When Stars Are Just Stars

“Your Slip Is Showing” by Matthew Fertel

Once, at the top of a hill in the woods, Dad said, “Your eyes look even darker with all the snow around you.”

Even then, I knew this was his first time back in snow since the day the stars turned into coins in his palms. The morning sky was flamingo and his voice hummed through the trees, signaling how alone we’d made ourselves. It was perfect. All I’d wanted this moment, his return, to be mine and ours alone. I'd begged and begged for it.

He set down the snow tube, knelt and crawled onto it. It blossomed under his weight. “All aboard.”

“No, I’m the conductor,” I said. “You’re the engine.”

He laughed and I looked cross-eyed down my nose, which had turned rose to have learned of true cold.

“All aboard!” I shouted.

I sat in his lap and clutched his ankles. He flinched at the touch of me. Apologized quieter than the ravens, who cawed all morning like they had shadows stuck in their throats.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you?”

“Who tells the engine to go?” I was five then, always for arguing.

“The conductor,” Dad said.

“That’s right. Go, engine! Go!”

Dad dug in his heels to rock us forward. I squealed. Held onto his hands and leaned back into his bed of a chest. We inched forward, slow at first but gaining momentum until we’d lost control, neither of us able to steer ourselves away from the trees or rocks, and I hollered at every lurch, the dips and turns when we felt destined to crash and break our bodies, but we somehow always drifted clear and skidded on. We slid past the children balling up the bodies of snowmen and ammunition to hurl at one another. We slid until the sun was above our heads then careened toward the west and left the forest hushed in dusk. Until all traces of people—their cars, their houses, their horns—were untraceable. When the snow tube finally came to a stop, we were far, far away from the car or the hill where we’d started. All I could see was lit by the stars that remained.

That’s how I remember it.

Dad reached for the snow tube and started back, but I stopped him. We hadn’t arrived at the end of the day I’d imagined.

I said, “You promised you’d make snow angels with me.”

The exaggerated sigh he always loved. His snowpants sizzled as they touched the snow. I tucked myself beneath the swing of his wing, felt such joy when his fingertips caught my hair.

Dad used to tell me about the day the stars turned into coins in his palms. In the story, he was the same age I was the day we went sledding, but he had lost everything in the war—his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, his home—and as he walked into the empty countryside, he found other children who had even less nothing than him. He gave away his cap, then his jacket, then his only shirt. He stood in the woods with nothing left at all, and then the stars started to fall from the sky and turn into coins when they touched his palms. The story always ended there, or maybe I’d always fallen asleep.

I could never remember it clearly.

There was a moment, when he stopped swinging his arms and legs but had not yet stood, where I thought he would tell me what came after, but that was when I realized there were things inside him I would never find. That would never fall into my palms. Sometimes, like that night or tonight, the stars are just stars.

“Okay, help me up,” I said, and he did, after hoisting himself to his feet.

Together, we took a step back. It was so dark. My hand in his.

The snow angels were so perfect we couldn’t even see them.

About the Author

Joel Hans was once called a saguaro cactus in disguise. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Story, West Branch, No Tokens, The Journal, Booth, and others. He edits Astrolabe, a literary journal in the form of a dynamic universe, and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson, Arizona with his family, and can be found online on Twitter @joelhans or at joelhans.com.

About the Artist

Matthew Fertel is a Sacramento-based photographer who has worked at Sierra College since 2004. Before that, he was a fine art auction house catalog photographer in San Francisco for over 10 years. Matthew’s work seeks to expose the beauty in the everyday objects that make up the landscape of our existence. Going to the same locations over days, months and years allows him to capture images under different lighting and weather conditions, and to see objects change over time. There is art hidden everywhere if we can learn to see it. You can find Matthew on Instagram @digprod4 or at https://mfertel.wixsite.com/matthewfertelphoto.