Universe of Stars

Pompton Lakes, NJ, native Amy Munno joins Demensions with her first effort, Universe of Stars. From the title, you would think this was a science fiction story, but it's not. Instead, we're treated to a tale of a love that cannot be, and the magical revenge of a lover spurned.

     There is death in the wind as it carries the screams of villagers who watch their straw huts burn, who see the timber of houses and barns coated with orange heat, their hopes quickly charred black. In a yard the oily fleece on a lamb gives the odor of scorched tallow as the animal is engulfed. A child of five thrusts tiny fistfuls of fine dirt at her home, imitating her mother. A young man has run out of air, slumping at the barn door. Flames run like a river in the road. The wind is soft, lifting sparks like fireflies alive to the tall field grasses, to the skeletal trees, then into the forests, sending the king's deer running. The flames are charging closer to town, to the taverns and stables and markets.
     The young queen sits beautiful within the cold stone walls of her castle, in her cold dressing room at the curved window, watching faint spots glow and pulsate here and there over the kingdom, imagining her people scattering like black ants when they lose their dusty hill. The messengers have no explanation, and the king's men are gathering to talk of the firestorm. The queen does not need a reason. She sits cold at the window and thinks about fire and something someone said once, when she was younger and not yet the queen, when she had courtly love.
     A handsome man of the court once wrote her poems and letters and sealed them each with three drops of red wax. When he was deliberate, the ink was even and sweeping and curved. When he was impassioned, the ink was thin and angled and tight, as if he could not bear to stop writing his thoughts to wet the tip black again.
One warm night, this man called her from her bed and took her out to the edge of the hills in a thick dark and presented to her a billion stars, and she looked at them then as if for the first time. He asked her what she liked most about them, and she said that they seemed to move as if on fire. She imagined that it was very hot up there, the same heat she felt when he was near her, never touching her, never doing anything but hovering, and just that short distance they kept between them brought such intensity. He said that the stars were on fire because he made them burn, because they were extensions of his own soul that burned for her, a soul that was alive only when he could see her and draw close to her. But they both knew the rules: She was taken and soon to be queen and he was to be virtuous, a martyr for love.
     He knew that night he had admitted too much, his suffering was great. He was bound to court her forever, to show his love in ejaculations of penmanship and parchment. He could never have her, never touch anything but her heart and mind. He could bring her to see the world but never give it to her. He knew that the only king he would ever be was Sisyphus, every day pushing her boulder up the mountain only to fall away exhausted, only to have it roll down again, only for him to push again. With each pulse of his heart he felt a deathly stab like a thrust out from within an iron maiden of muscle and blood.
     Now in her room the queen feels herself flush and prickle, thinking of the way she used to feel when she saw him in court, after she had married. She remembers how he remained close to her, as if existing only to see her. He engaged her in long discussions of worldly matters and discoveries to slip her poems on beauty and connection. At celebrations he would dance with another, yet never take his eyes from the queen's face. She would gaze back from the height of the throne, enjoying the beautiful curve of his thigh.
     What the queen does not know is how he would cool his cheeks on the stone slabs of the castle halls after the parties, after she retired with the king and he was left alone and drunk and hot from the wine and from being near her and from thinking of her undressing, undressing for someone else.
     The queen does recall the lasttime they spoke, when the king was away at war. He came to her and took her in his arms, and she told him that love made public would not endure, that a lover foolish and indiscrete could not be a lover at all, and she dismissed him, pulling quickly away before she could surrender. She parried his attempt at a kiss, the rippled folds of her dress swinging a barrier out in front of her.
     Abruptly he stepped back and made a great distance between them. His last words to her echoed through the dark recesses of the castle passages: "I will make for you one more time your own universe full of stars."
     He immediately took the long journey straight into the depths of the forest, to the thick, twisting branches that curved into a grand perfect sphere and glowed a faint green. He called out the words his ancestors had taught should only be called in fantasy, and the sorceress came out to him, hovering, large, older than the trees, her skin melting off her face in deep gray folds. She smelled of charred meat and blood. She came very close to him, looking into his right eye, running the splintered edge of a long yellowed fingernail over his lips. He tried to speak but he had no voice. She already knew what he wanted from her.
     The sorceress promised him a way to make a universe of stars if he would make one trade, and so he made it. She gave to him a powder light and silver, and she said in a chorus of voices, "You will hang the universe out in the trees. You will make fire in stone." He returned to his home and practiced the incantations each night until the right night when the moon was full and crumbling dry in the autumn sky. He traveled through the surrounding villages, mumbling words like a drunk, tossing the sparkles into the air, waving a bright torch. He rode to the edge of the forest and said the final words in a loud deep voice, and the deed was done, and the kingdom was her universe.
     Now there is death in the wind. The queen now understands his last words, now that she sees her kingdom glittering, patches of night alive with fire, even the ashes burning, turning the darkness to a rage. Here is her universe of stars, each life of her subjects now an orange satellite, and she is on fire in her cold castle room, burning with anger, with thoughts of him and how he has always made her feel, and even now she loves him for how much passion he can use to hate her. The queen thinks he is out there looking up at the castle, at the center of it all, burning for her, but she does not know he is back in the forest near a sphere of green branches with now only one woman to forever court.

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