Tristan’s been sweating. He wipes the droplets from his forehead, now clammy in the relative cool of late twilight, and the salt falls into his eyes, stinging and greasy. Tristan’s skin is riddled with mosquito bites, sunburned on the back of his neck. His t-shirt has yellow stains in the armpits and a big wet patch on the back where his pack’s been resting all through the long, sticky, humid day. Not much luck hitching; this county’s half-past the middle of nowhere. Tristan’s been trudging for miles. He has seen fields and pine woods and farms with threatening signs posted over their front gates. He has seen deer by the roadside, and vultures congregating to peck at a dead armadillo, and, once, an owl swooping low among skinny, needled branches. He has seen all kinds of trucks roar past him without stopping, all manner of ancient, rustbucket cars.
Tristan is uncomfortable, and Tristan is lonely, but there is a happiness in him too. It’s a joy to be on the road, untethered to anything, seeing new pieces of the world every morning and every night. He sighs as he lets his legs fold beneath him at last, dumping him on his ass on the soft grass beside his pack and bedroll. He lowers himself so he’s lying down in this safe place he’s found. A deep, verdant quarry with a shallow blue lake at the bottom, a lake and wildflowers and a gnarled tree to watch over him. He looks up through the tree’s twisted limbs and matrices of leaf, and he sees the stars above him. They seem to go on forever. The moon is a sharp sliver of fingernail amidst their thousands— millions, billions— of tiny fires, flickering through the oxygen of Earth’s atmosphere. They are so bright and distinct and densely packed into the Florida night sky that Tristan can almost convince himself he’s moving towards them and through them, falling upwards.
Tristan smiles. He listens to the night sounds of the quarry as he stargazes; Tristan’s got good ears. He can hear the rustling of small creatures in the underbrush, the myriad humming and whirring calls of insects. He hears a quiet splashing sound coming from the lake, maybe a fish jumping or a dead, dry branch falling into the water. He even hears the faint, distant drone of an occasional truck making its way down the rural road.
Tristan does not hear the sound of footsteps approaching, and he does not hear the skitteringof pebbles that fall when a person makes their way down the rough-hewn path in the quarry’s steep side. He doesn’t hear breathing, or fidgeting, or the slap of a hand trying to crush a mosquito too late to stop it sucking blood. Maybe there are no such sounds for Tristan to hear.
Whatever the case may be, the stranger’s voice takes him entirely by surprise.
“It looks like you could reach out and touch them, doesn’t it? The stars, of course.”
Tristan makes a sound that’s half shout, half gasp, with a kind of gargling undertone. It’s not intimidating; it just sounds like he’s about to be sick. He pulls himself into a crouch and whirls around, frantically scanning the dim quarry floor behind him for the source of the words. He was sure he was alone, and he had been sure he would remain alone all night long. Remembering the path down the rocky cliff, maybe that was a mistake. People must have made the path; people come down here.
There’s a dark shape standing several feet from Tristan. It’s a woman, he thinks, or maybe a short man, or a boy. It has two legs, two arms, and a head. Short, straight hair. It seems to be wearing tight pants and a loose, baggy jacket. (Who wears a jacket in Florida in summer, even at night?)
The figure’s face is entirely in shadow. Tristan can’t shake the unnerving impression that there’s nothing at all in the space between the hair and the collar of the jacket, that the area where the figure’s head should be is filled with an oily, inky void. No features for any light to bounce off.
“Hello?” calls Tristan, straightening up, trying to sound calm. “Hello? Who is it?” His voice rasps from dehydration and disuse.
“A traveler,” says the voice. “Like you.” It is smooth and androgynous, with a faint lilt of unplaceable foreign accent.
Tristan manages to keep from stepping backwards as the figure moves closer to him.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he says. He means to continue along these lines, but then the figure comes into view. It’s almost like the shadow covering its face was a heavy curtain, and some invisible pulley has now drawn the curtain away. The face seems spotlit, luminous. But of course, Tristan thinks, it’s only a trick of perspective. It must be. Nothing has really changed— even standing in the dark, the figure must have had this same beautiful, pale face.
The other boy (and Tristan can see that he is another boy now, with fine stubble on his chin) is eighteen or twenty, about Tristan’s age. He smiles hesitantly, revealing gapped front teeth, and extends a small but long-fingered hand. Feeling very large and bulky compared to the stranger— a feeling that both reassures him and makes him a little self-conscious— Tristan takes the hand and shakes it.
“I’m Tristan,” he says. The stranger’s smile grows wider, but he says nothing. The stranger stands in front of Tristan, so close that Tristan can see the slight flare of his nostrils when he breathes, and he looks Tristan directly in the eye, and he smiles.
The stranger’s eyes are a very light gray, almost silver.
After a few long seconds of this, Tristan continues, rather brusquely: “Well? You aren’t oing to tell me your name?”
The stranger puts his hands in the pockets of his baggy jacket. He shuffles his feet in the grass; when Tristan looks down at the rustling sound he notices, with surprise, that the stranger is barefoot. His toes, like his fingers, are very long, with somewhat overgrown nails. “What’s in a name?” asks the stranger.
Tristan snorts. “Not a whole lot,” he says. “Mine means ‘sad’, and it’s the name of some romantic hero from, like, an old play. Not what I’d’ve picked if it was up to me. But I’ve got to call you something, so don’t be cute.”
As though this boy could be anything but cute. Tristan feels the back of his neck grow hot; he tries to convince himself it’s just the sunburn.
“You can call me…hmm.” The boy clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth and rolls his eyes towards the stars. “How about Arcturus?”
“Like the star,” Tristan says, shaking his head. A smile creeps across his own cheeks. “You are something else, man. You an astronomy nerd?” He looks again at the boy’s bare feet, somehow unscathed despite the rocks and nettles and small, sharp twigs he must have had to step through to get to the bottom of the quarry. He looks at the boy’s silver eyes, gazing upwards, rapt or vacant. A terrible thought occurs to him. “Or are you one of those sci-fi people? One of those New Age types who’s all into aliens?” He tries, and fails, to make the question sound flippant, teasing.
Arcturus looks down. “All of the above, I think,” he says, straightfaced, and Tristan has no idea how to reply, so he spreads out his stuff and he asks Arcturus if he wants to sit for a minute or what.
“I don’t know about you, but my legs are sore as fuck,” Tristan says, uncapping his thermos with a squeak. He holds it out to Arcturus, who kneels hesitantly to take it. “I don’t have any food, but I got a little water, at least. Guests first.”
Arcturus grasps the thermos and lifts it to his mouth as though he’s never used such a device before and is afraid he’ll mess up. He takes a polite sip, swallows audibly, and returns the thermos to Tristan, who downs most of the rest of his water in one long gulp.
“Aaah.” Tristan leans back, looks into the salt crystal road of the Milky Way. “That’s the stuff. I don’t drink anything but good, clean water,” he tells Arcturus.
“Isn’t that unusual for a person your age?” asks Arcturus. Then, perhaps seeing Tristan begin to bristle, he adds, “Although I suppose it’s better for your body.”
“Body, nothing. Better for my mind, more like.” Something flickers in the corner of Tristan’s peripheral vision, a phosphorescent flare. He turns quickly, but it’s only Arcturus, sitting beside Tristan on the sleeping bag with his chin on his knees, his hands tucked under his ass. It’s a weird, childish position. Tristan can’t help but flash back to June sitting the same way, long ago, her eyes gray, too, but dark and threatening to overflow with sloppy, drunk tears. “I mean, it’s good for my body. That just isn’t the reason…”
Arcturus blinks at Tristan like he expects some follow-up, but Tristan’s not going to give him any. “So, why Arcturus, huh? Why not Pollux, or Polaris, or…or, I dunno, you could’ve picked a planet, right? Like Neptune. I had a cat named Neptune as a kid. God of the sea.”
“Your cat is the God of the sea?”
“No, Neptune. You know, that’s where the name comes from.”
“Planets. That’s true. I could have chosen…” he makes a tongue-clicking sound again, followed by a wet cough.
“Bless you,” says Tristan. Arcturus laughs. It’s a sparkling noise. Tristan almost thinks he can see the laugh, shimmering out from the gap between Arcturus’s teeth like a swarm of minute fireflies. He blinks rapidly and rubs at his eyes. It’s been a really long day. A long year. A long life, even though it hasn’t hit the two-decade mark yet. He’s just tired. That’s all it is.
“You misunderstand,” Arcturus says. “That’s the name of a planet.”
“In what language? Klingon?” Tristan shifts uncomfortably. The sleeping bag makes a swishing noise underneath him. The insect hum all around the quarry seems to rise in volume and urgency.
“In my language. That’s the name of the planet I come from originally.” Arcturus is calm and matter-of-fact. “Although I can’t say it properly when I’m inside this body. Arcturus is your name for my planet’s star, I believe. That’s why I chose it.”
Tristan grits his teeth and tries not to think of June, about her episodes of excited, rapid-fire rambling or dreamy, whisky-sodden whispers: Tristan, my son, sad-eyed son, my body is lying on the sofa but my soul is off flying through space. I’m approaching Europa now, with its ice-encrusted oceans. Six-finned ghost whales call across its barren surface to their living cousins in the deep, and I am a ghost, too, Tristan. Trapped outside the moon with those alien behemoths. The traveling part of me is tethered to my skull with a silver cord for as long as I’m alive. As long as I’m alive, Tristan, I’ll always come back. I can’t help but come back.
Tristan has learned that it’s best to play along with crazy people’s delusions, but he hasn’t been comfortable doing that since his mother died. Instead, he tries to gently guide Arcturus back to reality. “Consensus reality,” June would’ve said with a snort. “Bleak mundanity, Tristan.”
“You’re not an alien, Arcturus. I mean, I can see you sitting there. You’re a boy, like me. A human being.”
Arcturus blinks rapidly, a flutter of silver Morse code. “No.”
“Listen, I feel different from other people, too. I feel that all the time.” A surge of mingled jealousy and attraction courses through Tristan, looking at Arcturus’s lithe, angular form. Tristan is a fat, lumbering giant, his long hair— tied back in a ponytail— ridiculous. He is ashamed of his desire. Tristan remembers middle school, when the popular term of derision for everything uncool was “gay.” Poetry was gay. Astronomy was gay. Tristan’s hair was gay. His threadbare tie-dyed sweatshirts were gay. His nutty mother with her psychedelic-painted Corolla was gay, never mind her son and her rotating cast of sketchy boyfriends. Tristan shakes his head, getting the memories out. All that was a long time ago.
“I mean,” he continues, “ I can see that you really are different.. But pretending it’s because you’re from outer space is only going to hurt you in the long run, believe me. What’s real is this. Here. Earth.” Tristan points to Arcturus, to himself, to the grass and the lake and the rock walls towering above them.
“And that?” asks Arcturus, pointing up at the stars.
“Also real. But we’re never going to get to go there.”
“No.” Arcturus is smiling again. “I’ve been there, and I will return. And a part of you will be with me, maybe.” He leans in close and softly caresses Tristan’s cheek, then withdraws before Tristan can decide how to respond.
Tristan wonders if it’s morally wrong to make out with an insane person. He examines Arcturus, who is, in turn, examining a hole in the top layer of Tristan’s sleeping bag. Fluff is poking out through the hole like the bud of a tooth rising from red gum.
Arcturus is clean, Tristan realizes for the first time. He’s really clean, all over. His hair is glossy. He smells of flowers and soap. His clothes look high-quality, not Wal-Mart stuff. He must be local, Tristan decides. His family must live nearby, or someone appointed to take care of him at home. He’s too shiny and perfect to be a fellow vagabond, and if he’d somehow escaped from a hospital, he’d be wearing, like, pajamas or sweats. He definitely wouldn’t have a belt. Tristan thinks he can see the leather slung around Arcturus’s hips when he bends over to pull more fluff out of the tear.
“Hey,” Tristan says, putting his hand tentatively on Arcturus’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”
Arcturus nods without looking at him.
“So, what’s Florida weather like in winter? You live around here, yeah?”
“For too long. Too long. I haven’t found a suitable essence to incorporate into my psyche.” Arcturus peels himself away from the leak in the sleeping bag, sighs, and leans into Tristan. Tristan rubs his new friend’s skinny bicep, not quite believing his own daring.
“Florida’s nice enough in winter,” says Arcturus. “Not so cold as other places. Fewer mosquitoes. You wouldn’t sweat so much.”
“Well, sorry,” says Tristan. “I can’t exactly take a shower out here.”
“It’s all right.” Arcturus seems oblivious to sarcasm. “I appreciate the smell.”
Tristan squeezes him in a brief side-hug. They both watch the stars in silence for a moment, and Tristan manages to find the one he’s almost positive is the real Arcturus, shining very faintly orange.
“I should get to ask you a question,” remarks Arcturus-the-boy, who shines white as the sleeping bag’s polyfill guts. “Since I answered one.”
“Sure. Shoot.”
“What happened to your cat, Neptune?”
“…Oh. Her.” Tristan attempts a chuckle, but he’s trying not to remember. Again. “Well. My mom accidentally backed over her with the car one night. She was probably drunk, or stoned. Crushed Neptune’s poor skull, and that was the end of that.”
“How sad.” Arcturus sounds like he means it. “And you couldn’t save any part of her at all?”
“What, like her tail or something? Like taxidermy? Fuck no. I’m not a ghoul.”
“I mean her essence. Her…mind? Spirit? To eat and absorb.”
June would have loved this guy. “You’re fucking bizarre, you know that?”
“Yes.” Arcturus snuggles into Tristan more aggressively. One of his hands wraps around Tristan’s back and tugs on Tristan’s ponytail. His silver eyes are so close, Tristan can see shards of moon and stars reflected in their dilated pupils.
“Arcturus…”
“Tristan. Can I kiss you?”
Tristan says yes before he can think about it, before he can remember that this is another boy, that this is probably a mentally ill boy, that he has never kissed anyone in his life. He wants Arcturus to kiss him, yes, so much, and Arcturus does.
Kissing is wetter and more muscular than Tristan had imagined. Arcturus seems to be probing around the inside of his mouth with a tentacle, a deep-sea creature’s feeler, and Tristan almost gags before he gets the hang of things. After that, it is like floating away on a sea of warm spit. It is like falling through a field of stars.
After a short infinity, Arcturus pulls away. Tristan leans towards him again.
“Wait.” Arcturus puts a hand on Tristan’s belly. A small furrow appears between his eyebrows. “Tristan. I need to show you something.”
Without waiting for a response, Arcturus unzips his jacket and casts it aside. He isn’t wearing a shirt underneath, and Tristan, nervous and excited to the point of physical discomfort, is about to make a bad joke about Arcturus’s inability to enter convenience stores when he registers what his eyes are seeing.
First, the two thin, pink lateral scars underneath Arcturus’s nipples, traveling back to somewhere below his armpits.
That must be why he feels like an alien, Tristan thinks, sympathy springing up anew. He remembers what Arcturus told him earlier, about not being able to do certain things “inside this body.” It makes more sense now.
But that sense is fleeting, because the second thing Tristan notices turns everything else about the night upside-down and backwards.
It starts as almost nothing, just a scar, or a series of scars, on Arcturus’s breastbone. Three small, raised nodules of tissue. They have a crinkly texture, like burn marks.
Something is spreading from those scars, though. Dark, vine-like plant matter sends up shoots from those three burned places and, finding the air nourishing, grows and spreads like a time-lapse movie of kudzu. It is the yellow-purple-black of bruises and storm clouds. It is as thick as a rope, sinewy and dripping. It blooms from the scars and twists down and around Arcturus’s chest, down and around both his arms.
Tristan cannot accept what he’s seeing. He cannot deny what he’s seeing.. Small sparks, or chromatophores, or tiny fireflies twinkle from within the damp, dark, writhing mass of vines.
“Arcturus,” Tristan says, his mouth suddenly dry. Has this boy, this creature sucked up all his spit?
“I told you,” says Arcturus. His face, his voice, are still the same. “Now, Tristan. You have to make a choice.”
“W-what?”
“I won’t do this to you against your will, Tristan. But— please. Your essence is so sweet. This body hasn’t allowed me to travel much upon Earth, but you have by far the most complex soul I’ve ever tasted around here. The most sharp and poignant. Let me take more of it, and I’ll have fulfilled my mission and renewed my energy; I’ll be able to move on. You and I both will. A bit of you will see the stars with me, through my eyes.” He smiles dreamily. “All my myriad eyes. The real ones.”
“Y-you want to eat me?”
“No! No! You won’t die. Goodness. You won’t even lose much. A…a fragment of you will become part of me, and part of me forever, but almost all of you will continue just as before. It does not hurt.”
“Says you!” Tristan is trying to maintain his fear, his anger, his disgust. He knows these are the only rational responses to this impossible thing that’s happening, to the predatory monster before him. A wreath of ichor-dripping filaments frames Arcturus’s head like it’s an egg in a rotting bird’s nest. There is no way for Tristan to process what he’s seeing except through metaphor and simile, and nothing he can think up truly suffices. The word “monster,”he remembers June telling him once, originally meant a portent. An omen to warn, or a herald to show the way. June was crazy, there’s no doubt, but she wasn’t wrong about everything. Tristan’s heart swells and he fights the urge to reach out towards Arcturus again, to touch his alien coils. June did have some insight into the way the universe really is after all.
“Please,” says Arcturus, plaintive and gentle. “I’ve waited for such a long time. This body is almost used up, and I do not feel at home here.”
Tristan looks back on his life. He thinks of days, weeks, months on the road, of his mother’s grave back in Pennsylvania, of the run-down house she left to him, where he cannot stand to live. He thinks of his friendlessness. No one has ever kissed him before. Hardly anyone has ever even touched him in kindness, apart from June. June is gone. Arcturus is here. And Arcturus claims that this won’t hurt Tristan, or kill him. Tristan has no reason to trust the other boy, but he does. He does.
Cicadas whirr. Somewhere far away, a lone coyote howls. Tristan slaps at a mosquito, suddenly aware once more of the bites speckling his arms.
“All right,” he says, and his voice shakes only a little. “Yes, Arcturus. Come here.” He opens his arms, not sure this is how the process works but trusting his intuition.
Arcturus comes to Tristan, leaving a trail of black stickiness on the sleeping bag. There’s a burned-sugar smell rising off him, drowning out the soap and flowers. His tendrils, vines, tentacles, whatever, wrap around Tristan’s body, and around him again. Again. Tristan feels a series of sharp, burning stings across his flesh from neck to groin, like a thousand bees piercing him and injecting their venom all at once. He almost screams, but as quickly as the pain appeared, it vanishes, leaving behind a cool, soothing numbness. His skin is prickling with something not unpleasant, a sleep sensation. Arcturus brings his face close to Tristan’s, lips parted for a kiss, and Tristan puts his own lips upon them.
Something that is not a tongue twines its way into Tristan’s mouth, and up. The stinging returns to fill his sinuses, followed by the cool numbness, but Tristan thinks he can still sense small, glowing threads infiltrating his eyes, his skull, the gray crevices of his brain, growing into him and over him. Arcturus moans a little. Tristan cannot see, cannot breathe, and he cannot pull away. He feels a kind of draining, a lightness and a suction, a swirling pleasure that swells until it blocks out all his other senses, too, and all his memories, all his thoughts, all else that Tristan is or ever has been…
* * *
The merciless sunlight blares through Tristan’s closed eyelids, waking him. He groans and sits up straight. It can’t be that late in the morning, and he seems to have fallen asleep on top of his sleeping bag instead of inside it, and still he’s covered in sweat. He can smell himself. Disgusting. Maybe today he’ll find a YMCA or a truck stop with shower facilities and clean up.
In the daylight, the quarry is as beautiful as it was at night. The foliage is jungle-green; the water in the lake is swimming-pool blue. Shoals of silver fish are clearly visible in the shallows. Tristan frowns and rubs his temples. Something about the light glimmering off their scales reminds him of…what? A dream he had while he slept. A bizarre, intense dream. Already the details are scattering, slipping away from him, leaving him with nothing but a headache. He’s pretty sure he fell straight into a deep slumber as soon as he arrived in the quarry and set his stuff down. All that walking yesterday must have taken more out of Tristan than he’d thought. He didn’t even make his bed properly; the mosquitoes have feasted on his unshielded flesh. He scratches ruefully at a big bite near his navel.
There’s something lying beside the sleeping bag. It looks like a pile of clothes, but they’re not Tristan’s. He frowns. A pair of trendy gray jeans, much smaller than Tristan could possibly wear, and a large, crumpled black windbreaker that might conceivably fit over his shoulders and gut. He didn’t notice these at all last night. Tristan wonders idly if it would be alright to take the windbreaker, in case he needs one when he leaves the south. He’s reaching out to touch it when he sees what’s inside the clothes. It’s something flat and leathery, fish belly white. There’s a stringy, silky tangle near the top, above the windbreaker, that looks like— oh, god, it’s hair.
Tristan jerks away. He blinks several times, but the mass on the ground remains. It looks like a human skin, emptied of all the muscle and bone and meat. It’s lying in a facedown position, like a cast-off sweater, and Tristan imagines that if he were to flip it over, he would see dark, empty holes where the eyes should be, and a dark, empty hole inside the mouth. Discarded costume. Halloween mask.
Tristan shudders. He doesn’t know what it is, and surely there’s some logical explanation, but no way is he touching that thing.
For some reason, seeing this lump of rubbery stuff lying next to him makes him remember June, finding June curled up beside his bed as though she’d fallen asleep telling him stories, the way she had when Tristan was a child. But Tristan had just turned eighteen, and June was not asleep. Her face was puffy and bluish. Vomit leaked from the corners of her mouth. There was an empty bottle of pills in the pocket of her dress, a half-empty drinking glass of whisky leaving a ring on the floorboards beside the limp, spiraling mass of her long hair, so like her son’s.
Tristan shakes his head and looks away from the empty skin, resolving not to pay it any more attention. Thinking about June feels more remote than it usually does, less emotional. Tristan realizes he can no longer recall how her face looked when she was alive, and then he realizes that this doesn’t bother him that much. It’s as though something has been taken away from him in the night, a burden of care lifted. Tristan thinks about the long day ahead of him, and for once he feels nothing, not happiness, not excitement, not sadness, not grief, not regret.
He stands, stretches, and begins to pack up his things. He is a little hollow now, but then, so are most adults. He won’t turn into that skin on the ground, he reassures himself, the one he’s not looking at. He can live this way. It will be easier to live this way. That’s what sanity is all about.
Tristan hikes back up the stone path to the top of the quarry.
Briar Ripley Page (they/them) writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in Central Pennsylvania, where they reside with their cat and a lot of spiders. They have lived and traveled extensively in the American Southeast; the overgrown quarry described in this story is a real place, although Briar never saw any aliens there.
Briar Ripley PageMarch 2, 2020