"A Geocentric Model of Light" by Rachel Xie — Our June 2022 Silver Medal Winner

Rachel is our second place winner from the contest posted in our June 2022 issue!

What the judges had to say:

“Your prose is delicious.”

“The use of metaphor in this take on the image was curious and interesting... I applaud the attempt at constructing a very unique tale that was not contained by stereotype.”

“...an incredibly unique piece of writing... The writing is so original and bold.”

Meet Rachel

Rachel Xie lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she studies Computer Science and History of Science at the University of Toronto. In her free time, she writes poetry and short stories, and reads every vampire book she can get her hands on.

A Geocentric Model of Light

the unedited story by Rachel Xie

They say it’s a good street for lovebirds. What they mean is it’s a good street for parrots, but all those bright little beasties—flashy-feathered, loud-mouthed, singing in the rainforest—look the same to the sort of people we mean when we say them. These parrots, they cluster under the streetlamp, murmuring about the Hubble telescope, mistaking the lights in the bedroom windows for stars.

I’ve met a few. The dusky glow of the bulb outside my window draws them like a compass pointing north. I like to climb out onto the fire escape after dark, three thirty-three in the morning if I can help it. I whistle a few notes down to them, watch their eyes going wide.

“I’ll keep your little secret. Lots of you on this street,” I always tell them. Give a wink if I’m feeling saucy. Some of the younger-looking ones will press closer, palms raised as if the summer rain curving hot down their forearms is wine. They’ll beg for more, for any hint that there are people here like them.

I tell them I’m not—no wings back here, sweetheart, just regular old skin—but they never fault me for it. They’re forgiving like that, to make up for how bad they are at keeping secrets. Such hungry folk, snatching up every scrap the hooked lamps will give them.

Some of the ones who come by every week just to shake off their big shawls, their huge hiking backpacks, their aching shoulders, they know me by name. Might even get bold, flap up to pass me a cigarette, their own glowing like a desert sun. Not their type of habitat, and cigarettes aren’t mine, but I like them for the way they make me feel like a beacon, a point of light on top of a radio tower, sound waves bouncing meaninglessly off the atmosphere, smacking into closed windowpanes.

“I think radio waves are a kind of angel,” one of them confides to me one night. “I think those big towers are the closest people like us get to God.”

“Yeah?” I say to them. I don’t take this one too seriously; last week, they were telling me that a busy roundabout on the other side of the city gave them a premonition of the Second Coming. I went to see the next day, but that’s not how prophecy works. The divine is flighty by nature. All I got was a dazzling impression of fireflies bursting, teneral, from metal shells.

“Yeah. You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Not really.” No point lying.

“They called us angels, once.”

“Once,” I repeat doubtfully. I’m not smoking tonight, but they are. They exhale slowly.

“I think about it all the time. Walking straight down the main street down there, dripping feathers everywhere.”

“Not molting season,” I say, fast. “Is it? Unless you mean you’re one of them wax-wings. Careful, that lighter of yours might be enough to melt you.”

This time I know the smoke in my face is on purpose. “Just because you snagged a cheap apartment on a street half the city hates doesn’t mean you get to say things like that.” They say, again, “They called us angels once.”

I laugh. It’s funny, in the way that a worm squirming on the sidewalk after a torrential downpour is funny. It’s not me who will have to scrape the pink wiggling string of it off their boot, anyway.

They slip off the railing of the fire escape without putting out the cigarette or saying good night. A soft rush of feathers greets them at the edge of the circle of light cast by the streetlamp. I pretend not to hear a voice hiss, “What are you doing with one of them?”

They’re not all angels, by any means.

I go back inside once I start hearing the quiet trilling of birdsong produced from a throat not built for it. Do you ever really think about your vocal chords? The vibrating machinery of them? I wonder sometimes: what’s really stopping me from ripping them out, stuffing violin strings into the vacancy left behind? What, really? People who step on worms hardly ought to care about a spot of blood on their hands.

The next night, it’s just me. The spot along the railing I like to lean on has had its paint worn off by the dozens of elbows and hands that touched it before me. They call it the street for lovebirds because there’s something about hands. Even when you have wings, when you go to weddings trailing a train of squawks and whispers, there’s nothing quite like putting your hands where someone else’s were.

Or so I’m told. I flick my lighter on, off. Morse code for no one. Radio waves aimed at nothing. They—the scientists, not the birds—fill whole deserts with listening ears, with screaming mouths, in the shape of satellite dishes, and they don’t get half as many answers as I do most nights. I’m just some distant point of light, an untouchable body. They can imagine whatever they want about it. They can screech whatever they like. Since when does a light have ears?

When they look up at me, on my painted-metal fire-escape balcony, they get a wink, or a flash of smiling teeth. I’m the only indifferent star that can be bothered to look down on this city through the smog. The only honest thing on a street of colours that run at the first hint of rain. Drowns all the wriggling worms too.

Tonight I’ll sleep on my stomach. My shoulder blades keep aching. They know autumn is coming before I do. Tomorrow, I’ll go back to that roundabout. I don’t believe in any of it, and the way those cars gleam, washed and shining, makes me think I never will.

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