When the night dreams, the stars are for­got­ten and they are not put to bed. Some of them wan­der off and play and fade away when the much brighter sun shuf­fles in to take her place. Occa­sion­ally, a star would not suf­fer this igno­ble fate but instead pre­fer to jump to his death.

And this is one way of explain­ing why these pretty angels fall. But it can­not explain the beauty of the gen­tle arc of the shoot­ing stars, leav­ing a trail of dust­shower behind them.

The flower stands there in that gar­den of mid­night snow, and she can imag­ine noth­ing but stars. No bees nor the pollen they offer inter­est her; they are just insects after all — small, fat ambas­sadors of the teem­ing trade between plant sex and the honey industry.

Stars, they are all. Noth­ing else.

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Tired of all this dally daw­dle, the flower decides she can­not go on this way any longer with­out with­er­ing into a heap of sad, evil mould. She changes her­self, care­fully putting on new skin and curly hair and plat­form shoes. And of course, lip gloss the shim­mer of stardust.

She is still a flower under all that makeup; it’s not really hard to see if you try enough. But she’s all girl on the sur­face, this brand new bach­e­lorette. Sto­ry­tellers call her kind flower maid­ens, gor­geous crea­tures to behold if you did not know what lie hid­den beneath those short dresses.

And so she crawls out of the field over the fence into the nearby high­way, and hitches a ride to the city where all the bright lights are.

The jour­ney she cares not to remem­ber, only the des­ti­na­tion mat­ters she tells her­self. (And so often do we tell our­selves the oppo­site, when this is really what we mean. At least the flower is hon­est with herself.)

Once there, she sees ugly peo­ple every­where with their friendly faces and well-meaning hands she shies away from. She shud­ders. It is cold, and she should have worn more clothes. But she knows she looks good and that is the all and only.

Her star will not want some­thing that looks like it crawled out of a muddy field.

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She trawls the streets of the city, star­ing absently at the graffiti-plastered walls. A poster draws her atten­tion; it has such entranc­ing crea­tures hulk­ing from it, and they are smil­ing at her, call­ing to her. She knows she must go to them.

The club is like a sky itself; cir­cuits of neon scream­ing for atten­tion. This new light hurts her eyes, but she ignores it for what must be inside.

She goes in and finds it warmer, but darker too. Where are all the stars? She can­not see, only hear the thump-thump-humping both for­eign and new to her, but her body seems to like it. She wan­ders towards the per­fect sound.

There are many peo­ple in the cen­tre of the mys­tery. Naked flesh abun­dant and foul grins every­where. They move against her and caress her, but this time she allows her­self to be touched, to be wil­fully fon­dled. They are all stars. Bright, shin­ing stars.

Some­one slips her a drink, and while she finds the taste ran­cid, she doesn’t refuse when they offer her some more. Only this and more danc­ing and brush­ing against hard, soft bod­ies — sleek taut­ness she has never felt before — and she dis­cov­ers, to her delight, she likes it, quite.

She must be laugh­ing now; what other sound can it be, escap­ing with such aban­don from her lips?

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.

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Later, she can­not remem­ber what came after Before and before After; only fuzzy tele­vi­sion images remain:

Falling, but not down to earth. (Is there a ground here? Where’s the ground?) Arms grab her, carry her off on cheru­bic wings. Large, white ones with feath­ers that poke into your eyes, which seem too far apart.

Smells too strong, still makes her hun­gry, but not for food. She hasn’t eaten yet. Not all night. Hurl­ing, she finds out what that means.

Her lips are scrubbed gen­tly clean. Then some­thing warm rubs against them. And some­thing much warmer pries them open. Her mouth feels so hot.

More than bliss. More than sexlovegodmagic.

And then, the Later: The angel is gone. Her shoes are weary. The room they made their pass­ing par­adise is a mess of spill and shreds. Who knows what was the fab­ric that was torn; would that any­one throw off the sheets for the secrets that were shared under­neath; a half-hearted hunt for rasp­berry stains.

Did she write this story her­self, she won­ders. No one told her that to want and to get is not fol­lowed by to have and to hold. Noth­ing stays. Even the sun has to leave when the night’s turn comes.

She leaves the room. As she walks past the motel recep­tion­ist, a middle-aged man, bald­ing and beer-bellied, calls her by her real name.

She turns to look at this stranger with casual hatred. His face a mask of shock­joy, he is almost in tears. This unnerves her so much she quite begs him to stop, almost scream­ing at him. He sput­ters, man­ages to accede to her wishes, barely.

And he tells her a story, his story, the story:

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“Once upon a time, when every­thing was twenty years younger, includ­ing me, the sky was bright with dis­may, the stars were palled with ennui. There was noth­ing to do, noth­ing to see, noth­ing to touch and to hold.

“Then one day, the stars looked down at the earth, across the oceans to this green land, and they found this field in the mid­dle of nowhere, crim­son with the blush of angels. They had stum­bled upon beauty.

“The stars have never seen flow­ers before.

“They spent nights cry­ing over the dis­tance (and the days filled with dreams the scar­let of petals). Finally, the moon, wor­ry­ing that she’d hear no end of it if she didn’t do some­thing, agreed to allow one of her boys to go to the pas­sion­ate plains and find his love, their love.

“They held a com­pe­ti­tion, nights and nights till the moon had waned. And then the win­ner, the pret­ti­est, the bright­est of the stars, took his vic­tory leap and dis­ap­peared past the grey of the mid­night clouds.

“He fell to the city (he had no sea­men to guide him, while these ungrate­ful mariners had his brethren still to nav­i­gate by) and then he arrived at the con­clu­sion that peo­ple gen­er­ally liked the way he looked, and would offer him the world to spend time with him. Worlds that, alas, did not last.

“They would give me every­thing but their worlds.”

He looks at her again, and this time, she looks right back, deep into his eyes, and past all these years, she could see the spark still. The sen­tinel, sev­ered from his sta­tion, all for a promise that never was.

“Only the great­est gets to go. To come and find you flow­ers. You are the most beau­ti­ful things on earth. You are all we see, all we want to see, from above. Don’t you see that?”

The flower maiden can­not. She wants to just tear her skin off, to be crushed in a field with all the other worth­less things. Apolo­gies mut­tered, mean­ing­less and point­less now, she runs away from the urban cas­tle with its always occu­pied, always empty rooms.

.

.

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There are sev­eral ways this story could end. Per­haps as an allegory…

If the gigo­los and hus­tlers and cir­cuit cruis­ers are look­ing out for her, they will find her body lying crushed at the doorstep of their Eden. A with­ered rose, whose thorns were vio­lently plucked out. But they aren’t, and as they strut in and out night after night, soon mush she becomes and then nothing.

By then, their stars had burned out too.

.

Or maybe a fairy­tale finish…

And so the rose finds her way back to the field of flow­ers, and she stays there now with her sis­ters, never won­der­ing about the beauty of fallen stars again.

Ever after is so much sim­pler this way.

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But this is what I would like to believe hap­pens instead…

She realises she could never go back to the fields. Too much has changed for that. She has changed. But she can­not live the life she has just indulged in either.

Some­how she finds a job in a book­store, some­thing she enjoys and is good at. She man­ages to take an anthro­pol­ogy course as well at the nearby uni­ver­sity, but she is unsure if she will fin­ish it as she finds peo­ple more fas­ci­nat­ing than the dry, sci­en­tific study of them. She thinks maybe she’ll write some day.

She goes out some nights, and dates. The guys are nice, and she doesn’t need to wear those plat­forms and curls no more. These days, she wears flats and her hair is straight and shorter. She’s mostly given up being a girl.

Maybe he’ll grow a goa­tee too, but that’s too obvi­ous, and he is going to get his eye­brow pierced tomor­row any­way, and he has to see whether that looks okay first.

The den­tist from last week­end has called, and maybe they could be some­thing, but he is not count­ing on it. The boys are nice, but noth­ing stays. But he’s not exactly heart-stricken by this. For he still believes.

Some­one will, one day.

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POCO HOMEMADE, CAFE & ATELIER • 1 Lorong Kurau, Bangsar, KL.

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Copy­right © 2001, 2010 Kenny Mah Ying Fye.

I first wrote this for my friend Sarah Stone, one cold win­ter evening in Munich. The com­puter lab wasn’t warm much, but it was bet­ter than all the snow out­side. The clos­est I could feel to my friends who were miles and con­ti­nents away was through email, and for Sarah, a story.

Then I saw two lit­tle girls play­ing in the snow, beau­ti­ful and care­free, and I won­dered how long inno­cence could last.

Now, almost a decade later, I spend a slow Sat­ur­day after­noon flirt­ing with but­ter­fly girls who remind me of the flower in this story, and telling tall tales to a boy who reminds me of the inno­cence of the girls in the snow, and the flower after she’s cho­sen to become a boy, a real man. So, I’ve rewrit­ten this, a lit­tle, for the but­ter­flies and the stars, the flow­ers and the girls, and the sweet boy… in all of us.

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