Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(124)

At last, the hunter and the rooster left. Dusk approached like a mourner. The stars wept into night’s dark shroud. Saga and Freya—for they were no longer the hare and the deer—threw their arms around the tree. Their tears soaked its stiffening bark. They gathered herbs from the forest and applied a poultice to its wound. For this and weaving and love were the only forms of magic they knew. It was not enough. The oak’s trunk had gone pale as morning ashes. Its mighty limbs drooped; its leaves folded in on themselves. Its acorns fell like hard tears.

“Tell us what we can do to save you!” they cried.

“There is nothing to be done,” the Bridegroom’s Oak wheezed in a voice as old and regretful as time. “What magic I have is leaving me. You must save yourselves. Take my heart from its resting place. Carry it with you to the sea. Eat of it so that you do not forget me. Then you must become something new.”

The sisters nodded. For they knew, terrible as it was, that it was the truth.

“I ask only one final promise.”

“Yes,” said the sisters. “Anything.”

The oak brushed its stiffening limbs across the ground. “Plant the acorns.”

“Why?” asked the sisters. It didn’t seem like much.

“They will grow,” the tree assured them. “In time.”

“We promise,” said the sisters.

“So mote it be,” said the mighty tree. It shivered once and died. As promised, the sisters planted the acorns beneath the oak. They removed its beautiful heart and carried it with them through the longest night.

This is not the version I told you before.

Not Happily Ever After.

Stories are fiction. But that is not the same as a lie. You must ask yourself which story you want—what is true or what makes you comfortable.

It’s no matter. I can’t tell it like I did before.

That is all for now. I’m tired and remembering is hard.

I must rest.

Forgive me, my love. Vergib mir.





BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.


SPRING 2020

On his ride to Barclays, Miles goes over the checklist Chi has texted him about civil disobedience. He’s got a bottle of water to flush his eyes, mouth, and nose if he gets maced. He’s written Mom Lisa’s phone number on his arm and tucked his ID and a little money in his pocket in case he’s arrested. He’s left Dodger extra bowls of food and water, put down pee pads, and asked his neighbor Phil to check in, telling him where to find the extra key.

Miles locks up his Citi Bike off Fifth Avenue. The lighted Dime Savings Bank tower clock shows 8:30 p.m. The intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, Brooklyn’s two major arteries, is thronged with people of all ages, colors, identities. There’s a gray-haired South Asian grandma sandwiched between a white hipster dude and a Methodist church group singing a hymn while holding up a #JUSTICE sign. He finds Chi right where she said she’d be in front of Barclays Center. She’s wearing a Say Their Names T-shirt, a red bandanna covering her nose and mouth. Danny is with her. He looks surprised to see Miles.

“All right. Good to see you, dude,” Danny says.

Miles wishes he could hug his friend.

“Glad you came, Miles,” Chi says. “You ready?”

The sky roils with a storm trying to blow in. Teams of police fan out across neighboring rooftops. Miles zooms in on their rifles; the guns feel scarier than the virus. The chop of a police helicopter is loud overhead. Cops in full riot gear erect a wall of metal barriers outside of Barclays to push the protesters back into the street. A Black cop stands at the ready in front of one of those barricades. His nameplate reads Officer Vega. A young Black man in dreads approaches him. His shoulders are squared, his hands balled into fists at his sides.

“Hey! Hey…” He tilts his head to read the nameplate. “Officer Vega. Can I ask you something, brother? How you feel about what happened in Minneapolis, huh? How do you feel about that man crying for his mother while y’all didn’t do shit to stop it!”

Officer Vega stares straight ahead, silent.

The man with the dreads jabs his finger, careful to keep the distance between them. “It coulda been you on the ground, man! It coulda been me! How can you be part of this system knowing that?”

Miles can scarcely breathe. Filming the moment feels electric and intrusive, like he’s a witness to a pain so intimate he can only know it through a sheet of glass.

“Come on, man! Can’t you at least talk to me?” the young man pleads. His voice breaks like he’s on the verge of a full sob.

Officer Vega’s shoulders drop. He shakes his head. Miles can’t tell if it’s dismissal or disbelief.

“I would have done things differently,” he says at last. Officer Vega sighs a deep, aching weariness. He looks at the young man with fatherly concern. “Be careful out here, son. A’ight?”

Miles’s phone vibrates with a text from Mom Lisa: Where are you? There’s a notification for two missed calls. He doesn’t want a lecture and it will definitely be a lecture at the very least. He feels bad that they’ll be worried. But he is worried—about safety, the pandemic, the dying planet, the mess his generation has inherited with no instruction manual. He’s been running from his feelings most of his life. Now he’s standing in them. Now he is ready to fight.