Blue Star

There was a blue star hanging on a thread, in the dark blue night sky. But, when he reached out to catch it, the star moved farther away, just out of his grasp. He remembered a story from his childhood about Grandmother Spider, endlessly weaving the world into existence.

           

In his childhood there had been an abundance of spider webs, dew filled and glimmering in the thin morning light, when he followed his father to the barn.

"Hard workers, those spiders," his father often said. His childhood self too filled with the glory of the moment to answer anything but, "Uh-huh."

           

They worked the land as brothers, though he himself was only eight when he was considered old enough to first tag along.

           

The dew filled spider webs. The smell of new cut hay. Him. His father. The sweat. The trust.

           

He was an old man now, lying in his bed trying to wake up, his own two children fretting around, making him dizzy. It was Christmas Eve and his daughter insisted that they have Christmas dinner as usual, only this year served with him still in his bed. The bed he seldom left these days. His daughter wasn't a very good cook. Not as his wife had been. But he endured small pieces of every dish, including a thin slice of pudding at the end. His son ate as well, sitting awkwardly on a wooden chair close to the bed in his expensive clothes, dinner plate in lap, restlessly forcing himself not to reach for the cellphone in his pocket.

           

Finally, it was over; plates cleared away, kisses on his forehead, his daughter lingering until he closed his eyes, pretending to sleep.

           

There it was again: the blue star, mystically sending out light sparks over the deeper blue sky. Different in coloring than the bright, white stars covering the velvet sky had been when they smoked fish in a barrel at the backside of the house; first his father and him, then him and his son.

           

He had never moved. His wife simply moved in with him, and adapted easily to being a farmer’s wife, in a down to earth way. She was a good woman, as they say. Never complained, steadily working by his side year after year. Only when cancer ate her from the inside and out did he, for the first time, see weakness. He could not stand the sight, nor her moans, or her spasms. So, he overdosed morphine and made her drink strong toxic, herbal remedies he mixed together in a pot on the wooden stove. When the nurse came around that day, she pretended not to understand what had happened.

"Now she won't have to suffer," she simply said, locking his eyes in her summer sky ones a short moment, and then went about practical business. As if death was just another everyday chore. Perhaps it was.

           

He never moved. He never sold off the land either, just let piece after piece fall into wildness, ignoring his sons complaints, until the only thing he could plant was the tomatoes by the stone wall; shaking paper skin hands patting the soil, picking yellow leaves off the stems, caressing the healthy, hairy green leaves.

           

The blue star gleamed. A giant spider leg took a soundless step over the sky. He himself stepped right into the dew-wet grass and the scent of new cut hay flowed over him in a wave.

           

Michael and I saw him once, on one of my very first walks since I landed in the Blue Mountains. We walked up Berry Road and I saw a shadowy figure standing in the middle of the road. Everything was so new to me then: the moist, the thick vines circling up tree trunks, the lookout for snakes on the dusty road. I was a bit jumpy I will honestly admit. So, I took a sharp breath when I saw the shadow man, but said nothing to Michael.

           

Michael stopped soon thereafter, by a small creek, water falling down on a rock, making splashing, playful sounds. Michael cocked his head to the side, as if listening to the water and started to tell me of a man who had lived close to where we were. A farmer, who didn't want to leave his home, who stayed where he felt safe. The man simply moved farther into the land. Learned the language of spider webs. And listened to the song of the blue star.

Ghost-story by Sofia Karin Axelsson, first published in the December 2019 edition of The Echo World