September 8, 2014 | Occasus | Issue 4 | Fiction

Stars in the Sky Like Gold

Daddy would always say I was his little star, and when he looked up into the sky he wished he could reach down every sparkling diamond that hung scattered in the night, because I deserved to be surrounded by the same sort of beauty I myself projected. He spoke of worlds that I had no idea existed, as I spent my time gazing up at the foggy blackness that flickered squares of light from buildings, squinting hard trying to see what he saw, trying to find myself. His words were like poems, pouring out and wrapping around me like silk ribbons, I could listen to him all day swaddling me in his own rhythmic voice like a dance. He was a painter by trade, and a philosopher, though only in his mind. Mommy knew he loved me more than her, she always knew, and she hated me for that.  

“Your mother was never meant to be here anyways. She grew up on some shitty old farm on the outskirts of some rundown town where everyone’s related. Hours and hours from here. She couldn’t handle the light and the noise of ol’ Cha-ron-a as they say. She never belonged here, it was never your fault though babe, never,” he told me, sucking back on a cigarette, the smell of chemicals and heat curling viciously at the end of the burning embers, glowing orange. “Never meant she didn’t love you, kiddo, just meant she was a plain old bitch.” He coughed heavily, turned the cigarette to me, his eyes glossy, quavering like a mirage. I saw my small reflection inside them, taking the cigarette and breathing in quick, the smoke weighing heavy on my lungs and burning the length of my throat. My reflection was wobbly and distorted in the black of his eyes, like a painting beneath the water, just out of my reach. He took the cigarette out of the clasp of my little fist and stubbed it into an ashtray, flecks of ash crumbling off the end. “Atta girl,” he said watching me cough, blowing forceful clouds of grey out of my mouth.

 He was always sneaking into my room late at night, his eyes glinting sharp, a white speck sparkling in the corner like the edge of a tooth, and that meant trouble. It always meant trouble. It’s why my mom left us, flying away one night like a bird on a wire that had just discovered her wings. Racing away from the wind and the fog that engulfed this city, that sucked you in, and kept you hanging in limbo if you didn’t fight to break free. I imagined her landing back in her hometown, some distant dusty road that wound and curled alongside spanning fields of green with clear skies splattered with twinkling fairies, hovering over her like a halo. Somewhere far and foreign from the life I lived with Daddy.

“Baby,” he’d say to me quietly, flicking off my bedside lamp, darkness falling over us like a finger to the walls' lips, hushing the room to silence, swearing the room to secrecy. I wore jewelry from my mother and one by one he’d slip the bracelets off my arm, unhooking the clasp of my necklace, laying down the string of pearls like a row of teeth on the nightstand, gnawing gently at the tabletop with every nudge from the headboard.

When I’d wake up, floating from my bed out into the tiny living room I would see him sitting up by the window, disheveled hair and smoke swirling the perimeters of his face. He always woke up early, before the moon had even settled back down into the ground, long before the sun slid up over the skyscrapers to wake up the rest of Toronto. He liked being up before anyone else, always said the blank canvas of night was comforting like a shawl over his shoulders and it was calm. “When your mind is never alone, it’s nice to feel this still. Only time of day it’s possible in this town,” he’d say sitting shirtless on a stool, cigarette dangling from his mouth, brushing the length of his bare canvas with colour, bringing life onto the easel.

He’d put his brush down and sit me on his lap, leaning over to grab the cup sitting on the window ledge. He’d bounce me on his knee and swish the contents of his drink around, ice cubes floating like glaciers in the glowing amber sea within his glass, filled right to the brim. Those were the moments I liked best, sitting with him during those early mornings, watching the windows sweat beads of dew, little droplets racing each other down the length of the glass. As morning bloomed I felt small and safe in his arms, there was something different about the night. For hours I would watch him turn watercolour into life, eyes of jungle cats staring out at me, or the leaves of trees so full and so green I wanted to reach out and touch them, tear one straight off the branch. Sleep would arrest him as the morning hovered over us and I would nestle myself in the crevice of his arm, watching him breathe, the steady rise and fall of his thin chest.

The thing with us is we had each other, and that was all. No more, no less, and although he loved me I think he might have hated me too, because I was a burden and he was alone. Sometimes he got mad and yelled and broke things like mirrors or plates, crashing onto the floor all around me, cannonballs of ceramic smashing the surface of the tile. You needed money to eat and money was scarce, when “your brilliant and nobody knows true art or passion anymore in this bloody place.” He cursed taxes, Stephen Harper, and GMO’s for his failures as a successful painter, his failures as a Dad too maybe, when he remembered he was one. Sometimes he spent days pacing around our tiny apartment, talking and responding to himself, leaning heavy into the window, watching the passing cars like a cat, like he wanted to push the glass out and pounce on them. “You know you don’t get it Cal, you don’t. Maybe you never will, but you’re a fucking survivor, in this world, just like me, and that’s the only way you’re going to get through. Survive. Sometimes I’m a desperate person, your mother up and left and what was I supposed to do. I make mistakes fuck, yeah I make some shitty mistakes but you’re going to be alright. I’m sorry Cal, I am,” he’d say, scratching furiously at his arms, pacing and pacing and pacing, his words a direct address to me at first, until I’d lose him, walking the length of our home, speaking to something so much farther away. I wanted to be scared sometimes but I pushed the feeling deep down inside of me because I could tell, although he was my hero, he was not heroic, and he knew it as much as I did. It tore him up, maybe, that he was so weak, but I loved him just the same because in order to survive, I had to. I had to keep giving him what he needed because he was all I had. I tried really hard to believe him when he said one day things would change.

“Rumplestiltzkin spun straw into gold, ya know,” he told me one morning, the dawn of the new day struggling to break free from the night, the moon fading into the blue of the sky, as I watched perched on his knee, his brush gliding slowly across the blank canvas. “Imagine, if I could work my brush like that, paint little geometric shapes that would tumble off of the page, into buckets filling to the brim with gemstones, and diamonds, and pieces of crystal, and gold. Imagine that Cal, eh…imagine that,” he said looping and swaying the paint in scattered zig-zags and swirls, like he really meant what he said, like he really wished that could happen.

“Wasn’t Rumplstiltzkin a bad guy, Daddy?” I asked mulling over the idea in my head, squinting at the vibrant colours spread in a mosaic blur, like a rainbow wind, like the breath of Iris. “Didn’t he want the girl’s baby or something? Didn’t he take her necklaces and stuff? I know he was helping her, but he was mean too, right?” I asked, confused, trying to remember the details of this fairy tale I had once read.

I could feel the scratch of his scruff against my shoulder as he nodded slowly, his hands slipping underneath the cotton of my nightgown, a tingle spreading through my body, unnatural and yet familiar all the same.

“Yeah,” he said, drawn out, the words a trailing sound at the end of his breath, airy and cool against my ear. “You’re right, he did do that didn’t he.”

“He sounds scary,” I replied, looking up at my Dad, watching his eyes lull back, wishing he would stop.

“Well that little girl was desperate, I suppose. He said he’d help her, and he took things from her too, but in the end it all worked out honey see…eventually she guessed his name and then he split into two. He died Cal, and that beautiful girl never had to give him anything else ever again.” I nodded, rolling the beads of my necklace in between my fingers, grazing the tips against the cool silver of the bangles that crawled up the length of my arm, and kept my eyes on the sky, searching intently for all those sparkling stars I’d heard so much about.

RAQUEL FARRINGTON is a third year English student minoring in Creative Writing.