creation myths
My brother wanted to make magic art, illusion. On the fourth of July the trees were all lit up with fireflies and everything smelled like sweet grass and smoke, our wide wet lawn singed by dropped sparklers and ground spinners. I can still hear the echo of my brother’s steps across the stone out back, his barefooted smack, our sister trailing behind, his disciple. Can hear, as if through water, our father’s slow rise from his haunting place—our kitchen table—hear him following out into the almost-night. Click of a lighter, high whistle across the lip of a glass bottle. All together, we were not alone.
*
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void and darkness were upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light—and there was light.
*
There’s a picture of his magic trick: my brother arranged me on the red tricycle, lit two smoke bombs over the back wheels, told me to put my arms up and smile, smile bigger, wider, and just as he snapped the picture the wind blew back my hair. It was that perfect dusk-time when everything is hazy, purple. In my memory of the photograph, I still see myself shot forward, his tiny rocket girl, even though I know better—know it’s only pretend movement, an imitation of an imitation, ultimately false—the opposite of the stillness of stars, how we perceive the slow crawl of comets.
It’s a good trick.
When I close my eyes to conjure it, still, it gets me every time.
*
To understand the ways in which Copernicus ended the world it is first necessary to reflect on the bounded Ptolemaic universe, the ways in which the human animal occupied a comfortable and comforting place at the center of the cosmos. First, it’s necessary to consider belonging. Imagine, for a moment, what it would feel like to know you had a place where you belonged. This is what Ptolemy gave us: here a space for humans, there a space for heavenly bodies to move, everywhere a space for God.
*
God himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you or forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.
*
My mother knows I’ve been looking for the photo.
“Your mother said you were writing a story about it,” she says.
When she says your mother she means your sister. (She is always making this mistake.)
We are talking on the phone. It is almost my brother’s fiftieth birthday. Pisces, that water sign—that well, deep and abiding.
“I thought I was making it up,” I tell her. “I couldn’t find a copy anywhere. I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.”
“No,” my mother says. “We remember it too.”
*
In centering the sun, Copernicus obliterated place. In the heliocentric model, nothing, save that centered sun, belongs any-particular-where. Without Copernicus we would have never moved toward infinity, that horror, toward Einstein, his unstable referents, his ultimate placelessness. In the unbounded universe anything can infiltrate our space. Equally, we might well bleed up, out, and over into that stellar void. Now nothing can contain us. But now there is nowhere else for us to go.
*
Before that creation myth were others.
On my brother’s shoulders, my neck craned up, peeking through the fringe of eastern hemlock crowding our Blue Ridge Mountain. My brother stretched his lanky arm, creating patterns in the night sky to teach me the ways our world had come into being. There, the Pleiades, their mess of freckles west of Orion. There, the Dog’s tail furiously bright, a defining feature on the face of the universe. A guide.
No, that is much too neat. I don’t remember what stars my brother showed me, how his sand-colored hair smelled, or the color of his eyes. Sea green, like my sister’s? Brackish blue, like mine? And what color were our father’s eyes? And how much does it matter?
My sister had already slunk down into the valley, creating her own destiny, and, now, my brother is dead.
*
Let there be light.
*
Love letter to astrology as would-be stable referent: you remind me of my mother—witchy, costume-jewelry-clad, talky, never saying much. Curl up beneath my collarbones, whisper your secrets out my throat. Haven’t we always looked up at the dark, overfull sky and said, “Yes. There I am.” How badly I want you to be true. Teach me how to know another person. Dig a tunnel out from my belly that goes somewhere real into the world.
*
What good is my memory of you if you are gone from me? What good is a photograph? What good is your ghost?
*
My mother’s makeup doesn’t run, never runs. She sets it with hairspray. She looks tired. She looks old. It is spring and she is visiting. She wants to talk about my brother. She asks how many times someone can come home, hat in hand, and say they’re sorry before you tell them enough.
*
March first, his birthday. Happy birthday, big 5-0. His name was Vincent Hokusai. What more do you want from me?
*
And what of his centered sun, Copernicus’ visible God? What was lost when Bruno shattered his fixed outer layer of stars, unyoked the theological heaven from our gaze? When God and light, again, were everywhere, but gone from our astronomy?
*
There’s not much more I can give.
*
Dead twenty-five years by his own two magic hands, still I feel my brother’s steady streak across the sky of my life. Brilliant, he could tell me all the constellations in the summer sky.
How long dead are the closest stars?
Please, let there be light.
Aliceanna Stopher (@_itwillbeloud) is a writer, a mama, and a short story evangelist. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2019, Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, The Normal School online, and elsewhere. She lives offline in Colorado, and online at aliceannastopher.com