GUYS I WROTE SOMETHING FOR ONE OF MY OC’s.
i’m really tempted to turn it into an agathario fic of sorts.
ANYWAY, this is the story of how the very lesbian cole first fell in love.
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Rosie and the Sky
Cole did not care for UFOs and only from time to time would she think of them at all, usually when somebody on television had seen a light over a field and was prepared to swear before God and county that it had changed shape. Those were explainable evenings. Cole could tell you where she had been, what road she had taken home, what she had eaten, what had made the dog next door bark, and why a light in the sky was most likely some other light with a proper earthly occupation. The world kept to its duties then. The stars stayed far off. The planes minded their routes. All that came before Rosie.
When she got Rosie much became less arranged.
Now Rosie was not a rabbit from a fair or a lamp from a shop or some other object a person may come home carrying under the arm, and yet there are people who enter a life with such immediate and lasting consequence that afterward they seem to have been acquired by fate or religion or one of those forces that never fills out a receipt. Cole met Rosie in a parking lot behind a diner where the gravel was poor and the sign buzzed red and white and there was always one lonely pickup truck sitting off by itself as if embarrassed to be seen there.
Rosie was leaning against her car and looking up.
There are plenty of people who look up with no real seriousness. They glance. They squint. They admire. Rosie looked up the way somebody listens through a wall. This interested Cole because it seemed a rather grave way to behave in a parking lot.
Rosie said, “You ever see anything strange out here?”
And Cole said, “No.”
And Rosie said, “That’s because you don’t look long enough.”
This was one of the first things about her.
The second thing was that she carried in her car a red flashlight, a thermos, two county maps with circles drawn on them, one folding lawn chair, and a box of newspaper clippings kept in a plastic grocery sack from a store that had closed several years prior. Rosie treated all of this as ordinary equipment. Cole, who at that point knew her only a little, found this charming in the way a person finds a storm charming when viewing it from indoors.
They began seeing each other in the manner such things often begin, which is to say gradually at first and then all at once and then in such a way that afterward it becomes difficult to remember what hours used to belong to whom. Rosie would call late and say she was going out past the edge of town because there had been sightings near the water tower road, and Cole would go along because she liked Rosie and because liking a person has a way of making their preoccupations seem briefly reasonable.
Love does not always arrive with understanding. Sometimes it arrives first as attention.
There is a stretch of road outside town where the fields flatten and the ditches shine with old rain and the power lines go on ahead of you like they know where everything is. There are cows there and low fences and one shut-up fruit stand with hand-painted peaches fading from the wood. Rosie liked this road. She said a place ought to have some loneliness to it if something marvelous was going to happen there.
Cole said, “Marvelous is a big word for hovering.”
Rosie said, “You don’t know they hover.”
This pleased Cole.
Rosie had folders. Rosie had reports. Rosie had an overflowing tote bag with patches and pins. Rosie had stories about silver lights over reservoirs, lights over soybean rows, lights over a church lot in Arkansas, lights over a football field in a town so small the witnesses all knew one another’s middle names. She knew dates and weather conditions and where the moon had been on a given night twenty years ago. She spoke of one retired deputy in New Mexico as if he were a prophet and one waitress in Oklahoma as if she had been chosen for a sorrowful and splendid duty.
Cole did not believe any of it.
Still, she listened.
There are subjects you endure for the sake of a person and subjects that become dear by attachment. It happened quietly. First Cole learned a few stars because Rosie grew tired of every heavenly body being called “that one”. Then Cole learned the difference between a plane blinking with a clear conscience and a tower lamp winking in place. Then she learned that some people tell a foolish story badly and some tell it with such plainness that foolishness takes on an unsettling dignity.
A strange thing loved well enough begins to shine. That was how Cole came to understand Rosie’s fascination.
Rosie said once, out by the old reservoir, “I just think the world keeps things.”
The water was black. The reeds made their dry rubbing noise. Somewhere far off a dog barked as if correcting another dog. Cole looked over at Rosie and saw that she meant it fully. She did not want fame from the sky. She did not want to be proven right in a newspaper. She wanted mystery to have remained in the world in a physical form. She wanted astonishment with a shadow and a soul and perhaps a dent in the grass.
There are people who make the world feel larger simply by taking it seriously.
And because love is catching, Cole came to want something of it too.
This did not make her a believer at once. She still distrusted grainy photographs. She still suspected loneliness, illness, bad memory, ordinary aircraft, the government, and people with a dangerous wish to be interesting. But she began to like the drives. She began to like the fields and the waiting and the hush after Rosie turned off the engine. She began to like the maps spread over the hood of the car. She began to like the way Rosie looked when some little point of light moved across the dark and she narrowed her eyes as though reading a far-off sentence.
Before Rosie, the sky had been full of nothing other than whatever shape the sky takes.
After Rosie, it was full of possibility, and possibility is a difficult thing to remove once somebody has set it there.
Most of romance is just learning what another person looks toward in silence.
One night in late summer they took a blanket out by the fruit stand. Rosie brought the thermos and a sack of peanut butter cookies that had gone a little soft from the heat. Cole lay back in the grass and Rosie lay beside her and named things overhead in a low voice. This one was a planet. This one was a plane. This one disappointingly honest. This one too steady. This one maybe worth watching. The stars were out in such numbers that a person could begin to feel they had been slightly overdone.
After a while Rosie said, “If something did come down, what would you do?”
Cole said, “Depends what sort of shape it was in.”
Rosie said, “You’re impossible.”
And Cole said, “I came out here, didn’t I?”
Rosie laughed then, and because it was dark and because the sky was carrying on above them with its old silent extravagance, Cole reached for her hand and found it at once as if it had been waiting there the whole while.
There are evenings that prove nothing and change you anyway.
Nothing appeared. Nothing descended. No craft interrupted the county. No silver marvel wrote its name over the field. The night passed in the ordinary way, which is still a strange way when a person you care for is beside you and the dark is warm and the earth is turning under everything without the least bit of noise.
Cole looked up.
She did not do so out of belief exactly. She did it because Rosie had been looking up for so long and with such faithful attention that the sky itself had changed shape in Cole’s mind. It had become, through Rosie, a place where something might answer back.
The world is full of things we do not believe in until somebody beautiful points at them.
And that is how Cole came to care for UFOs.
She cared for them the way one comes to care for a song first heard through a wall, or a town one would never have visited except that somebody beloved was born there. She cared for them because Rosie did. She cared for the roads and the maps and the reports and the impossible talk. She cared for the waiting. She cared for the looking. She cared for every bright and foolish thing that made Rosie’s face lift toward the heavens as if she had friends there.
Rosie never did love her back.
Rosie told her so one night in the kindest words she had. She said there were loves that came to her true and whole. She could grow attached. She could grow loyal. She could think of a person first and miss them when they were gone and want them near and build little habits around them that felt sturdy as fence posts. But the sort of love Cole meant was not among the things that happened in her. It had never happened in her. It would not happen by waiting.
Cole sat very still beside her.
There are sorrows that make a great performance of themselves and there are sorrows that simply settle in a person and stay there.
Rosie was her first love all the same. That was what remained. For a while Cole had stood beside her in fields and on back roads and by the water, learning the patience of looking up. She had learned that a person may wait a long while for some bright impossible thing to answer and receive only the night for it, and still go on looking. Perhaps that was the nearest she would ever come to Rosie’s way of loving the sky.
There are things that can be loved only so long as they remain a little out of reach. Cole thinks Rosie had known that all along.
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ROSIE IS AROMANTIC, SHE’S NOT EVIL!!!
