The Girl Who Swallowed the Sky
By Jacqueline Bowen

he brings the heels of her shoes down onto the papers spread over the table between us, and I’m pressed up against the back of my chair, not quite shaking, not quite still. Yesterday, she took out my neck with a swing of the edge of her hand. That’s not a blow from which you can easily recover. My head was hanging from my shoulders by a string.

She cranes her chin back because she’s bored around me. I was talking just a moment ago; now I’ve lost my nerve, and either way she has no motivation to listen, because I’m no one, and in her mind she’s the Sun God. She pops the front two feet of her chair off the ground, and it terrifies me, because everything she does terrifies me. I can’t tell what I’m looking at anymore. I’ve got no sense of judgment.

She’s watching the sky, where the golden stars change places every night. They move like animals, fast and wild. I want to think they’re making decisions, but I taught myself they’re not.

I tell her, “You know…” and I can’t get any further.

She says, “Say it.”

I look out over the rail. The city is murky below us. It’s a white haze, an explosion of flour in drops and dust. That’s the lights in windows and in the streets. It’s all we can see up here, a mile into the sky.

Let me tell you about the place.

We live in the care of the man who built this winding tower with his two hands. Maybe this happened in our lifetime. It’s impossible to remember where he came from, how he constructed the tower, or when. Those things vanished when he gave away his name. Today he is the Sun God, and we are sitting in two white chairs in the garden on the roof of his tower. I keep my feet on the floor, tight to the floor, because the tower will save my life if I need it. I only have to touch it, and it will preserve me. Or it’s possible I don’t have to touch it. I must consider the constant separation. The soles of my shoes. Yesterday she took out my neck with a swing of her hand. But I am still here.

What I want to tell her is that I know how to predict the movements of the stars, that I spent a few of these endless, blurry-edged years staring hard at the sky. I made an elaborate chart. I could tell her where they’re headed if she’s interested. The small paths and the big ones, groups moving within groups. I could tell her what they’ll do tomorrow.

For a moment I want her to see me. I would drop my voice lower, let her perk her ears up, that little animal. I’d tell her how each movement depends on the ones that came before it, how the mathematics only work in one direction. So you can figure out the future, but you can’t unroll the past.

That’s like all of us, I want to say.

I’m supposed to teach her about the outside world. I was an adult and she was a child once, but today she is full-sized. She caught up to me as days piled behind us uncounted, and now we will stay as we are. It’s like this because I also gave my name away to the Sun God, who passed it along like his own. I want to be like an ordinary man, who knows everything about himself, who grows older in proportion to children. I want to remember my birth.

I don’t see why an ordinary man shouldn’t remember his birth. It’s a part of him, like everything. It’s the first in a series of events.

I still haven’t said anything. I pull air over my teeth and down my throat.

“I’ve been mapping the stars,” I tell her.

This isn’t good enough, and she ignores me.

“There’s no cycle,” I add, grinding my heels back and forth across the floor. I need the reassurance that it’s there.

“They never repeat, but I can still tell you where each one is going.”

“Of course they repeat,” she spits.

I falter. I don’t know why she’s sure. I am a terrible teacher, and she can barely count. I fumble under her shoes for my charts and records, the papers where I showed myself that my system was true. I can’t find them. I think maybe I haven’t written them yet.

I think that it’s possible my days have reversed. Maybe I am spending today preparing for yesterday. I swallow hard.

“They don’t,” I say.

But she doesn’t feel she has to prove it to me. She is full-sized. The sunlight shines out from her skin in the daytime. She’s a murderer. Her hand flies out and I see the stars moving together in unison, a forward arc. My chair topples onto its back, and I slide several inches off the seat. My brain is on fire, but I reach out and feel the tower’s cool stone under my knuckles.

That’s all right then, I tell myself. In the morning the sun will rise as usual, and I can forget the things I don’t need to keep.

When I gave my name away, I think I wanted to live forever. It would be consistent with my personality. I must fear death, or I’d be bolder than I am. The day it happened is gone forever, and I know nothing about who I used to be, but I imagine it was something like this:

We are standing in the Glorious Chamber where the Sun God receives his visions of the future. I am a trusted insider, but not a local boy, I can’t be. I am nothing like a local boy, according to the mirror. I am an insider from the outside. He confides in me because I have no way of understanding him. Maybe I am a fresh mind, insignificant, amusing. I watch court proceedings with an uneasy smile, whisper to this invincible and unreachable person, "Say, why did she do that?”

He decides that I’m not capable of doing harm, and he is correct. I am absolutely not capable of doing harm. I figure into his slippery idea of tomorrow’s world.

He said to me once, can you believe, “I think your purpose must be to change her heart.”
So keep in mind that when she and I sit here with her shoes on the table between us, when I stammer on uselessly, when she kills me again and again—I am ruining his future world.

But at one time, he must have trusted me with all his being. We must have stood together in the Glorious Chamber, under the shadow of his guide’s red wings.

He must have said to me, “Are you sure you want to live forever?”

And I must have replied, “It sounds better than the alternative.”

“Do you know what it means to lose your name?” he might have asked in order to be considerate.

“I can’t be bothered with trying to imagine it, so let’s just go on,” I must have replied.

Then, with an unbelievable sound, every insect ever hatched in the world would have squirmed like water from cracks in the walls and the floor and swarmed on me, climbing up my nose and eating everything inside my body except my tongue and my teeth. That is why today I am hollow and haven’t got a mind or a memory anymore.

I am here to save her heart—she is here to save the kingdom. We call her the Guardian, because one day she will protect us. There was this vision of the future sent to the Sun God by his red-winged guide. Someday something terrible will come here, something not even the Sun God can stop. And on that day, the Guardian will take up her sword and vanquish it. We were promised. It’s hard for him to remember it now, because he gave away her name, and he doesn’t know where he found her anymore or even why she was the child he picked. But it had a strange condition.

In the sand outside this white tower, she kills a man every day in order to grow strong. As often as we can, we give her criminals, but this doesn’t console us. It’s sure that when you die out there, your skin splits open and never comes back together again. The flies come by to nip you. The Sun God and I are both afraid that she loves it. People press their noses up to the gates and try to see. I think that if she went outside, they might just rip her apart.

Today, tomorrow, I want to tell her to stop, but she isn’t ever allowed to stop. In the Sun God’s vision of the future, only a girl who has killed a man on every day of her life will be capable of keeping the kingdom from harm. When she was too tiny to move herself, he tightly held her hands.

We’re certain of the future, here. We all know our next move.

Mine is to be courageous. But when she comes inside and sits down to lunch with blood under her fingernails, I’m glad that I never have to die.

One morning we discover the grey-spotted end of a snake tail sixteen stories below the Sun God’s room, and we follow the tail upstairs, crawling over its surface when it covers all the walking space, until we see that it fills the bottom half of the Sun God’s doorway and finally terminates with its head and a very small portion of its body curled over his bed—even tucked insolently under the covers. We are sure that he was eaten—and not transformed into this creature—because we can see a fat swell in the snake’s belly moving steadily down towards its southern end. Understand that we would never do violence to the snake if there were any feeling that it might be the Sun God in a perplexing new form.

All of the Guardian’s best efforts are put to the service of murdering the snake, but like me, it cannot be murdered in the Sun God’s tower. Its flesh seals itself swiftly every time she attempts to open a gash wide enough for her to extricate her lord. By the time we haul it outside and cut its belly open in the sand, the juices in its stomach have digested every bit of the Sun God’s body. All we can find of the man is a little chip of the same unbreakable stone that makes up the tower. He has been carrying his immortality with him in his body. But without a scrap of him left clinging to its surface, the Sun God will never return.

I hold it up and turn it over in the light, looking for such a scrap, but it is boiled clean. The film of digestive juice makes it shine and stings my thumb and finger.

She snatches it from my hand and wrenches my wrist out of joint. I howl and stumble back inside, not seeing what she does next. I stand in the door and look back over my shoulder when I hear everyone cry out, but I miss the event. I have no opportunity to appreciate what she does with the only thing that remains of the Sun God.

Someone whispers that she swallowed it.

I think suddenly that this is trickery, not a price I paid for something good. Instead of dissolving the ending-boundary of life, this magic has destroyed the beginning. My past stretches before me, infinite and unknowable. My future is fixed. I can’t believe anymore that we can endlessly create.
    
She did it like it was a ritual, an aide is telling me. Watching her, we knew the Sun God must have wanted it that way.

She did it like she was swallowing the sky.

I think that she’s a monster, and she’d swallow the sky if she could. The rest of us would suffocate, and she’d watch it all with shining eyes. I wonder if maybe she’s the one who lured the snake inside, because I know she’s wanted to be the Sun God since she was old enough to know herself. Even as a child, she looked at him with a feeling more terrifying than love.

I come back outside, clinging to the doorway. I’m not safe outside without the Sun God, but I watch her.

I realize, She is now safe.

She’s standing in her nightclothes, covered in the snake’s blue guts, glowing and invincible.
“This isn’t going to last forever,” I say. My voice gets lost in the wind that’s blowing her hair into her face. She turns to look at me anyway.

“You should prepare my enemy for today,” she says.

“I think this was all for nothing,” I say. I’m sure all she hears is a swirling howl, but I’m trying to connect with her. This is my time to be courageous. I can’t take my hand from the door, but I can shout.

“We can disintegrate too one day,” I scream.

She smiles at me, hoisting her dripping sword over her shoulder. She walks away into the sunshine and dust.

But the next day she starts to notice me. She asks me to stand beside her when she sits in his throne, though she still doesn’t want me to talk. Three days of this, and I start to suspect that somehow I’m necessary.

I say to her, “Stop the killing, or I’m going to leave.”

She turns a little at the waist. She puts both her hands down on the same gleaming armrest.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me whether you’re here or not,” she says, “but I forbid you to leave.”

“That’s irrational,” I say.

“If I wasn’t a killer, there would be nothing left of me,” she says. “There’s nothing else I want to be.” She looks proud and unhappy, and I wonder if it’s possible she is capable of considering things like this on her own.

“It’s selfish to try to enrich your own life by disrupting other people’s vital systems,” I say. “You’ve got to keep your hands to yourself; it’s the rule that everyone else lives by.”

“I don’t understand why.” she says. She looks hard into my face, which she’s never done before. I realize that she sees me, and she hears me. We’re together in this space. I could tell her that I know the future.

My heart lifts, and I open up my mouth, but she lifts one hand and reaches for me. She digs her fingers in behind my teeth and quietly rips my tongue from my head.

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” she says.

I remember once I was standing outside the gate to the sandbox, and a young boy was standing beside me with his fingers in the grates. He looked up at me, and said, “She killed my father today, and so one day I’m going to kill her.”

This is something I hear all the time, and I almost like responding to it.

“Encounters like this one are how I arrived at the conviction that she shouldn’t go outdoors,” was what I said.

Except I noticed how he looked the same as she does, black hair and shining skin and the same terrible bright eyes. A little brokenhearted twin. So I wonder if there’s a hole in this world in the shape of her body that maybe I’ve found, a hint of the life before. It’s better not to think that she might have killed her own father. Instead I think of the fog lifting, looking towards birth instead of death. I don’t want to move ahead anymore. I want to turn around. The three of us, we could reduce and split and multiply. We could become our parents and our parents’ parents. Watch the world spiderlike from sixteen thousand eyes. I want this so much that I could lick my lips.

But instead I’m alone in the tower with her, and I can’t wait for the inside of my mouth to heal before I get out. I’m so afraid. I stumble from the room and find the door to the stairwell. My throat is filling up with blood. I keep my head down, look at the wide stairs.

I see a female insect with long red wings, and it’s the Sun God’s guide who stole my memories and got me into this. I ought to stop and have a word with her, but since I can’t, I try to push on past her. I go blind through one side and the wing wrinkles against my hands like a sheet. My elbow slips down the side wall, my head hits the edge of a step, and I roll lengthwise at least one time.

The red-winged insect lands on my stomach, crawling over me with her many pink legs.
“I guess that you feel stiffed,” she says.

She pushes her face up close to mine. Her two front legs rest on the sides of my face. Of course, it’s difficult to speak.

“Auuah,” I say.

“I won’t stand for any pitiful noises,” says the insect. “Asking for a thing doesn’t mean you deserve it, you know. And giving is only giving. You only deserve a thing if you take it, of course.”

She pinches my cheek between her toes.

“I gave you quite a lot considering I wasn’t held to my word by anything. This place—well, isn’t it pretty?”

“Breathtaking,” I want to say without meaning it, but I don’t make any noise at all, because it would only be pitiful.

The insect uncurls a tube hanging from her chin, twists it several ways in the air, and vomits up a small stone, which lands beside my head with a delicate sound.

I feel like I know what it is.

“You wanted to go outside,” she says to me, in a tender kind of way. Then she bursts in the air, leaving little bits of silky cloth hanging in the spot where she used to be. One of them flutters down and covers my eye. I sweep it aside because it’s as cold as water.

When the girl who swallowed the sky finally comes down to figure out what I’m doing, I’m grasping the stone in my hands and looking at it. She leans over me from several steps above.

“You didn’t get very far,” she says.

I tell myself I’ve got nothing to say to her anyway.

Her long dark hair has slipped over her shoulders and is hanging all around me. There’s something beautiful about this, as you might expect.

The next moment, the stone is falling down to the steps. I realize this is because without meaning to, I’ve stretched my fingers out and I’m trying to touch her. She and I look at one another. I’ve never done anything like this before. She opens her mouth to say something more, and I gather fistfuls of her hair and pull.

I’m pretending that it’s her tongue that I’m pulling. She makes it easy to pretend, because she doesn’t say a word. I wonder if maybe she’ll gag up the last bit of the Sun God that wound up down her throat. I laugh a little, and it sounds awful and wet.

She stumbles forward, catches herself on the steps with her hands. Her face comes close to my face. She’s baring her teeth at me, and I want my tongue to grow back faster, but I can see it peeking out of her pocket, and that complicates things.

I want my tongue to grow back right away, so I can say:

“Let’s stop hurting one another. We’re all that we have left.”

Lying on the staircase, I’m thirty degrees from being upside-down, give or take. There’s maybe half a foot of space between us, because she landed on all fours. From here, I could do most anything. While she is off-balance, I could try to snatch back my tongue. I could slip away, turn and run.

Or maybe I could try to kiss her.

She gives me a pitying look and braces her foot on my shoulder, and she reaches down and tugs off my head.

It’s hard to tell just what happens then.

She picks it up, I imagine. My vision goes strange and dark. Then she starts down the stairs, and it seems we are going outside the tower together, just the way I wanted.

“I’m coming back for your body,” she says, which I realize means I will die, unless maybe she forgets to mop up the blood. She’s never threatened to do this before. The Sun God wouldn’t have liked it.

In a drifting, hazy way, I am able to see through the crook of her arm as we go bumping down the stairs together, and I’m measuring my chances. As the staircase starts to fall away behind us, I notice the little piece of unbreakable stone still sitting well within reach of my hand.

I tell myself, she’ll disintegrate anyway. Everyone wants to get her. She’ll have second thoughts before she makes it halfway back up the stairs. If she dumps me in the sandbox, she must understand she’ll be alone.

Even now I can still see… a little.

I figure if I look backwards insistently, maybe one day I’ll see everything.

Maybe in the gaps, I don’t know what.

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