Thrust: A Novel

“It’s okay, Laisvė, love, the boat is also a whale. The floating boy is safe. The whale is descending. You’ll want to take the beautiful baby boy to the place where lilies meet the dawn. There you need to collect a different boy, a young man who is on the verge of creating new life — you have done so well, my love. You are so brave.”

“Who is this different boy? Is he a boy or a young man?”

“Everything about him is in his hands. He is not like other people. He doesn’t think like other people; he doesn’t speak or act like other people. He is misunderstood. He’s trapped in a time and place that cannot understand him. In that liminal space between boy and man. Like you are, between girl and woman.”

The sea floor undulates. Not violently. Gently.

“Is he like me?” My chest tightens. There’s never been a girl like you—that’s what my mother told me when she was alive. I don’t think she understood how heavy that would be to carry alone.

My mother stares at me. Her eyes glow very blue. Is it love, her eyes?

“A little,” she says. “Yes. The two of you both understand how water moves, how water will change the story. Sometimes you have to believe that people can yet be moved, even when it seems that they cannot. You both understand things differently, not the way other people do.”

Aster comes close to me now. He is still smiling. His smile is like a new word that has never been said. As if he’s entered a dream he never has to leave. A good dream. His smile is the answer.

I put my hand up to his face, his cheek. “Aster, is this your seizure place?”

“Laisvė, my perfect daughter,” he says, and I hear in his voice for the first time the absence of grief. I hear a giving way. “Do not be afraid. We are with you into the everything. We are in the air and the water and the earth, the plants and the animals. We are even in the night sky; we are made from everything in the cosmos. We arrive, we leave, we emerge, we dissolve. We are in the meteor, in this tsunami, in all the bones of whales on the floors of the world’s oceans. All the fish and creatures, all the roots and branches of trees, everything reaching into everything else.”

Is it love, what Aster says? I think this may be love. A great swelling of the sea that overtakes every story we have been told. The chance for a different story to emerge. Godless, and filled with animals and rearranged history pieces and the motion of elements.

“I love you. I think—” I say to them. Beautiful Aster and Svajonė.

The story of a star and a dream.