stars at dusk

6/13/20 - First piece I’ve written on this website since its inception! Haven’t done a flax-golden tale in a while, but I still find myself enjoying the process of creating and condensing a tale. Again, as always for these, this is based on Erin Morgenstern’s 10-sentence flax-golden tales writing exercise.

They say the lake is haunted, the one on the west side of the hills, the one with the waves that catch wind only on every third day. Tales of a woman’s outline, ghostly and vaporous, skin the pale color of bloated fish and black hair so dark it leaves no shine, fill the village with whispers as they speak of her.

They say she appears only at dusk, shimmering in the mist, a whorl of light in her palms, and they call her Siren and Ghost and Wraith and Goddess depending on the season, on the sky, on the way that moonlight shines on the surface at night. If it scares them, if it serves them, if both. They mutter prayers when dipping their hands in the water, holding it to their lips, slipping it down their throat; they curse when their bodies sink into the lake’s depths as teeth into apple skin, flesh, core as though death has let loose a spirit on the water’s surface.

In the haunted lake on the west side of the hills, somewhere in the sand, there lives a palace, built of stone so black it does not shine; its every turret is lined with fish scales — pale, dead things that do not shimmer without light. 

I am the tale and the woman and the light, the skim of water on the surface, the wave that moves only on every third day.  And below me, nestled where human men cannot walk, there sleeps a grave of fallen stars from stories so old they no longer breathe, with faces so gold they glow even in the dark and in death. It is those faces I bring to the surface at dusk, where they may gasp alive in my hands, and sparkle as they once had, silent now as they never were before.

I am neither dead nor celestial, neither ghost nor god, merely the last star to walk this surface, and the first to die alone.