way. Chemical compositions of stars, the movements of galaxies in the distance, even communications from distant alien civilizations reached Luna’s mind.

  She was learning. She was feeling. She was glowing. More, more, more.

  Within a few thousand years, she reached another solar system. Now her glow was the size of a small planet, and she noticed something intriguing. The star in this solar system started to dim as she passed it. Only slightly, but enough that she could tell.

  The reason was obvious to Luna. She was stealing its light.

  By this point, her spacecraft was mostly useless. Thanks to that amazing formula, it still was running off its original tank of water, but the electronics inside had started to degrade. Luna had the knowledge to fix them, but also knew that she didn’t need them anymore.

  So she abandoned ship about a hundred light-years away from Earth, letting the spacecraft follow its own momentum. Through her understanding of biology and quantum mechanics, Luna knew how to propel herself through space at ridiculously fast speeds using nothing but … excess gas. Let’s leave it at that.

  Luna could now explore the universe as she pleased, turning this way and that, moving forward and backward, gaining more knowledge, absorbing more light. The one thing she sought out more than anything, though, was feelings. She wanted to recapture the warmth she knew from her friendships with Rosie, Hamish, and DeeDee. But the more feelings she experienced, the further away she was from that original feeling. That original feeling got buried beneath it all.

  A million years passed. She sped up and left the Milky Way galaxy. By this point, her glow was bigger than any star in the universe, and keen astronomers on other planets would be able to spot her once her light reached them.

  Luna’s speed was approaching the speed of light, however, which meant as soon as someone saw her, then she was probably long gone, streaking her way into another solar system, borrowing light from the stars in her path.


  After a while, stars started to blink out as she passed them, because Luna sapped them of all of their light. After another while, it wasn’t only light that she was stealing. It was every beam and wave—sounds, signals, thoughts, and even feelings. Not only could she understand the noise of outer space, she was absorbing the noise of outer space. She was becoming outer space.

  Luna was now the most powerful thing in the universe, more powerful even than black holes. Scientists on Earth had believed that nothing could escape the pull of a black hole, but Luna proved to be the exception. Nothing could escape the pull of Luna. When she passed black holes, she absorbed them.

  Deep down inside, she was still Luna, but the Lunaness was hidden beneath so much … stuff. So much … everything. It’s hard to be a humble little wombat when you’re essentially the most awesome thing in all of creation. It’s hard to take a moral stance on anything when morality doesn’t even exist anymore. Death. Birth. It’s all the same when you’re that powerful.

  At three billion years, Luna’s glow was as big as a quarter of the universe. Everything inside her glow was dead or incorporated into her mind and soul. The creatures that lived beyond her glow began to worship her, for they could sense her presence and her inevitable arrival. There were countless names for Luna, but they all meant the same thing.

  The Ending.

  When you’ve lived for three billion years, and when you move at nearly the speed of light, the passage of time doesn’t feel the same as it does for a kid sitting through eighth period math on the day before vacation. Time for Luna was merely another part of the skyscape. Another wrinkle in the universe. Another fold in everything.

  Ten billion years. There was almost no universe anymore. Luna’s glow covered almost everywhere. She was almost everything. In those final moments, as her glow reached the edges of the universe and around the edges to meet itself on the other side, like caramel enveloping an apple, she revisited how it all began.

  The road. Rosie and Hamish. The sign.