by Randall Brown
Susquehannock State Forest, tangled and far away, holds black cherry trees and astronomers, lured into the nowhere by the exceptionally dark skies. Owen has set himself on the creek bank, his father’s ashes in a wooden green box, painted flies on its sides, a brook trout on the lid. Night will fall soon and still the ashes rest on Owen’s lap, unscattered. In a nearby field, the star party of astronomers, stargazers, astrophotographers, professors wait for the dark sky and the appearance of the nucleus of the Milky Way. Still, his father’s bamboo fly rod rests on Owen’s lap.
Owen hears the murmur from the star party, the anticipatory hum, the gurgle of his father’s favorite stream in the center of Potter County Pennsylvania, God’s Country.
Not god, but goddess appears out of the dark trees. Athena, the grey-eyed one, owl-like. Or maybe not form but substance, a wanderer from the star party. Except she’s transparent and knows his name. All day he’s sat in the August sun, without water or movement. She’s formed of red-light and black cherry tree and dark sky.
“Owen the rock,” she says. “Or a sugar maple.” Owen feels his veins transform to root and reach for earth. “Ash and rod forever caught in your branches.”
“That would make him terribly sad,” Owen says.
“Now it matters what he wants.” Her laugh lacks lightness, not of the air but of rocks and gravity.
“Yes. Now it matters.”
“Matter, matter everywhere, not a drop to drink.”
“My father’s dead.”
Athena cocks her head. “Here come the stars.”
“God, I fucking hate you.”
The star party clicks like crickets, the singsong of stars and the stretch of telescopes. Look stars! Look a planet! The gods created the heavens for such moments, as if the points of light and those transfixed under them mattered, two mirrors catching reflections.
“I’m sorry,” Owen says.
“Of course you are.” She remains on the boundary between forest and bank. At times, she looks like his mother, wanting something she cannot name and he cannot give. She died in some long ago childhood, when Owen felt that desperate attachment to her as if she were some lost place he’d never been to. All that rage and hatred set against a father burning like dead stars until the skies turned to ash.
“Help me,” he says.
She’s next to him. She’s unrooting him as if to toss him aloft. She isn’t translucent but lined with cracks, an egg put back together again.
The night falls. Athena flickers out of light and passes as a cloud past the nothing of moon. All that never will be. What’s ash cannot be unashed. The past like stars, to gaze into, to wonder about one’s existence and insignificance.
Do this for your father. Here, in the darkest place in the furthest corner of a faraway place, he hid, wanting you to follow, just once. Here, he came, uninvited and solitary, the archetype of man in the universe. He swung his flies into the ether and wondered what he’d done to lose the son.
Do this for your father, okay. How you hated his uncertainty, his stuttering steps, his doddering, his bending to every demand, his giving up, never dating, marrying, his loneliness impossible to take away, a reminder of your own meaninglessness.
Do this for your father.
And Owen does.
Night and the terrible darkness, the hush of the star party, telescopes and eyes turned to the heavens. And Owen, with a creak in his joints, dips the hookless Crane Fly with dangling legs into the box of ash. Owen casts the bamboo rod and its heavy line as if wielding a wand and flicks the fly into the unseen eddies. The gods and goddesses transform from stars into the wild brook trout and all night against the backdrop of the swirl of descending stars and darkness they rise and swallow what was once his father, this thing he set himself against, like a galaxy against the nothingness of infinity.
