"Star Eater" by Jamie A.M. / Passages North Journal
"I’m changed by every light gone out, just as the sky is changed."
Some of the best-known stories are allegorical. We continually resurrect George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” Aesop’s fables, from one generation to the next.
Why is that?
Certainly for their powerful themes. But also because the lenses we view these stories through are odd enough, are epic enough, are entertaining enough to make their deeply moral arguments digestible.
Preach to us directly about the perils of political systems, the poisonous blow back of revenge obsessions, or the proper way to interact with others in the world, and you’ll likely put your audience to sleep. Or have them hurling your work into the circular file.
Jamie A.M.’s “Star Eater,” in issue #47 of Passages North journal, is a great example of newly arrived allegory in full bloom. To my mind, it succeeds for two big reasons.
First, because of its seductive premise, which it lays out boldly in its opening paragraph. The narrator, a young woman named Ira, “lick[s her] fingertip and reach[es] skyward, dabbing up a couple stars like breadcrumbs, drawing them down to [her] mouth.”
She’s a literal Star Eater.
“I’m changed by every light gone out,” she says, “just as the sky is changed.”
As a sci-fi conceit, the story hints at its world-destroying-horrors enough to establish huge stakes, but it clothes them in the distance of a million light years away, in the casual and benign tutelage of a long-standing family tradition (mom is a star eater, grandma too). As Ira’s grandma puts it, “Your mama and I, our maternal line, we came from up there. From star dust a long, long time ago. Now, we have a special connection with them.”
Second, the real-world issue the allegory gestures toward is amorphous enough that it will speak to many different situations, and so to many different people. This is a very good thing. It’s a sure way of avoiding the trap of preachiness. More on that in a minute…
“Star Eater” is framed as a love story that tracks Ira’s relationship with a young woman named Mara. Like you and I, Mara is an old-school food eater. And she’s charmed and smitten with Ira’s special skill when it’s shared late one night, shortly after the two meet at college, on a camp out under the stars.
But Mara is soon tortured by the ramifications of Ira’s star-eating, and it comes between the two of them. In one wonderfully conceived scene, Mara returns home in the dead of night as Ira feigns sleep and forces a kiss to see if she can taste the lingering after-effects of stars ingested. This is something straight out of an Al-Anon meeting, a “is that liquor on your breath?” moment, and it gets to that second point mentioned above.
Star-eating, it seems to me, is a stand-in for any addictive behavior that negatively affects others as much as the eater, if not more. And Jamie A.M. lets the light of their story refract through the prism of that idea in very satisfying ways.
“The closest Mara gets to understanding is when she tastes it on my lips […] Lately, she makes her face screw up in disgust. I know it’s a performance, an assortment of gestures she runs through like a script to convince herself that what I’ve done is incomprehensibly vile.”
A similar dynamic plays out with Ira’s family. When she’s introduced to star-eating at the age of five, there’s something of the mom-running-a-whiskey-soaked-finger-along-the-gums-of-a-teething-toddler in it. Ira is warned by her mom: “don’t go star eating without our help, ok?”
Then later, at the age of thirteen:
“I only ate stars with the help of my mom and granny at the times deemed appropriate. This was typically in celebration of rare celestial events—a Blue Moon; the alignment of five or more planets; a passing of Halley’s Comet.”
A glass of wine at Thanksgiving won’t hurt anyone, right? It’s a special occasion!
By framing the idea of entire solar systems destroyed through the stealing and eating of a star—worlds obliterated, possible civilizations snuffed out at the whim of a single person—the thought of the downstream effects of addiction are given their due in a way that news reports on the effects of second-hand smoke, or DUI traffic fatalities, or intra-generational trauma never could.
But addiction is really too singular a label. Star-eating is really a stand-in for any destructive behavior. That makes “Star Eater” a universal story. One that wouldn’t punch as hard if not for allegory.
Check out how neatly Jamie A.M. makes the threat of that larger connection sing:
“If I could draw you down like a star right now and swirl you across my tongue, I would. […] And when I’d swallowed the last of you, no one would notice. […] They’d look around and see the billions of other glittering people and your absence wouldn’t matter just like the absence of the stars you think I’ve stolen.”
Mara proves herself to be the story’s moral center. Shortly after they meet, Ira refers to her “as a vibrant Polaris,” aka the North Star…a star that might be too big to eat. A star that, for sitting just above the earth’s rotational axis, appears stationary while other stars revolve around it.
For the writer looking to tackle allegory, “Star Eater” is a North Star of its own.
Passages North is published out of Northern Michigan University by a team of undergraduate editorial interns, volunteer graduate student and alumni editors, a graduate assistant, and English department faculty.
They “publish a variety of short fiction, poetry, short-short stories, creative nonfiction, and visual essays.” They “print writings from every demographic and from all over the world,” and “are an accomplice to LGBTQIA+ communities, Black Lives Matter, and abolitionist movements wherever they may be found.” They “strongly encourage BIPOC, disabled, economically marginalized, and queer and trans writers to submit.”
They are open for fiction submissions from 9/1-10/15 and from 1/1-2/15.
“Please send us your best short story,” they say, “1000 - 5000 words in length. The Passages North team has diverse interests; so send us your weird, your experimental, your speculative, your genre-bending, your brave, risk-taking work. We are looking for unique, impactful, powerful voices. We’d love to read stories featuring settings we’ve never seen, situations we couldn’t have imagined, and characters that pull us in for the ride. That said, we love the quiet ones too—the ones we’ve seen before but still hit and burn softly in the back of our brains for weeks. We want your entertaining stories and your emotional stories. A good way to win us over is through great dialogue, a propulsive first page, and an ending that either leaves us completely satisfied or begging for more. Don’t be afraid to send us your stories that hit close to home—we promise to treat them with care.”
Check out more of Jamie A.M.’s work at their website.
Thanks very much to Jamie A.M. and Passages North for the universally lip-smacking “Star Eater.”
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