Fall 2021 | Occasus | Issue 11.2

Stars and Ink

“Do you think we’re alone?”

“In the Universe? No.”

Character 1 scoffs and pulls his eyes away from the night sky to look at his date. Let’s call him Finn for the sake of clarity. “Great, now we can never fuck in peace knowing that aliens are watching us from a million light-years away.” Finn is not really his name. He doesn’t really have a name, but that doesn’t really matter. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

An easy chuckle comes from Character 2. His name shall be Ollie and he shall be curious because that’s how the ink splattered on the page. “Yes, I think we’re alone atop this deserted lookout.” Ollie is not looking at his date. He is looking up at the stars.

Suddenly those stars reflecting in Ollie’s paper irises turn into the blurry face of Finn. A blurry face because the features are not yet cemented. Ollie does not care. The stars have fled from his vision, replaced by the constellation of freckles on Finn’s cheeks. Now his features begin to take shape. There could be godlike hunters or baby bears within those freckles, but that can change, especially if there is no concrete answer. Finn can have a million shapes dancing on his cheekbones as long as a million people care to give it to him.

They kiss and it is perfect. They kiss and it is real. They kiss and it is just words on a page.

Go ahead, pick one of these options. It doesn’t matter which, even though only one of them is accurate.

Ollie’s lips are dry, and his mouth tastes like coffee. In an instant, Ollie becomes more than words on a page because he now exists as a concept in someone’s brain. He’s been given a personal history. Sometime in his recent past, he drank coffee, meaning sometime in his recent past, he walked to a café and paid with cash. No one ever said that he paid with cash, but it’s a possibility. All that was said was that he tastes like coffee. He likes coffee more than tea. He likes to be fully awake when stargazing. Or maybe not…this is just the inside of someone’s mind – the part responsible for imagining faces and creating stories. Ollie has become more than words on a page and all it took was a couple more words on a page.

Character 1, Finn as you’ll recall, breaks away from the kiss. It’s not aggressive. He has a curious look in his eye as if he sucked the curiosity from Ollie’s lips. “We aren’t alone?”

Ollie sighs. “I told you, no one is going to see us.” He is right because no one else has been imagined yet. Any person who might catch them is only stagnant ink in a pen. Besides, that ink is needed to fill in the holes in these characters’ lives.

“No, I mean…you think we’re not alone in the universe.”

“Of course, we aren’t. How selfish would we be to think that our world is the only one?”

“That’s a scary thought.”

“No, it’s not,” Ollie says. Ollie knows he just said that, but it was clarified for someone else. How lucky these men are to have someone care so much about their fictional conversation. “Is it scary knowing that there are stars we can’t see?”

“A little!” Finn admits.

By now character 1 is no longer on top of character 2. They both stare up at the sky once again. Sex is good, even for people made out of letters, but there is something compelling about the dots of light flickering a million light-years away. The black sky looks back with its millions of eyes. For a moment, it’s hard to tell who is admiring who.

Ollie has a wondrous look on his face. “Why?” For those millions of eyes in the universe still keeping track, he wants to know why Finn fears the knowledge that there is more to life than he can see.

“It’s hard to wrap my head around.”

“I agree, but that doesn’t make it scary.”

“Don’t you ever wonder where it ends? Or where it begins?”

When hearing these questions, some people might think that ‘it’ – whatever ‘it’ is – begins at the line “Do you think we’re alone?”. Of course, Finn is not one of those people because he thinks that he’s been alive for more than a few words. Finn had a bagel for breakfast that morning. He went to work and got reprimanded by his boss for slacking off. He took a shower before meeting up with Ollie.

Finn is, regrettably, wrong about all of these things, but you cannot blame him for this. You also cannot destroy the illusion of his world because that is all that he knows. Give him the freedom to live his fictional life in peace and maybe someone will do the same for you.

On the other hand, Ollie is less oblivious. He is already beginning to see the shadow of the hand that writes his existence. When he looks up at the stars, he sees the millions of eyes that make his life meaningful.

Finn’s question might as well have been rhetorical because he will never get an answer. So, he moves on. “Do you believe in intelligent design?”

Without hesitation, “Yes.”

“How can you be so confident?”

Ollie pauses before answering. He turns on his side so that the center of his universe is once again his date. He drowns himself in the black pools of Finn’s eyes. He watches his pupils dilate, like a black hole expanding to swallow a galaxy. Its effect on Ollie is a gravitational pull. “Did you know your pupils get bigger when you look at someone you love?”

“Don’t dodge my question,” Finn blushes and hits Ollie’s arm playfully.

“I’m not dodging the question, I swear.”

“Fine,” Finn concedes with a smirk. “As it happens, I did know that. Your eyes are the size of the moon, by the way.”

Ollie smiles as if he’s pleased that his body betrays his feelings. “I refuse to give evolution all the credit for something so adorable as expressing love with the muscles in our eyes.”

“Come on? You don’t believe in evolution?”

“Oh, I do, don’t get me wrong!” Ollie stresses. “But I think that someone, probably a hopeless romantic, thought it would be cute if our feelings of love broke the boundaries of our minds.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

And Finn was right. It doesn’t make any sense because something like this is hard to put into words. It’s difficult to create realistic characters using only words, let alone characters who can express the existential questions of the world.

“Finn…” Ollie bows his head closer to the other boy. Their foreheads touch, making Ollie wish he could transfer all his thoughts through contact alone. “The only reason you’re here with me is because somehow your heart pumps blood throughout your entire body. Somehow that blood reaches your brain. Somehow your brain turns electrical pulses into the thoughts and feelings and quirks that make up who you are. You can’t tell me that a bunch of genes and fossils did that without a little bit of help.”
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Finn doesn’t say anything because what is he supposed to say to that? After all, he is only character 1, and if the ink isn’t flowing then neither is his fictional blood. Ollie too freezes for a moment. Their lives cease temporarily until the right words come. If they could think on their own, they might be reminded of how brief their existence is. As soon as the stars in the universe blink away, their life is but a memory. Even Ollie, who can see the pen glide across his piece of paper, cannot predict when his story will end.

Mackenzie Emberley is a fourth-year student completing an Honours Specialization in Creative Writing and English Language and Literature at Western University. They have published flash fiction, poetry, and academic essays in two of Arts & Humanities Students' magazines.