Stella

          Stella May Spelling was a pearl-wearing, flapper-dress loving, Charleston-dancing, all-around all-american twenties girl. Her mother was a seamstress, who, having failed fashion school, resorted to sewing other people’s big ideas. She hated it. Her father was an investment banker, who wore scary round spectacles and was constantly polishing them. Stella never liked her father, and neither did Stella’s mother, so the two of them spent hours in her mother’s room at her vanity, brushing each other’s hair and daydreaming about possible other fathers of Stella.

            Stella’s greatest fear in life was to be like her parents. Her mother was hollow and heart-broken, always waiting for some superman to sweep her away, to rescue her from her eternal life of washing dishes until her hands dissolved into the grimy soap and doing laundry until she ironed herself into a shrivelled up corpse. Her father was bored and dull and only talked algebraically. Stella was a dancer, and she danced through everything. She danced like the world was ending and she danced with everything that she had. Her skin was smooth and fair, like ivory piano keys that seemed to be draped like cake fondant over her delicate bones and dance-conditioned muscles, which were just strong enough to support her as she span and jumped and kicked but never got in the way of her doll-like appearance.

            John was the first and only boy that Stella ever loved. They met at a dinner party on Christmas eve, 1923. Stella was seventeen, and John was a twenty-year-old from New York, sweeping into her hometown of Boston with such an air of life experience that Stella was immediately under his spell.

“I’m John,” He murmured in his deep, throaty voice.

“John what?” Stella asked, her eyes holding questions.

“Just John. John from New York City.” Her heart leaped. A mysterious, older, handsome New Yorker? Her night was made.

“Stella,” She held out her hand to him, her pearl bracelets clinking. She thrust her champagne glass at an already loaded waiter and he took her hand, pulling her onto the dance floor, his hand around her tiny waist.

During their final dance, as the music swelled and their hearts beat faster, he lifted her above his head by her hips, and she arched her back as she span around, dizzied by champagne and twinkling fairy lights. When her satin-clad feet touched back down on the ground, she breathed in deep, and their eyes met. The kiss that followed was unlike any that Stella had experienced before. It was giving, respectful, but eluding and inviting. Stella, her dignity to protect, pulled away. John’s hand brushed her cheek and traced her arm, dropping something in her hand.

As his back retreated into the crowd, Stella looked at the paper in her palm. Her eyes read the ink, unbelieving. She read it and re-read it and re-read it, digesting, spitting out the information, and digesting it again. She moved to follow him but her breath caught in her chest, and she stopped.

Stella moved out from under the huge marquee that the party was being held in. June air filled her lungs and she stared at the moon that was rising over the blue lake and illuminating the dark sky. Stars twinkled at her and made her tears shine like rounded diamonds as they wet her cheeks. She brushed at them out of reflex, not really caring who saw them.

She looked up at the sky. Her eyes found the moon, and the face that was projected on it like a film projector. It was his, in all its perfection. His hair even moved in the breeze and as she raised a hand towards it, he winked. She climbed the railing overlooking the lake, her shoes abandoned, her feet feeling the cold metal and the rain from last night. She leaped off that railing like an angel in flight and she didn’t look down, she believed she was flying as her body was suspended, and she felt herself rising up, past the clouds and the atmosphere. The sky darkened as she entered the vast emptiness that was space and her fear was quieted when she neared the moon, her hands intertwining with his and her body pressed against his, for he was a part of the moon and she melted into him, their figures eternally embraced on the surface of the grey moon rock.

Back on the ground, her best friend, Emma, stooped to pick up a piece of paper she had found near the railing overlooking the lake. Her eyes read it, confused, and then her eyes found the lifeless silhouette of a body floating on the lake. The figure was wearing the dress that Stella had been wearing moments at ago at the party, Emma was sure of it. She screamed as the realization hit her, as she came to know that Stella was floating, dead, on the lake below, some couple hundred meters of a fall.

She looked again at the note, tears that weren’t Emma’s smearing the ink.

I was only an illusion.