Stars That Sing the Requiem
story collection by
Deb Houdek Rule
(D. A. Houdek)
Stars That Sing the Requiem collection
©2012 Deb Houdek Rule
ISBN 978-0-9849558-1-7
Stars That Sing the Requiem ©1990 D. A. Houdek/Deb Houdek Rule
Originally published in Galactic Citizen, Millennium, Best of Millennium
Flowers on the Moon ©1998 D. A. Houdek/Deb Houdek Rule
Silver Lady ©1995 D. A. Houdek/Deb Houdek Rule
Originally published in Wellspring Literary Magazine, Jackhammer
Silence At the Fall of Night ©1993 D. A. Houdek/Deb Houdek Rule
Originally published in Terra Incognita
Terra Formation ©1998 D. A. Houdek/Deb Houdek Rule
Those We Left Behind ©1995 D. A. Houdek/Deb Houdek Rule
Originally published in Millennium, Best of Millennium, Private Galaxy
Contents:
Stars That Sing the Requiem
Flowers on the Moon
Silver Lady
Silence At the Fall of Night
Terra Formation
Those We Left Behind
Afterword
Stars That Sing the Requiem
The long howl of a wolf rose into the icy night air. Beneath the cold gleam of countless stars and the staring white light of the moon, the cry spread over the snow-covered hillside, rising to a wailing crescendo. Along the length of the hillside voice after voice took up the cry, the eerie howls clear and loud in the winter air.
A shivering chill passed up Clara's spine. Though the night was cold with the bitterness that reaches to the bone, it was the howling of the wolves that made her shiver. Inside their small, rough shelter Clara's sheep stirred restlessly, a woolly mass huddling together against the sound that rang with terror to their ears.
Clara looked in at the sheep. The moonlight reflected in their eyes, turning the normal dullness of the sheep's eyes into radiant blue gems. The sheep stared back at her with wordless fear.
From the frightened sheep, Clara turned toward the hillside. She sucked in deeply the freezing air, feeling its burning bite, like life itself, inside of her. Beneath her boots the snow crunched softly, even this small sound distinct among the chorus of howls.
Clara let her gaze drift upward, carried by the wolves' song. From the stark branches of the frosty trees, her eyes lifted to the stars that filled the darkness. The clarity of the winter night seemed to have increased their numbers beyond any lowly human ability to grasp. She wished she could let her voice rise like the wolves, a wordless lament of longing and wonder at the spectacle above them.
On the horizon, low above the trees, a single bright red star drew her attention. It was Mars. The vision of that planet, so near yet so unreachably far away, brought a tear of yearning to Clara's cheek. The tear froze against her face.
As the howls died away, Clara turned to go back to the house where Mother and dinner and all the ordinary earthbound things awaited her. Then one last, lonely cry rose into the night. To the glaring light of the moon, the song was offered up as a remembrance of a darker, primal age, a requiem to the lost past.
~~~
“Clara. Clara.” The voice was so low, less than a whisper pricking at her consciousness. Was it Mother calling her? Morning already?
Mumbling, Clara tried to tell Mother that she just wanted to sleep a few minutes more, just a little longer in this wonderful dream she was having. . . floating steps by an emerald sea. . .
Something jarred her right ear roughly. “Clara. Wake up.” The voice was louder this time, through that ear. Clara opened her eyes, one stiff hand going automatically to resettle the hearing aid the nurse had put in her ear. The movement startled Clara. Her fingers felt like dried, knobby sticks ending in thickened claws. That small motion taxed the strength in her skinny arm to its limit leaving her exhausted.
It was only in these first few minutes after waking that Clara was truly aware of her age. Every bone and joint ached. Every muscle was weak and useless. Her eyes were blurred and itchy. Everything hurt and nothing worked right.
Even as the nurse, with her pasted on facade of cheer, pulled Clara out of the bed, struggling to put her limp mass into the wheelchair, Clara was drifting away from the scene. The indignities of the bathroom were a vague haze happening to someone else. . . someone old. As she was being fed, with a bib over her chest, Clara barely remembered to chew. She had retreated to a better place.
~~~
She was born the day Sputnik was launched. It had been an autumn day of drifting red and brown leaves and quiet, earthy smells that Clara Elsie Picha came into the world. As she took her first squalling breaths the shock of the space age was sending tremors across the globe.
Clara learned of that years later, on a hot and sticky summer day.
The sidewalk was hot beneath her feet, that day when she was nine. Her legs, scratched from the hay they had been baling, were tough and wiry, as were her arms, from the hard work of a farm in the summer. As Mother led the other kids into the dime store for candy and treats, Clara sneaked away to the cool, quiet of the library. It was a pitiful library, as libraries go, but to Clara it had become an obsession, the place she fed her deepest longings.
On a fuzzy black and white TV, Captain Kirk had led her to a new frontier and she couldn't turn back. When she discovered Heinlein and Asimov and Herbert, Clara thought she'd found a treasure that was hers alone. While other girls dreamed of boys and lavender weddings, Clara walked the sands of alien worlds and sailed in her dreams to distant stars.
This day, sitting in the warm breeze of a slowly thudding fan, her legs swinging back and forth beneath the table, Clara read of the crude ships named Sputnik and a dog who was the first Terran in space. Tears poured down her face as she read of the last days in the life of Laika, dying alone in the endless falling of space.
“Laika!” she announced to Mother, who was trying to untangle a screaming three-year-old from her skirt. “I've decided to change my name to Laika.”
“Um,” was all Mother said, as she bent to clean sticky candy from the face of the squalling toddler with a spitcovered hanky. “Now, you've missed out on the candy by running off like that. Go get your brother, we've got to go home.” Mother pointed to the little boy who was splashing in the park's water fountain.
Clara felt her excitement dying like a rabbit squashed by a car. Jerking her brother's arm harder than she needed to, she followed Mother silently.
That night, in her room, Clara wrote a story of spaceships and a beautiful alien princess on a warm and gentle planet far away and unimaginably long into the future.
Proudly clutching sheets of pencil-covered paper, she hurried down the creaking stairs to show Mother. On the bottom step she stopped. Daddy and Mother were yelling. Daddy was drunk again and that had to stop, Mother cried.
“You promised to quit,” Mother repeated over and over.
Clara heard Daddy's chair crash to the floor as he stood unsteadily up. “Talk pretty to me, woman!” he bellowed and Clara heard the stinging crack of a slap. “You're all nothing but a bunch of leeches. I do nothing but work and you're never satisfied.”
Mother's wails dropped to a whimper. A door slammed, shaking the house.
“Oh! Come back in. You could get hurt out there in the dark,” Mother moaned.
Then there was silence except for the low sobs coming from Mother and the endless ticking of the clock. Quietly, Clara crept back up the stairs, folding the pages of her story as she went so she wouldn't have to see her words of grand future times.
The next evening Clara read her story to the cat
tle as they placidly chewed the hay she had fed them. Sitting on a hay bale in the cobwebcoated barn, beneath the yellow light of a single bulb, Clara told her tale. The cows listened patiently, their big eyes rarely straying from her face.
~~~
“I can't. . . I just can't get the twine off this bale of hay and the cows are hungry,” Clara held her knotted hands up to the face in front of her.
“Clara, dear,” the silky voice with the condescending tone said too loudly in her ear. “I need to know your granddaughter's name. I need to know where she lives. Do you understand? Since your son died we haven't been able to locate any of your family. We need someone to take care of you. To make arrangements for you.”
Blankly, Clara stared at the floating face before her. Cows had nicer eyes she thought, soft and understanding. “Cows will always listen, even if no one else will,” she said, not realizing she spoke out loud. It was cold in here, but it wasn't the invigorating cold of winter. It was the dull, frigid feeling of air-conditioning. Where was she? Clara looked around in sudden panic. A fluorescent, antiseptic vision of hell surrounded her.
“Where am I?” she whimpered.
An exasperated sigh came back to her. The conversation rose above Clara, continuing as though she wasn't there; as if she was invisible.
“Senile?” The silky voice was irritated.
The nurse's tone was defensive. “They do tend to live in the past more than the present at this age. And who can blame them?”
I never wanted to live in the past, Clara thought as the annoying voices slipped away.
~~~
“Clara. Clara.” The voice intruded on a dream of an alien sea that flowed like liquid emeralds beneath the radiance of a gigantic ringed moon.
A hand shook her. “Clara. Wake up.” It was Daddy. “You wanted to see, so wake up.”
She struggled up from the sofa, yawning. In the living room the curtains were open to the moonlit hillside. The room, though, was flooded with the blue, flickering light of the television.
In her homemade pajamas, Clara sank to the floor before the television, transfixed by the distorted images on the screen. Daddy stood a moment longer, watching her, then silently left the room. Clara heard the stairs creak. Sometimes, Clara thought, she loved him so much, but she was sorry he didn't share the feelings the welled up in her this night.
Honey, the Siamese cat, came purring and stretching to lie beside her. With one hand on the silky fur of the family member who understood her best, Clara watched the greatest triumph of the human race unfold.
“Houston. Tranquility base, here. The Eagle has landed.”
~~~
Clara wept with the hopeless grief of the old and helpless.
“Can't you just let me die?” she asked again and again, trying to thrash her arms and legs, trying to rip the tubes and life-giving devices from her body.
“There, there. There, there,” the doctor's mechanically emotionless voice chanted above her. “It's all right. We won't let you die.”
“Can't we. . . ?” It was the gentle nurse, the one who cared. It will rip her apart eventually, Clara thought clearly before the doctor's numbing drugs cast an icy fog over her mind and body.
“. . . on full life support,” she heard the doctor say from a great distance. “We can keep her alive indefinitely.”
~~~
One day she looked at him and all she saw was a stranger. With her eyes she traced the lines of his face as if she were seeing them for the first time. And they were alien to her.
When Clara closed her eyes and tried to call up his face nothing came to mind but a blurred outline. The image was lost in a fog of indifference. She couldn't remember what color his eyes were.
Clara could remember loving him, but she could not call the feeling up. It was not the acrid burning of denied love. It was a complete absence of feeling. For him, she no longer felt the heat of passion nor the comfortable love of an evening by a fire with hands barely touching.
Lying in the bed, Clara stared out the windows as the slow creep of dawn turned the city from black to the dull, cloudy gray of January. It matched her mood. She pulled herself from the bed, not looking at the sleeping man on the other pillow.
She huddled into a ball on the sofa, her arms wrapped around her knees, staring at nothing for hours. It hadn't turned out the way she thought it would, none of it. All the grand dreams had been squashed by the unrelenting coldness of reality.
She'd talked to Mother last night. “I'd have left your father long ago,” Mother had said, “but I needed to see that your brother got through college.” Her brother. . . while her own life trickled away at a nowhere job. Then Mother had twisted the knife a little harder. “Are you still trying to write? Or have you given up yet?” Mother had never read a word Clara had written.
She didn't mean to hurt, Clara told herself, any more than Daddy, or the man in the bedroom or the boys who didn't date girls who got straight A's in physics. They were earthbound creatures, all, plodding through their tedious, gravityladen lives beneath this binding atmosphere. Not her. Not Clara. She soared far into space and drank in its wonders, at least in her imagination.
“Do you ever fly in your dreams?” someone had once asked.
“Oh, yes.” Clara's eyes had gleamed. “But I always have a spaceship.”
Spaceship. . . Clara turned from the windows. There was a launch today. She reached for the television remote.
It rose from the launch tower on a pillar of flame. Clara envied those lucky few feeling the exhilarating crush of acceleration. Soon they'd float free, gazing back at the bulging curve of this bluegreen planet.
“Go for throttle up.”
Would that it were me. . .
“Roger, throttle up.”
They were the last words from the spaceship Challenger.
~~~
“I wrote a book once.” Clara's raspy whisper was barely audible. She couldn't see. Clara wasn't sure if they'd done something to her eyes, or if it was her brain that wasn't working right.
The nurse patiently stroked Clara's hand. “I'll bet it was a good book.”
Clara tried to laugh, but choked on the machine that breathed for her. “My Mother and Daddy never read it. I didn't even bother to tell them about it. My son wouldn't read it. He was mad at me.”
“Why was he mad?”
Clara was quiet for so long that the nurse must have thought she'd gone to sleep. “It was all my fault, he said. If he'd had a father his life would have been perfect. My granddaughter read it, though.” Her words dropped to an incoherent mumble.
The door opened. Sharp heels clicked on the floor. “We've located her granddaughter. By tomorrow we should have permission to pull the plug.”
Tightly, the nurse answered, “Tomorrow is her one hundredth birthday.”
Clara heard the words as if from a great distance. Strangely, they stirred no feelings in her, none at all except, it went by so fast.
~~~
Her granddaughter was born the day the Mission to Mars project was finally canceled. “We shouldn't be wasting money in space when people are starving on Earth,” the politically correct pinheads shouted, trapping the dreamers and visionaries beneath the atmosphere with them.
“We've got to get off of this planet,” Clara whispered into the ear of her infant granddaughter. She called the baby Laika, even though it wasn't her real name.
When Laika was a little girl, Clara took her to the wintry hillside to see the stars and hear the wolves howl. But the stars were dimmed by the haze in the air and the only thing they could hear was the highway and a million voices from the housing tower.
“You stay away from my daughter and stop filling her head with nonsense!” Clara's son shouted years later when Clara offered to pay Laika's way through aerospace training.
But Laika listened to Clara. Maybe dreaming skips a generation.
~~~
“I was born too soon,” Clara's lips shaped the wo
rds, but no sound came out. Just a little too soon. Live the adventure for me, Laika.
“Her granddaughter is one of those kooks trying to live on the moon. That's why she was so hard to track down.” Silky voice sounded annoyed. “Anyhow, we've got her consent.”
The nurse didn't answer.
~~~
Clara died the day Luna City was born.
It was nothing more than a few pressurized tanks welded together on the surface. The handful of colonists knew it would be a year or more before they could take a proper bath or have room to stretch out or even have a window to cherish the view. And it would take their lifetimes to make the moon a proper home for humans, a place from which they could reach to the stars. It didn't matter. They were ready and their lives were committed.
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