Star Light Star Bright

Star light star bright… The first star I see tonight… I wish I may, I wish I might have the wish I wish tonight.

As a child it was easy to make sugarcoated wishes. I wished mama would come back to me and I wished daddy wouldn’t bring home those women that reeked with poison perfume and had smeared lipstick smiles that left kiss marks on my forehead and on daddy’s neck, like a flattened ruby necklaces. I wished for rain when it was sunny and sunshine when it rained and for snow in the middle of summer.

But it wasn’t long before I found out that stars aren’t very reliable things to wish on. Falling stars lose their luster and their ability to grant wishes and as time went on, I found it hard to be faithful in any stars at all and so my wishes stopped…but not before I made one final wish, and that wish was to have my own star beside me. One I could trust in…and one that wouldn’t fade away.

Years passed before it happened…but it did happen and that’s how I got to where I am today.

-

“I don’t fucking care!” Saul hisses, his teeth bared, where he sits scrunched and bent like a Raggedy Andy doll that’s seen happier, sunnier, better days. “I don’t care I don’t care I don’t give a fucking I don’t care.” His words turn to mumbles that scatter across the floor and hit my sneaker toes.

I crouch down and balance shakily, not wanting to touch the grimy toilet that Saul’s head is resting against to steady myself. “You have to get up,” I whisper but my whisper echoes around our heads and I flinch ducking my head down closer to my lap even though it almost makes me topple over.

“Fuck, I don’t care,” he twitters and raises a crystalline bottle to one of his bloodshot eyes, peeping inside, hopeful and expectant like he’s ready to see the answer to every question ever asked scrawled in microscopic script at the bottom of the bottle. He seems displeased with what he sees and tips the bottle over to watch a clear alcohol diamond slither down to the bathroom floor. Nothing else comes out. No genies, no revelations, and no vodka waterfalls. “What… What, the fuck, Ali?” he cries.

“It’s okay,” I whisper. He’s a spooked horse. He’s a wild horse like the ones mama took me to see before she ran away away away with the man in the business suit. He’s feral and afraid and I’m tame and scared and I whisper and murmur desperate pleads for him to calm down. “You have fans out there waiting for you. You have to play here. You have to.” I inch a hand toward him to put over his that shakes and trembles around the neck of his bottle, so tight I’m afraid it’ll shatter and then what’d happen? No guitar and no singing and no money and he wouldn’t be a popular star anymore. He’d lose his luster.

“Did you hear me, Ali? I don’t fucking care.” He raises his hand to smack me and I wait patiently until we both realize at the same time that there’s a bottle in the way and his hand tightens more and more and loosens till the bottle’s whizzing past my head and hitting the wall behind me so it rains deadly hardened acid rain that pelts into the back of my head.

Saul meets my eyes and his widen, tempting and enticing me to peek inside so I might see the answer to every question I’ve ever asked him and he’s never answered. Do you love me why’d you do that are you okay what’re you drinking what’s that pill do that you’re taking are you listening to me? But his eyelids snap shut before I can tug out the answers and he tilts his head back to laugh and scream.

The bathroom door slams open and it echoes, clashing with Saul’s shrieking. I stare up helplessly at manager Mark who’s managed to move himself away from the teenage girls in the audience with shirts and jeans low and tight and I reach for him feebly.

“Help…” I think I whisper but if I do, it’s lost among the echoes and Mark storms inside, slamming the door back shut and I flinch and fumble away from Saul, my hands skittering through sludgy dirty pieces of glass that Saul helped to create.

“What the fuck’s going on in here?” Mark demands, kneeling down in front of Saul.

“He doesn’t want to go out,” I explain.

“He doesn’t want to go out?” Mark repeats, glancing back to me and I nod rapidly, waiting for my head to topple down from my shoulders and roll across the floor. My fingers circle my throat to hold it in place, fingerprints lining up with blue smudged bruises that Saul’s left behind. Mark shakes his head and turns back to Saul, grabbing him by his messy black crow’s nest hair and jerking him up to his feet and Saul’s laughing turns to whining as he yanks away from mean manager Mark. “Don’t you keep talking fucking crazy, you hear me, Saul? You get your goddamned ass out onto that stage and you raise hell like you always do, god damn it!”

Saul doesn’t argue with Mark. Saul doesn’t raise an arm to slap Mark across the face. Saul doesn’t laugh in Mark’s face or push him into the wall. Saul doesn’t treat Mark like he treats me, but he does grab me by my raspberry red hair and drag me across the dim bathroom until I manage to scramble to my feet.

“You!” he growls as he forces me to pace with him backstage. I’m hunched over and sore all over before he finally pushes me and I fall to my knees, biting my lip so I don’t cry out. “I told you that I didn’t want to do this tonight but you let fucking pedophile Mark make me.” He’s staring down into my face and his face is a contorted monster mask that’s spraying spittle into my eyes and mouth and I whimper as it burns burns burns like acid.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…” I find myself mumbling even though I know that I have no power over Mark and I know that Saul knows that I don’t either. “I love you I’m sorry.” And I’m not sure if I’m sorry for loving him or if I love him and therefore I’m sorry for hurting him.

Saul’s calloused, long fingers twist into my hair again and I clamber up to my feet, in tears by the time his lips shove into mine. I’m on fire. My whole body’s on fire and I press myself into him, basking in that delicious painful pressing of his sword sharp pelvic bones into my stomach as they try to damage and dent me. I’m shaking when he lets me go and my legs tremble beneath me and ashes ashes we all fall down but only I fall and Saul leaves me with his guitar hanging from his shoulders as he steps out from behind the dusty musty curtain and begins to play.

I wait till I hear his low, softly sweet voice accompanying the twang of his guitar before I wander from backstage and out into the audience. I sit against the wall, thankful for its solidity because without it I might tip back to my knees again.

I love seeing Saul up on stage. That’s how I first saw him, at a concert with two of my friends and I fell in love and remembered that wistful wish I’d made years before. I’d wanted my own star and I found one in Saul. We talked that night. He brought me home and tore my virginity from me none too gently and I woke up with his body wrapped around mine like a boa constrictor and he hasn’t loosened his hold on me since. In the beginning he called me ‘slave boy’ and I answered to it because he was a perfect celestial god and worshipped him. By the time I noticed his minor faults like the drinking and swearing and anger and the drugs and the unfaithfulness and the anger and the anger and the anger it was too late for me to leave. By then I didn’t want to. I don’t want to.

I’m jarred out of my memories when two girls bump into me giggling and grinning and twittering.

“He’s so fucking gorgeous!” Blonde Girl Number One comments with even more giggles that make my ears ring.

“And talented. I love him and you know…he’s really good with his hands… With his fingers…” She trails off and they both burst into laughter that makes me jump and flinch. I glare at them for talking that way about my Saul even though they’re right because those rough fingers on my soft skin always reduce me to rubble.

They notice me staring, sneer through smeared on lip-gloss, and saunter away, miniskirts swishing behind them as Mark trails them through the crowd and I hate them for loving Saul and I love them for loving him and making him the star that he is. My star, my star, my star bright…

But I mostly hate them.

-

The night air is humid and sticky and I squirm as I lean up against the blue motel room door and stare across the parking lot where two young boys are bouncing a basketball back and forth and laughing about jokes that I can’t hear or understand. On the other side of the door creeps the vilest noise I have ever heard and that is the sound of a woman reaching orgasm.

I plug my ears and hum beneath my breath but I still hear it screaming through my skull. I bite my lips till I taste rich blood and I pull at my hair with scrabbling bitten fingers but it still taunts me and teases me but then the door is opening behind me and I tip in to sneak a peek beneath a miniskirt and catch sight of saintly pristine white panties as a woman steps over me, upset and piercing my arm with high heels. I whimper as she leaves and Saul appears shirtless grey and muzzy with dark rings around his eyes and sweat drenched hair that hangs in his face like creeping tainted veins.

“You. My little Ali…” he whispers and rubs at his eyes like a child woken from a nap. “My wings… Fly me back to bed.” His jeans ride low as he turns around and I count the dots of his spine and separate the sections. Cervical thoracic lumbar pelvic.

I climb up to my feet with help from the doorframe and shut the door behind me, peering through the peephole once and watching the White Panties girl walk between the basketball boys and I frown, wishing she’ll maybe get hit. She doesn’t so I turn back to Saul who’s spread on his belly in the middle of the unmade motel bed that smells of sex and sweat from dozens and dozens of people before Saul and White Panties helped to add on more.

“So how was she?” I ask quietly as his hands fumble around on the nightstand. “Was she good? She sounded like it.” The words stab at the space between us and at his sharp edge shoulder blades.

“You’re mad. Fly over here with your wings, butterfly,” he entices with his pet name sweet talk that he saves for when he knows I’m mad mad mad dog insane.

“I just don’t understand,” I sit on the corner edge of the bed and stare at the door. “You know I love you. Am I just not good enough for you, Saul?” I ask and another one of my endless, depthless questions go unanswered as he snickers and his body tenses up terribly tight and I glance over my shoulder to see him snorting a line of god knows what from the nightstand’s surface. I don’t even bother asking what it is because I know he won’t tell me and I know it’ll hurt me to know so I shut up and look away and press my fingers into my eyes.

“Why do you always talk so much, butterfly?” he coos, sitting up and slithering to me with his head in my lap and his eyes wide and pleading and I avoid them because he’s just teasing me with hopes of answers. “Why don’t you look at me?”

I sigh and meet his eyes and he pulls me into a kiss keeping his eyes open and mine can’t shut and I tumble tumble jack fell down and broke his crown and jill came tumbling after. I get caught in the cloud of yell in his eyes ad try my hardest to struggle free from the red spider web spindles that twist around me, crushing and contracting till I can barely breathe.

But he’s suddenly no longer kissing me. Instead he’s shoving me down into the mattress so hard that I whine in pain but he just grins and straddles my stomach with his hands made into claws gripping at my shoulders and I wait for his nails to pierce through the spaces of my clavicles and pop through the other side but it doesn’t happen so I’m left on edge.

“Fuck you!” he growls letting go of my left shoulder to grab me by my jaw and twist my head till I feel tendons stretching and hear cracking in my lower neck cervical. “Just fuck you, Ali.” He lets my neck go and I slowly look to him and he’s shaking his head slowly like he’s disappointed and sad before he presses his lips into mine again and once again I taste blood and I tremble against him, wanting more and more and more and so he gives more and more and more and he’s in me on me everywhere at once and he’s a star made of fire and points and it hurts it hurts it feels so disgustingly good.

-

Saul sips stinging smelling poison from a bottle and blows alcohol flavored kisses in my direction.

“Last night I had a dream and you were there,” he announces to me as I lay sated and sleepy in the midst of stagnant wrinkled sheets. “You were flitting around with wings made of ashes on fire like a hijacked plane and I pinned you down and put you in a frame.” I snuggle closer to him but my body’s stiff as I listen to his words slur into the sloshing of whatever’s in his bottle. “But all the smoke built up and the glass exploded and left shards in my eyes and I saw rainbows and a million reflections of everywhere and everything but it was ugly and dirty and I woke up hating humanity even more.”

I stare down at my hands fingernails stabbing at each other as I tear away hangnails that make me wince. “Is that why you didn’t want to play?” I whisper and expect to be ignored because he’s been drinking and it’s hard to hear me when his head’s clogged with bubbles and alcohol.

“No!” he finally snaps. “No, no, no!” He kicks at me and I flinch but don’t move away. “I’m sick of singing and playing and being a little puppet to bring in money for Mark.”

“You can’t quit,” I argue because if he quits he won’t be a star anymore and he’d shed his shine and then what’d happen to me?

“I want to quit everything. I want to hang myself with Mardi Gras beads and tie bells in my hair so when they cut me down, I'll still be making music even though I'm dead. Would you be the one to cut me down, butterfly?” I don’t answer but I glare at him through sidelong stares because I hate when he starts to talk this way. “Or would you be hanging beside me?”

I don’t answer I can’t answer because things like this make my insides hurt. “Can we go to sleep?” I ask I beg I whisper.

“Fuck you,” he growls and rolls over, spilling liquid from his bottle that makes the air around us reek but I don’t complain. Instead I close my eyes and I let myself crawl away from reality.

-

“Go the fuck away!” Saul growls when I try to wake him the next day. I let him sleep late and now we’re expected to be at a local bar in a few hours so he can sing but he won’t get up and I’m afraid to get Mark. “My head is bursting open. Can you see inside?” He shoves away his hair and points and I look obediently but I don’t see gaping hot red. I just see his pale scalp and I press a kiss against it even though I know he’ll jerk away. He jerks away.

“You have to,” I whisper like a broken record but he doesn’t stir.

“I don’t have anything. I don’t have to do anything. Nothing nothing nothing.” And so I leave his side to go into the bathroom where I start up the hair blow dryer and return to the TV to turn it on and all the way up and I talk and I talk about nothing at all but finally Saul stumbles out of bed to smack off the TV and slap me across the face before storming to the bathroom where he yanks the hair blow dryer from the wall but at least he’s up and my face is stinging.

An hour later Saul’s found a grimy bar bathroom again but this time he’s perched in front of the toilet, pushing his hair back from his face as he vomits loud and aching. I stand behind him, peeling his threadbare t-shirt from his spindly spine and blowing cool air across the sweaty surface.

“Why’d you let me drink so much last night?” he asks, his back heaving up and down as his stomach settles for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” even though we both know that I have no power of him when the bottle meets his hand.

“You went to sleep on me!” He turns around to shove me backwards and I hit my head against the door of the bathroom stall, yelping as I make contact with graffiti of I hate what she’s done and I can sympathize because I hate what Saul’s become. “You’re fucking useless!”

“I’m sorry I love you I’m sorry,” I repeat more broken record words and continue to blow air across his skin. He tenses up again and turns, spitting thick yellow saliva that smells like stomach acid at my feet and I’m frozen in it as he pushes past me and leaves the bathroom and I think my toes are burning off.

-

Saul’s sitting in the back of the van, tucked down between the rows of seats and there’s a spot of blood dried at the inside of his elbow and it makes me ache and break to see it and see him.

“What’re you on?” I ask him and he just shakes his head and smiles at me.

“Butterfly, you’d better flutter away before I crush your wings.” He grins and I frown, sitting beside him but careful not to get too close because those star edges they hurt.

“Are you okay?”

“I bought myself a gun once, Ali, and then I held it to my head for a long long time but when I finally pulled the trigger I realized that I didn’t have any bullets and then I hated myself so much…” he babbles and his eyes are wild wild things. “And then I once saved up pills of every size and color and I was ready to take them all and then I was indecisive and tried to drown myself in the river but it made the pills disintegrate and someone pulled me out of the river and I hated myself even more.”

“Why? You have everything and everyone loves you and I love you.”

“You always say I have I have I have to do this I have to do that I have this and I have that and I have nothing at all.” He kisses me softly and sweetly and it hurts more than when he’s rough and then he’s shoving me away and running from the van and I let him go because we’re in a new city and I know he’ll be back by nightfall.

-

I’ve spent hours searching for Saul because he never showed up at the bar and Mark was pissed at me and he hates me all the time so I commandeered the van and drove across this unfamiliar town searching for the familiar light of my star. I drove past churches and bars and homes and abandoned factories but I did not see him and so I’ve wandered back to the motel, scared and alone.

I fumble for the key in my pocket and drop it three times before it makes it into the keyhole. I push open the door and it creaks and blasts me with foul stinking air of a room that hasn’t been properly cleaned in years. As I step inside there comes a familiar smell among the foreign bodies that’ve been here before me and that’s the smell of vomit.

There’s a lump of fear in my throat that I can’t swallow down as I flick on the lights beside the door but there’re just two beds and a dusty TV and my backpack that I dropped here earlier. The bathroom door is open a crack and I tiptoe to it and shove it open but that’s empty too. Just fingerprint smeared tiles and a mirror with dried toothpaste creeping down the middle and cracks crisscrossing at the edges.

Confused, I step out from the bathroom and collapse onto my bed but then the breath catches in my chest and I’m choking and crying and choking some more.

On the floor between the bed and wall is Saul, spread out and still with white chunks of vomit slithering from his pale, dry, cracked lips. I reach out and touch him and he’s cold…not like how a star should be and he doesn’t yell at me or jerk away and his back doesn’t rise with the movement of his lungs inside his chest and I run my hands up over his spine pelvic lumbar thoracic cervical till I reach his neck and feel for a pulse that isn’t there.

I sit up slowly and grab my backpack, dropping my key on the bed and sliding outside where the air is cool again and the night’s deep and dark. My feet scuff across the parking lot and toward the nearest road and I wait, thumb in the air for a ride back home or at least far away from here.

Saul was my star and I should’ve known that he was a falling star. It was inevitable that he’d lose his luster because all stars fall and fade away.

End.

A/N: I like Saul. Halfway through this I lost my focus ‘cause I found amazing pictures of abandoned buildings…which I love. But I finished.

I’ll be posting a one-shot for Rachizzle soon… Her birthday is July 2nd so happy early birthday to her. :D And tomorrow’s my birthday. :O And I might be getting a webcam or a new camera... :keeps fingers crossed:

Oh, and according to freetranslationDOTcom, Ali means wings in Italian but I'm not sure if that's right. If it isn't...just ignore that. xD