Body of Stars Laura Walter (chrome ebook reader .txt) 📖

I gestured to the examination table, where the girls waited. “Let’s get started.”

I began by reading the markings of the girl predicted to be taken. As usual, I felt compelled to close my eyes during the reading, as if I had to cut off one sense in order to bring the others fully to life. When I did open my eyes for a moment, I marveled that Miles was there, alive and next to me, and that we were working together as my juvenile markings had predicted. It seemed as impossible as the fact that our partnership, so newly formed, was already approaching an end.

“You’re doing well,” Miles said, glancing my way. “I know this isn’t easy.”

The abduction prediction was a complicated, subtle pattern with range. When I read juvenile girls, I waited to feel or not feel that tingling sensation. I waited for the hairs on my arms to stand up, for my breath to catch in my throat, but really I was waiting for the absence of these things, because I never wanted a girl to be marked to be taken.

What I wanted, instead, was for the chart in Julia’s office to continue expanding as it had been for weeks: negative, negative, negative, over and over. In the last few months, we’d only found three additional girls marked to be taken while the negatives bloomed faster and faster. We attached new sheets to the chart every few weeks, taping it together until the data started running off the wall and onto the floor.

Meanwhile, the summer turned over into September. Cassandra surprised me by sending a letter relaying her first week at university. “I hear you’re doing important work,” she wrote near the end, her only cryptic reference to why I might have returned home. I accepted this opening and replied at once, and soon we struck up a correspondence in which I revealed to her what Miles and I were up to.

“I’m not surprised,” she wrote in another letter. “You always were made for great things, Celeste.”

It felt good to have Cassandra back, especially as I was about to lose Marie and Louise as they prepared to depart for university. At their joint farewell party, Marie’s mother gave us each a handmade bracelet—to maintain our connection, she said. My bracelet was made of thin, soft strips of braided red and brown leather. I wore it on my wrist not only in honor of my friendships but as a reminder that Marie’s mother was not quite the person I’d expected. While she was well versed in the domestic arts and could make bracelets and her own clothing and five-course meals, she also had a subversive streak. She sent her daughter off to university with a girlfriend. She looked for ways to help Julia, Miles, and me. She was so much more than I’d ever imagined.

Once my friends had left to further their educations, I remained behind with Julia and Miles. I conducted readings. I continued teaching behind the double glass doors. The days were ticking by, the sun rising and falling again, and October crept ever closer. October, the month of dropping leaves, wood smoke, decay. The month that would bring my brother’s final birthday.

Course: Body and Mind

Assignment: Fill-in-the-Blank & Short Essay Instructor: Celeste Morton

Label the diagrams below with the appropriate prediction groups as outlined in Mapping the Future. Next, select no fewer than three (3) of these Mapping the Future. For every negative prediction, consider its positive. For every positive, consider its potential complications. Be creative. Consider not just what is marked on your skin, but what alternative interpretations might be possible. Imagine what it might be like if your body was not beholden to the future. Points awarded for creativity and imaginative display.

1. ____________________________________________

2. ____________________________________________

3. ____________________________________________

29

On the third of October, I rose from bed, my body moving automatically as if pulled by an unseen force. I grabbed the package waiting on my dresser and went to my brother’s room. Miles was already awake and sitting at his desk, his hands folded over a wrapped package of his own. He was waiting for me.

“Happy birthday,” he said, offering the barest of smiles.

“Same to you.” I sat on his bed and we exchanged gifts.

Miles went first, ripping open the wrapping paper. Back on the mountain, I’d made him a journal in bookbinding class. Every bit was handcrafted, from the paper, which I’d mashed in a pot, to the cover, which I’d dotted with wildflower seeds. I’d had a hard time deciding what to give him—no gift seemed appropriate for someone’s final birthday—but it felt right to offer him something that had the ability to grow.

“You don’t have to actually use it,” I said. “You can tear the cover apart and plant it in the backyard.”

Miles ran his hand over the cover’s embedded seeds. “It’s perfect.”

It wasn’t. The handmade paper was rough and bumpy, difficult to write on, and he might not have time to fill the pages anyway.

“Now open yours,” he said. His gift to me was a broad flat rectangle, like a book. I remembered the astrology book he’d given me for my sixteenth birthday. I still had it somewhere in my room.

I carefully peeled away the paper. I didn’t want to tear into it, to destroy what my brother had put together for me. When I finished, I was holding a notebook with a spiral binding and a worn cover of pale blue. It was instantly recognizable, as familiar as an old friend—the journal Miles had kept throughout our childhoods to map out my juvenile markings.

I flipped through the pages, astonished. It was like looking at old photographs of myself, or reading my own biography. My childhood markings had once seemed unforgettable, their patterns indelible in my mind, but now they struck me as foreign and strange.

I kept turning pages until I arrived at the juvenile pattern on my left elbow. Miles had sketched these markings again and again, drawing different