Someone that used to be important told me the stars would taste like love when I got there, and I never had the heart to believe her. Instead, I dyed my hair and tried to look like someone else, holding her words so close to my chest I forgot they were there and that I was living by them. She tried to point out that I was running once, so I boarded her up in the crawl space at my grandmother’s house and I left her there until we’d all forgotten. She never came back as a ghost like she said she might, when she could breathe without dust coming out of her mouth, without spider webs breaking because her lungs moved for the first time in ages. I hadn’t been afraid of it — there were scarier ghosts that haunted me than she could ever become. I didn’t think about her for the longest time, never feeling guilty for suppressing something so insightful, but once I reached the stars and found out they tasted like love, it was inevitable that I would remember the way her tongue had flicked those words at me and a ghost was there anyway. It was raining that day, and there wasn’t anything good on TV, so I pulled the nails out from the boards that I’d secured and found her bones beneath the rotten wood. I knew people were afraid of crawl spaces, afraid they’d find a skeleton inside when they opened up the trapdoor; I’d always expected one, so if there weren’t eye sockets to use as a mirror I’d feel disappointed. I reached underneath her ribs, into the hollow of her chest where her heart was shriveled like a raisin, and I was surprised at how small it got when there was nothing to make it big. I put my fist around it, because they say the size of your fist is the equivalent to the size of your heart, filling her chest again in some private thanks, and I felt her squeezing back around my own like she had nothing to forgive me for. I remembered the Friday nights that we’d sit at home and listen to classical music, reading poetry from authors no one’s ever heard of and drinking tea instead of pollution from the riverbed and I didn’t have to miss it because it was becoming me again. She asked me if I’d tasted the stars, if that was why I was there, and my answer was my heart swelling in her hand.

Melanie Beatrice is a Creative Writing major at Susquehanna University, in her third year of school. This is her first campus publication. She’s an aspiring novelist who also enjoys horseback riding, animals, nail polish, and horror movies.