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The girl with the violin knows more melodies than she can name.
Bkornblume only recognize Vivaldi’s seasons — everyone knows those first bright notes spilling forth from the violin, pouring out long, serene bows of untroubled skies and roses aglow with warm sunlight. But the girl knows other melodies too, some somber with the rumbling of an encroaching storm, others serene in their low-pitched melancholy, others still, fast-paced that would sound far grander with the backing boom of percussions and rippling brass. (There were only so many things that you could get at a record store down in East Berlin, after all.)
She notices the girl traipsing her way through the Suitcase with all the subtlety of one of those lazy summer sunsets — slow and floaty, with all a ballet dancer’s practiced grace yet never taking center stage. No, the girl always lingers in the background, her expression a contemplative constant listening to the ocean flow of chatter sweeping through the Suitcase’s halls. Where many reflect, this girl glows.
Bkornblume wonders if anyone else has been struck by how lovely she really is.
The girl’s long-lashed dark eyes glimmer with a quiet cheeriness; long hair — dark blue, with flashes of pale yellow — bound away from her face with white ribbons and star-shaped clips. There is an inhuman air of longing about her; she looks as though someone filled a jar with starlight and molded it into human form, a Galatea borne of the galaxies. Something about the glimmer of the girl’s heart-shaped face reminds her of all those nights she made her way up the creaky fire escape ladder to squat on the cramped balcony, shoving her reddened, ungloved hands into her pocket to stare up at the night sky and squint at the stars not blotted out by light pollution or factory smog. She reminds Bkornblume of the telescopes she couldn’t afford, of solitude between her and the world above.
There was a book Bkornblume found in an empty building a few years ago. Its paperback spine was cracked, yellowed pages malleable under her fingers and prone to tearing; the ink used for the illustrations bled through. The book — Der Klein Prinz — told the story of a boy who descended from the stars and kept the pilot narrator company. He hailed from an asteroid with a talking rose and had set off in search of brighter life beyond the scope of his little world. It sat alone on her shelves throughout her high school years; the Stasi never found out and therefore never managed to shred those worn pages made of starlight and talking foxes.
Whenever she looks at the girl, she sees the prince from an asteroid.
She awakens to the sound of rain dripping against glass windows and soft opera music playing from a gramophone. This is not her near-bare bedroom back home in Berlin, with cracks spiderwebbing their way on the walls and sunlight pouring in too bright through the wide windows. Nor is it the small, clean office she quietly scribbles away at Stasi paperwork in, where she listens to the ticking brag of the clock in the corner and voices crackling on static. She is curled up across the two spots of a rather plush, plum-colored loveseat, where slim fingers drape a white woolen blanket over her—
“What are you doing here, stranger?” She sits up and pushes newly messy gray hair away from her face.
The girl with the violin stares back down at her.
“Oh.” Some dashing, efficient spy I am, falling asleep moments after getting back from a simple mission to deal with some critters. “Perhaps it’s not a stranger who entered the room here after all.”
She provides Bkornblume with an apologetic little smile, pulling away from the couch. When her hands find the violin bow, she plays a set of short, somewhat regretful notes.
“I’m sorry for startling you, Miss. I’ve said before — when that Vertin girl first recruited me, in fact — that I’m not the best at dealing with visitors, and… well, if you have a job like mine, you need to keep your eyes and ears wide open.”
The girl’s smile loosens. She closes her nebulae eyes and begins to hum, hands clasped together. As Bkornblume strains to make out the tune in the muffling of her soft, silken voice she finds herself singing a little under her breath — yes, she knows this song, “Weißt du wieviel Sternlein stehen?” from all the nights her mother would pull up the covers and sing to her, squeezing her little girl’s hand as she eased her to rest when she was afraid of monsters in the closet creeping out or thunderstorms rattling windows hard enough to make the glass shatter. And she would always be lulled to sleep with thoughts of trying to count and pluck all the stars from the skies above.
“I see, I see. You were only trying to help, weren’t you? You saw how tired and undignified I looked sprawled out on the couch and felt like I deserved a touch of warmth while I was asleep.
Nodding.
Bkornblume draws up the blanket to her chest with a gloved hand. “Thank you. I was very tired, and it was nice of you. If I go back to sleep in a few minutes, then, it’ll be with the blanket you brought me.”
(After all, she knows that people choose to be cruel. It’s easier for most people to be cold and hurt, she supposes, because they are hurting and, in the moment, they want to drag other people down so that they are broken and hurting alongside them. And maybe she could have done that, too — yet she still finds herself sneaking flowers into woodpecker houses and humming lullabies over monitors to sick babies because she cannot let go of all the things her parents taught her.
Maybe she’s a fool for thinking that way.)
“Since you’re no stranger to me — well, I’ve seen you around the Suitcase before in the background — do you have a name I can call you?”
Bkornblume expects another violin piece, or a humming of a chorus as a hint. To her surprise, the girl answers with, “Voyager.”
“Would you mind giving this package to Miss Voyager for me?”
Vertin looks up from the book she reads, staring up at Bkornblume with one solemn, pale green eye. She’s watched her shifting around on the armchair this evening, insistent on not having both feet on the floor while the black tea perched on the little table next to her grows lukewarm.
“Hm?”
“That girl with the violin. The one who reminds me very much of the character from Der Klein Prinz. I have a gift I’d like to give her.”
“Of course. I’ll be sure to give her your package next time we meet.”
“Just don’t tell her it was from me. After all, I’d like to keep a low profile…”
“I’ll do my best.”
(The package is crammed with Alpine milk chocolates and dense marzipan, wrapped up in a plastic bag secured by a periwinkle ribbon — and a cornflower snuck in too, because maybe Bkornblume wants to be acknowledged after all.)
She arrives at Stasi with a dandelion squeezed into one hand, its fuzz all blown away by her breathing and the chill breeze from today. Back to sitting within silent walls, skimming over reports of every person’s little twitch and breath, transcribing what she can from between the crackling static of the radio. In some ways, Bkornblume is almost relieved to be assigned for more tasks here — something about the thought of Voyager unwrapping the little bag of candies she bought for her with her own pocket money makes her hands twitch with anxiety.
Back to being SCH KA/123456, listening to hushed arguments from families whose bellies are empty of food and hope. There’s only a few packages of dry pasta left, and teabags that won’t do much good with the dirty, bitter water flowing from their kitchen sink.
“What about Liesel — she started crying last night when we told her we only had a little bit of applesauce left to eat!”
“There’s not all that much at the supermarket. Too many shelves bare of food. There’s really not much else we’ve got
“Perhaps we can—”
“No. We can’t. Think of the trouble you’d land yourself in. You already make barely enough money as is.”
“Poor hungry family,” Bkornblume mutters to yourself, “stomachs gaseous with hopelessness. I… well, it would be really nice if I knew how to change it…” Maybe I can ask Bunny Bunny for some cans of soup to deliver?
“Have we tried asking the neighbors?”
“There’s not that much, it’s not like that they’re any better off than us now, either. I’ve had to go to sleep listening to little Franz wailing because of how hungry he was.”
A terse pause. Then:
“There’ll be a full moon tonight.”
“Well, we’ll have to try with what we have in terms of food. And… a blue moon? Really?”
“I wonder what this blue moon means to you.”
She thinks of Voyager again, who traipsed in a spattering of stars from somewhere far beyond Earth’s moon. How did you do it? She wonders. How did you live on this planet for so long and not feel so shackled by how much you can’t do?
When she sees Voyager upon re-entering the suitcase, the first thing that catches her attention is her hair: there are the faded, indigo petals of a cornflower tucked against the white ribbons and sparkling hair clips smoothing everything back.
“There’s something decidedly floral about you today, Miss Voyager.” Bkornblume pulls at her scarf, grateful that the soft fabric can hide the uncertainty of her expression. “What sorts of meadows did you travel to to decorate your hair that way? Or is there a little garden you have that you haven’t spoken much of?”
She spins around a little, the clicking of her black shoes muffled by thick carpeting; a knowing giggle bubbles from her lips as she extracts the little flower from her hair and presents it in Bkornblume’s direction — not a gift, but as an act of recognition. So it would seem that she was able to trace who was responsible for giving her that little ribbon-wrapped bag of sweets, even without so much as a note attached to it. But Voyager’s eyes do linger even on the most innocuous little details of the world.
“Well, then… I suppose your anonymous benefactor isn’t nearly as anonymous as she would have liked to be.” But I was the one who’d slipped in that same little flower, Bkornblume thinks, so I did know. I usually try my best to be more inconspicuous. “What are your opinions, then, on Alpine milk chocolates? The sort you spend months saving up pocket money for as a young child. Grown-ups tend not to like them because they think it’s too sweet, but it certainly stands above the waxy American stuff that’s easier to come by. I’m curious as to what someone who’s from another galaxy might think.”
Voyager closes her eyes, licking her lips as though trying to catch the last remnants of sweet chocolate. “Mm!”
“I see, I see… are you the sort of person fond of sweet things in general?”
She starts to hum something; Bkornblume catches it as the Spanish hot cocoa number from The Nutcracker — the sort of silky, decadent cocoa flavored with cinnamon and fresh, pale milk.
“Hmm, so you’re at least the sort of person who likes sweet chocolate. Your benefactor will have to keep this in mind…”
Bkornblume receives a gift the day after, presented to her by Vertin: a thin sheet of packaging wrapped over something flat and round, tied together with simple twine. There are so many stickers placed on its plain brown surface, from little stars with glitter that rubs off on her gloved fingers to smiley little bunny rabbits to cartoonish slices of pizza with sunglasses. Though she has not checked its contents, she has a guess as to who it’s from, even before she checks the neatly folded note slipped beneath the twine keeping it all together.
With tense fingers, she unfolds the note to read what message it contains on its page.
Hier ist ein Lied für dich.
The signature is a jumbled mess of static and stardust, any transcript of a name lost to the distortion of smeary black ink. Inside the sheet is a vinyl record — new, with how sleekly black it is, light in her hands. Could it be, Bkornblume thinks as she sets the record beneath the needle and sets to play it, you’re doing the same thing as me?
She finds herself guided into a melancholy drizzle of violin strings — “Ständchen”. The song Bkornblume would play until the needle was worn out, curled up on her side staring at the dark clouds gathered in the night sky until she fell asleep. It is a song that wrapped her in an understanding embrace as food shortages made her stomach clench with hunger, as tears burned her eyes. And now the girl who drifted in from so many starry miles away lets it wrap her up again with the recording of each velvet note drifting from beneath her bow.
“Are you the traveler from a faraway world who gave me that gift?”
Voyager halts her waltz, the fizzy bundle of starlight she’d been keeping as a duet partner vanishing. Bkornblume thinks she recognizes the song trickling from the gramophone — maybe something she’d heard classmates singing out of tune to one another as they ran through the streets playing hopscotch or drawing chalk on concrete — its place here makes her realize how stringent and elegant its every note really is.
“I got to have a seat with Schubert the other day — ‘Ständchen’.”
Voyager’s only response is to give her a knowing smile.
“Then which birds are singing high up in the trees tonight?”
“An der schönen blauen Donau,” she says. Then she stretches out her hand.
When Bkornblume steps into dance, she mutters “step, two three, step, two, three” under her breath, just the way her parents did. She is fragile and unsteady where Voyager is smooth and lighter than any cloud, the simple skirt of her frock swishing about her legs. But her fingers radiate warmth even with the gloves Bkornblume wears. For all of the times she accidentally steps on Voyager’s foot or spins too much, she finds herself laughing. If she falls that’s okay. Voyager will wait for her to fall back into orbit once more.
As a little girl, Bkornblume watched many movies; the American residents of the suitcase looked at her with wary surprise whenever she brought it up and she still doesn’t quite know why. If there was an extra mark in her pocket, she would call out that she was going to see that new movie, Mama, and make her way down cracked concrete sidewalks to the little theater. And she would cram into the seats and watch: from grainy black-and-white dramas where all of the actresses’ face seemed to possess a soft glow, to romantic comedies painted in dreamy technicolor. Sometimes the movies were new, sometimes they were old, but they were a part of her lazy weekend afternoons or Friday nights like they would have been for any American youth. She has memorized the rules for each and every universe kept in moving frames since, every genre.
Bkornblume is not so privy to the rules of horror movies, however.
She bites on the inside of her mouth as she makes her way back into the Suitcase with muddied boots and a gash in her shoulder that tingles with itchy poison. Horropedia had given her a sincere smile when he’d told her she would make for an excellent final girl, but that does not lessen the dirty scabs showing on her knees through her torn tights, nor the pain in her ankle as she hobbles back inside to collapse onto the nearest armchair. Work as the support staff is always tricky, she thinks to herself, but no one tells you what to do when you’re face-to-face with a deer dryad in the middle of a slasher movie. I always avoided those movies because I like sleeping soundlessly at night, then again, maybe after today it was for the worse.
“Verdammt,” she mutters, “Verdammt, verdammt, verdammt—”
Voyager enters the room looking pristine and floaty as ever, tilting her head a little at the injured Bkornblume curled up on the armchair.
“I was never one for horror movies,” she says. “Served me for the worse during our little trip down to Green Lake.”
“Hmm…”
The feel of her naked palm on her cut shoulder already soothes the throb of itchy poison that Sotheby had managed to neutralize the worst effects of. Bkornblume closes her eyes and breathes, forcing herself to concentrate on the touch of cool, gentle skin. Then, Voyager starts to hum: some sort of little tune that would fit creeping its way out of a music box, porcelain ballerina at its center spinning in stiff circles to every dulcet note. She inhales and exhales, her every pulse and breath marching to the pace at which Voyager hums.
It is only towards what she thinks might be the song’s end that she notices the itchiness of her wounds dulling.
Bkornblume opens her eyes. “Thank you.”
Voyager only responds with a humble little nod.
“There was a time where I fancied myself as a good radio presenter if I had the opportunity,” she says. “Maybe you heard about it during my encounter with Pandora Wilson? I think you would make for a better radio presenter than me — if your mere humming can ease poison itches, maybe it could ease sick, crying babies or the stress in listeners’ hearts.”
Voyager smiles and begins to hum again.
“Vater, when did you first realize you were in love with Mama?”
Her father sets the papers he had been writing aside. He is a wiry man, with gray hair like hers and creases at his eyes and mouth and cheeks — backlit by dusk’s rose-gold sunlight. She will oftentimes find him still hunched over his work by the light of a desk lamp even after she returns from Stasi, creeping into his little office to plant a kiss on the top of his forehead before she goes to brush her teeth.
“Why do you ask, Leni?”
“Can’t a girl casually ask what love feels like? That is to say: No reason in particular.”
“Well…” he pushes up his glasses, which have been slipping down his nose, “I already told you that your mother and I met in around high school, back in the late fifties — it was at some sort of party, I noticed her because she had sewn a little dachshund onto the edge of her skirt, like those skirts girls wore in America back then.”
“But that’s when you first laid eyes on her, Vater. Did you know you loved her then?”
“I knew I would like her. But love… that’s harder to tell. Hmm…” she watches him scratch his head in thought. “Ah, I think I can remember. There was a terrible snowstorm back in our college years, and the heater had broken. We had to bundle up in all of the blankets and sweaters we could find laying about in her house, and we only really had chicken broth and a little bit of bread to tide us over for the night. But we read books together, and your mother read aloud. I remember she was resting her head on my shoulder — hadn’t washed her hair for days, there were bags under her eyes — yet her voice was so warm and sincere, and I could only look at her and think she was the brightest, prettiest woman I’d ever seen.”
Her mother has the kindest, gentlest voice she’s ever heard; it’s a voice that glows with the steady cadence of affection, deep and blanket-like in its comfort whenever she’d read to Leni (not yet Bkornblume, not back then) at bedtime. Even after the time she was sent to the hospital for thyroid cancer, the deep, bittersweet quality to her voice remains under the raspy inflection she’s acquired.
She thinks of Voyager, whose humming is like liquid crystal — soft but high and clear. She thinks of how Voyager saw her covered in cuts and bruises after the events at Green Lake, her hair dirty and knees stinging with scrapes. She thinks of the girl who floated here from the stars.
“I see…” Bkornblume says. “Thank you for telling me that, Vater.”
She finds Voyager on her way back home from the Stasi office when the sun has begun to sink below the horizon, everything warmed beneath rose-gold twilight. This princess of the stars stares at spray-painted flora, creeping along the wall in dried splatters of blues and purples, clinging to gray bricks under a bridge. “I’m out and about in this part of Lichtenberg,” she’d said, “if you’re ever feeling the urge to visit me, my friend.”
“This is the most beautiful flower to me on Earth — well, a rendition in striking graffiti, of the kind I picked my namesake from.”
Voyager turns around. The starlight-frosted stockings of her pristine uniform are splattered with flecks of mud at her ankles. “Cornflower!” she says, gesturing first to the graffiti and then to Bkornblume.
In Der Klein Prinz, the little boy had loved a rose so dearly on that tiny planet he oversaw, hadn’t he? Perhaps…
“Well, you must have much more splendid flowers to look at among the stars. You even get to see your own suns wither and crumble and then bloom all over again.”
She shrugs.
“Do you have a favorite flower? Is it something like our roses here? Or is it something that’s invisible to earthly eyes like mine?”
“Andromeda.”
“The princess who almost became a sea monster’s lunch?”
Voyager shakes her head. “Milky Way, too.”
Perhaps she has a point… If Bkornblume squints just right the unfurling sprays of starlight she remembers reading about in slick high school science textbooks do look like the curved petals of a flower.
“Mama, what moments made you realize you loved Vater?”
The two of them are huddled over the kitchen sink, washing the dishes from tonight’s dinner. Bunny Bunny had offered her alongside the other arcanists lingering around some plastic containers crammed with meatballs and soft Italian bread from earlier today. It was the first night in weeks she’d been able to sit down with her parents and eat, between her time in the Suitcase and her work at Stasi — there was something so strange about cramming down bites of meatball sandwiches, letting the juice drip down her chin until Mama reminded her of her manners and gestured for her to use her napkins.
Her mother wrings soapy water out of her sponge. “…Didn’t you ask your father that question some days ago?”
“I asked him when he first realized he loved you, not when it happened all over again. He said it was when you were reading together during a snowstorm, during your college years.”
“Ah, I remember that night very well. As for me, when I realized all over again. Hmm.” She picks up a plate to towel dry. “There are many moments, but if I were to pick one out in particular… Leni, do you remember how in your last year of high school I had to go to the hospital for my thyroid cancer?”
She had received the news in the middle of class. Bkornblume had to dryly mumble that she needed a moment to step outside, stomach turning at the image of her mother hooked up to needles and tubes in a hospital bed. Her mother recovered, but the raspiness to her voice still indicates that a tumor once bloomed near her throat. “Yes.”
“Well, I’d been reading a book just before I was hospitalized, and I didn’t have much chance to read it while recovering. I was tired and cranky even after it was clear I would live. So, your father packed up this book the moment he was permitted to visit me and sat by my side to read aloud the rest of the story to me long into the night. I felt like I could cry, it made me feel that much better. And that was when I fell in love all over again.”
She emerges from the silvery waters of some hazy dream with no bruises or torn hems, yet still rubbing at where phantom pains tingling at her wrists. Voyager clutches her violin as though it’s some lifeline. Her breathing is strained, this trance she laid down to for practice renders her every step coltish and shaky within the brighter waking world. And the Pavlov Foundation staff who set up this session shrug, that it’s natural for an arcanist — especially an alien like her — to react so sensitively, it’s not a cause for any alarm.
Ah yes, Bkornblume wants to tell them, how comforting your show of apathy must be — surely, any alien or arcanist we encounter would react the same as any human left to their own devices through sleepwalking.
Bkornblume finds her curled up in one of the plush, olive-green loveseats scattered about the Suitcase. Voyager stares out at the window watching raindrops chase each other, forcing herself to steady her breath. Her hands shake. She is breathing in tandem to the soft music playing from the gramophone, this one some sort of tinkling evening melody to counter the damp, blue gloom of this artificial outdoors.
“Those who shrug off the possibility of our extraterrestrial friends feeling pain differently aren’t the brightest stars in the sky.”
Voyager looks up, eyes attentive.
“After all, I’ve had sleepwalking spells before even outside of Artificial Somnambulism sessions, and I would wake up with my chest aching from where some demon had tried to suffocate me in my subconscious mind. But we’ll leave our friends Freud and Jung to deal with the specifics of whatever all that meant, I think.”
She giggles, and then winces. “Ow.”
“I’ve been there, my friend. Now then, I’m no medic nor therapist but I do want to help you feel better. Should I get you a glass of water? Fix you a snack — some peanut butter and crackers, maybe?”
Voyager shakes her head, but her smile returns — not as pronounced, but ever present.
“I could read to you, maybe?” Bkornblume’s suitcase is heavy with books as well as Stasi paperwork. Sonetto had lent her a handful from the Foundation’s collection; I did my best to find some German translations of things you might enjoy, she had said. “I did talk about my ambitions to work as a radio announcer, after all. For now, this will have to do and I’m perfectly alright with it.”
Bkornblume sits down and lets the contents of her suitcase spill out: only a scant handful of slim books, enough to carry without straining her arms. As she parses through the selection to display the titles, Voyager points to one in particular.
This book is a slim white volume written by an Italo Calvino — Cosmicomics. There is a picture on the right side, of a rather smirky-faced crescent moon tied above a boat lodged halfway into glossy black ocean. Bkornblume had kept telling herself she would read it later when she had the time, but never did.
She clears her throat and begins.
“At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away: the tides that the Moon herself causes in the Earth’s waters…”
“…but you have to add all the stuff we had to keep piled up in there: all the material that was to serve afterwards to form the universe, now dismantled and concentrated in such a way that you weren’t able to tell what was later to become part of astronomy (like the nebula of Andromeda) from what was assigned to geography (the Vosges, for example) or to chemistry (like certain beryllium isotopes). And on top of that—”
Bkornblume pauses. There is a warm body curled up next to her, head fallen on her shoulder. Voyager’s form is loose in sleep, the tight worry in her earlier expression all but smoothed over. She is serene in rest, rocked to sleep by words that act as a clumsy but human hypothesis about the home she left behind all those years ago.
I oughtn’t get up. It would be rude to wake her, especially after the unpleasant day she’s had.
This is not the ravenous, fiery love from dramatic plays she studied in high school, there is no ichor that runs burning gold. This is the sort of love her mother and father spoke of, that quiet and airy comfort where even at your most tired you are able to find relief in the other’s sprawling smile, or the gentle cadence of their voice.
“Leni, we’ve noticed that you’ve been really on edge lately.”
Her parents have gathered her up to sit down in the living room half of their living-and-dining room. She sits down on the worn, lumpy couch to stare up at them, hands squeezed into her lap. If only she had her scarf so that they could not see the concern furrowing her face nor the dark circles under her eyes, but her beloved blue scarf has long since been left to hung up on a peg alongside her coat when she got back earlier tonight.
(It can’t be about Stasi. Her parents know — parents always have a way of knowing — but they have never brought it up.
“What do you mean by ‘on edge’, Vater?”
“Well…” He adjusts his glasses. “Not quite ill-tempered, but very nervous and very longing for something at the same time. It’s like there’s something you want very badly, but you’re worried it might be out of your reach. And if it’s something serious, we want to at least make sure that everything’s okay and see if there’s anything you’d like us to do to help.”
“You turned eighteen in March,” her mother adds on, “and with you being an adult — a young adult — it’s natural there are things you’d want space for. But we just want to ensure it’s not anything that’s hurting you.”
Bkornblume takes a deep breath. I think if I give them the broad strokes of it, they’ll understand.
“…You’ll recall how I started work at the Pavlov Foundation some months ago? And that even earlier than that, I explained to you my more sapphic preferences in romance?”
Her parents nod.
“There’s a girl I work with. She feels like the character from Der Klein Prinz come to life, since she comes from a faraway galaxy. I have worked with her for months, and read aloud to her, danced with her, and she even showed up to look at some of the fairest graffiti flowers here. I like her. I like her a lot. But I’ve no ways to know if she feels the same way — she’s not exactly a chatterbox and prefers to use her violin music to make her points known. So how do I tell her my feelings? Would she even understand? She’s certainly understood me as a friend up to now, but if I try to tell her I see her as even more than that…” Bkornblume sighs. “I don’t know. I’ve been losing sleep about this for nights. And I know you didn’t always need words to know you love each other. It’s different when that person doesn’t really talk so much to begin with.”
“Why doesn’t she talk that much, Leni?” her mother asks.
“Well, I told you she’s from the stars beyond. I don’t know where, but while she can understand many of Earth’s languages it’s harder for her to say much beyond an occasional handful of words.”
“Then give her time and give yourself time. If she loves you back, let her say it in her own way — you should work to understand her just as she’s worked to understand you.”
“And what if she doesn’t?”
“Leni—”
“What if she sees me as only a friend?”
“Leni.”
Her father gives her a solemn look and she quiets down. When he continues, his tone is firm but warm with understanding.
“I’ll not sugarcoat it: rejection hurts, especially from someone you’re in love with. It will be hard to move on from, especially with first loves. And just as you’re allowed to feel hurt and sad, this girl is allowed to not love you in return. She exists as someone else outside of you, and if she turns you down, you should treat her with the same good manners and respect you’ve approached her with before. As your parents, we can offer you a shoulder to cry on if it makes you sad, but nothing more than that.”
“You could offer me some Lübeck marzipan as a treat if all else fails.”
He laughs, sitting down next to Bkornblume on the couch to ruffle her hair. “Alright. We can try to pick up some marzipan for you if you’re turned down alongside the hugs and words of sympathy.”
“Thank you, Vater.”
Her mother joins them, scooping Bkornblume into her arms so she can cradle her head on her shoulder even if she’s too big to sit on her lap anymore. You’ve grown so tall, Leni, she says every so often, you could use my head as a platter to eat your food off of.
“Remember: give her time and give yourself some time. Work to understand her as she understands you.”
A week later, Voyager beckons to her for a dance — a waltz.
Her every step on the Suitcase’s carpeted floor is practiced, but Bkornblume does not recognize this melody: warbling and mellow, enveloping her in a soothing chill that no ordinary music could. Voyager only smiles back at her, as though she knows something Bkornblume doesn’t.
Then the solid world starts to melt away. But she isn’t worried; she has learned how to waltz and knows that Voyager will catch her if she falls.
They dance not on any earthly ground, but amidst starlight: scattered, dazzling starlight in a shimmering rainbow of pastel of rippling hydrogen and helium set against black space. Voyager, too, has changed: no longer is the second party Bkornblume waltzes with a girl like her, but a buoyant spiral of stardust — something that every human being can trace back within themselves, except the graceful creature that spins around with her is the most gorgeous entity to exist, the finest embroidery between time and space.
When Bkornblume looks away she notices the coalescing of two galaxies: twisting light in gold and yellow and white and colors she can’t even name, caught up in a waltz like their own. These flowering blossoms of planets and stars unfurl in their dance; no one and no world will be hurt, she knows, but all will bear witness to the skies above engaged in a tango for centuries upon centuries until these starry lovers unravel to just the stamens of their centers.
Andromeda, Voyager tells her in all languages and none. And the Milky Way.
Now Bkornblume understands. These are the favorite flowers she spoke of when she was admiring that peeling graffiti so long ago.
Back to Earth. Back to the comprehensible. Back to the present.
Voyager smiles and presses a kiss to Bkornblume’s hand.
“Ich liebe dich, meine bärchen.”