January Smiles

Home for the holidays and for a break from her troubled life, a young woman rediscovers an old passion... and is discovered in turn.

***Content Warning: Episode deals with themes of severe depression.***

Transcript

NARRATOR

Episode Thirty-Six: January Smiles.

(Sound of blustery winter wind)

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The evening wind skirls down from the hills and moans against the windowpanes of the old farmhouse. The snow of the previous night was neither long nor heavy, leaving only a thin skiff of white over the yellow-brown of dormant grass and weeds, but the wind is as chill as a blizzard’s breath, carrying the lowing of the hungry cattle in the large lot north of the house.

Lindsey shivers on her bed—or at least, what was her bed during her childhood and adolescent years—where she lies reading. Downstairs, she can hear the front door open and close, her father going out to pitch hay to the cattle, and a pang of guilt needles her. He is getting too old to shoulder all the work himself, and yet he seldom asks her to help when she’s home. When she was a child, they had been close, and she had helped him with the cattle as much, or more, than any of the local boys helped theirs. But at some point during her mid-teens, something had subtly shifted, and a grey gulf had slowly yawned between them.

Now in her early thirties and keenly aware that her parents will not be around forever, she misses that closeness, but a decade and a half of gradual transformation is not so easily undone.

Things with her mother, though, have always been more complicated. Lindsey looks across the room to the window, where the Celestron Astro Fi telescope sits pointed skyward. It is one of the most thoughtful Christmas gifts that her mother has ever given her, recalling her lifelong fascination with astronomy and sparing little expense, and yet Lindsey cannot quite forget that the first comment her mother made when she arrived home for the holidays was that she looked like she had gained quite a bit of weight. And shortly after that had followed the question if it would kill Lindsey to smile every now and then.

Yes, she had wanted to say, it just might.

But instead she had played nice and put on her brightest false smile, bottling up the poisonous resentment and despair that simmers inside her. Only a few weeks prior to Christmas, she was let go suddenly from her lab technician position, barely a month after her girlfriend Heather had left her to move in with a hyper opinionated, underinformed gym bro she had apparently been seeing on the side for some time. Now Lindsey is not sure she will be able to afford her Denver rent through March. She had come home to spend a couple weeks with her parents as a sort of temporary retreat from the stresses of her life, and this is what she gets instead. And now that Christmas and New Years’ are past, the post-holiday blues are setting in like a hangover, draining her spirit even further.

But at least the country skies, less riddled with light pollution than those of the cityscape, are good for stargazing. Studying the heavens was once how she escaped the depression of her high school and college years, finding comfort where many are unsettled by the reminder of how small and inconsequential she, and indeed everything she knows, truly is on the grand scale of the cosmos, and reconnecting with that childhood wonder at the strange beauty of existence that becomes harder to find with every passing year of adulthood.

Outside, the stars emerge, sharp and bright.

[Short pause]

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After a quiet dinner of chili and homemade rolls, and a couple of games of chess with her father, Lindsey retreats upstairs once more and begins another night of peering through the Astro Fi. As always, it fills her with a kind of calm marveling, the sort of feeling she imagines more spiritual people find through prayer or meditation. As she looks from one planet and constellation to another, she internally recites familiar astronomical facts, which return so easily despite her not having pursued the hobby for years now.

Then, she pauses, jaw going ever so slightly slack. Of course, she tells herself, she is not seeing what she thinks. Pulling away from the telescope, she adjusts it slightly, then peers through once more.

And still, that cluster of stars and nebulae that looks so much like a smiling human face gazes back at her.

She steps away from the Celestron, rubbing her eyes. Then she turns toward the little bookshelf in the corner, where some of her collection of astronomy books still resides, and pulls down two of the most expansive volumes. Sitting down on the bed, she begins to slowly leaf through them, trying to regulate both her breathing and her expectations.

When she finally resurfaces almost two hours later, she is still torn between doubt and exhilaration. There is no indication that such a feature of the night sky has ever been previously described – and yet, when she returns to the telescope, she locates it again with ease. It seems so clear to her, so obvious, that she cannot believe it could possibly remain undiscovered.

Lindsey finds a notebook and begins to furiously jot down every detail of what she cannot help but think of already as her discovery.

It is many hours before she goes to bed, long after her parents have fallen asleep in the next room over.

[Short pause]

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Over breakfast, Lindsey sits debating whether to tell her parents what she has found, or to keep it to herself, still half expecting to find she has made some embarrassing error or oversight.

As her father excuses himself to tend the livestock, whose needs are so much more burdensome during the harsh winter months, and her mother sits to watch her favorite daytime soap operas, Lindsey decides she cannot wait any longer. She takes her laptop and tells her mother she will be driving to the library in town to do some work, since her parents have never bothered to connect to the Internet and her smartphone barely gets any reception at the old house. Her mother looks up from the television, frowning, and says that she thought Lindsey didn’t have a job anymore.

Work for myself, Lindsey clarifies, and her mother makes a noncommittal little noise that nevertheless sounds utterly dismissive.

Annoyed, Lindsey packs up and makes the fifteen-minute drive to the small municipal library. It is all but abandoned, with only a single clerk at the front desk and not a single patron in sight. Lindsey tucks herself into a secluded corner, and begins her research.

When she blearily looks up to find the clerk telling her, with slightly strained patience, that it is closing time, Lindsey apologizes awkwardly and shuts the laptop, moves outside into the waning purplish daylight. Her eyes are reluctant to focus, strained after so many hours of screen time, and she feels drained in that way that only sedentary computer work can gift. She is suddenly aware that she has not eaten for almost eight hours, and wonders whether her mother will take offense if she decides to eat in town without them.

Probably, she decides, and drives home with a sinking feeling.

A full day spent, she reflects as she drives through the darkening countryside, and not a thing learnt. There is no record of any constellation quite like the face she has found, and she wonders if her mind has simply played a cruel trick on her, seen a pattern where none existed – pareidolia, she thinks it’s called.

But then, she reflects, isn’t that what all constellations are?

When she reaches the house, her parents are just sitting to a dinner of chicken-fried steaks and mashed potatoes. Her mother smiles and says that she has been gone a while, then asks if maybe she met someone in town.

No, Lindsey replies, just lost track of time.

Her mother makes a sound of acknowledgement, but her smile takes on a knowing quality that irritates Lindsey to no end. Still, she takes the place at the table that her mother has set for her, trying to remind herself that she came home to relax.

They eat quietly for a few minutes, and then finally Lindsey says that she thinks she might have found something with the new telescope.

Oh, that’s great, honey, her mother smiles brightly.

Lindsey realizes she hasn’t explained well, draws a breath, and clarifies that she means she thinks it is something completely new, something previously undiscovered.

Her mother’s smile slips ever so slightly, and her eyes take on a pitying cast now. After a pause of careful chewing, she says that Lindsey shouldn’t get her hopes up too much, that the odds of such a thing are vanishingly slim.

Something cold and heavy turns in the space between Lindsey’s stomach and her heart. She wants to say that she knows that, that she has been wrestling with that all day and that is why her research kept her so long, but instead all she does is nod and say, Sure.

They finish the meal without further conversation. Lindsey washes the dishes, then says she’s going to turn in early, and ascends to her bedroom. Through the Astro Fi, she notices that the face looks even clearer than it did last night, despite the wispy cloud cover raked over the stars and the waxing crescent moon. And it seems that something else has changed, too, something that she cannot quite elucidate even within her own thought.

(Mysterious music)

[Long pause]

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It is only when her father knocks on her door the next evening that Lindsey realizes she has not left the bedroom all day – not to eat or drink, not even to use the bathroom. Rising from the bed where she has lain sprawled amongst assorted texts and notes, she moves to the door and cracks it open. Her father peers in, concern plain on his weathered features, and asks if everything is alright.

Yes, she says vaguely, just reading.

He nods, but doesn’t look at all reassured. He tells her that supper is ready, and that they have been calling her. She apologizes and says she was so absorbed in her reading, she just didn’t notice, which is partially true. He urges her to join them and eat something, then turns to walk back downstairs, but pauses at the landing and looks back at her. Slowly, he tells her that her mother does love her, that she just has an unclear way of expressing it.

I know, Dad, Lindsey replies, and it is true. She has never really doubted that her mother loves her, only that she respects or understands her. Where the distance between Lindsey and her father grew, that between the two women has existed as long as Lindsey can remember.

Shoving his hands in his jeans pocket awkwardly, he says that he loves Lindsey, too.

I know, Dad, Lindsey repeats, and he smiles and descends the stairs.

A powerful gust of cold wind shrieks over the roof, and the lights in the house flicker briefly as the power lines sway and groan outside.

After dinner, when she trudges back up to her room, she does not even need to look through the telescope. The face, now gaunt and skeletal, has grown to be nearly as large as the moon, the smile now a ghastly grin.

She pulls the curtains closed and turns off the bedroom light. Lying in the dark, she tells herself that it is impossible, all impossible. The skeletal grin widens.

[Short pause]

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She sleeps until noon the next day, but when she wakes, it feels like she has not slept at all.

Foggily, she tries to remember what day she’d told her parents she would go home. She is ready to leave behind the quiet old house, where every memory is slightly greyed and soured, where erstwhile affections have started to turn gangrenous. And even more, she is ready to return to the Denver light pollution that she has so long resented, but which now promises refuge from that awful thing in the sky.

She wonders if it is really even there, ever has been. Worse yet, she wonders what it could be, if it is.

Yes, she thinks, it is time to leave. But a niggling inner voice just below consciousness asks just where she will go, what is left for her to return to in Denver.

[Short pause]

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That evening, she volunteers to help her father with the evening chores, partially to get out of the house, but also because she needs to ask him. The frigid air tears at her throat and lungs, filling it with a coppery taste as she pitches forkfuls of hay over the sturdy metal fencing to the jostling heifers. Years of lab work and city living have taken their toll, leaving her winded and aching as they walk back toward the house in the falling dark. Just before they reach the front door, she turns and looks into the velvety ultramarine sky, finding at once the leering skull that is now the largest celestial feature.

Pointing toward it, she asks her father if he can make out anything new in the night sky. He turns and looks for a long moment, silent, and Lindsey’s heart races. Her throat feels dry and raw, and her breath comes scratchily.

Not sure, he says at last, giving her a bemused half-smile. Should I?

She is surprised by how childlike her voice comes out when she asks him, falteringly, if he doesn’t see a face.

Just yours, he says, and then he remarks that it is too cold for much outdoor stargazing tonight. Listlessly, Lindsey follows him into the house, only half-hearing his relay of the bleak overnight forecast.

[Short pause]

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The blizzard that comes in the wee hours dumps two and a half feet of snow before dawn, and the sixty-mile-an-hour winds that persist long afterward push that snow into long drifts six feet high or more.

When the three of them wake in the morning, the power is out, and Lindsey and her father spend all day between the tasks of starting the generator in the basement and doing the most basic and most necessary of the chores, chopping the ice on the water tanks and feeding the livestock. As they work, the sky clears, promising a bitterly frigid night to come… and also a clear view of the stars.

By the time they return to the house, Lindsey is too tired to even eat. The toothy, star-studded grin looms just outside her window, and she pulls closed the curtains, wondering if it was her mother who opened them again.

Lying on her bed, she begins to cry silently, feeling sure now that she will never escape. 

[Short pause]

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She wakes in the middle of the night, feeling the pull of… something… beneath her navel. Dark suspicion swirls in her mind, but the pull is inexorable, just on the brink of pain and full of cruel promises.

Before she knows it, she is up and out of bed, past her sleeping parents and down the stairs, out in the bitter cold and the deep snow, wearing only a coat and snow boots over her pajamas.

The skull has now swelled to sprawl across the sky, its features changed to be hardly human. The teeth are now more defined, too long and sharp, the mouth too wide, the eye sockets appallingly large and void, yet somehow also teeming with such malignant yearning that Lindsey feels she is about to fall impossibly upward into the unthinkable vastness overhead and be swallowed in that blackness.

The snow crackles and crunches glassily underfoot, a crust of ice formed over the unevenly blown snow. The shrill wind, though died down considerably now, still cuts straight through her pajamas and her flesh, freezing her very marrow.

She walks out of the yard, into the middle of the empty hayfield to the west. Pausing there, surrounded by ice and snow and dark, she screams up at the thing in the sky, asking it what it wants of her.

But of course, she knows, has always known.

The toothy grin yawns wider, and she feels her weight diminishing, feels gravity altering in the way she knows it simply cannot. Unaccountably, she remembers riding in her father’s pickup as a child over the pastures and fields, and feeling how vast and ravenous the wide blue skies seemed to her then, how she might become lost in the mere contemplation of their coy infinity.

The wintry wind shrieks as she rises into the air, drifting ever higher above the frozen prairies and the coldly glittering stars of the scattered farmhouse lights. Up, and up, and up, the air growing thinner and still more gelid, her vision dancing and freckled with oxygen starvation.

The face in the sky is laughing now, the black vacuums of its eye sockets radiating a wicked, predatory glee.

And now, at last, Lindsey offers her own smile back, a weeping rictus of terror and exhaustion. The tears freeze on her cheeks, but she can no longer feel them.

At least, she thinks, she will never need to see it again. For she is now certain that it has always loomed over her, watching her all of her life, awaiting only that time when she became perfectly aged and seasoned to its taste.

The stars and the infinite black between them devour her, her last short scream drowned in the icy night wind.

(Dark, mysterious music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

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If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]