He’s been looking for something simple like hydrochloric acid or magnesium for the past half hour, but he’s been caught up by other things: the mummified cat on the top shelf, the model of a human brain still tucked away in the model of a human head, Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein, bauxite, obsidian, and gypsum. Passing by the window, there are more distractions, the varsity football players scuffing each other in practice, all the weepy-eyed girls staring astonished as though these young men could defy physics, like wishes, to give them anything they want. This will never happen, but they don’t need to know that. A few steps farther, the clear upside-down bell of the vacuum chamber waits for its once a year feeding of balloons and marshmallows, ready to feast on the air, drawing it out in one mortifying extended breath. There is one teacher for all these sections, a balding minister of a Baptist church, who tells the boy, quoting a thousand sermons, he is going to Hell unless he accepts God into his life. For a few moments there is a presence in everything, something blue in the flame of Bunsen burners, something waiting in the mongrel pup stored in a jar of formaldehyde, something in the atoms of helium that pushes it to float upward toward its own dispersion. Nothing that holy could exist on earth. So he resigns himself to tarsus and metatarsus, tibia and fibula. The quivering skeleton in the back room all the kids guess is real, wondering who it was, and if it suffered, and, if there are souls in heaven, is it there? But that is another problem, a test with no observable evidence other than these bones hanging from a metal pole in the darkness of a storage closet, ready for its numbered parts to be labeled and displayed and reassembled. He could search all afternoon, tomorrow, and the day after that for whatever it is he has been sent to find. Outside this room, he knows the stars are moving farther away. The light they send is so fleeting and old.
Sirius, the dog star, and Procyon, the little dog, I’m in the spill of streetlight trying to find the brightest stars. Really, I should know better, here in the midst of town where the aura of buildings and roadways is stronger than constellations. Growing up in the country, I could see every pinpoint in the sky, the dancing arm of the galaxy aglow across the night. Arcturus, bear watcher, in the last stages of its life, and Vega, the vulture, there are so many animals in the sky, so many dead heroes to keep them company. I’ve often dreamed myself among them, a few barely blinking lights in a cluster somewhere near Orion’s heel. Which is called Rigel, the place where Scorpio stung him in fiercest battle. But I’ve done my research—Orion was a giant and the worst sort of man, the kind we should all reach up and tear from the sky, all those stars falling in fire upon the world. Canopus is a supergiant, and Capella is actually four stars. I have a hard time orienting myself at this confluence of rivers bordering town, the way they snake and change direction. Betelgeuse is a lion waiting on the other shore, and Achernar is the end of this river, which is an ocean, which is another place too wide to see all at once, at least from here. Eventually, I will go back inside to lamplight, watch a movie I’ve seen a dozen times before, maybe something science fiction. Something that allows me to weave in and out of stars, and all the fabled creatures that live among them.
—no thanks to Shakespeare My lover’s eyes are nothing like what you’re thinking, and when I use the word my, I don’t mean to denote ownership or dominion. I intend a certain intimacy— sitting at dinner, our knees touching—or later, asleep, our arms, our hips, our hands fallen where they may. May what, I couldn’t say. And when I say lover, I don’t mean to imply a strictly physical relationship, a constant passion ravaging the body. We walk along grocery aisles comparing prices. We sing and talk and answer tv gameshow questions. Yes, I said ravaging. Sometimes passion shakes your bones brittle, deprives the body of oxygen, snaps the junctions in the brain. My lover’s temperament is earthquake and typhoon, tornado and lightning. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And when I drown in the deepest oceanic trench or suffocate in the exosphere, my lover is my metamorphosis pulling me back to land, restarting my heart, blessing air back into my eager, ravaged lungs.
David B. Prather is the author of WE WERE BIRDS from Main Street Rag Publishing (2019). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, The Literary Review, and many others. He studied acting at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York, and he studied writing at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. He lives in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
The German biologist Ernst Haeckel was fascinated by medusae, the umbrella-shaped animals commonly called jellyfish. For Haeckel, whose imagination was shaped in the Romantic era, medusae expressed the exuberant yet fragile beauty of Nature. And in their ethereal forms he glimpsed a reflection of his great love Anna Sethe, who died tragically at the age of twenty-nine. As part of his efforts to demonstrate that all living things are interconnected through evolution, he produced monographs on Siphonophorae (1869–88), Calcareous Sponges (1872), Arabian Corals (1876) and Medusae (1879–81). A year after completing the medusae book, a mighty two-volume work describing 600 species, Haeckel had a house built in Jena. He named it Villa Medusa and decorated the ceilings with frescoes of medusae that would later appear as lithographs in his classic book Art Forms in Nature (1899–1904). From Public Domain Review
