Madeline Sonik
PhD Candidate
Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education
University of British Columbia
Email:  sonik@shaw.ca

     They were white, lanky-limbed, trim, with dust on their down.  Dust on their halos. Their long thread tresses swept their grey oceans. White exhaled into their velvet palms. Everything they touched, everything they swallowed, illuminated their chaste pallor, their triangular silver backs, their flat lily bottoms. Each breath they took, every murmur, droned with their deep pearl essence, their chalky exponential.

     At first, we could not see them in the darkness as they basked. We only knew of craters, sprawling around their enfolding rings, of flaring meteorites, of ancient lava flows that discerned untarnished acres of grit. We knew of the mountain ranges, the rilles that travel across borders in parallel lines like tidy fork scrapings across continents.

     Our days were too busy to question. Our days were filled with stinking laundry, stores, jobs we took for the moment, hunting for lost socks, receipts, coupon books that saved us money. Our years were made up of three-hundred and fifty-degree ovens and casseroles, hamburgers we ordered from car windows, appointments with professionals. 
 
     We looked upward, into the night sky. Stars we could have named, if we'd wished to. Flickering planets. We looked up, sighing under the oppressive weight of magnetic fields that held us fast in the grooves we'd carved. Our feet flatter than stone. Our faces frozen. Nice evenings when the warmth of the day bounced back from our pavements, when the north wind sneezed the heady smells of lilac and primrose onto our porches. We recalled what the poets had said. We remembered each delicious word. Her soft white sheen; her sorcery; her blood. We thought of yearning lovers who joined beneath her pitted eye, rolled unashamed and lustful, through the window of her enchantment. We looked up into the sky and praised her without knowing, then bowed our heads to toil and sleep, and dreamed vanishing dreams as her bright shadow painted our rooms.

     Days unfolded into days. Tides rose and fell. We faded into quiet slumber. She became a bauble, a brilliant ball; we smiled at her, a kind of astral parlor trick. Rockets climbed to the clouds and up, far up, into the ruffles of her hemisphere. She panted, breathless, with cruel silence. She announced our loneliness to the fluttering of our fearful hearts. Her vast blackness, bright with sun, acknowledged our estrangements. Erect white rockets jumped into her holy sea, stole her stones, trampled her peaks, and then returned to us. Yet, still, we could not imagine.

     Only a few, touched by her beams, inflamed by her need to be known, withstood her candid tortures. They swarmed toward window bars, howling, the objects of our greatest pity, and wept a truth in words we could not understand.

     Rockets reached her, like seed pods scattering from these earthly trees, burrowed into her magma, broke her stellar scars, then returned to us as if nothing had happened, as if life had not been altered, as if she had passed unseen. They carried great plastic bubbles to her, domes of silver, shrines of cosmic void. From here, we could just see the cool dim shimmer of their concentric erections, outlines of structures, as they worked at containing and making her small. The glowing face of her expanded in a swell, and we thought for the first time of her duplicity, the side of her we'd never seen.

     Dreams of her erupted into our waking world.  We saw her thin shining face, pock-marked, fragile.  We saw her skin that scattered like crumbs. Our heads became hives. We moved with the heaviness of labor, with the conception of multiple births. Drugs could not stop the buzzing, could not expel our nights, could not erase the potent rain that fell from her and filled our choking apiaries with unwanted sight. We took to our damp beds as larvae chiseled in our brains, as she poured her writhing visions through us. We closed black curtains, lay black cotton over our eyes. She whispered, tickled, showed her gaping, cratered grin. She called us to our windows, called us to the sky, and we saw in the clarity of blackness the gleaming transparent citadels of our deceptions, the waif-like women, white and naked, who loped beyond the bounds of darkness from the shelter of the brothel on the other side. They entered the transparent bubble, demanding kisses. Torturing reluctant lovers with a touch. Closing cream-coloured lips on the mouths of their masters. Transforming them to brilliant flashes of ash.