Portrait of Alpha Orionis

The internet tells me that the star Betelgeuse has gone supernova and, because I am too panic-filled to fact check anything, I rush outside and search for my darling star, my bursting body. She keeps spitting up matter, or so NASA says, and so we have all been waiting for her to tear herself apart for the mountains to see.

But tonight, instead of making love to an astronomer’s breach across 700 light years, Betelgeuse supernovas red and paints ichor onto my pavement. I don’t have a telescope, but if I did, I’d be picking her bones out of heaven’s ashtray. I’d sort the vertebrae from the soot with a tweezer so I could put them all in a box I’d keep on my nightstand, and then I’d string them together like pearls so I could crown the empty space where she used to be.

This was a star, once, I tell myself as I imagine holding her little segmented spine in my palm. She took up space. At some point, she was more than just a body, more than bones clacking together. Stars smile too, you know. Her mouth and its delicate spackled smile dotted bunny teeth into heaven.

When Betelgeuse guts herself dark on my concrete, I instead have to scoop her limp carcass into a bucket and dig her grave with a garden trowel while Meissa and Bellatrix watch. They weep quiet halos while I gather her ribcage, her dark-filled stomach, her heart which I handle gently, tenderly. I drop nothing.

In the excess of my porch light, a man walks past with his dog, eyes forward. Cars drive by and don’t stop to offer help despite the mess of pulped starlight on my hands. Miles away, a woman points her camera up to the empty cavity in the sky and wonders to herself: wasn’t there something there before? A man at the top of a mountain points his telescope towards Betelgeuse’s place in heaven, expecting her to be present so he can pick her up for their date tonight, but when he finds nobody home, he curses her under his breath for standing him up and searches for Jupiter instead. This heartbeat was bigger than yourself, I want to tell my fallen star, but her weightlessness presses blood into my skin. Instead, I kiss her red remains and assure her softly: you were beautiful, you were loved, you were so so good.

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