Christine Boyka Kluge

Falling Moon, Rising Stars

The Underpants Tree

Alice Hoover angrily wonders how an eighty year old woman, chronically underweight for her entire life, can suddenly fail to squeeze her belly into a pair of size 22 mail‑order underpants. It can only mean one thing: she is pregnant. How ridiculous! The three‑packs of size 20, size 18, and size 16 are all in shreds in the bathroom garbage can. In a rage, she rips off the size 22s, shoves open the window, and heaves them through the darkness like a fiery comet.

It is 1:00 a.m. on a moist and silvery August night. Topless, and now briefless, poor, tired, hot, pregnant Alice leans her elbows against the windowsill to follow the trajectory of her undergarment. The damn things streak across the yard, brilliant as a U.F.O. Amazingly, they land in her neighbor's maple, the twin to her own, and dangle precariously in the lunar glow. The open legholes look like screaming mouths. Alice opens her own mouth wide enough to scream, but shrieks silently, boiling inside and out. She feels like she could eat that fat old moon, tear into it with her fierce teeth. In fact, she looks like she has. Her pearlescent stomach is tremendously huge, a rival to Earth's satellite, trapped in the pathetic orbit of her small house. She wonders if this miracle pregnancy will result in a multiple birth, then pictures the contortions she will have to practice in order to nurse a litter of mewling newborns.

Poetry in the Sky

Alban Kirby writes poems of love on three foot lengths of pale blue ribbon. With his little bottles of Wite‑Out, he paints lines including cherish, angel and starshine in radiant white calligraphy. He plans to tie his poetry on the branches of the towering maple outside Alice’s second floor bedroom window directly across the way. He imagines her finding his beautiful words floating like puffy clouds on their blue satin skies in the morning's revealing light.

From his desk, Alban gazes longingly at the pair of size 22 white cotton woman's briefs perched like a tropical blossom on the branch outside his own bedroom window. They must be a message of love,

tossed across the narrow yard like a rare orchid, fragrant and alluring. He is unworthy of the wearer, but he imagines her delicate fingers flinging this bloom of love straight toward his aching heart. He tries to reach the moonlit panties from his desk, but he can't quite grasp the elastic waistband. He attempts snaring them with his ruler, but they tangle among the twigs. Fearful of the long drop to the dark ground, Alban decides to admire them from afar, perfect and nearly attainable like the lovely Alice herself, Alice of the platinum ringlets, Alice of the white silk dressing gown.

Angel with a Weapon

Beneath Alice's window, a shadowy form approaches through the quivering leaves. She looks down and sees Alban struggling to climb her maple, a bouquet of glowing ribbons waving in one fist. He ascends slowly, smiling dreamily, totally unaware of his naked observer. Alice watches in horrified fascination as Alban finally reaches the level of her window and begins to knot his love streamers around her branches.

Her unused scream now emerges as an ear‑splitting, rage‑filled question: "What the HELL are you doing, you ugly little moon‑faced alien?! You hairless, crater‑faced, fish‑lipped freak!!!"

Blindly, she reaches behind herself for a weapon. Her groping hand locates the hose of the vacuum cleaner, and she lets Alban have it full in his startled face. For a moment Alban continues to stare at his angel in all of her moonlit glory. He balances on the branch like a huge white bird with blue satin plumes, then plummets earthward, wingless, through the maple's outstretched arms.

The Orange Mummy

As Alice leans over the sill to watch his descent, her amazing abdomen pulls her forward into the night. Breasts flapping like useless wings, she falls down and down, landing right next to her admirer, her skinny limbs at odd angles on the damp lawn. Trembling, one arm brushes across Alban's oily chin and ends up resting on the shining top of his head. Surely she has murdered this tree‑climbing juvenile delinquent.   She pokes his silky eyelids with her good hand, but they remain closed.

Suddenly, Alice is aware of her aged nudity. She reaches desperately for the orange tarp protecting the heap of firewood propped against the garage. With one hand, she wraps the mildewed plastic around her torso, then struggles to stand. Two fingers curve strangely backward on one throbbing hand and her nose is bleeding. But her legs are working, so she gets up and looks down at the sprawled intruder.

Alban is perfectly still. Despite cheeks cratered with acne, his forehead and scalp are as smooth and glistening as a dome of delicately veined marble. Just look at the size of that head! His protuberant eyelids and large lips give him an odd froglike appearance, but long elegant fingers emerge from his silvery cuffs. While Alice holds her breath, Alban flutters his swollen white eyelids, revealing opal irises with wide black pupils.

Alban is stunned by the vision of Alice, wrapped like an orange mummy, leaning over him and dripping blood from her flared nostrils onto his sparkling shirt. His darling even bleeds in two perfect lines of­ rubies, jewels that dazzle as they fall. Her frizzy hair rises in a wild gray mushroom cloud, but to Alban it is a starlit silver halo. Had she really greeted him in the heavenly treetops in a pure and unclothed state? Before he fell, was Alice tossing him a rope so he could climb up to her window? Thankful, blessed by the love of an angel, he reaches up his long fingers to touch her flowing gown.

Silver Tadpoles

As his fingertips make contact with the clammy tarp, Alice experiences the shock of her first contraction. Oh, Lord, she is going to give birth to her magic little Dionnes right here, in front of this dazed nutcase flopped on his back like a metallic turtle. Once again she collapses, crumpling inside of her plastic tent, her big belly as hard as a boulder. Annoyed, she wipes at her bleeding nose with her good hand and whimpers. Her water breaks and pools in a glimmering puddle under the quaking maples. Before she loses consciousness, the last thing she sees is Alban Kirby, that tinsel‑eyed dodo, staring up her tarp.

A tearing pain awakens her to the sound of Alban shouting, "PUSH! I can see another head!" He tries to capture what appears to be a hovering, silver tadpole with enormous egg‑shaped eyes. Three other human polliwogs are following a brilliant beam of light to a lozenge‑shaped hole in the sky. Her babies! The last child emerges in a shower of sparks, wet and wide‑eyed, staring into Alice's amazed face with an expression of intense awareness. He has a broad searching mouth covered with gold flecks, and little reaching hands in two rows down his chest. Alice tries to catch the infant, but he levitates above her outstretched palms, then joins his shining siblings in their journey up the sky.

Alban reaches out and picks up two fallen blue ribbons. He gently ties them in bows around her ankles, then rubs her cold toes between his pale hands. Alice lies on her back in her sticky tarp in her strange backyard, looking up at where her miracle quints have vanished, zipped up in the twinkling night like five lost stars.

An Underground Constellation:

What Goes Down Must Come Up

Alice notes that her position is perfect for stargazing but suddenly glimpses the placenta, glowing like a jellyfish in the moonlight, like a separate universe, its sparkling tentacles waving, beckoning. Countless miniature spheres, like amphibian eggs in a congealed inner mass, bubble anxiously, awaiting attention. Alice stands up slowly, then turns her back with a snap. NO.

"Good night, you albino tree frog pervert. No more. It's over! Just leave." Limping, Alice struggles to her back door, her blue ribbons dragging like fading meteor trails. "GO HOME!" She does not glance back at Alban Kirby. Not once.

Riveted, Alban watches her leave. But once the door is shut and locked behind her, he immediately takes a slender metal vial from his shirt pocket and pours the bright, hissing contents into his hand. Panting softly, he begins to plant thousands of tiny chrome seeds in the moist ground where the tarp had sheltered his love. Fine, thirsty roots are already emerging as Alban pats the fragrant earth in place. Like a mighty Portuguese man‑of‑war, the placenta glides over the fertile soil, releasing the bubbling eggs to merge with the sprouting seeds. Then it sinks into the teeming ground, absorbed like summer rain.

Quietly, Alban unhinges the polished dome of his white scalp and gently reaches behind his eyes to lift out his iridescent brain. He tenderly places it on the awakening soil. Pulsating vessels descend from his rippled brain like pewter hoses, spouting blinding light. He lets his life run out in rivulets of brilliance, down into his sacred garden. There it flows to feed the planted constellation of his hungry star‑eyed children, the true reason for his visit to Earth, for his one hundred year residency in an adolescent human body guided by hormones. He is exhausted, extinguished by interplanetary passion and obsessive love.

Blue Light, Silver Light

Alice's quints are merely decoys, drones, guides for the emergent subterranean generation. Alice herself is only an emptied Earthling vessel, the unwitting donor of womb, placenta, and chromosomes to another planet. Poor, senile Alice, now useless, shrinks smaller and smaller, alone forevermore in her cramped bedroom. She fades into the otherworldly blue light of her TV, her only comfort the faithful vacuum cleaner, glistening at her side.

And Alban, now hollowed and still, sleeps eternally against the gurgling earth. His offspring busily suckle at the roots of the mighty trees, gaining green strength from the heart of the pulsing planet. In a year they will leave with hybrid souls, botanic and zoologic vigor united in a constellation of super beings. These sylvan titans will depart on a path of silver light to repopulate Alban's waiting planet.

Cruel Illumination

Now, ecstatically sighing, the twin maples link hands over Alban's bowed, open head, shielding his empty shell from the cruel illumination of the moon. Their crossbred descendants nestle safely in the rich soil among the roots, pressing their greedy mouths to the flowing veins of the contracting planet.