Starstuff

by Kaylim

paint, fingers wet with food and dye, constantly judging the color and consistency. The paint is bright red, not soft brown or faded ochre like in her dreams, but she figures it will do. She wipes her hands off on some patches, until her skin feels stretchy and clean.

  Blank sheets lay before her and she places her right hand flat against one; with her left hand she grabs a big chuck of her goopy paint. Splat. She brushes it against the edges of the fingers on her right hand. When she is done, she peels her hand away to reveal the bright red outline of her hand on the white plastic. Then she starts all over again, this time switching hands, until several of her prints scatter across the white expanse.

  Wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of her wrist, she sits back and looks over her work with a critical eye. Her work is a little messier than the art on the cave walls; her fingers are not as always clearly defined, the paint is chunkier and not as smooth, and she didn’t manage to replicate the tree-like pattern that was present in the cave.

  “Why your hands?” Yallie asks.

  Ajita startles at the question. So far Yallie has preferred to remain silent, watching so quietly that Ajita sometimes forgot she was there. Ajita pulls her bottom lip into her mouth, thinking. Yallie raises an expectant eyebrow.

  “They’re…handprints,” she fumbles for the word, “they represent your identity.”

  Yallie’s eyebrow goes higher, which means she does not believe it, and Ajita scowls. She takes Yallie’s hand and pulls it against the plastic. Yallie’s skin twitches, and Ajita stops, realizing that so far Yallie has not once gotten her hands dirty. Snickering, Ajita lobs a big blob of paint against her skin and Yallie yelps.

  “Sorry, it’s cold,” Ajita says, not sorry at all.

  Yallie glowers at her.

  Ajita continues to paint, fingers gently moving against Yallie’s, and her skin feels good even covered in paint. The fine hairs of her hands become slick with paint, something else Ajita’s lips curve at. She tries to memorize the contour of Yallie’s palm, the shape of her nails. She is more careful this time, more detailed, smoothing out the paint and tracing the outline of the blonde’s hands with more forethought, making sure each finger is clearly distinguishable from the next.

  When she can linger no longer, she pulls up Yallie’s hand and they look at the outline of her hands. Yallie inspects her paint-covered hand and then squints at the painted image.

  “It is relatively accurate,” she concludes.

  Ajita huffs and shakes her head, unable to stop her lips curving, “Yes, accurate.”

  “Not accurate down to microscopic levels, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  But something else is preserved on the plastic besides the print. Inside the print, Ajita can see grey-ish lines, the same thin lines she saw on the scanner’s eye before. Thumbprint, the word comes to her.

  “It’s your identity,” Ajita says.

  Yallie hums deep in her throat, a speculative noise.

  “It will last a long time, even after you are no more,” she continues, “it says: you existed.”

  “But only because you are the artist. Without you, the prints wouldn’t have been painted.”

  Ajita catches the wistful the note, the way Yallie’s eye drift to the paint, “Your turn, then.”

  Yallie’s eyebrows shoot up in shock, and Ajita pushes the sheet with the paint on it closer to her.

  “It would be a shame to do all this research, and forgo the experimentation,” Ajita croons sweetly.

  Yallie hesitates for a moment, and then with a single finger, taps the paint. She frowns. Ajita stays silent as Yallie familiarizes herself with the feel of the paint. Eventually she sighs and grabs a bunch of it, watching with distaste as it drips down her arm. Ajita puts her hand flat against the plastic and nods encouragingly at Yallie. The blonde scrunches up her nose, narrows her eyes at her target, and tosses the paint.

  It splatters all over the back of Ajita’s hand and the parts that break away skid across the rest of their prints and over the floor. Ajita’s lips curve, but when she looks up, Yallie’s expression is furious. Instantly, she’s hunched over the canvas and smearing the paint over Ajita’s hand. It’s not the careful, soft touch Ajita had been employing, and she rears back at the unexpected fervor. Yallie’s grip keeps her hand in place, but her skin quickly feels raw as Yallie continues her vehement painting.

  “Yallie,” she says, because she’s not sure what this is, but it doesn’t look like painting.

  Yallie yanks Ajita’s hand off the plastic and glares at the result.

  “It’s okay, we can try again with the other hand,” Ajita consoles.

  Yallie drops her hand, kicks the paint tray to the other side of room and stalks off to the corner. Ajita winces at the clang and the paint that spews across the room in red streaks. The handprint looks more like an accidental blob, and the streaks across the room weren’t intentional, but they’re the product of something.

  “Art doesn’t have to be an accurate representation,” Ajita reminds her softly.

  Yallie, hands on her hips, breathes harshly and stares at the wall.

  “It didn’t turn out like I envisioned. If art serves as a representation of what the artist imagines, then my art failed,” Yallie says sourly.

  “But it is the product of intention and emotion,” Ajita says, “the product of your imagination and inspiration. It is still art.”

  Yallie snorts.

  “Not everything turns out how we want it to,” Ajita stands up.

  “Your paintings turn out fine,” Yallie grouses.

  “How would you know? Can you see inside my head? What I imagine each painting to look like?”

  Yallie huffs. Ajita moves closer to the blonde.

  “Just because we are not as good at something as we want to be, does that mean we give up?”

  Yallie groans and puts her head in her hands. Then she spins around, folds her arms, and rolls her eyes heavenward, “No. We keep training.”

  Ajita’s lips curve and she holds out her paint-covered hand. Yallie, hand sticky and red as well, takes it. Ajita leads her back to the scraps and splays her fingers against the plastic. Still holding Yallie’s hand, she guides her to the paint, and then helps her trace Ajita’s fingers. Yallie’s fingers swirl along the edges of Ajita’s, her touch soft and light; she leaves Ajita’s fingers tingling in her wake.

  Ajita’s heart is beating faster than it was a minute go, and she swallows to wet her throat. She’s never felt this bubbly feeling in her chest before, something that makes it difficult to breathe, something that shoots heat through her arms, legs and chest. It makes her stomach constrict and she scoots a little closer to Yallie, as if obeying some sort of subconscious calling.

  Yallie looks up at her movement, and Ajita has never loved the color blue as much as she does now. Their movements slow as they retain eye contact, and Yallie’s eyes are bright, like the way they were when she was learning about fractals, and Ajita loves to see herself reflected in them. For the first time, Ajita wonders what Yallie sees in Ajita’s eyes.

  “Look,” Yallie says softly.

  Ajita backs up abruptly, and somehow her face is burning and red, but then she look down. Their various handprints, some smudged, others well defined, are spread across the entire sheet in bright red. Linked together the handprints, their identities, proof of their lives and existence, form a pattern…a tree. Ajita blinks rapidly, as if trying to disprove the existence of the image, but it remains the same. She had somehow finished creating the tree with Yallie even though that hadn’t even been her intention.

  “We did it,” she says, still surprised.

  “We are artists,” Yallie beams proudly.

  Ajita laughs.

  Yallie raises an eyebrow and Ajita promptly stops because no one laughs in School. It is something she has only heard of in her dreams. Her face flushes again.

  “You are very strange,” Yallie says, lips curving, and Ajita wishes
she knew the word for that, wishes she could name it, this special something that only two of them do.

  “So are you,” she says, laughter threatening to emerge again.

  She hopes she can feel like this forever.

  The cave painting flickers in the fire light. It’s the bear again, running across the wall, followed by three stick figures, each holding something different. The fire flickflickflickers and the bear starts to move, his mouth opening in a long cry. He looks over his shoulder with a grunt at the stick men rushing towards him. The image moves faster and faster and she can hear the whip of the long grass as the stick men gallop through it…

  …and then it’s passing by her, dark reeds brushing against her legs. The night is young and the moon is yellow and bright, and a harmony of insects surrounds her. The grass whips against her legs as she runs and darts around trees. Behind her…the men follow. One man leads the chase, eyes narrowed in concentration and face formed in a frown, sweat trickling down his neck. Something glints in the light, a pointed stone…an arrowhead. He loads the arrow onto his bow.

  Whipwhipwhip. On her right another man jogs forward, a large pot over his shoulder. He disappears in and out of view as he flits between the trees and shadows. Her legs feel heavy and her muscles pull and push against each other in pain, but she doesn’t stop. In her peripheral she sees the last man, carrying chopped trees in his arms.

  She wakes with a headache, with words like hunter and weapon carousing through her mind. Rubbing her temples, she sits up in bed and remains like that until the Instructor comes in to wake them.

  Her headache persists throughout Lessons, and her stomach feels vaguely queasy. She glares at the Instructor that morning, but he avoids her and doesn’t react if he sees her face. Glaring at the screen as well, she tires of the Introduction and its ongoing drivel. She wonders what the Instructor would say if she called it ‘pointless’ and ‘incongruous with what I am interested in learning’. But he doesn’t approach her at all, and she is tired of the blinkblinkblink of the blank answer boxes too. So she begins filling them in.‘I do not understand this question. The Introduction material was insufficient.’ ‘This equation is irrelevant to my interests.’ ‘I find the shape of this graph intriguing; it reminds me of the ebb and flow of waves on the ocean. Do you know what an ocean is? Probably not, as you most likely don’t do any extracurricular research.’

  Other Students glance her way, probably unused to this amount of activity from her. She can hear the Instructor stutter in his pacing, which means he’s confused as well, but he continues to ignore her so she ignores him as well. Just when she is almost finished answering all of the questions, way ahead of her peers for once, there is the clink of a door opening. The Instructor stops pacing and begins a muted conversation with someone. She listens carefully as she submits the last question and hears her name, whispered quietly.

  She looks up and there in the door is Yallie. The Instructor has a distinctly sour look on his face and Ajita stands up, lips curving, not caring who sees. Yallie tips her head in a ‘come here’ gesture and Ajita gleefully logs off the kiosk. She breezes past the Instructor and is glad to see that Yallie, while her lips are not curved, has a bright look in her eye. Yallie nods respectfully to the Instructor, but Ajita doesn’t bother to give a farewell, and matches Yallie step for step as they walk down the hallway.

  “How are your Lessons going?” Yallie asks politely.

  “I had the most productive Lesson yet,” Ajita says, and feels she just might burst out of her skin.

  Yallie hums once and Ajita basks in the sound, replaying it over and over again in her head, ridding the words ‘hunter’ and ‘weapon’ from her mind.

  “How is Training going?” Ajita asks.

  Yallie doesn’t answer right away and Ajita misses a step in her