Stargazers | A flash fiction story

90 of 💯

Maya rested her head on one of Jax’s stupidly large biceps, the distant stars staring back at both of them, specs of dust in a vast desert.

“Do you ever ask yourself why humans exist?” she said. “I mean, why are we here?”

Her voice vibrated through her skull, taking her question to her own ears. When she heard it, she realized this wasn’t a Jax kind of question.

He didn’t even spend a second thinking of an answer. “No,” he said.

Yeah, she thought. That’s on me.

“We’re here because we’re here,” he grumbled. “Because of everything that happened before.”

Maya’s mouth changed shape as she browsed through all the different things she could say in response. None was fitting. She deflated.

“We weren’t here,” Jax said. “Something happened. Now we’re here. End of story.” He said it as if it really were.

She sighed, her hand resting gently on his naked chest. A cool breeze swept the desert. She shivered. “Why, though?” The question escaped her, just a murmur.

The dark sky spread infinitely over them, and Maya felt minuscule under such immense indifference. The absence of an answer left her abandoned. Forgotten in the desert.

Jax’s deep black eyes pierced through her own and rummaged in the insides of her soul. Then his eyes departed from hers and landed on the black sky again.

“I don’t know why we are here, Maya…”

She sighed again, out of impotence. What did she want from him? How could Jax give her an answer no human had?

“But I’m glad we are,” he finished.

His voice was confident, his statement brief — an arrow flying straight at the target.

She searched his face, but there was nothing to be found there. His eyes were too busy in the dark sky, reaching for the impossibly distant stars to bring them down to her.

A better answer was an impossibility.

She cuddled under his gigantic arm and he rubbed her dark skin, pressing her body against his until her eye produced a small tear. The tear was a key and it opened the cage that kept her shy smile locked. Maya’s smile turned into an unbridled grin, and it ran freely in the desert while a massive fire burned in her chest — a bright star, just hers.

“Thanks, Jax.” She closed her eyes as another tear followed the first. “I’m glad we’re here too.”

< Purple | Stargazers | Features >

Fund a human! Support my writing on Ko-fi.