Pull Down the Stars by Tippi N. Blevins

Pull Down the Stars

The setting sun illuminated the land around the shelter in a sickly orange glow. Bare remains of cypress and oaks stood like sentries around the perimeter of the old converted house. Dried moss clung to their branches, reminders of a time when the place had been considered a swamp. A few scrubby plants still grew in odd patches on the hard, cracked earth, and a bent juniper clung to life near the porch.

Cadie sat near the dormitory window with her notebook open in her lap. She fingered through the pages until she found one with a blank spot. The paper had gone soft as suede from all the times she'd erased old words to make room for new ones. In the time she'd spent at the shelter, she figured she must have written three journals, one on top of the other. Sometimes she could see the ghosts of old entries, peering up through layers of newer writings. Most were too faded to read, but dark enough to remind her to choose her words carefully. Paper had become as rare as water in the last few years. Everything had.

Almost everything.

Cadie tapped at one of the infection clusters on her arm with the tip of her pencil. No one would say what the things were, but they were everywhere. The boys at the shelter had taken to calling them the spiders, but that wasn't what they were, not really. One of them alone looked like nothing more than a grain of red sand. Massed together on her arms and legs, they formed hard crimson nuggets, transparent enough to show what remained of the skin underneath.

She looked out the window to where the horizon gave way to the smoky amber sky.

No rain. No stars. She thought of something her mother used to say whenever she tried to do something impossible. "I'm pulling down the stars, from the feel of it," she would say. "It's no harder than anything else I do these days."

Cadie wrote in small letters: "Can't pull down the stars."

Something moved in the yard below.

She leaned forward and saw a dark-haired girl coming up the walkway to the shelter. One of the nurses walked with her, holding onto her arm with a gloved hand. The girl wore a man's tattered shirt with the cuffs well below her fingers. Cadie thought the girl must be younger than her, maybe twelve or thirteen. Dust darkened her bare feet and face.

Cadie watched the girl and her escort until the gable beneath the window obscured their path. A moment later, the door to the first floor opened. Voices murmured in the old parlor below.

Someone grunted nearby. "Another sponge."

Cadie turned.

The twins Jane and Louise stopped their chess game long enough to glance toward the corner of the dormitory. Simon sat in his narrow bed, not quite looking at anyone. A bright red cluster adorned the hollow of his neck like an insidious cameo. His fingers picked at what hair remained on his freshly shaven head.

Cadie walked to the foot of his bed. "What did you say?"

He jerked his chin toward the door. Spots of angry color flashed in his cheeks. "Another sponge, I said. Here to suck up our water."

She narrowed her eyes. "Did the drought make you a bastard, or were you born that way?"

Without waiting for an answer, she turned and went to her own bed. She tucked the notebook and pencil beneath the thin mattress and posed herself by the nightstand, watching the door. Waiting. She could hear footsteps in the stairwell outside the dormitory. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, leaned against the wall, then pushed herself away from it. It had been a long time since anyone new came to the shelter, and even longer since she'd had a friend. She chewed on her lower lip.

The door opened.

At first, only the nurse came in. "Everyone, this here is Evelyn. She ain't never been to a shelter before, so you make her feel at home, okay?"

The girl came out from behind the nurse. She looked at each one of them in turn, stopping when she came to Cadie. She had wide, dark green eyes. She said nothing.

Cadie stepped forward. "I'm Catherine Delia," she said. "Everyone calls me Cadie, though, so you can, too."

Evelyn simply gazed at her.

Cadie gestured around the room with a sweep of her hand. "Over there's Simon and the twins, Jane and Louise. The boys and girls used to keep separate rooms, but there's not enough of us anymore. That empty bed is where Kevin usually sleeps, except he's in the infirmary right now, on account of his foot being all eaten up by the--"

The nurse grabbed her by the arm. "That's enough, you hear?" She gave Cadie's arm a good, hard shake before releasing it. "Don't be scaring Evelyn with that talk."

Except Evelyn didn't look scared. Cadie had seen a lot of fear in her time at the shelter--she'd seen it when Kevin learned the doctors were going to cut off his foot--but she didn't see it in Evelyn now. Fear had a way of pushing people away, as much like an ugly, contagious disease as the spiders, but Cadie wanted to be near the new girl. She had a calm about her. She reminded Cadie of water.

"Evelyn, you can stay in the bed next to mine, if you want to. It's the one nearest the window, because I like watching the sky." She cleared her throat, feeling shy. "You want to? Stay next to me, I mean."

The nurse spoke. "She can't answer you," she said. "The girl ain't got a tongue."

Out of reflex, Cadie ran the tip of her own tongue against her teeth, testing for its continued existence. "Oh." The syllable came as a sharp, outward breath. A gasp in reverse.

Cadie had seen arms and legs amputated, had had slabs of flesh from her own belly cut out, but there was a horrible intimacy in the act of removing someone's tongue. Forever after, you'd somehow be a part of the words that person would never speak again. You'd be a part of all the kisses that mouth would never know.

"I--I'm sorry," Cadie said.

Evelyn pointed with a sleeve-shrouded hand over Cadie's shoulder.

She followed the line of Evelyn's arm, her gaze going the bed next to hers. "You mean you want to stay next to me?"

Evelyn nodded.

Cadie reacted by running to the linen closet. Who cared if the girl couldn't talk back? Cadie could talk enough for the both of them. She grabbed sheets and a meager pillow still gritty from the sand-washing.

She talked as she made up the bed, careful not to ask any questions Evelyn couldn't answer.

"Tomorrow, I'll show you 'round the shelter," Cadie said, talking to fill the silence. "I'll take you to the yard, too. That's where I go sometimes, when it's not too hot out. There's shrubs and things there. It's nice to see green still, let me tell you..."

Later, after they settled in for the night, Evelyn was in her dreams. She dreamt that she saw Evelyn walk to Simon's bed and extend a hand to touch his chest. As she pulled back the sleeve of her shirt, her arm glittered with a thousand red jewels.

Cadie woke the next morning to find Evelyn already at the window. She sat with her knees drawn up under the man's shirt she still wore. The sky beyond the window framed her in panes of sullen gold.

Cadie sat down beside her. "Some days, it gets so hot I sit here all day, trying to catch a breeze. Watching the sky. As if I could make it rain, just by wanting it."

Evelyn looked at her.

"Except it ain't rain that comes from the sky," Cadie said. She rubbed at one of the clusters on her arms. "Not even close."

Evelyn held out her hand and pulled back her sleeve.

Cadie's eyes widened. The girl had the worst infestation she'd ever seen. Shiny gobs of red encrusted her arm from elbow to wrist. Only small patches of skin showed through the red. When Evelyn moved her arm, the masses glinted in the light.

"You must've had them a long time," Cadie said.

Evelyn nodded and pushed the sleeve back down over her arm.

Cadie pulled up the left leg of her pants to expose the cluster on her knee. It had started to form only the week before. The mass was no bigger than the pupil of a mouse's eye, but a fine dusting of red grit surrounded it, feeding into it.

She rubbed at her knee, but the red clung to her skin. "Funny how just one of them alone ain't much. A grain of sand, really. They come together and look like something." Cadie remembered the images from her dream. "They look like jewels."

"They're the spiders," Simon said behind them. He came around and sat on the windowsill, facing them. An ugly smile contorted his face as he leaned closer to Evelyn. "You know why we call them that? Not because they look like spiders. No, because they weave their cocoon around you, and then eat you from the inside out until there's nothing left."

Cadie gripped the arms of her chair. "Shut up, Simon." She tried to keep her voice calm in front of Evelyn. "You shut up right now, or I'll--"

He unbuttoned the top of his shirt and spread open his collar.

Cadie gasped.

The space just below his neck was bare. The cameo of red was gone, replaced by a faint depression of rough, dry skin. Like an old scar from a deep wound. Simon's face reflected Cadie's shock.

His hands flew to his neck. His fingers danced frantically over his chest. "It's gone," he said in a low, shaking voice. He pushed up his sleeves, revealing unadorned arms. "It's--it's gone. They're all gone. Aren't they?"

Cadie nodded, unable to speak. In the year since the first cluster showed up on her leg, the infection had only spread. And she was one of the lucky ones. She'd seen residents at the shelter die from all the surgeries the doctors performed to remove the insidious red masses. She'd never seen the clusters just disappear.

Simon pushed himself away from the window and hit the floor running. Jane and Louise sat up in their beds, blinking.

He screamed for the nurses as he ran into the hall. Cadie took a few steps after him, but stopped when Evelyn remained in her seat.

Cadie went back and knelt at her side. "Maybe Simon's just the first," she said. "The first to beat the infection, I mean. Maybe we're next. You think we could be?"

Evelyn just rubbed her arm through her sleeve and shook her head.

Days passed before the doctors allowed Simon to have visitors in the infirmary. Cadie would go two and three times a day, just to remind herself it hadn't been a dream and he really had gotten better.

"How are you?" she would ask him on each of her visits.

He complained a lot. "I can't get enough water. My throat feels so dry," he would say. "I don't remember being this thirsty in a long time."

Cadie didn't like that kind of talk, though, so when Simon got to whining, she would change the subject. "Maybe the twins would let us borrow their chess set," or: "I knew a boy in school who looked just like you." Anything to keep from talking about droughts and thirst.

Whenever she found Simon asleep on one of her visits, she used the time to work on a gift for Evelyn. She had chosen a page from her journal and torn it carefully--and with more than a twinge of pain--from its binding. She sat at Simon's bedside for hours working on the paper, caressing the surface with her eraser, gently so she wouldn't rub holes in it.

At dinner nearly a week after she first began working on it, Cadie produced the blank sheet of paper from behind her back with a flourish. Sitting across from Evelyn, she held the page on palm of one hand.

"So you can write what you want to say," Cadie said. "So we can talk. Sort of. Like friends."

Evelyn blinked up at her.

"Oh, and here--" Cadie reached into pants pocket for the pencil she'd created by breaking her own in half. "--this is for you, too."

Evelyn accepted the gifts, mouth softly parted to show the darkness within. Her eyes shone.

"Sometimes you got to let go of one thing to keep a hold of something better." Cadie cleared her throat. "Talking to you is better than writing in that old journal any day. You bet, Evelyn."

Evelyn ran her fingers over the paper, delicately, as if touching some rare artifact. Her fingers paused when they came to one corner. She turned the page so Cadie could see the faint outline of one of her entries. Can't pull down the stars.

"Oh that," Cadie said. "That's what my Mama used to say when she tried to do something she knew she'd never be able to do. Like feed a family of six on one hotdog and two dented cans of corn. 'Might as well be pulling down the stars,' she'd say. That must've been the hardest thing she could think of, I guess." She tapped the paper. "When I wrote that, it seemed to me like nothing was ever going to get better. Maybe now, though, with Simon..."

Evelyn's brow furrowed.

Cadie reached for her pencil. "Here, I'll erase it better for you--"

Evelyn drew the paper to her chest with a sound of protest.

Cadie realized it was the first time she'd heard Evelyn's voice. The substance of the words remained trapped inside her without form. Music without instrument.

"How--" Cadie stopped herself, searching for a way to ask the question without hurting Evelyn's feelings. She self-consciously rubbed her bottom lip. "Were you born that way?"

Evelyn shook her head. She mimicked a scissors with her fingers. Open. Close. Cut.

Cadie swallowed. "Surgery?"

Evelyn smoothed the paper on the table and began to write. Cadie read with growing horror as the words formed.

Some boys in the desert where I lived cut it out, Evelyn wrote. Cadie gave a ragged gasp. Evelyn shrugged and wrote: They were hungry.

Cadie let out a long, low breath. "What happened to them?"

Evelyn held the pencil just above the paper for a long while before she wrote. And then: I killed them.

A shiver went up Cadie's spine. "Good," she said. She nodded. "Good. I'm glad. They deserved it."

They exchanged small, tight smiles.

One of the nurses came around then, passing out tins of potted meat stamped with an expiration date over a year old. Another nurse followed her, depositing small cups of ruddy water in front of each resident. Cadie drank hers right away--a habit she'd picked up in her early days at the shelter, when there were more mouths to share so little water.

"Did I ever tell you it rained on my fourteenth birthday?" She looked into her empty cup. "Mama said it was a gift from the sky. We thought the drought was over. The water tasted so sweet, I remember it was nearly clear. We guzzled it right from the sky, licked it off our hands and arms, sucked it out of our clothes. I wish I could've given you rain, you know, instead of an old piece of paper."

Evelyn nudged her own cup across the table.

Cadie moved it back. "I know it doesn't look very good, but you need to drink it."

Evelyn shook her head. She pointed to the cup, then to Cadie.

"You want me to...?"

Evelyn wrote: A gift.

Cadie lifted the cup to her lips. Evelyn nodded again. She drank.

Evelyn wrote something more on the paper and turned it so Cadie could see.

Thank you.

Cadie got up early the next morning to visit Simon, but when she got downstairs, she found the door to the infirmary closed.

She knocked. "I'm here to see Simon. Can I come in?"

The door opened a few inches and one of the nurses peered down at her. "Ain't nobody coming in here today. You go on back upstairs, you hear?"

"But I just wanted to see--"

The nurse pulled the door shut. The locks tumbled audibly into place on the other side.

With one more look at the door, Cadie started up the stairs.

The heat that day promised to be unbearable. The air already felt warm against her skin. She resolved to take Evelyn and find a cool place in the parlor.

Maybe they would make fans out of pages from her journal, if they weren't too soft...

Cadie walked into the dorm and let out a sigh. Evelyn looked up from her seat at the window.

"They wouldn't let me in," Cadie said.

When the door opened behind her a moment later, she turned hoping to see Simon, but it was Kevin. He came into the room on mismatched crutches. A knot tied off his left pants leg just below the knee.

She peered around him. "Is Simon with you?"

"Gee, Cadie, nice to see you, too." Kevin struggled toward his bed. Small clusters still freckled his face and arms. "And thanks, by the way, for coming to visit me while I was getting my foot hacked off with a kitchen knife."

She waved aside his sarcasm. "Why didn't they let me into the infirmary?" Kevin shrugged. "Probably because Simon died last night."

Cadie stared. Kevin had said the words so casually that she thought she must have misheard him. "What?"

"I said he died."

Cadie shook her head. "Died? No. He was getting better. Wasn't he? The infection... How?"

Kevin snorted. "Oh, don't tell me you actually care," he said. "Everyone knows you hated Simon."

She gritted her teeth. In three steps, she crossed the room and grabbed Kevin's crutch from under his arm. He hopped back, unbalanced, and fell against his bed.

Cadie drew back the crutch, holding it like a weapon. "Did the clusters come back?" Her voice rose as she spoke. "Is that it? Tell me!"

Kevin, eyes wide, held up his hands. "They couldn't keep enough water in him! He died of thirst, okay? Jesus, Cadie!"

Cadie staggered back as if struck. She lowered the crutch and let it drop it to the floor.

Hot tears came to her eyes. "It doesn't matter, does it?" she asked the room. "It doesn't matter if we're ever cured, I mean. There's still the drought. There's still the thirst. It's never going to get any better."

Evelyn came to her and gathered her in her arms. She only pulled away to write something on her paper and show it to Cadie.

Yes, it will. I promise.

In bed later that night, Evelyn crawled in beside her. Cadie thought she felt the girl sob against her shoulder, but when she reached up to touch Evelyn's face, there was sand where there should have been tears.

Cadie? Wake up, Cadie.

The whisper came to her in her sleep, the voice almost familiar, drawing her toward wakefulness like an outstretched hand.

She opened her eyes and saw Evelyn standing over her.

"It's almost time."

Cadie stared. The words had come from Evelyn's mouth. The voice that had guided her from sleep belonged to her friend. The girl with no tongue.

Cadie sat up. "What?"

Evelyn stood to one side and pointed across the room where the twins had taken off their shirts. They pored over one another's bare backs and arms. Rough scars had replaced infection clusters.

Cadie turned to Evelyn. "Their infection--"

"That's not what it is," Evelyn said. "At least, it doesn't have to be."

She opened her mouth. A ruby jewel shone where her tongue should have been. "I told you about that night in the desert," Evelyn said. "But I didn't tell you the whole thing."

Cadie pushed herself out of bed. She felt behind her for the wall just as she collapsed against it. She didn't understand what she was seeing, what she was hearing.

Evelyn went on. "After those boys cut out my tongue, they left me to die, bleeding and thirsty. Except I didn't die. Do you know why?"

Cadie felt herself shake her head.

Evelyn's eyes glittered. "Because that was the night the red sand fell from the sky. You call them the spiders."

She opened her shirt, showing a solid red mat from her neck to her belly. As she slipped out of the shirt completely, the jeweled arms came into view. The clusters had gathered so densely together that they formed a skin of rubies that moved when Evelyn moved and when she breathed.

Cadie gasped. "Oh God."

The twins screamed.

Within seconds, the door opened and one of the nurses ran inside. She moaned and clutched her stomach as she turned in Evelyn's direction. The part of her face not obscured by clusters went white.

Cadie nodded at the twins. "You cured them," she said.

Evelyn shook her head. There was sand in her eyes and her voice sounded like crying. "I've killed them."

By then, the other nurse had come in, as well. Together, the two nurses grabbed Evelyn by the arms. Cadie watched as they dragged her out of the room. Evelyn didn't struggle. She never looked away from Cadie.

Trembling, Cadie picked herself up off the floor. As she glanced down, she noticed the new dusting of red sand on her hands and arms.

By the time they finally let her in to see Evelyn, Cadie hardly recognized her. What lay in the infirmary bed looked more like a statue of a herself, sculpted from carnelian and garnet and polished to a mirror shine. No skin showed through. The dark hair had gone. The face was more expressionless than calm.

"Is she alive?"

One of the nurses stood near the open window, looking out at the night sky. "If she is, she won't be for long."

Cadie studied the reflection of the woman's face in the window. "She cured you."

The nurse's hand went up to her scarred cheek. "She--she asked to do it."

"You'll die, you know."

The nurse swallowed. "Some of us are leaving the shelter," she said. "We heard about a place past the desert. There's enough water for everyone."

"When you leaving?"

"Soon."

Cadie thought of what Evelyn had found in the desert and shuddered. "Good luck."

The nurse nodded tightly.

Cadie gestured at Evelyn. "Can I be with her for a minute? Alone?" When the nurse left the room, Cadie went to sit on the edge of Evelyn's bed. She couldn't tell if Evelyn was breathing or not. Her chest didn't move. Maybe she had died, Cadie thought, and this thing--this spider's cocoon--was all that remained.

She reached out and pressed her palm against the jeweled chest. A tremor moved through the hard surface. A heartbeat? A breath? Cadie pressed harder.

Another tremor came, this one stronger. Evelyn's body moved visibly and then, with a sound like a sigh, collapsed into red dust.

Cadie let out a small cry and pushed herself off the bed. The dust slipped from the bed and onto the floor. She took a step back to keep from standing in its path.

As she watched, the red sand moved across the floor and then up the wall to the window. It remained there for a moment, poised on the ledge, and spilled over the other side.

Cadie ran to the window.

"Wait!"

She climbed out into the hot, dry night, and landed in the empty shelter yard. She scanned the horizon. In the distance, the glassy figure of Evelyn stood silhouetted against the bruise-colored sky.

Cadie ran to her.

"Evelyn, can you still hear me?" She searched the crystalline face for some sign of life. "Do you understand me?"

The thing that had been Evelyn said and did nothing.

Cadie reached out and clasped one of the gemstone hands. "Don't leave me."

Something broke off in her fingers.

Cadie looked down. On her palm sat a large red cluster, rough as an unfinished ruby.

Sometimes you got to let go of one thing...

When Cadie looked up, Evelyn fell to dust again. The crimson particles moved as if a wind blew them, dispersing over the ground. Within minutes, Cadie couldn't see them at all. All that remained of Evelyn now lay in her hand.

What was she supposed to do? She could go with the nurse and the others, looking for some oasis in the desert. The idea held little appeal for her, though. Her only friend was gone. The desert was full of knives and thieves who would steal a young girl's tongue. But staying at the shelter without water meant death. She wanted to be with Evelyn. She would be with Evelyn.

She stared at the jewel for a long while before pressing it to a bare patch of skin on her arm. She held it there until it smoothed beneath her palm.

Cadie held up her arm under the light of the moon, turned it this way and that. She marveled at the beauty of her new skin. It shone as if she had made it herself out of stars pulled down from the sky.

The End