[short fiction] early childhood education for protostars

One of my fondest lit mag rejects! This story addresses chronic illness, and contains brief discussion of pregnancy, surgery, and traumatic birth. Please read with caution.

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Rian sobs until cracks form in her skin. Then the light comes through. The little wefts widen and spill as she heaves, and all Haru can think is that tonight when Rian crawls into bed with her, it’ll be like trying to sleep with a lamp on. She can’t sleep with a lamp on. She hates the feeling of sleep masks, too.

“Mama, burns!” Rian wails. “It burns!”

“I know, baby,” says Haru. She goes to the medicine cabinet. Rian takes the syrup better than most five-year-olds, and she knows to rub at her cheeks to coax the light back into her blood. She’s a good kid. But even after the Tylenol, she cries.

Eventually she falls asleep on the couch, as Haru strokes her hair with one hand and browses a remote work portal with the other. It’s intolerable in the silence — Haru hasn’t listened to music in a week. Rian’s fissures radiate slim veins of heat from where her face is pressed into Haru’s leg. If she gets up for her headphones Rian will feel it, and wake, and it’ll all start over again.

-

She was born November 12, four pounds, eight ounces. Her skin was thin and seethed like the surface of the sun. Haru’s arms were flush, then peeling, hours after she held Rian for the first time. And by then, some of her sheath had grown in; Haru had laid anesthetized in the operating theater for five hours while they tried and tried to put her back together.

For months of the pregnancy Haru was feverish, crying, in and out of the hospital on her work’s feeble health insurance. They took Rian from her like a tumor, and after that, all of the sickness was in her daughter. She went to pediatricians who told her that every child was special, and that Rian was a healthy girl who would develop normally if she had the right care.

Haru said, “I don’t have the money.”

Ask the state, said the pediatricians. But she didn’t qualify.

Submit an appeal, said the state. Haru did, and didn’t hear back.

So a couple months after Rian was born she drove them out to the quarry, poured a beer off the cliff and hucked the bottle at the sky, and screamed, “PAY SOMETHING, ASSHOLE!”

She hadn’t heard from him in a year. She wouldn’t again.

The longest Rian lasted at a daycare was one week, and it wasn’t her fault. The caretakers called Haru and took her to the nurse’s office, where a skinny, freckled girl was hugging herself and screaming like the world was ending.

At that point Haru had really had enough of screaming children, and childcare workers looking at her like she was a Munchausen’s mother, so she said, bluntly, “What?” The nurse coaxed the girl’s hands down and showed her: perfect, crinkled, bruising, finger-shaped burns tattooed into her back. She was Rian’s friend, of course.

“We cannot have a child who does this in our program,” said the daycare administrator.

“You have autistic kids,” said Haru. “They can hit people. Scratch them. Doesn’t it happen all the time?”

The administrator looked at her with absolute disdain. “They’re kids,” she said.

Haru wanted to slap her. She left with Rian, and quit her job the next week: the beginning of a two-year indenture in their cramped little townhouse.

-

After dinner Haru takes Rian out on the patio and ices her knees through a bad flare. Rian’s little hiccuping sobs ebb beneath freeway traffic and the warbling of the neighbor’s birdbath.

There, Haru talks about the constellations. She’s got them pulled up in an app on her phone. The light pollution turns their sky a dark, slate blue broken only with the occasional airplane, but she can draw with her finger, and Rian needs to know.

She used to know a lot about stars. She used to take edibles in the local planetarium and cry silently through the aging presenter’s forty-minute lecture. Rian can take medical marijuana when she’s older, and when her body has steeled itself against the acetaminophen, though the thought scares Haru to death. She’s heard too much on Reddit about safe, friendly doses that flipped a switch in someone’s brain and started to eat them alive.

That can’t happen to Rian on top of everything else. Haru looks at her daughter. She knows stars are born violently, and don’t ever stop hurting.

Out loud she says, “What do you think about space?”

“It’s scary,” says Rian.

“Why’s that?”

Rian doesn’t answer for a long time. Finally she says, “If you jumped really big, would you fall up there?”

The image of her daughter reaching for a windowsill flashes vividly through Haru’s mind. “I dunno, baby,” she said. “Probably, yeah.”

-

On Rian’s first birthday she drove out to the quarry. The neighbor’s kid — he’s at college, now — was babysitting, and Haru had given him her number, but then she’d turned off her phone.

She parked the truck and walked to the cliff and stood there a long time. She slept very little back then, and when she woke up it was always to Rian’s crying and screaming. Haru would lay in bed and listen to her daughter being crushed under the weight of the Earth. Once the light seared a hole through her cheap little IKEA crib, the one it’d taken Haru three hours to put together.

When she met him she was angry, and always had something wrong with her. Those were the words that held her together: angry and sick. They had long, loud conversations about it where Haru insisted he wasn’t as sure as he pretended, and she was right, in the end, but he’d convinced her then. She tried to write about him and called him the worst names she could think of, and threw beer bottles off cliffs, but ultimately she loved him, and Rian had his eyes.

She was afraid, leaning over the edge until it dizzied her. Not that she was his daughter, really — that Rian was hers.

-

Haru puts Rian in long-sleeved pajamas, and the light has cooled, though it turns the fabric red like shining a flashlight through a sheet. She wants to keep the bedside lamp on and read for a bit, but Rian grabs Haru’s shirt and says, “What if I fall when I sleep?”

“I don’t think you’ll fall,” says Haru.

“What if the bed forgets I’m here?” says Rian, starting to tear. “What if the burning comes back? What if the ceiling gets on fire? I don’t wanna fall. That’s so far.”

Haru turns out the light. She scoops Rian into her arms and holds her against her stomach, where a big, ugly scar cleaves her skin in two. The skin pulls sometimes, when she puts dishes away or gets Rian’s toys down from a high shelf. Then she’ll feel the heat spill and start to seethe. 

“We’ll go together, baby,” Haru says. She hugs her daughter, and braces.