Miki whispers “Daddy” into the dark, as she has on the cusps of the last seven midnights. The dark breathes back onto her. 

Her hand reaches up to the shelf beside the bed and presses the large pebbled button on her alarm clock. A thin voice says, “It is eleven-fifty-six p.m.” Each word’s tail is clipped by scissors.

Anticipation prickles her back. The noises of the house gather around her. They widen through the rooms, arc up over the staircase. They slip through the gap in her door to swell in the cups of her ears. 

Jackson calls out a cooing syllable from his crib down the hall. Miki lies very still and very straight. Her lips draw back from her teeth.

The music is low but she can hear every blemish in it. It is a rather poor performance of Chopin’s Nocturnes. She could play them more richly than this. Chopin is beautiful but easy. The broken chords of the left hand, the yearning song spilling from the right. It is playing because she is there, ensconced in her dark, but still she hears everything. 

“No, no, Lynn,” Aunt Sarah says to Mama. “Hoshu didn’t mean it like that.” The two voices drift up from the vaulted expanse of the living room, closest to the stairs.  Miki could listen to Aunt Sarah’s sugary voice forever. She hopes her face is half as pretty. “He only wants to help Miki see reality.”

Mama utters a caged bird of a noise.

Farther away snippets of talk flap to her like freer birds folded out of living paper. Daddy is speaking of her—“She is eight years old now but still she believes in these things she’s dreamed up”—with a tone that tastes like bad air. Miki hears how he says the word things differently, the extra tongue against his teeth. “She thinks a miracle is going to happen,” he says. “Her mother can’t take it. She could not even leave her with the babysitter tonight.”

Uncle Easton agrees with small sighs and sad noises.

“Perhaps the bigger problem,” Daddy continues, “is that Miki still has not warmed up to Jackson. We have to make her hold him. We have an appointment with someone her therapist referred us to next week.”

“I did not dream them, Daddy.” She pushes his voice away. Her arms lock rigid against her sides.  

Dishes click together in the kitchen sink. Boot heels clump on hardwood. There is a flush beneath Miki and the water surges and groans distantly through the veins of the house. The noises are a blanket woolen and stitched and stretched over the bed of the too-thin piano. The baby has settled back into quiet. Outside is the occasional drone of a car at the other end of the long, winding driveway. There are no insects, no wind, and the oak that once scratched at her window has had its fingers shortened by Daddy’s shears. She misses it sometimes. 

She reaches over and taps the clock’s button again. “It is eleven-fifty-eight p.m.” The moments crawl on her skin. 

 Beyond the bedside shelf, to the left, is the suggestion of the nightlight’s smear. A paler daub of dark with a faint electric thrum just above sound. The nightlight is a model of the Orion constellation. The Hunter. Mama said she chose it because nothing is prettier and because its lights are so bright that Miki can see them. It is only the smear, yes, but still Mama was right. Mama has taken Miki’s fingers in hers and used them to describe Orion. Thickly bearded. Pulling back the bow, raising the club to strike, or holding a mighty lion’s pelt aloft. 

At first she longed too deeply to see the stars, and so loathed them, but as the years collect in a spreading ink pool, the smudge of light on the wall has come to be an unseen comfort. The proof of warmth and color and sun beyond the horizon, just over this hill she will soon crest. 

Daddy said to her not long ago, “Mono no aware,” in his Japanese voice, softer yet more grunting than his practiced American one. The palms of his hands were so smooth. “Where half of you is from, Miki, we say this. It means ‘the sadness of things,’ but it is up to you to be happy.”

And Mama told her once—in her impatient voice with the words running together—that many stars are dead a thousand years before their light reaches people’s eyes. Then Mama stood up, quickly, and left Miki’s blanket pooled at her waist. Moments later Miki heard her voice, soft and snug now, lulling the baby. 

Even if it is true and Mama was not just being mean, she still wishes upon the stars. When Daddy will point her finger at Orion. One wish, always. The notes of her piano she witnesses from birth to death. Her fingers can read the riotous feel of tree bark, alive and harsh and sweet. But to see the tree that used to tap at her window, to see Daddy’s eyes shine when she performs flawlessly… 

The stars, cold or no, have never lost their wonder. And it is up to her. Miki looks toward Orion on the wall and listens to the underneath-hum. Her fingers reach toward the clock.

And then the doorbell rings; to Miki it is two buzzing bells in a minor key.

Mama, still in the living room, says, “Who on earth?” Her voice lifts up at the end. Aunt Sarah makes a noise in her throat. Mama walks toward the door, and her heels snick, snick, snick, and stumble. She cries out with the sharp thumps of her elbows upon the floor, the brief chimes of a thick glass smashing.

A chair’s legs squeal against wood in the den. Each of Daddy’s words gets bigger as he says, “Lynn? Honey, you okay?”

“Someone at the door,” Mama says, and a sound comes from her, a thin wail that pulls at the skin around Miki’s eyes. It makes the down on the back of her neck lift with a chill. 

In the den Uncle Easton begins to cry. Miki is confused by the sound. Chopin blares for a moment, a rill of keys climbing up the scale. Miki sits up in her bed. Daddy steps to the door; his shoe cracks a shard of glass. His hand turns the deadbolt with a snap then twists the knob and pulls the door toward him. The hinges give a sliver of a creak at the faintest edge of her ears.

For several heartbeats there is only the nocturne.

Daddy says, “Miki.”

Then his voice is gone. Everything is gone. The music, Daddy’s shoe on the glass, Uncle Easton’s sobs, the fading course of water through pipes. Gone. She strains her ears. The hum of Orion has vanished. There is not even the sound of her own body. A thing Miki has never heard is all that is left: true silence.

The roar of quiet distends into shapes and cold textures. The blob of lesser darkness, the Hunter’s beacon, is still there. She opens her mouth to push out a sound, to call out for Daddy, but so alive are her senses that her breath will not come. She holds herself up, palms pressed into the pillow behind her, as a soft sound brings the house back to life. A sound like Christmas presents being carefully unwrapped. Then a sighing breath, and a pile of weight collapses to the floor. Miki hears the same sounds repeat, and something cold lodges in her chest. 

The front door clicks shut. Slow footsteps rasp into the house. Another small exhalation, another heavy sack being dropped. 

Miki realizes there are two new sets of footsteps in the house, and the first moves across the room and away down the hall. Toward Uncle Easton in the den.

Are they being hurt? She tries to piece the sounds into an answer, but the thought of it only confuses her more.

She slips out of bed, squeezes the carpet between her toes. The taste of salt is on her lips. She walks twelve paces, reaches out a hand to touch the edge of the door, pulls it wider with one muttered creak that erupts like fireworks in her ears. The Hunter calls to her, and she turns and fumbles along the wall until her hand bumps the stars. She can almost feel Orion’s light gleam off the tears on her cheeks. She slides him out of the wall, steps out into the hallway, and pauses. 

Fingers wrap around the banister at the bottom of the stairs and slide upward.

Miki pads lightly down the hallway to Jackson’s room. The footsteps on the stairs behind her mimic quiet, but they drag against the risers as though bearing a great weight. Once inside she closes Jackson’s door, easing the doorknob back to rest. She needs time enough to tell him something. There is no way around the springy click of the lock, so she pushes the button and runs to her brother, plunges her hands inside the crib and against his clean thriving warmth. He is asleep and she brushes her fingers across his face, the drool-slick corner of his mouth.

She swipes her hand on the wall, locating the wall socket by memory. Jackson’s balloon light is too faint for her to sense, but Mama told her it is there. She yanks it out and tosses it behind her, then plugs Orion in. She stands and turns in the direction of the door. In the darkness she waits. Hears herself at her most recent piano recital. Daddy cried when she finished the Shostakovich preludes. She puts her memory there, turned toward the rush of applause, waiting to touch Daddy’s wet eyelashes. 

The doorknob rattles. Fingernails scratch the wood. 

“Mono no aware,” she says. “Daddy told me that, but it really is for you. He meant that life has sadness in it. You’re too little to be afraid, Jackson.”

Something presses against the door. The knob rattles again. She hears the lock give way and the door opens toward her, expanding the room. She presses her back into the railing of the crib. The gauze of stars limns the right edge of her dark. 

Heavy feet chafe the carpet across the room. A trunk of blackness looms over her. Twin stars resolve above her face, pinpricks that stab at her brain. The shadow separates from the greater dark into lines and curves. Slowly, she sees—with glistening, gazing eyes—what could be a mouth, a downturned furrow. The dull blade of a nose with bored nostrils. The flesh of its face sags as though it is merely borrowing it. She sees the seeking tip of its tongue, the wet clay texture of its white skin—a corona of blazing sun to her eyes, this first brightness.

It has no scent. The thought of smell is far, far away.

The other fills the doorway, obscured behind the first. Her eyes do not know how to look at them. She needs none of her old senses to know they are not human. Her hand reaches in its habit to touch the strange limbs, but falters. Something dark covers its body, but it does not seem like clothing. Its figure is all whorls and fuzz with patches of stark detail; its eyes glitter at her behind long curtains of hair the color of—she does not know. She can only think that it is not black. Its hands lift, fingers as long as her forearm curled up from open palms.

“You came,” Miki says. “I knew you would. I see you. I can see you.” She remembers—like a piling just breaking the surface of her emotional tide—the sounds from the living room. The ice beating in her chest. “My Daddy’s not hurt, is he?”

It opens its mouth. It is the entrance to a cave. Inside the cave is the word no, and a great urgency. 

Miki turns and bends and lifts Jackson into her arms. “Jackson! I can see.” He stirs, the thin flower of his mouth pressed against her shoulder. The simple sight of him stops her heart for a moment, empties her lungs. His tiny hand curls in a loose grasp against the fabric of her shirt. Her eyes move from his face to the soft wrinkles of his fingers. He is more real than she ever thought. She hugs him to her chest, her cheek atop the soft beauty of his head, and whispers, “You’re too little to be afraid.” 

And she places the baby in the thing’s hands.

It pulls out a slice of shadow and tucks Jackson into itself, as though it were wearing a coat. A final scrutiny from the sparking eyes set within deep sockets, and both of the figures leave the room in dim streaks. She stands and listens, her eyes fixed upon the stark lines of the doorframe. Her brother’s warmth begins to fade from her skin. The front door opens. Then silence.

Miki falls to her knees and drinks Orion with her eyes, a quavering smile on her lips. Each point in his figure is as clear to her eyes as the taste of salt is on her tongue. After a moment she looks to the ceiling. Her mouth widens and she leaps to her feet and runs into the hall. Photographs on the wall burst and gleam with colors and people she has known only through texture—many Miki herself—but she ignores them.

She soars down the staircase, not seeing Mama and Aunt Sarah folded, dreaming, on the floor. Her eyes skim over the room like flat stones on a pond, not seeing Daddy sitting slumped by the door. She sprints into the wide empty yard. The grass is cold and fresh on her bare feet. In the sky brilliant winks of light arrive across eons.

Her arms reach out as far as they can go; she turns in circles and circles and circles. She laughs and looks for Orion, knowing he is alive and shining back at her. 

(originally published in Shock Totem #6, 2013)