Bottling Starlight

I have a habit of leaving projects half-finished. The only more hateful chore than one which has yet to be started is one which has recently been completed, for the same apprehensions exist in both. But there is energy in lingering halfway through. It’s a call to action, or a method to maintain a constant sense of progress. Cleaning the six stories of my apartment building is the largest project I have ever undertaken, and the longest I have ever stalled.

Each day I mop, sweep, and scrub my way down from the top until my feet are aching and my eyes need some other stimulus than brown water running over cracked tile. So I stop on the second floor landing, and stretch out on the cold stone of the window sill. Across the alley there is an old brick tenement which I like to watch. It used to be an attractive rental, but its units are used for storage now, or as bragging rights for affluent suburbanites who will never step foot in the city. One active apartment remains, on the third floor. Faces revolve in and out.

You can imagine a lot about a person without ever interacting with them. There was Max, the man who I called Max, who left in the mornings to bike to his job in the veterinary office and returned in the evenings to call his long-term girlfriend Maria, who was studying abroad in Spain. There was Harriet, the woman I called Harriet, who made campaign calls in the morning, left for her daily Starbucks runs around noon, and went clubbing with her girlfriends most nights of the week. Those are the things which I remember about them, the activities they displayed which gave them value—jobs and connections and patronage of local businesses. These were the ways that they contributed to the balance of the world, the chores they would forever complete and restart, but I cannot say that I ever truly understood them. I cannot understand anybody who willingly chooses to leave their home for anything short of an emergency.

There are car accidents and muggings and trips and falls and falling debris and foreign germs and lightning strikes. I’ve run the numbers. I know the risks. There are ways to contribute while keeping yourself safe, and they come with side benefits. My reading list is fully caught up, I exercise by pulling a mop across five flights of an apartment building, and I even have a job answering calls for a sex line.

I stay logged into the service seven days a week and twenty-four hours a day. Calls wake me up in the middle of the night, or interrupt me while I’m soaping down a particularly filthy window, but I’m glad to take them because the folks who contact me need help. Of course, not many people intend to end up on my line. They don’t realize that the number on the website doesn’t connect straight to the sex workers, so my primary function is to act as a sort of secondary dialing service. Press one to join the party with hot singles in your area (eighty-five cents per minute); press two to request a home visit (prices vary); press three to speak with a certified mental health counselor (thirty cents per minute)...

I suppose if they were in the headspace for detailed instructions, they’d be in the Kindle erotica section, not dialing a number they found via a “singles in your area are horny to speak with you” banner ad. They’re people crouched beside empty beds, or giggling in the backs of small town bars, or failing to get comfortable in cramped hotel rooms with the television turned all the way up, but whatever the case, I am on the other end for whoever presses eight. “Eight for eight, that’s eight cents a minute to express your thoughts.”

State law only requires one party to be aware that a call is being recorded. I don’t work on the actual sex end of the sex line, so I don’t consider my library to be unethical. Listening back to my recordings helps distract me.

It’s been years since Max, Maria, or Harriet have lived in the old brick tenement across the alley. They got sick or fired or killed or whatever else happens to people when they stop showing up in the places you expect them to be. Nothing filled their vacuum but stillness and silence and the sort of disuse that cloaks apartment walls in cobwebs and leaves tepid pools of filth on the floor. But now there is Zeb. There is a child I call Zeb, who lives by himself and has to prop himself on his tiptoes to grasp the doorknob.

He has been alone in that apartment for days, pacing circles around the empty living room or trying to make himself comfortable in the dust where a bed should be.

I could cross the alley and knock on his door, but this might not be an emergency, after all, and my presence might not help.

I could call the police, but they have a way of making bad situations worse.

I could call child services, but they would likely call the police themselves, and I don’t want to make life any harder for this kid. It seems to be hard enough as it is.

I keep my headphones handy for moments like this.

Roger: My name’s Roger, I’m six foot three, and before you say anything—listen, alright?—before you say anything: Your name is Alice, you have curly blonde hair and size—

Me: Sorry, sorry, Roger?

Roger: What the fuck?

Me: Yeah. You might have pressed the wrong number.

Most of them end like that, in the sudden disappointment of my gruff drawl, but I get paid for the time. Eight cents a minute. What’s that for five seconds of conversation? 0.006 repeating. The service generally rounds that up to a full cent. Thanks, Roger.

The distraction helps me slide off the window sill and get back to work. I don’t head down to the first floor, where I haven’t been in years and which will be the chore of a lifetime whenever I get around to it, but to the second floor hallway outside of unit 213. Old buildings collect an astonishing amount of grime, particularly around cornices and doorframes. This is an important area.

An elementary teacher named Robin lives in 213. She wakes up before dawn to get to school on time, and though she has infinite patience with bratty kids, she cannot deal with anything amiss about her personal space. I pay special attention to her door, because for whatever reason it seems to attract dirt faster than any of the others. There are days that I scrub it multiple times, until my knuckles are red raw and the wood is gleaming, but it never looks exactly how it’s supposed to, in my memory, so I bring up one of my favorite recordings and give it another pass.

Me: You dialed eight for eight, what’s on your mind?

Anna: Is it night, where you are?

Me: Eleven PM.

Anna: It’s even later for me. I’ve been learning how to appreciate these bizarre hours.

Me: What do you like about them?

Anna: There is silence, and the stillness of oncoming movement not yet realized. It’s a great time to catch up on baking.

Me: What’re you making tonight?

Anna: Chocolate chip cookies. I have a weakness for the classics.

Me: Are you using the Saffitz recipe?

Anna: That… YouTuber?

Me: It’s a good recipe. Her cookbook is a lifesaver; I’m so sick of Googling recipes and having to scroll past a ten-page story about how the author met their spouse and how much of an appetite they have or don’t have. Just tell me how many eggs I need!

Anna: You say you’re sick of the stories, but what is a recipe, if not a story? The number of eggs, the amount of butter, and how many chocolate chips to drop into each scoop. That is why we make and share recipes, in much the same way as we make stories: to express ourselves, or to present a particular picture of ourselves to anyone who might care to look.

Me: I might not be your target audience there. My idea of fine dining is a turkey sandwich and a can of Beach Plum LaCroix.

Anna: That’s not the point. I had Taco Bell for breakfast.

Me: Your Taco Bell serves breakfast?

Anna: I thought they all did.

Me: Not mine.

Anna: And that is a story. A boring one, but a story nonetheless. And when we tell our stories, we move closer to the person we want to be. At least in the minds of those who listen to us.

Me: And what type of person should I think you are? The jealous hoarder of a chocolate chip cookie recipe?

Anna: Certainly not.

Me: At least tell me it’s not better than the Saffitz.

Anna: It is.

Me: Family secret?

Anna: Not at all, but it is a process that not many people believe in.

Me: If you’re about to sell me on an air fryer, I’m afraid you’re preaching to the choir. Or is it that you’re nabbing Keeblers down at Krogers and passing them off as your own?

Anna: No air fryer. No grocery store. I cook with the unadulterated power of the sun.

Me: So we’re talking extra crispy, then.

Anna: It’s not as brutal as it sounds. If you know how to control it.

Me: Control the sun?

Anna: That’s right.

Me: In the middle of the night?

Anna: You really want to hear this?

Me: I’m here to listen.

Anna: Eight hundred years ago a monk named Malb Hyacinth discovered the process of bottling sunlight, to use for radiance or heat, and inscribed it in his Grimoire of Small Cures. His followers have maintained the practice ever since.

Me: Sounds like this Malb dude was a real medieval Julia Child.

Anna: I don’t expect you to believe me, but this is a serious tradition.

Me: Listen, uh—

Anna: Anna

Me: Anna. I don’t mean to offend, I’ve just never encountered this belief system before.

Anna: It hardly counts as a belief system. More of a collection of tricks to make life easier.

Me: A grimoire of small cures, per se.

Anna: It feels good to talk with someone who’s willing to listen.

Me: That’s what I’m here for.

Anna: I could teach you. Anyone can do it.

Me: No need. My oven works fine.

#

Zeb hasn’t faded away or disappeared. He is there, across the alley, unaware or uncaring of the fact that he has turned his apartment into a stage by his refusal to draw his shades. Perhaps he isn’t able to. I don’t have to stretch to reach appliances, but I too struggle with minor impositions that do not bother normal people.

His parents must be paying for him to live on his own.

I imagine that Zeb doesn’t worry about food. He has a refrigerator stuffed with snack packs and deli ham, and there are no rules about how much he can eat. Every night he asks his mom about that, when they chat on Zoom, because he’s a well-disciplined boy who doesn’t want to break the rules, even accidentally. She laughs and tells him that he better eat all that his little stomach can hold onto, because when her flight finally comes in things are going back to normal.

I imagine that Zeb doesn’t worry about food. His aunt Yolanda left him a hundred dollars—a hundred dollars!—to watch her cat, which keeps him in personal pepperoni pizzas and Sprite.

I imagine that Zeb doesn’t worry about food. He’s got that condition that makes him look like a malnourished eight year old, but actually he’s a middle-aged account manager.

I have redoubled my cleaning efforts. The floors have never gleamed like they do now, and the air has never smelled more of pinesol. It’s an upward trend. It’s a momentum that I might build to get myself down to the first floor, where the wind whistles through the walls and there are deep scratches in the linoleum. From there I might simply walk out of the front door. And what would I find, out on main street? Through the window it appears not to have changed—there is still the pothole in the middle of the intersection and the red banner flung across the shop on the corner—but I cannot see the whole picture.

And if I left, one day, without warning or plan, then who would clean for Robin?

Dillhole #47: What the hell is this?

Me: You dialed eight for eight—that’s eight cents a minute to express your thoughts.

Dillhole #47: People call this line?

Me: You did.

Dillhole #47: As a joke, man. You have to listen to the robot lady talk for like five minutes before she gets down to you.

Me: Instructions are also included on the site.

Dillhole #47: Well I didn’t see that.

Me: My condolences. All time recorded is charged automatically to the card on file.

There are other ways I could fill my time. There’s media created entirely for that purpose, in fact, but it all becomes background noise. Queer Eye on Netflix or Chopped on Hulu or a manbaby crying about video games on Twitch, it’s all the same, and listening back to the recordings is easier.

I wish they would talk longer. There I am traipsing down the stairs, lost in memories surfaced by the cadence of half-forgotten words, making more progress than I have in years, when the recording ends, and in the stinging silence I am forced to take stock of my situation. Maybe I have begun sweeping the fourth floor hallway, or checking handles on the third, and I can play the next recording and continue on my way. Or maybe I’m standing on the second floor landing, staring down the steps at the mold that has collected on the first floor tile, and I am frozen. Once I have stopped, no more progress can be made.

Anna: Why do you answer so late?

Me: I pick up whenever calls come in.

Anna: Don’t you sleep?

Me: Here and there.

Anna: When I lose sleep, it is because of the things I failed to accomplish in the day.

Me: What is it that you wish you were doing tonight?

Anna: Cooking.

Me: Then cook! You were telling me about all of those bottles of sunlight.

Anna: There are only a handful left.

Me: How’s that? I thought bottling sunlight was so easy that even I could do it.

Anna: I’m certain that you could. All you need is the right sort of container—a vial, or a jar, or even a candle sconce, if you can find a suitable lid. A piece of yourself has to go inside. Malb suggests a strand of hair, but I haven’t had any for a while now. Fingernail clippings have never steered me wrong.

Me: You don’t have any hair?

Anna: Not for several years, no.

Me: Anything you want to talk about?

Anna: That’s one of those questions, I believe, that you’re not supposed to ask.

Me: Okay.

Anna: You bring your container outside, find a sunny spot, and clear your mind. You’ll have a ray of sunlight, simple as that. People are naturally attuned with the sun. It gives us warmth, it grows the food we consume, and we bathe daily in its light.

Me: People are naturally attuned to the sun, but not you anymore?

Anna: No. Losing that connection has felt like losing myself.

Me: So, what, you’re a moon person now, or something?

Anna: The moon’s light is a reflection of the sun. I have become a star person.

Me: At the risk of sounding pedantic, isn’t the sun also a star?

Anna: It is our closest star, and that is an important distinction. Its influence is overwhelming and inescapable.

Me: What does that mean?

Anna: I no longer have any energy during the day. I can’t work. I can’t cook. I can’t get out of bed.

Me: I’m going to give you a number that I want you to call once we’re done talking. They can help you with these sorts of feelings.

#

Dirt builds up in the hallways, rodents nest in the walls, and graffiti sprouts up wherever I’m not looking. It is particularly bad on the second floor, the product of bored teenagers or rebellious twenty-somethings working through their trust fund guilt. Sometimes I suspect they’ve used genetically modified spray paint which is only visible to my eyes. Why doesn’t anyone stop them? Why hasn’t anyone reported them, at least?

I am especially cautious while I scrub the graffiti off of the door of unit 213.

Robin, the environmental lawyer who lives there, cannot be woken in the middle of the night. She fights every day for our planet. She deserves to rest.

Robin, the environmental lawyer, gives so much to the world and requests so little in return. She has told me this, how she is not like the corporate lawyers or the hedge fund managers or the CEOs whose lives are bent around the sponging of resources. That is the only question worth asking of anybody: do they put in more than they take out?

Robin, the environmental lawyer, cannot step out of her apartment in the morning to see tags on her door. She has infinite patience for working the rotten gears of a corrupted system, but she will not hesitate to move out if she suspects her home is no longer safe.

Dillhole #92: Wa’n know what ya pervs would do t’me.

Me: Excuse me?

Dillhole #92: I’m tall, okay?

Me: Alright.

Dillhole #92: ‘n blonde, is that still a’right with you? ‘n I wanna know what ya would do t’me.

Me: I think you might have—

Dillhole #92: I’ll tell ya more if ya tell me more, babes.

Me: Right, the thing is—

Dillhole #92: ‘n there’s a lot more to tell, if ya get the picture.

Me: Okay.

The internet couldn’t kill the sex line. That discovery surprised me as much as anyone else, and I assumed that it was a small collection of diehards and aging hornballs keeping it alive. I was wrong. Some people prefer to talk to a human being before inviting them into their hotel room, and other people crave the rhythm of voice more than the vision of skin.

Phone calls are controlled experiences. You put in what you can, take what you get, and hang up when it becomes too much. It’s more inviting. It’s simple. You leave an impression of yourself behind, a fragment named Roger who is eternally searching for the curly blonde Alice, but most folks don’t consider that, or else they shrug it off as someone else’s problem. It’s my head that they live in now, and they’re not pretty. When a drunk woman calls a sex line to rant, I do not hesitate to assume her a moron. When a man calls to make fun of a service he himself discovered, I do not hesitate to assume him insecure.

When Zeb turns his head to see my face framed in the window of the second floor landing, he will assume that I am a pervert, or a recluse, or sickly. It hasn’t happened yet. He rarely looks up. He’s sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room, or sorting through papers, or reading comics, or sobbing into the crook of his arm. At one in the morning he wanders outside to sit in the tall yellow grass.

Zeb hasn’t considered the dangers inherent to the outside world. He doesn’t know about the car accidents and the muggings and trips and falls and falling debris and foreign germs and lightning strikes and all of the other calamities that happen when you relinquish control. Multiplied across the span of an average human lifetime, the risk becomes a certainty.

“Please listen to me,” I say, but the window pane is too thick.

“Please go back inside,” I say, but the alley that separates us is too wide.

Zeb has a flip phone pressed against his face. Tears are streaking down his cheeks.

They’re happy tears. His father’s long-delayed train comes in tomorrow, and he’s bringing a brand new bike to reward his brave son for waiting so long. Oh boy, was it a process getting that thing approved as a carry-on! It’ll be a story that gets larger every Thanksgiving.

They’re happy tears. His mother is telling him that he was accepted into Larimore Academy, the premiere preparatory school for young boys in the Illinois area. Whatever might have gone wrong in the past is fixed now, because he is in, and his future is set.

Broad horizons. No limits. Zeb’s hands are shaking.

Dillhole #1: Big-breasted Brazilian beauties.

Me: Excuse me?

Dillhole #1: Big-breasted Brazilian beauties.

Me: You pressed the wrong number.

Dillhole #1: Hey, dillhole, I’m not talking to you, alright? Now where are all my big-breasted Brazilian beauties tonight?

#

Years ago, before my self-imposed tenure as groundskeeper and amateur sex line psychologist, I woke in the middle of night to the shrieking of a fire alarm. I flung my arm out and was confused when it landed on the perfectly plump pillow beside my head. Her absence was still fresh. I curled into a ball and recited the reasons that fire alarms go off that aren’t related to building-consuming blazes: someone cooking a steak; a malfunction; a prank. When tendrils of black smoke worked their way underneath my front door I began listing the ways that fires self-extinguish.

It was a minor incident. The flame smoldered in the fifth floor hallway where it began, leaving behind soot that took days to scrub off the walls. I had to dismantle every alarm in the building to make them stop ringing.

While I cleaned I applied for my position with the service, and had my only conversation with the woman who runs the show. It was part training, part philosophical aside. She told me that most of their callers are looking for sex workers, primarily for house visits or video services, but that some chicken out at the dialing service and decide to test out their conversational skills before jumping into deeper water. She said that through this process a not-insignificant few realize that they’re more lonely than horny, and that they only want to chat. Folks reach out to the sex line who haven’t opened up in years. So they talk. A lot. They tell stories about their lives, even when they’re trying not to. They question themselves, if only by accident, and sometimes come to the conclusion that the conversations they’re having need to be taking place with a qualified professional.

Through this process, I am helping people. Despite my limitations, I am putting more into society than I am taking out. But some people are difficult. They retreat rather than engage, because for them it’s easier to lean into an invisible entropy than to face the fact that they’re no longer able to manage their own decay.

Robin, the package delivery lady who lives in unit 213, is fast asleep and hasn’t seen the tag on her door yet. If she had, she would’ve called me. I have a few hours to clean before the morning dawns and she has to be out of bed and in her truck, ready to deliver all those priority AM packages. People get rude when their knick-knacks come late. Her patience with them is inspiring—no matter how harsh, they can’t get under her skin—but when she’s home, her temper is unbalanced. Any clattering outside of her door will set her off.

That’s one thing she cannot tolerate: inconvenience.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. She works hard, after all, and deserves the comfort of competent company.

She deserves a clean door, which is proving particularly difficult. Where the spray paint is flaking off, I am leaving noticeably cleaner wood than the rest of the door. I will have to go over the entire thing again. But I don’t have time. I scrub harder, and harder, cursing the teenagers for their graffiti and myself for my racing heart, until Robin’s door swings open.

Cockroaches scatter from the intrusion of hallway fluorescence, leaving trails in the thick coat of dust on the floor of her abandoned apartment.

Anonymous: Fuck! Jesus, fuck!

Me: Are you okay?

 Anonymous: Shit. I don’t want to tell you my name, okay?

Me: That’s fine. Are you alright?

Anonymous: I don’t know, man, I don’t know.

Me: Try to breathe. Are you somewhere safe?

Anonymous: Yeah. It’s not… goddammit, it’s not anything like that.

Me: Tell me what’s going on.

Anonymous: I called her a bitch.

Me: Who did you call a bitch?

Anonymous: A lady from the other line. You know, the party room.

Me: Oh.

Anonymous: I didn’t mean to.

Me: It was just that, just ‘bitch’?

Anonymous: I’m never going to talk to her again, and I never said that I didn’t mean it. What if it comes back to her, me calling her a bitch, when she’s at the grocery store, while she’s just trying to choose a jar of pickles?

Me: They’re used to dealing with all sorts of things on that line.

 Anonymous: That makes it okay? They’re used to being treated like shit, so that means, what, that I should feel good about it?

 Me: I’m sure she took it as sexy talk.

Anonymous: I wish I hadn’t said it.

I imagine that I am a bored man cleaning his apartment and answering calls to pay the bills.

 I imagine that I am feeling down right now, for reasons that are significant but ultimately not more dramatic than what anyone else goes through, and I will pull through it in time.

I imagine that I am fundamentally the same person that I was a decade ago, and one morning my body and mind will realize that too.

I’ve chosen those imaginations before. I must have, or I would not be where I am now. Working for the sex line was meant to get me cleaning was meant to get me down to the first floor was meant to get me out onto the street where I might clearly see whatever problem it is that I can only glimpse in fragments, but it isn’t working and I don’t know how to fix it and, now, there is this child.

Zeb’s lights are on and his shades are open. He never turns to look in my direction, no matter if I jump up and down or wave my arms or shout myself hoarse against the glass.

There is skittering on the first floor. There are echoing footfalls and green sprouts struggling through cracks in the plaster. But I can open the window. Moonlight spills unfiltered onto the glimmering tile of the second floor landing, the perfect spot for a mason jar. What were Anna’s instructions? I’ll need a strand of hair. And to clear my mind. Think about nothing.

Nothing.

 Nothing.

The nothing black of the cap that I wore when I graduated from Northwestern Illinois University.

The black and red of the Audi that my parents bought me as a present.

The red of the sky that I drove under, a thoughtless year of absolute freedom.

The bubbling of the champagne on the night that I married Robin.

That’s not right. I never married Robin. I lived a free life, swapping partners like gloves, and I enjoyed every second of it. But I could have married Robin. Robin could have married me. Robin could have been stronger. I could have been better.

I can no longer remember her face. Her smile is lost in the detailed rigamarole that I memorized, or invented, about her morning routine: get to school before the first bell, get to the office before the coffee orders are taken, get to the truck before folks start complaining about their late packages. All I have is her voice, clear as a recording, telling me that she can’t handle it anymore.

#

Why did Anna call a sex line in the first place? I imagine her pacing around her house in the tiny hours of a new day, blinds cast open for the clouded moon, scrolling through her phone and clicking on a banner ad that reads “locals in your area are horny to speak with you.” That doesn’t seem right. I imagine her sitting on the corner of her bed, blinds shut tight, face lit only by the glow of her laptop, searching for anyone who might be awake to speak with her. I imagine her somewhere far away from home where she cannot order a coffee at the cafe or understand the news on the hotel television, desperate for anyone who will answer a call in the dead hours of the night.

That’s not correct either.

Anna: Hello, dear.

Me: Good to hear from you again. How’s it going?

Anna: Getting through another dark night.

Me: I’m right there with ya.

Anna: Do these calls help, or are they just work?

Me: With what this gig pays, I do my best not to think of it as work. What’s keeping you up?

Anna: My niece’s birthday is this Saturday.

Me: And you want to bake her a cake.

Anna: Yes, but not just any cake. It has to be as delicious as it is empowering. Thirteen is an important age.

Me: The problem is that you’re out of bottled sunlight.

Anna: You really have been listening.

Me: I’ve had an idea on that topic, actually.

Anna: Really? Did you read the Grimoire of Small Cures?

Me: No. But if the problem is that you can’t channel sunlight because you’re not a sun person, why not use starlight instead?

Anna: The night sky may seem like it is lit by stars, but that light is washed out by the reflection of our sun. It is impossible to isolate the starlight alone.

Me: This, uh, Marlboro guy wrote about all that?

Anna: You just want to hear me say his name again.

Me: It’s very old-timey.

Anna: Well, fair enough: He lived a very long time ago. Malb Hyacinth described how to call home an errant cat, how to soothe an empty stomach, how to capture a beam of sunlight, and, yes, the difficulty of attuning oneself to the distant stars.

Me: Nothing about free Kool-Aid?

Anna: You don’t have a lot of respect for this.

Me: Trying to be honest. That’s part of the deal.

Anna: Honesty and snark are different.

Me: Fine, fine. There must be positive elements to being a star person. Didn’t Malb write about that?

Anna: There is focus. Persistence. The cold sort of beauty. Communication.

Me: Communication?

Anna: The sun may talk to everything it touches, but it is always the same message. The stars—they whisper their identities across vast breadths of space.

Me: So if you got ahold of a beam of starlight, it might not help your chocolate chip cookies, but you could send a message anywhere you wanted?

Anna: Maybe. If you could ever capture it in the first place.

Me: You know that we’re talking about fiction, don’t you?

Anna: Here it comes.

Me: I want you to call the number I gave you. A qualified professional can help you work through these issues.

Anna: And what should I do in the meantime?

Me: Fix your oven and bake a cake for your niece.

This is the final form of the picture, the closest that I can get: Anna in her kitchen, surrounded by empty bottles, unable to cook, unable to bear the thought of inviting another person into her space, looking for some new way to connect. Something she’s never tried before.

She hasn’t called in weeks. I imagine that she found a way to sleep through the night. She found a medication that works for her. She started talking to a professional, and doesn’t need me any longer. Her magic came back.

These stories cannot change the world. My neighborhood is still abandoned. Zeb is still alone. I am still incapable of helping myself, let alone anyone else. But tomorrow there will be a total lunar eclipse. A break in the cycle, or another chance at momentum. The earth will drift between the sun and the moon, shielding the former’s light from the latter. For an hour the dark side of our planet will be lit more by starlight than by sunlight.

Everything is ready. I’ve written and rewritten a letter to Zeb—to the abandoned child who I should stop referring to as Zeb. Having a name made his situation more tolerable to me. I will learn the real one. I will be better.

Anna will call and show me how to use a bottle of starlight to deliver my message.