(22) Jasmine Sawers: Recipe for Constellations
“I measure every Grief I meet”
—Emily Dickinson
I once met a girl whose whole body was the color of a sunflower in bloom. Eyes like nectar, palms like butter, teeth like points of starlight. We were in Asphodel Books when our eyes met over a shelf in self-help. Rather, I was in self-help, she was in cookbooks, and she didn’t smile so much as her mouth unfurled as petals do in the first flush of springtime, and the world became brighter around us.
Why would someone like her look that way at someone like me? Me, a stippled sky the color of rainclouds and fading auroras. Me, while other customers in warmer shades craned their necks just to get a glimpse of her. What could I do but smile back?
She raised her book so I could see. Bake Guilt-Free! it read.
“More like bake taste-free, am I right?” she asked, and I heard her wind chime laugh for the first time.
“How much Splenda can one person eat before despair sets in?” I said, and she laughed again. My face hurt. She slotted the cookbook back into place and slid around to my aisle. She brought with her the scent of birthday cake. Vanilla sugar and snuffed out candles. She leaned over to see what I was looking at.
“Your Colors Are Not Your Destiny,” she read. She pursed her lips and tilted her head up to look me in the face. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve got such a lovely teal, just here.” Her fingertips, more warmth than weight and soft as moth wings, traced the curve of bone around my right eye.
“How do you do it?” I said. She blinked and drew her hand back. At the loss, a burst of mahogany grief crept in tiny tendrils up my neck. “I mean, look at you.” Her, lush and tender and shining in a green sundress. Her, contentment splashed across the canvas of her skin. With the sudden red blazing hot along the bowl of my belly, unstoppable, we hardly seemed the same species.
She wilted and turned away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My thwarted hands, lavender limp at my sides. “I just—”
“You’ve just never seen anyone like me before,” she said. “All one color.”
“I’m sorry.”
She turned back around, only to lean into the crook of my neck.
“Where does your happiness live?” she asked, soft. Pink spilled slow over my collarbone. “Will you show me?”
I have to tell you, I brought this girl back to my studio apartment. I held her summer’s day hand in the winter moon cup of my own and led her past the labyrinth of books and papers into my bedroom with the second-hand mattress crooked on the floor. I let her peel off each article of clothing I wore, let her pass her hands gently over each patch of watercolor skin she revealed. I let her awe at the sight of me soothe the dull burgundy that threatened at the base of my spine.
Her fingers skittered over the spray of white, purple, and green that dappled my left side.
“When my nephew was born,” I said. “Six pounds, four ounces, two days late, and screaming bloody murder.”
She swept her palms over the full swell of pink and tangerine that curved along my right hip.
“When my first love kissed the inside of my wrist,” I said. “I was seventeen.”
She trailed her hands up my stomach and took into them the weight of my breasts. She pressed her mouth to an ocean areola, swiped her tongue over the white crest of a nipple.
“When I read Ishiguro for the first time.” I touched her, finally, stroked trembling midnight fingers through her hair.
Though she was herself still fully clothed, she bore me down onto the mattress. With hands and lips, she mapped each graduation, each publication, each love letter, each reunion with a friend, each infatuation, each perfectly executed batch of scones, each book that changed the fabric of my character, each visit to a new country, each dip of my feet into a new ocean, each sighting of phosphorescence, each tangle of my fingers with those of someone I loved, each shooting star.
Afterward, as we lay twined together in the ruin of my bedding, a swirl of gold arose beside my bellybutton. She rubbed it over and over with her thumb.
“Me,” she said.
“Let me see you,” I said. “Please, let me see all of you.”
The afternoon sun threw long shadows across our bodies, made pale the low light of my bedroom. Made my girl a supernova.
I did not ask her to stay. I did not tell her I loved her. I lay in silence with her while her heart throbbed against my side.
“What about this?” she asked after I’d given up hope for a reply. She cupped my jaw and pressed the end of her nose to the swath of navy that spanned my face, cheekbone to forehead. It was, if you looked closely, dotted with points of white.
I breathed her breath. I closed my eyes against the light of hers.
“The end of friendship,” I said.
She kissed me there. She kissed me where my father had died, where I’d fought long and bitter with my sister, where the neighbor boy had made free with me. She kissed all my pains, great and small, brown and blue, red and purple, light and dark.
When she was finished, she stood and presented her back to me. I sat up to make my goodbyes, but she raised her arms above her head and said, “Help me with this.”
I stood and pulled the sundress over her head. Her breath came quickly as I traced the sunny line of her neck, her shoulders, her spine.
My hand rested upon it then: a star with countless points at the hollow of her back. Hot to touch, it churned every color I’d never seen. Streaks of red blasted forth and faded, cascades of whitewashed it clean, blue boiled into purple bubbled into brown, mauve and green crackled and burst, orange sparked like embers. This infinite starburst stole my senses.
I had no eyes, no ears, no tongue or nose or hands. Caught in its gravity, I became dizzy and hot. I stumbled, but the girl was there, upright, warm, and strong. I shut my eyes and heaved in air. I slung my arms around her waist and pressed my face into her neck, my body to her body, my pulse to her pulse. I felt her shudder in my arms before her hands locked over mine on her perfectly golden belly.
“Does it hurt?” I asked her.
“Do yours?”
She left my apartment that night, and I never saw her again. Not at Asphodel Books, or in a coffee shop, or on the subway. Our eyes never met across the crowd at a party, we were never set up by mutual acquaintances, we never ran into each other at work. She came and she marked me and she left. This ball of sunshine is hers, you know that. But this white lightning, right here, do you see? That was her, too.
“You look like a nebula,” she’d said when she pulled her dress back on. “You are the light of the universe.”
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow in fiction and a graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University. Originally from Buffalo, New York, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Sawers’s work has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Fairy Tale Review, and The Offing. Learn more at JasmineSawers.com