WILL MCMILLAN
Felicia Heterophylla
The sky wasn’t really the sky after all. My brother and I, under the influence of our youth, had decided.
It wasn’t the cobalt expanse of space there above us but rather the ocean of some strange other world, its orbit locked forever with ours. And when the inhabitants of that vast other planet gazed into what they thought was their sky we knew they were simply peering into our waters. Our two worlds in tandem, looking up at each other. Each one the source of the other one’s heaven.
“Let’s send them a message,” we’d said early one hot summer morning, snatching fistfuls of plump dandelions from the guts of our sprawling, weed-lavished yard.
“Let’s get their attention.”
Up past our ankles in Kentucky bluegrass, the air heavy with birdsong and the familiar clamor of our house, another house, being dismantled, moved out of, we emptied our lungs blowing delicate umbrella-shaped tufts to the winds. To that strange, other Earth. We stared as the tufts drifted upward and higher, melting into the cerulean sea of the sky. Those people up there, whoever they were, in their world. Had they ever seen dandelions?
“Let’s see what they’ve sent us,” my brother and I said when daylight broke the next morning. If we could float a message up to them, we reasoned, they’d likely floated one back to us. From sunup to sunset, we scoured the grass, through sun scorched masses of white-petaled daises, searching for evidence someone had received what we’d sent them. Searching until dark for what they’d sent us.
Nothing but the grass and daisies we knew. Nothing for us from that bright, other planet.
“Nothing but what you can fit in this box,” said our dad the day after. He tossed a decaying cardboard box at our feet. On his face, a clear mask of sweat. Behind his back, in our house, the rumble, the noise of our mother, once more, packing our lives into boxes. Weeks left in this house had been whittled down into days. And now merely hours. Groaning with the weight of our family’s belongings, our truck was squeezed dry of sentimentality. No room for anything that wasn’t essential.
Submerged in the swaying emerald veldt of our yard, my brother and I examined our slim collection of toys one by one. Each weighed gently upon the scale of our interest. Whatever toy that couldn’t fit in the box we’d be forced to abandon, treasures for some future children to find. My brother held his action figures up close, checking their joints, the wear of their paint, forcing slight imperfections into artificial disinterest. Noting a soldier’s failing articulation, he’d sigh, look away, then cast it aside. My herd of stuffed animals, the only playthings I’d ever wanted, all my short life, demanded to be held tight in my arms. Which ones would forgive me when I left them behind? So close to our own, I stared up and into the vastness of our swirling blue neighbor. If only they’d received just one of our messages. If only they knew we were here, among the rhythmic lilt of the grass, of the daisies, looking upward to them. I was sure that, somewhere deep in that blue, they’d have room enough for my brother and me, and everything we wished we didn’t have to abandon.
A slamming truck door was our signal. Hours into minutes and then seconds and now? Now it was time to move on. We pulled ourselves up from the sweltering abyss of our lawn, the air smudged with our rumbling pickup’s exhaust. Our feet dragged the dirt. One step, then another, reeled reluctantly forward, invisible lures of sorrow hooked deep within us. Boiling afternoon dew sweating stains on our legs. I looked up and into that orbiting sapphire. I looked down at the emerald green of our yard. A swallow of hot summer air hit my lungs. Before us, something that wasn’t there yesterday, something more than the grass and daisies we knew.
I didn’t ask my brother if he could see it, because I already knew that he could. Both of us frozen still in that moment, we’d seemingly lost our dimension. No sound, no motion, no depth to our bodies, as if we weren’t really two little boys anymore but merely flat, lifeless cutouts of what little boys looked like. Still, somehow, we could see, we could see it.
A single blue daisy.
As if it had always been there, poking out of the grass, among the millions of puffed dandelions and billions of white-petaled daisies. Its disc, a blazing egg yolk. Its petals, each one, as deep as the sea of the world just above us. As blue as the world we knew that it came from. Had anyone on our world ever seen a blue daisy?
We snuck up on it gently, worried our muffled footfalls might scare it away. As if our naked desire to believe it was real might push it right out of existence. My brother and I stood silent beside it, facing each other, the sun, high above in its path, melting our shadows into a single, dark puddle.
“Is this even real?” It was all I could say.
My brother squeezed a single, frail petal. I reached out as well, taking hold. The blue, so deeply entrenched within the daisy’s corolla, made our fingers seem waxy and bleached by comparison. I’d never touched anything so fragile, so soft. Like butterfly wings in my grasp.
“It’s real,” said my brother. His eyes slid away from the daisy, shifting upward. “I think they might be real.”
Just me and my brother, two flesh and bone moons, orbiting a speck of electric blue flora. Already on the outer edge of our childhood, our years for believing there were other earths locked with ours were numbered, were already fading. Those years would become months, and then days, and then nothing. A sudden blue daisy added some length to those years, had planted a seed within the soil of our hearts. Maybe, sometimes, what you wished to be real could be real.
“Boys!” our dad shouted, our pickup truck roaring, and my brother and I took one, final touch of those warm, vibrant petals. One final brush with our fingers, one final thanks to that bright other planet. It didn’t occur to either one of us to pick it, to take this gifted alien flower along with us, to wherever it was in our world we were headed. It would die before we reached that bleak destination, and whoever they were, concealed in their blue, had planted that daisy on purpose. As a sign, a beacon, to me and my brother. That we could, hopefully, find our way back to this place, to this moment. To an unending expanse within ourselves we could live, a world deep inside we could think of as home.
Will McMillan is a queer writer born and raised just outside of Portland, Oregon, where he still lives today. His essays have been featured in Sun, Hippocampus, Redivider, and Atticus Review literary journals, among others.