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Cyanide Constellations

By Sara Tantlinger

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In the daylight, I pretend nothing can hurt me, but we both know that has never been true. What hides in shadow or creeps through the night must exist during dewy mornings and August afternoons.

I stretch my limbs beneath the buttery warmth of late summer sun, using the dirt of our never-planted garden as my bed. Heat penetrates defenseless skin, burning flesh with strips of red along my arms and legs where the dress you loved offers no protection. I should go inside, keep the lights off and hide within the cool darkness of air conditioning, but here I remain, glued to the soil as if the sun melted my body into gooey strips, pinned down like butterfly wings mounted on a board, my brittle body to be sold as art. Who would buy the art of me if there is no you?

And you are what I think about as I burn. The clay of your bones and how they formed a strong, beautiful structure. The smooth bark of your skin, like a pale aspen that grew away from the rest of its colony and learned to walk, to escape the root system where you would have stayed your whole life. Your eyes wild, unnamed blossoms, and your marrow comprised only of clouds. How the entire planet existed within the space of you.

Or maybe you consisted of constellations—the afterbirth of a galaxy that slid down from a viscous womb and tore the cosmos in two, only to land on Earth and find me. Love me. Leave me. I don’t know if you returned to whatever you were before your gloom slithered into my gut, or if you’re simply gone, but I so deeply wish to share my darkness with you again.

Every atom of mine aches for your blood, the salted metal of it staining my tongue. The way we entangled limbs near the river where we fantasized about drowning ourselves, about drowning others. All those times you prodded at the black fuzz of my thoughts, daring to venture a little deeper to understand how far the sickness lingered in both our souls. If you were sent here to learn about human beings, to understand them, then you never should have been sent to me.

Would you do it? you had asked once. Would you kill her?

One single pause as river fish swam away from the rock we lingered on, breaking the smooth water’s surface into ripples. Frogs croaked between the reeds where gray snakes slid, hungry. Muddy scales blended seamlessly into the bank as they danced ever closer to their prey.

I would.

I did. Long after you dissolved back into the particles of the universe, long after my mother disappeared and my dad went to prison, I took Clara down to the river where red clay tinted the banks like rust. She asked so many times when our parents were coming home. I told her lies, told her the truth, but neither mattered. Our parents had been good to her, rotten to me, and toxic to each other. After her final round of questioning, I pressed her small head beneath the calm surface until she never moved again. All of her blonde curls soaked through until strands tangled together, forming a noose around her neck. She barely struggled.

What an amazing thing to have had her trust; the way I held it like a glass ornament in my hands and squeezed until it shattered. Such fascination electrocuted my mind when the shards cut into my palm, drew out beads of blood. I was so busy always examining my own pain, I never noticed when she suffered. At least, not until I dragged her body home, finally realized how much she’d put her faith in me.

Even then, I didn’t feel a thing other than a buzzing relief that with Clara gone, they were all finally gone. Poof, no more life. The whole family. Freedom ricocheted through my bones with a tinny melody. The orchestra of my skeleton played on, but I had more work to finish.

You weren’t here for me to tell you that I felt nothing. I let the void grow, lolled against the dirt the way a mangy dog might rub a deer carcass in the grass. Fleas and bacteria and decomposition juices soaking into the fur.

With everything and everyone gone, I can finally be gone, too. At last, I sit up and eye the prizes I brought with me into the yard.

Alone beneath the sky, where afternoon clouds transform into pink, coppery puffs of an oncoming sherbet sunset.

Alone where no one can spy because the woods offer a final divider of defense between me and the rest of the world.

Alone in the yard where I buried my sister’s bloated body. I would have scattered your ashes here, too, but you left no corpse behind. Instead, I burned all the letters you wrote me before we knew how to talk about our nightmares aloud. Charred ruins of your graceful handwriting remain strewn between unkempt hedges and wild vines climbing the house, all the way to the roof where you told me your fantasy about pushing someone from a high cliff just to watch them fall. To see what the end result looked like. If the blood would spread the way it did in movies, if the brain matter would explode like a dropped watermelon on concrete.

All those perverse little questions and pleasures, how our spines quivered when we morphed our sticky thoughts into spoken words.

I would have buried my mother here, but they never found anything more than her severed hand, and my father never told them where to look for the rest. When I asked for the hand to bury it, my request came back denied since it was still seized as evidence. All I could inter was the heirloom necklace she gave me once after years of her acid words. I should have broken the thing, hammered it down until the opal softened into dust. But I treasured it. Wanted it to be a token of love and not just an apology for years devoid of affection.

At last, I come to join you all. I cannot bury myself, but there is another way. You taught me to plant my body deep within the ground, though when you whispered interstellar secrets into my ear, I knew you never expected I would be the one to carry them out.

My prizes, my scavenger hunt for death. All the things you warned me about. All the things I should never lust after, should never place upon my tongue and hold them there, daring my throat to swallow, but I can’t resist. Running my fingertips over each surface, feeling the difference between smooth and jagged on the different pieces, it all sends electric jolts through my nerves. I spark like lightning, remembering the first time we touched and your skin fizzled. How I made you glow electric blue all over, learning everything that comprised your impossible body. How well we fit together, and how you could have burnt me to a cinder with your power, but you never did.

Is that what took you in the end? You never let go, never lost control, and I wonder if it all became too much and swallowed you up. Am I the reason for your absence? Did I make you hold all that raw power within your shaking cavern of a body until you collapsed back in on yourself, returning to a vast universe in the cosmos?

No matter. I will understand everything soon. I will find you, or I will find you out.

You told me so many times not to eat watermelon seeds and to avoid the bitter pits of cherries and plums. Things we learn from childhood, the edible and inedible bits of a fruit, but you were fervent with your warnings in a way that planted sour curiosity to curdle in my brain. Your entreaties against the amygdalin hidden within the center of apricots, peaches, and nectarines float away on the breeze, no longer needed. Take your warnings to the grave where they never buried your body, because I don’t want them. There is no point to cautionary tales when everything else is gone.

Small seeds first, pinprick tickles as they slide down my throat with the help of gulps of water. What I cannot swallow whole, or what is too teeth-cracking to masticate, I cut in half or pummel down into chipped bites. Fragmented shards stick in my gums and between molars. Piercing slivers slash inside my cheeks, inviting blood to trickle across tongue and down my throat, where more splinters scratch.

In my grief, I defy you. What a strange thing it is to be haunted by pale memories of your strawberry mouth, your voice like birdsong, and the dark curls of eyelashes powdered with stardust. No bounty or blue jays here, though. No Orion or Ursa Major. Just me, hunching over the wooden-like insides of the fruits, their juicy flesh long gone, because it would do me no good, not with this mission. This need to understand where you went. Is Clara with you? What about my mother?

Your voice in my head ringing like a death knell, asking too many questions. Do you regret what you did? To Clara?

Yes, oh yes, oh yes. My baby sister, all gone.

I swallow the unpleasant teardrops of apple seeds and broken up nectarine pits. Acids release from my digestive system, turning amygdalin to cyanide, poisoning me from the inside—a place I cannot reach, a place you cannot reach me, either.

A place Clara will never grow up and understand, because I drowned her in the river and never thought about the heartbreak of that until now, right now, and now is too late. Now is nothing. The sum of all I am boils down into hunks of meat and bone, infected by regret. A toxin-filled shell of person chasing a swan song, the end to all endings before the universe you abandoned splits at the sutured veins, bursting into malleable magma rivers where minerals and rocks drip blood.

I’d tell her I’m sorry, but my mouth is full of sour venom, and time is running out. I allow no room for error. Even if my body tries to pass the poison, I will never stop in my consumption. The pulverized cherry pits, saved for last. I’ve mashed real cherries in with the obliterated centers, an attempt to make the taste more palatable. After all, if everything turns to bile, spills from my lips in a vomit waterfall, then my work is done for nothing. I cannot fail.

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After the toxins take me and I collapse, dying from the toes up, I fall into glittering darkness. You’re so close. Every jewel in the sky becomes you, inviting me to reach upward and join you in the garden of constellations where you’ve replanted yourself. I ache and stretch, willing my mass to ascend into the open embrace of night sky, but I am rooted here.

I am awake, aware, feeling the unexpected elation of strength and life. A lightness takes hold of my consciousness that I have never experienced before, and I only wish I could reach you.

The first vine shoots from my wrist, pushing through membrane where veins should be, but no pale blue reflects beneath it, or at least beneath whatever has replaced my skin. Transparent green encases my skeleton. Blood morphs to dirt, and bones warp into thick stalks. From within me, the seeds grow. Splintered pits nestle deep into the soil of my dead flesh and take root. Apple trees and nectarines, wild watermelon vines reach up where the cherries try to regrow from the stems of my arms. Saplings shred through the elbow crooks like flags claiming land.

All these newborn twigs sprouting from my ears, leaves spilling from my mouth, all the fruits combining together, so lovely; their cyanide churning from my stomach to give us all life again, but will it bring you back to me? My flowered sight stares at the heavens where your starry garden grows opposite of mine on Earth.

The air fills with electric scent, cold metal and lavender, like the oil you dabbed behind your ears at night. Perhaps this is our ending, to rotate around the planet—you with your constellation garden, and me splitting apart as all the toxic seeds I ingested regrow from a new body. Never quite within reach of one another. The way I will flourish during the day, only catching glimpses of you during clear nights before I sleep.

Is Clara with you? Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I bet she’s the brightest star in the sky.

I want to stare at you forever, but the tulips of my eyes tuck themselves in for the night, forcing the petals to close. The last moment I capture—a shooting star races across the obsidian sky, burning out its brightness.

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Host Commentary

Here’s what Sara Tantlinger had to say:

 

This story ended up being the title piece for my debut fiction collection, Cyanide Constellations and Other Stories, out October 21st from Dark Matter INK, because it represented the overlap between nature and horror, with a bit of cosmic chaos sprinkled in. I love the strange dreaminess that can awaken when exploring how nature and the universe surprise us, especially in those moments when the sheer vastness feels so much greater than we will ever know. This collection where flowers whisper and the moon holds dark secrets was such a joy for me to put together.

Tantlinger’s story is a telescoping series of lenses for me, focusing on the vast, unknowable uncaring universe and the broken toys of someone who has been wired to think violence is love. The reference to ‘prizes’ in particular was something that snapped out for me, because it speaks to so much of the mindset we all deal with, internally and externally, living and working in geek spaces.

 

Whimsy is practically my blood type, so I know a little about capturing elements of things that bring you joy in physical form. What I don’t know, I can ask the Professor Hulk funko, the mini Godzilla, the bear holding post-it notes, the magnetic goose or the five variants of autobot Cosmos on my desk. I’ve made suits of armour out of reference, built refuges inside homage. Huddled around a guttering fire deep inside the empty, echoing caverns of postmodern irony. We all have. We all do. I vividly remember the moment a friend and I realised that at 18 we suddenly had Pasts with a capital P and that moment being just over thirty years ago at this point which, frankly, should be illegal.

 

But the point isn’t to capture those moments. It’s to remember them. To build a life not of them but with them as foundations, as compass points, as decoration. Anything you want to do that doesn’t hurt others or yourself. But dusty, decaying trophies of the past are just that, dusty, decaying, past. We can’t live there anymore. Even the protagonist here knows that. But they do it anyway, because their condition is the extreme version of the horror we all feel at change, at loss. They’re so broken they think violence is love. They’re not too broken to recognise that’s wrong.

 

I keep circling the ending here, because it feels, I’m not sure I have the word but I think ‘primal’ is the closest. There are elements of folk horror as well as cosmic. We see the vital, barbed magic of seeds and plants and daily life play the same tune as the orchestra of cosmic dread, harmonising with the awe-inspiring and terrifying. Keeping time with consequence. Turning the clock from life to death to life again.

 

I’ve worked this job for almost two decades now and the more time I spend on the darker side of the street the more hope I see. The more reason to be joyful, even if that joy is the bloody toothed exploded laughter of realising the monster’s finally dead, the sun’s finally come up. I find that hope here, wrapped in the pollen drenched barbs of violent life grown from violent death. I find it in the idea of all lives bearing fruit, even if that fruit, like Hamlet once said, is simply to be banquets for worms. We’re all here, together. We all leave the same way, and none of us leave alone and none of us leave entirely or forever. We’re ghosts haunted by ghosts. Audiences and storytellers. Keeping the fires burning as the trees grow and the years turn and time’s wing’d chariot draws near, flies overhead and vanishes. It’ll be back. So will we So will you. And so will I. Thanks to all.