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By: Mya Guillermo
Are we alone in the universe?
The question still haunts me, just like he does, even now.
His answer was different—strange. It didn’t fit the accepted narrative. People shunned him for it. Put him in a box where they could keep his blasphemies at a distance.
We were taught that we are a happenstance people. Yet I grew up believing that because we controlled fire, we were our own finite gods. We are the crafters of our own realities, and we are all we need. I built my existence on the foundation that we are the illegitimate children of an apathetic universe, believing we were then the highest form of intelligence—but entirely alone. Unseen and insignificant. But our reality doesn’t need to be crowded. Doesn’t need to be created or complex. We are here, and it is truth enough.
It’s safer for our egos. And so everyone collectively lies—we are all there is. We are all there needs to be.
Everyone but him. And now he’s alone anyway.
…
He was buried in a matte black casket. Black for the color of our sky. Black for the color of his eyes. Black because there are no other colors to choose from here.
This darkness is why I knew the man in the first place. My father was a fireman, and from the time I was old enough to handle them, I helped him sell the flames. It is always dark here. The velvet sky lays heavy across our buildings, a draping ceiling of twilight. Everything here is lined with thick shadows, clinging to us like the stubborn smell of smoke. Therefore, owning flames, having a monopoly on fire—it makes people like my father powerful.
I was a carrier for him; I delivered his flames. I learned young how to hold them in my hands. Flames are fluid, but with something to burn, they become a living solid. From over a decade of carrying flames, my skin had singed golden, a stark contrast to the population’s normal gray—and it scared people. The unknown does that, I guess. When I came knocking, most— wide-eyed and weary—would watch me pour the fire into their hearths from their doorways, never daring to touch the hot, liquid light themselves. Most—but not him.
The first time I delivered to the man, he opened his door just enough for the span of his wide black eyes. My first impression was that he was the loud kind of quiet; although he hadn’t spoken, I could see the shapes of his thoughts in the shadowy wrinkles of his face. He was old, and I liked to think he’d always looked that way. The color of his nose’s rounded tip was the same as everyone else—muted gray—but his hair was nearly as white and wild as my flames. That first day, he’d stared open-mouthed at the light that licked lazily around my palms.
“My word, child,” he whispered, his voice raspy and reverent. “Your hands are the color of the sun.”
“It’s just from the flames, sir,” I’d told him, too frustrated with the familiar remark about my fingers to bother asking him whose son he was talking about. I assumed the carriers in other districts had the same tainted skin as me. He looked up from my hands then, the wonder on his face rearranging into something like sympathy.
“You don’t know what the sun is, do you?” “Whose son, sir?” I’d asked.
“No, no. Not who, child. What.” At the look on my face, he pushed his door open a little wider. “Imagine the magnificence of all the flames in the world—but a thousand times brighter. Imagine if all that light could be rolled up and cocooned into one body. A celestial jewel of radical, blazing, golden light
—suspended above a black void like ours—a flame that never dies.” Suddenly, his hand, gray and wide-knuckled, slipped through the opening of the door. With startling audacity, he scooped the flames from my fingers and thrust them between our faces. “The sun can light places eons away so each intimately knows and is touched by its existence.
Whole worlds spin circles around suns. It is beautiful, my dear.”
With that, he’d given me a smile that betrayed the insanity of his words and disappeared behind his door.
…
That was three years ago. Now he was dead. I’d known it as I stood waiting for his wide eyes to emerge from his door six days before. It had become a pattern of ours—a game to play. He told me about suns and stars and things he called planets. He told me about colors besides gray, white, and gold. He told me about a man called God. When he’d finish, he’d take his flames and retreat to the darkness of his home.
I’d never been further than his front step until today.
According to his will, he had left everything to me—the girl with golden palms, as the document read. I had done nothing for him except humor his fantastical tales and bring him flames once a cycle; yet here I was, walking through the door that he’d shut in my face day after day.
His house wasn’t big, from the outside at least. Stepping in, it didn’t seem to be any grander inside. Since he’d been gone for nearly a week, all his flames should have died out by now. I carried one in my palm, though, and I pieced the room together in the white radius of its glow. No furniture claimed the space—there was nothing to fill the dusty emptiness. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the strangeness of his home, based on his eccentricities, but I was. I don’t know what I expected exactly, but I guess I expected something. I spotted his hearth, though, and inspected it. It was empty, of course; no flames, no trinkets on the mantle. There was, however, a doorframe to its right. I traced my fingers along the panels, and it nudged open before I found its handle.
My eyes—expecting more darkness—suddenly burned against blinding, white lights. I stepped back and shielded my face, but bright little circles still danced against the blackboard of my vision. Slowly, I squinted my eyes open and slid my hand from my face. The edges of the room were dark, and my eyes adjusted slowly to distinguish the lights in the middle. Suspended above me in the center of the room were a dozen glowing ornaments floating in a haphazard circle. There were threads holding them up, I realized; and some weren’t just spheres—they had rings around them. They had auras of colors that I’d never seen before—hues I couldn’t even begin to describe against the matted grays of my existence.
I crept closer and stopped next to one the width of my outstretched fingertips. I studied the shapes that glossed its surface. It was dark—but not black—embossed with shifting white ink that spilled over splotches of other colors beneath. It was beautiful—unlike anything I’d ever seen. I looked carefully at each of the different orbs, wondering, until I reached heart of the collection. At the center—the largest bulb—was a round, golden flame. “A sun,” I whispered, remembering.
Was that what this was? He’d crafted a glowing diorama of all those wild things he’d told me about before. He'd conjured up colors I could barely describe and created a whole new world in the back room of his house.
Flame in hand, I wove out of the hanging marbles to the side of the room. I saw now that there were tables there buried in papers. I rifled through a stack of sketches, holding them up to my flame. There were diagrams of other orbs, like the ones that hung behind me; sketches of what looked like plants; and caricatures of faces. I found one that looked kind of like me—a girl with a round face and long hair. Beneath, a hurried note read, “They have green blue eyes and red hair. There are children with pale features, old men with dark faces, and girls with golden skin.”
I looked at my own fingers. I didn’t have words for the wonder that had rooted behind my ribcage. I was floating. I was dreaming. I was a small bird learning how great gravity is when it falls from its nest the first time.
I lifted another paper from the pile and read the large, lilting handwriting: “Are we alone in the universe?”
“You really didn’t think so, did you?” I asked to the emptiness. To his ghost. His words echoed in my head, every impossible thing he’d said with so much conviction. I didn’t understand what he told me then. I didn’t understand what he’d left for me now.
I read the final thought on the page. “A blind man can see that the heavens are painted by hand. I have arrived at the end, which is the only possible beginning: There can be no other explanation but God.”
…
What if we’re not alone in this universe?
Selfishly, I used to think that this dark place was all that existed. Now, though, I wonder how I believed that darkness could conceive any life brighter than itself at all.
Maybe he really was insane, but I like that suns and stars really could exist somewhere— brilliant flames in voids like ours. I think maybe it is easier to believe we were hand painted than to believe we were spilled here on accident. Even though it scares me to know that a man called God might know me, might notice my golden hands, it is less terrifying than thinking we are alone.
We are here, and that is true enough. But I wonder if there’s more than that. Mostly, though, I wonder what the old, black-eyed man would think now, knowing that I believed him.
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