Speaking of Stars and Static by Mary Buchanan

     Lewin Bormann CC




Speaking of Stars and Static

       “Small moves, Ellie. Small moves,” says Jodie Foster’s character’s father after tucking her into bed—played by David Bowditch Morse, a kind, cute, reastically vague 90’s father. As you write this, dissatisfied by failing to convey the nuanced emotions collecting like bees to an ungloved hand, your inability to write this memory in a way to you, Reader, that will do the thing all good words do: take you traveling. So you (as remembering writer) stop worrying and lean back into the grandmotherly floral guest room bed pillow you’ve been using as a back prop since early June. You’re writing your book mostly from bed, park benches, and a shaded brick patio deep into suburbia. For once in your life you can live anonymously, save for the birds, and you are grateful for it.
 
       Refocusing, you attempt at repossessing the POV of Child You in order to access her feelings and thoughts, because when you watched widowed Ted Arroway reassure his precocious young daughter about taking her initial steps towards dreams that lacked physical substance—ones that relied purely on mental stamina and radically stubborn belief—you were horcruxed. 90s movie scene as soul tie. For you, the scene had a kind of irrevocably imprintish and unresolvably permanent impact on you as an unusual little person, and later, as an unusual adult.   
 
       You watched it with your parents as a child. Y’all watched everything together, just the three of y’all forming a nuclear triangle between couch and brown leather recliner and the thick, black square and static purr of the television screen. The only thing which illuminates us in this memory is that heavy black box and its promised phantasmagoria. As with his little girl’s tentative radio emissions into space, you too felt like Ellie: you were looking for something or someone bigger than this world, and that’s why you’d turned to books instead of outer space, maybe. The possibility of the airwaves providing no fulfilling response to Ellie is too paralyzing to fully confront. 
 
       Something about Pensacola. Something about trying to reach out to Mom or Dad using tools she wasn’t fully sure of, bursting through, we hope, bursting right through Earth’s smelly, plastic atmosphere and out past Earthshine and cosmic rubble and into a stranger’s ear. In this moment, both you and Jodie Foster want to hijack syzygy for a greater collective potential that’s simultaneously based on personal core wounds in extraordinary and (sympathetically) average ways. The inability to communicate what you need to and in the right way and the right time. The wishwashy nature of wormholes. You are hoping for Ellie’s voice to find something greater than anything Earth could possibly provide. You hope, in this moment, that Ellie’s ghostly radio pleas will find someone or something that is not only listening, but cares. Cares in whatever form an alien species can. You suspect that love—the feeling itself—is mostly universal despite its many aesthetics. 
 
      You watched this movie before and after your grandmother’s death. Maybe that’s where you learned this move—begging to the ephemera with all your 98 pound, 11 year old might—you remember being spent afterwards. You were on the bathroom floor and staring up into the buzzing fluorescent overhead in your upstairs bathroom. You had just lost your grandmother, a second mother in many respects, and you had promised a piece of yourself in exchange for her to never leave you. This is what has formed a horcrux for you in Ellie’s character. She, too, reached out into the ether in the aftermath of her most significant death. Placid, red-eyed, determined to not let her guardian’s soul go, she stubbornly speaks to the stars and the static, looking for patterns, as her character says midway through the film, ‘in the chaos’. She is searching, and that’s something you’ve always found both inspiring and sexy in others.

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​Mary Buchanan is a writer and educator from Mississippi. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Mississippi, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Fiction from Louisiana State University, where she served as graduate prose editorial assistant for The Southern Review. Her graduate thesis, a hybrid novel, Rapunzel Has Insomnia, was a finalist for the University of New Orleans Publishing Laboratory 2018 Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Hobart, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Razor, Psychopomp, Flash Fiction Magazine, Third Point Press, Sidereal Magazine, among others.
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