The stars keep their promise

Issue nine: flash fiction by Georgina Kamsika

The stars have always called to humans, and they still hold sway in the popular imagination today. In Indian vedic astronomy there are 27 nakshatras, which are similar to the concept of the zodiac signs in Western tradition. Mrigashira, a nakshatra in the form of a deer, takes center stage in this luminous tale exploring identity and grief. What happens when a constellation takes shape and follows you into the woods? Better yet, when it calls your name, will you answer?

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A star map created in Jaipur, India (1780).

My story starts with my grandfather dying. That probably sounds sadder than it is, but I’d only met him once when I was six, and I mostly remember that he loved to calculate my astrology birth chart. Big charts, too, not the mini horoscopes you’d get at home in England. He’d lay the paper out, and it’d be wider than my dad’s desk, covered in swooping curves and intricate golden symbols. He took it very seriously, like a science.

‘Venus collides with the Stag pulling at the threads of your fate. A love like yours is written in supernovas,’ he told me, his voice soft, his fingers blackened with ink. ‘You are not made to love gently.’

When my mother emigrated to England, he stayed back in India. Twenty years later, I’m in the village where my mother was born, and my grandfather has passed. His home clings to the lower slopes of the Himalayas, at the edge of a forest so old it forgets ever being young.

I listen to the chorus of family and friends repeating the stories he had told. My mother, the junglee child running wild through the trees, his life managing the railroads carved through the mountains, and of the golden deer that used to visit his home.

That is the story I prefer, and other people seem to like it as well, albeit for different reasons. I want to hear about the old god with moonlight for eyes; these neighbours explain how it caused my grandfather to lose his mind.

He told of children that wandered into the woods, lured by the sound of hoofbeats. ‘If you hear it, don’t follow,’ the neighbours repeat his words. ‘No matter how beautiful it is, no matter how it calls. That deer is not of this world.’

I sip my masala chai, sweet as memory and spicy as my regrets, and wish I’d not been too busy with university and the beginning of my life to miss the end of his. Why had that girl felt like everything to me, when she’d thrown me away without a thought? So much for a blazing bright love life for me.

My Hindi isn’t fluent enough to follow everything, so I let the discussion wash over me.

‘Go.’ Mum gestures outside.

I don’t want to. I’m tired after the fifteen-hour flight. But the aunties cluck and fuss and usher me out the door. They want to talk about adult things without the child there. Sad, single, unmarried, I am nothing like them.

I pad through the fields behind the house. The soil is dark and rich, monsoon-fed and grasping at my trainers. A rice paddy glints emerald off to my right, the rest of the village off to my left. And above it all, the Himalayas loom, jagged teeth against the sky, crushing me beneath their weight. I turn to them.

The forest waits for me ahead. The wilderness is nothing like the genteel woodlands of home. Towering trees tangle their broad leaves, clumps that look like bamboo, and huge sentinels that guard their mysterious fruit. I’ve heard the hum of insects in films, but I’m shocked by how loud it is when they’re right beside you.

The farther I go, the more I feel like I’m in my grandfather’s stories. The trees twist together, vines coil across my path. The light dims to a perpetual twilight, the leaves an unbreakable canopy. Birds still fly above, but I have no idea whose hoofbeats are rustling the plants beside me.

The forest breathes wrong.

I run. Branches lash at my arms; vines slither to trip me. I turn for the mountains, but the sky has vanished. My heartbeat drums through me. I sprint through the choking dark. The thing keeps pace with me. A flicker of yellow-white.

I break into a clearing, and the world falls silent. No birds, no insect hum, only the sound of my own breath. The space is perfectly circular, littered with bones scattered around a tree decorated with strips of leathery hide. The sweet scent of jasmine is undercut by the reek of decay.

The deer steps into the clearing, dainty like a dancer. Its hide is woven from the night sky itself, body shimmering with golden constellations. Antlers spiral like galaxies, tipped by a burning star. It stares with the gravity of the sun.

My legs refuse to run. My breathing is more like gasping.

A wet, clicking sound rattles from its throat; its voice the sound of wind through dead leaves. ‘You found me.’

I find myself moving. A step on the grass peels back to reveal wet flesh. The ground pulses like a living thing. Tiny ribs snap brittle under my feet. The closer I get, the stronger the cloying smell of something long dead.

Its stardust hide is cool beneath my fingers, resonating with the hum of creation. It’s too celestial for earth and too earthly for the gods. My fingers sink into its body, its hide stippled with patches dark and glistening. It turns its head all the way around, its neck twisting like rope. It watches me, its mouth too wide, its lips stretched into something that is not quite a smile.

Run. The thought appears in my mind.

‘Love me,’ it commands. The ancient trees bend close like they’re listening.

I whimper. The sound is pathetic. I’m going to vomit. Why did I come here?

‘You will be beautiful,’ it promises. ‘See.’

I look at the tree. The trunk is a twisted horror of bodies fused together, limbs like branches. Its bark is the mottled colour of bruises. The leather strips are not from animals.

‘Come,’ it whispers. ‘I will show you wonders.’

The deer leans in, its breath hot and foetid, pressing close as a lover. Stinking of ozone and the iron scent of meteors. I try to scream, but my throat is full of stardust.

Above me, the constellations wink out. And the world unravels.

The star cluster Westerlund 2 in the Milky Way galaxy courtesy of NASA.

Photo by Hector Fisher

Georgina Kamsika is a speculative fiction writer born in Yorkshire, England, to British Asian immigrant parents and has spent most of her life explaining her English first name, Polish surname, and South Asian features.