Stars
Rosie Cooper
The man kneels, his warm breath brushing his clasped hands, stumbling over his words.
 "Father," he mutters, through the lattice, "Father, I’m insane." He shuffles his hands together, skin rasping on skin. "I’ve lost my faith," he adds for effect. The human behind the wood shifts his position, sighing to himself, peering at the dirty postcards pinned around his nose. Another one.
"Have you been reading the bible?"
"Yes," he lies; the bible is dusty with disuse.
"Have you tried counselling?"
"No." A white card slides through the loose slat in the division between them: man and saint. Next, please.
Walking home, he watches his shoes slap the pigeon-grey pavement. Don’t walk on the cracks or they’ll gobble you up, and the shop windows are filled with chopped and rancid flesh. He has ridden for ever on the thin line that divides him from the dead-black address on the card, grasping his freedom with hands like skeletons.
Twelve men sit in the sterile waiting room, each one staring at the eleven strangers around him. It is judgement day in the white, square cubicle, waiting for the door to open and the quick, clean, impersonal voice to tell them: heaven or hell.
On the other side of the door the man who thinks he is mad sits on the edge of the chair, scraping his feet along the carpet, missing the eye of the sterilised woman in front of him.
"Hello," she is saying, her cheery friendly voice smiles across the room, hitting him in the stomach so he retches. She cocks her head. "Would you like to tell me what the problem is?" she asks, her perfect, white teeth glinting discords in the beams of the clean neon light above them.
The man opens his lips and finds himself telling her his life, shattered dreams, broken memories falling out of the back of his mouth, tripping off his tongue, words spilling out like dried peas from a jar.
"How old are you?" The man stops, apologetic, his emotions shutting out like a light.
"Forty five."
"Ah." She is knowledgeable. She smiles. Motherly, sisterly, brotherly, professional.
"I think you might be going through what we like to call mid-life crisis, are you with me?" Her pearl teeth chat together, and the tip of her nose reflects the light.
"Not mad at all then, are we?" He is her son, her brother, her teddy bear. He patient: tell me your problems and I can make them go away. Trust me, I am like you. I am your friend. Her face confides in him but her eyes reveal nothing: he is alone, helpless. He drowned years ago.
"Yes." He lies again. "Yes. I see."
"Have you a hobby? Some people like gardening, they find it very therapeutic."
"I have a hobby," he says. "I count the stars." She nods, understanding, but she understads nothing except the money he pays.
"And when the stars run out?" She is still smiling.
"So do I."
The man arrives home late, zipping up his flies as he walks down the road.
"Coming to drinks tonight?" asks the wife. The sweet sticky smell of her perfume clogs his nostrils, and her necklace looks like a string of tiny bluebottles crawling around her neck. "I’ve brought them a bottle."
He sinks down into himself, as she talks to him, to herself. Her lipstick looks like wet blood, smothering her mouth, covering her lips with shine.
The room is stifling with smoke, with couples laughing and drinking, trying to outdo each other in false conversation. The man laughs with them but his lips remain frowning. He cannot smile for vampires. All his friends have gone slowly, quietly insane. They change, faces come and go; trust no-one, they will only leave, only break your heart with sour promises and stale contentment.
Suddenly the bitter taste of acid stabs at his throat. His stomach pulls together and he can feel himself tighten. The man runs out of the room, his swollen tongue filling his mouth with flesh and teeth, leaving the bored, stagnant pool of sparkling wine and jewellery. He is different. He is real.
He runs down the street, his lonely shoes tapping on the pavement, striking at the lonely quiet of the night and the distant traffic. He runs through his house and out into his bare cement garden, to sit, lonely, on the ground, and look at the stars.
Alone he can feel the hardness under him, and the swift night air all around him, biting at his cheeks and nibbling his fingertips. He can hear the sounds of a television set, and cars, and dogs, and people, all indifferent. All separate. All alone. But tonight, he is not alone, tonight he sits with the stars, and the gun, nestled in his warm hands. He strokes it and he can hear it sigh with pleasure.
The man who thinks he is mad is looking at the stars. The wife brings him tea. She can see a smile on his face, a smile she thought was gone forever, but she cannot see his hands. She kisses his forehead, her lips, hot, stain him with marks that look like blood, or rose petals.
He is remembering a line in a book, and that at night, blood is black. His head fills with noise, and his blood is black.
In the morning, she finds him, covered in rose petals, blood red against the grey cement, the colour of his face. The blood marks of her kiss are still on his forehead, and she cries.
A piece of paper rests between his finger and thumb. The wife, who does not understand, reads it. ""Stars," it reads, "ninety one million, trillion, billion."
"Oh God," she says, "Why?"
And God, who does not understand, looks down at the garden through a gap in the clouds, and says: "Ninety one million, trillion, billion is my favourite number."
The man is a speck of dust against the vast spread of gardens.
E N D
Rosie Cooper
Rosie Cooper lives in London.
"This story is a lot about myself, and about people I know, people who get called things like ‘unstable’ and ‘screwed up’, because they feel, experience, notice and are affected by their surroundings more than the people who want to ‘cure’ them.
I wanted this story to be applicable and identifiable to anyone who read it, which was partly why I didn’t give the man a name. He is a nondescript stranger in a street, a friend, a neighbour, normal except for what goes on inside his head. He is a nondescript figure whose death would go almost entirely unnoticed. I think this is the same for all of us."
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