Eleanor Henderson

Dark Star: The Oddity

The panther was not actually a panther, but the sort of oddity that sometimes occurs when two utterly unlike things collide: in this case a panther with a tiny piece of the heart of a star. The odd pair tumbled in a throw of cosmic dice that had not yet hit the table. The part of the heart of a star longed for her six sister stars; the panther longed for dinner. The star-heart caught a glimpse of her sisters’ cluster twinkling urgently, a flare in the night sky. The panther smelled a hare. The panther chased the hare, the star chased the sight of stars in the night sky, and the combination hit a tree. The combination nursed several versions of a headache and considered options for how to coordinate themselves. As it sat, nursing its headaches, its two parts began to be taken with each other. Surely the athletic grace of a panther with the brilliance of a star was a superlative combination.

Then they remembered what they had in common, which was a big problem. Flare and hare forgotten, the panther with its hitchhiker crawled silently toward the forest edge and the open valley floor. Covered in shadow, the oddity's parts began to blend. It searched the valley floor and the sheer white cliffs on the northern side, dazzling by starlight. Nothing. Then, in the sky, something. Something nauseating. Something dim, disorienting, indecipherable. The shape fluctuated, roiling into and out of itself. The color was more an absence of color, a gaping hole in the field of vision. Its texture was madness, like the frenetic pencil scratchings of a schizophrenic eaten by hallucination. It hovered in the western sky, hung.

Dim, distant, barely visible was the small cluster of the star’s sisters. The panther-star crouched quiet and barely visible in the shadows. As it watched with the vision of a star for distant things, it began to distinguish shapes and colors in the cluster: pale blue, pink, yellow, green, purple, silver, all surrounding a small empty patch of sky. “Come back,” they said, “Come back. We need you.”

★       ★       ★