The Earth From Afar
by Alyssa Proujansky
[fiction]
You are in the car hurtling through real darkness—not in-the-city darkness—with your friend who has been dead and not on this earth for some time now. Your hands on the wheel, your dog in back, your friend beside you, hands folded neatly in her lap. She’s wearing the same white sneakers as always, faded red hearts on the sides. You speed down winding roads, along a coast, stars endless against the black, layered sky. Heat radiates from the pulses in your necks, though your hands are cold, your toes aching. A silvery thread connects the two of you—your neck to hers and back again. An inverted 8, an infinity. She always loved the number eight, her boyfriend said, when she killed herself on the eighth of November.
Eight: it fastens to you. Infinity: adheres to her.
Infinity is a spiral, a siphon, and where it deposits you seems, at first, like a blanket on the beach under the night sky. An empty stage, scuffed wooden floors.
Do you think this is just a regular trip? Flatness and grime, the humdrum everyday? Are you afraid of glittering, stubborn infinity?
You are. It is like a wooden hammer on the top of your head.
You look quickly at your friend. In life, she was the biggest lover of sky you knew. Not you. You cowered beneath it.
Sky, she’d breathe, her neck thrown back.
Each of us terminates unto ourselves, you’d say. This blunting off, this mute-feeler world.
You were giddy with dissent. Still: you loved it safely, secretly, through the filter of her. You felt endlessly surrounded—until you weren’t.
But none of that matters now. Your hands fly off the wheel. The car races forward on its own, your friend beside you. And it is in this acceleration that some quick pluck happens, pinched fingers darting in to snatch some stuck stitch from your chest. And something larger zooms in again, so vast you can’t even see it—but you feel the shadow and the rip. And now you can see the earth from afar, all lit up from some unknown other place. Its familiar blues and tans, its dark shadows. It happens so quickly as you race by and by in your car—and you have never felt such awe, and you have never felt such joy.
Infinity is a spiral, a siphon, and where it deposits you seems, at first, like a blanket on the beach under the night sky. An empty stage, scuffed wooden floors. A deserted house, wind gusting through. Sand and dust under your fingernails, under your feet, blowing in your eyes and mouths, no ceiling, no doors. You are bared before the sky, absolutely. Unbounded, surrounded. Your dog sits quietly, looking out over the inky sea, breeze gentle in his soft fur. Your friend’s grubby white sneakers with red hearts on the sides shine dully under the starlight.
And the red is dull, and the red is dull, and wouldn’t you break this whole story open and run from it if the red were any brighter, if the red were any other way?
Alyssa Proujansky has studied fiction in Ithaca, London and New York. She was recently a runner-up in contests held by Atticus Review and Psychopomp Magazine, and a finalist in Third Coast‘s 2018 Fiction Contest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Third Coast, Columbia Journal, Hobart, Moon City Review, Atticus Review, Psychopomp Magazine, Flock and elsewhere. Her website is