Supernova
by Chloe N. Clark
I used to see her around, at the cafes on campus, or sitting by the edge of the lake. We’d had a class together, but it was one of the large lectures and she always sat a few too many rows away from me. I’d heard her name and said it sometimes under my breath because I liked the way it felt in my mouth: Cherry Smith. It felt so accidental, like halfway to the name of a superhero.
She had a habit of sucking the end of her pen. In the class or in the cafes, as she leaned over a notebook. I practiced saying hello, in my head, Hi, I’m Ava. My name was short but it still got stuck on my tongue.
When we finally met, it was at the library where I worked. I was shelving books on astronomy. “Did you know the bigger a star, the shorter its lifespan?” someone asked from behind me. I turned and it was her.
“I just shelve them, I don’t know them,” I said.
She laughed, though I hadn’t meant to be funny. So, I smiled back as she asked, “does anyone know the stars?”
We started going to movies together. They were cheap on campus, and though the seats were usually sticky with spilled soda, the screen wasn’t bad, and in the dark, everything else fell away anyways. Afterwards, we’d walk around, talking over what we didn’t like. I wasn’t sure how we’d decided on it, but we never talked about the aspects that we enjoyed, only the flaws, what stuck out to us, pushed us away.
We spent a month like that, always ending the night at my door. I’d wave, as she left, a flick of my hand up, biting my lip to keep from asking her in. I didn’t have the words to ask what we were, what I might have been to her.
And then one night, she asked, “don’t you want me to come inside?” And I stepped aside so she could. She looked at the few pieces of furniture I had in my tiny apartment, ran her fingertips over the back of the couch, and then took my hand. When she kissed me, all I could think of was the tips of the pens, how she tapped them against her lips before taking them into her mouth.
On the couch, she kept kissing me. Our tongues dipped between each other’s lips. I slid my hand under her shirt, traced the small nub of her nipple with my finger. She pushed me back and I thought I’d done something wrong; as always I was quickest when it came to apologize for things I might have done. But she slid a finger over my lips, pushed me back fully, and slipped her hand under my skirt.
It’s strange to say how I don’t remember how we slipped away from one another. How one day we talked a little less and then less still. How the other girls I dated after her started to take larger shape in my memory. How when my wife once asked, “who was the first person you loved?”, it took me a bit to remember her name. Maybe we never really take account of those slow untanglings until the knot has already come undone.
I almost never think of her. Though sometimes, I will see a young woman by a lake and the light will hit her just so. Or I’ll notice someone suck the end of their pen and, for a split second, I’ll remember her. That moment of her mouth moving against me. I had sworn the ceiling flew off the apartment, up into the sky, and away, until I was staring up at the night and it was filled with so many stars.
Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Your Strange Fortune, the forthcoming Escaping the Body, and more. She is co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph and she has baked more bread than any one person should. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes.
