A Few More Suns

By Aricka Gannon

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In my room, it is dark. The only light shines through the barred window across my bed. Not the moon, but a lamppost illuminating a wire fence.

My eyes are closed when they open the door. They are voices with hands that hold me still. I open my eyes and the room is light again, and it’s time for breakfast.

#

I stare at the walls. The walls stare back. There is music playing in the room, or maybe it’s playing in my head. There is music playing, and it fills me with the ocean and the sun, and the way mother brushes my hair in the morning before school. Everything dances if I look long enough.

There are doors that lock only from the outside, and there are people wearing big grey suits who swing their arms like pendulums, keeping time with the clocks on the walls that hiss like stray cats Keeping track of when we are fed, and when we should be shot.

They shoot us. With needles that point like an angry finger. They make us bleed and search for veins that are tired of being found. None of us can hide, but our veins try in vain, and we admire them for trying.

I stare at walls. The walls stare back.

There is a room lined with locked doors and sealed windows. People are placed in plastic chairs in front of plastic tables. For days when the windows are plastered with rain, we play board games. We use boards that have their pictures scraped off by plastic forks, and use dry macaroni in place of the metal pieces deemed “too sharp for this facility.”

We do not like to play board games.

Old women come to pray for us. They sit with their backs to the walls and search for us, or something, inside our eyes. They stare at us and speak words over us, but our souls are dragons. Steam erupts from their stem, fire ignites at its core. We are all dragons spouting cries in our lungs. Bleeding through our throats. The women leave us with cheerful fair-wells and long, tired faces. They think we cannot see, or cannot understand, or will not judge them for being so hopeful, so jumpy, so old.

I stare at the women; the women do not stare back.

Cannot.

Will not.

Try not.

Fail to.

On days without rain, when you can see the street or the trees, or a flower if it dares to emerge, then you sit by a window, or look over a shoulder or breathe down the neck of the person in front of you until they move or scream and are shot. We stare out the windows because the outside does not stare back.

The outside doesn’t see our parched lips, thirsty and cracked. Our hair in knots, in clumps, in large, oily strands. They won’t look at our fingernails hanging over our fingertips, cut in diagonals, immersed in our own skin. The outside turns its pretty head from our crooked smiles, our lopsided lips, our toothy tooth-less grins.

We are the dirt stuck inside the cracks of sidewalks. People step on us and forget us and cover us with paint. But still, we remain. Designed to stare at walls. Destined to exist in the places people cannot get away from. Trapped in the smog of cities filled with laughter. They choke on our decay. Too thick to ignore. Our scent is stuck in their hair for days.

Only the walls stare back. And the walls are everywhere.

#

On Sundays, he plays the accordion. He plays the accordion to be heard. We are his best listeners. Even when that man with the spiked hair drools, he listens. He enjoys it. His eyes open like spaceships do when they blast off. I read about spaceships. They say reading curbs my screaming. They put books in front of me instead of board games.  I read about spaceships. I read about them leaving earth and landing on planets that have no water. They have to bring their own air. They could get trapped in black holes and never return. I read about astronauts. I read about spacesuits and NASA and Sputnik. I think about astronauts and what they think about in space and what it feels like to float. When I lay down in bed, I imagine myself floating. The blankets fall from me. My paper pajamas slip off my body. All I feel are molecules.

The man who plays the accordion is named Stephen. He likes for us to call him that. He’s younger than the rest and covers his face with a beard where the others leave their face clean. He doesn’t wear a white coat or glasses. He wears big sweaters and khaki pants and the same white tennis shoes covered in grass stains. His hair is brown, like mine. It’s blonde too, but not like mine, like the sand. Sometimes it’s longer than my hair. They cut my hair because I pull it out when I have tantrums. I don’t do that anymore, because I read. I don’t have tantrums anymore because I’m going to be an astronaut.

I listen to Stephen play the accordion, but mostly I watch other people. Stephen says you can learn more about yourself by learning about others. I’m not sure what I have to learn about myself, but I like to watch.

There are people here with small faces. They curl their hands at their sides and tap their fingers against their thighs. They pull stray threads on their robes. They tug at the tops of their hairs. I watch a woman bite her lip with the back of her front teeth. She bites like a pulse. It’s to the rhythm of Stephen’s music.

The woman’s name is Lucy. She has thick, grey hair and talks like a child. Lucy wears hats with wide brims, and reading glasses strung around her neck with purple beads. She carries a pen with her that says, “Good Work!” and draws pictures on the table during meals. One day, Lucy drew two mice. She named them Big and Little.

“You’re Big,” she said to me.

“Okay,” I agreed.

Lucy is my friend. I teach her how to shelve the library books. No one really reads them, but sometimes they’re checked out by visitors, or doctors. They give them to the patients and are later returned with torn pages or bent covers. They always look sad when they give the books back.

Lucy doesn’t know how to read. She knows the order of the alphabet, and that is good enough. Sometimes she recites the letters over and over again. Chanting. I don’t mind. I think she is happy knowing something different than the walls. It makes me happy too.

Lucy has a husband and a son. They visit once a month and bring flowers and strawberry cake with white frosting. The son watches his mother as if he is afraid of her. Her husband doesn’t speak to Lucy but tells jokes to the doctors. Lucy draws on the table she sits at with her son, and sings a song about umbrellas. Her glasses swing around her neck as she dances.

Once I heard the son whisper to his father, “Are you sure she’s my real mother?”

Lucy had had a daughter, too. She told me there were shadows living under her bed. They turned to demons at night. Demons that stole her daughter out of her womb. They reached inside her skin and tore the baby from her. Lucy said they left blood in her bed. That she almost drowned in it. I too believed in those shadows. I saw them on walls. I saw them on faces of visitors. The patients’ eyes were clear and vacant. Except for the screams I saw growing inside their pupils. Shadows darkened their iris’ until demons burst from their mouth. I thought maybe the shadows had taken my mother too.

In one of my books, it says that the sun is a star and the closest star in the galaxy to where earth lives. I see stars all the time. I see them in the sky and on the walls. Sometimes, I am in my own galaxy.

I cover my eyes with my hands and press my fingers to my eyelids, so I can see stars whenever I want. They are like Christmas tree lights, like the ones they string onto the sealed windows in the room where we play board games. There is darkness around them. Darkness like night. Darkness like the times we are locked in the quiet room. There are many shades, some black, and some grey, but the darkness covers everything.

#

There is a fenced yard for very nice days. Precise days. These are days that the temperature is warm enough for a light jacket and the ground is hard and there are just enough clouds so the sun won’t burn us. They do this so that we won’t track mud, or require mittens or thick coats. They do this so we won’t die of skin cancer.

Instead, we will die of suffocation.

Stephen watches us while we are outside. He wears his khaki pants and his grass-stained shoes, and smiles. I walk around the fence in the shoes I brought from home. I don’t wear the shoes inside. I wear socks and foam slippers. They let me keep my shoes for outside because they have small Velcro straps. And Velcro can only damage itself.

We stay outside until they decide to feed us. We eat in groups that are assigned by the doctors. When I first got to the hospital, I had to eat in my room, chained to my bed. I was fed by a woman whose face pointed in every direction. Her eyelashes pointed to the ceiling, her forehead pointed to the wall, her chin pointed to the floor, and her nose pointed directly at me. She pointed the spoon with its carrot mush at my face. She lifted her chin so it pointed at my neck until she saw me swallow.

After we are finished eating, we go outside again. This is because Stephen believes the sun is a part of good health. The sun is also a part of the Milky Way, I tell him. He tells me I have a nice voice. His eyes are round like when the old man is listening to Stephen play the accordion. Stephen says we should talk more often. He walks over to two women rubbing dandelions together. I hope we can talk more about space.

When it’s too dark for Stephen to keep track of us all, we head inside. Stephen tells me to wait by the guest vending machines. The guest vending machines are always full because we are not allowed to spend money on them, and because we rarely have visitors. The vending machines are grey like the suits, with large windows displaying all of the snacks and candy bars. In the center, F4, there is a Milky Way.

When Stephen comes back, he has a coat I recognize from the lost and found. I put it on. It’s as big as a blanket and smells like coconut. We head down a hall I don’t usually go, because that is where the quiet room is, and it is never quiet. I follow Stephen past the quiet room and cover my ears because someone is screaming. It reminds me of when I used to scream. Stephen sees me covering my ears. He blocks the door to the quiet room as I pass. He squeezes my shoulder as I walk by.

At the end of the hall, Stephen leads us to an emergency exit and hands me shoes he had hidden under his coat. They have shoelaces and Stephen has to tie them for me. We go outside where there is no fence. There are a lot of trees and long grass. The blades crunch under my new shoes.

I breathe in cold air, and it feels like I’m drinking water, but without getting wet. The cold air goes through my nose and I feel it in my throat and my throat feels smooth when I swallow the air. I look up at the sky. There are three stars I can count, and pillows of grey. Stephen asks me if I know these stars. I tell him I don’t know them yet, I only know the sun.

He says that the stars show up better here because there is nothing around us for miles. I watch him speak while he looks at the sky. His breath comes out in smoke. Does he know the stars, I ask. He does not, he says. But he likes that they are there.

When we walk near the trees I reach out to one. The tree is rough with ridges like tiny rock hills. My hand moves like a wave as I rub it up and down its trunk. Stephen is ahead of me. He is watching me. He reaches out to touch a tree too, and his hand moves just like mine. We keep walking near the trees. Stephen stops when we reach a new one so we may both feel its trunk.

He leads us into the forest. I spread my hands at my sides. I pretend they are wings. Branches scratch my palms as I walk past. The tip of my nose is cold and my lips are dry. I wet them with my tongue and the air fills my mouth again. Stephen stops with his hands on his hips and faces me. He is standing in a space that’s clear. There is only grass, and when I look up, the trees are a window letting in the sky. There are so many stars.

We lay with our backs on the grass. The blades poke me through my coat, but the coat is big and I stay warm. I can’t count how many stars I see. There are too many. They are too close together. Stephen says that somewhere the sun is still shining, that it never goes out. It just moves on to someplace else. He says the moon takes its place, so we never have to be completely dark. Stephen says the stars that appear the brightest and biggest are the closest to us. He says there are more stars than we can see, their light just hasn’t reached our eyes yet.

I think about what we might see if we had more suns.

I lift my arms to the sky while he talks. The sleeves of my coat fall to my elbows. The cold wind blows around my arms. I am really in the sky with all the stars. I can’t even see the trees now.

– Aricka Gannon

Author’s Note: This piece was originally published in the Spring 2017 issue of Qua Magazine (via the University of Michigan Flint).