Sneak Preview – The Celia Eris Stolen Epistles – The Girl Who Saw Stars

The Girl Who Saw Stars – by N M Sirett© – All Rights Reserved

From the Bumper Sticker Bessie novel©

This is about 58K words in and is a snippet of the Celia Eris Stolen Epistles – Celia is another separable soul who can occupy other people’s bodies and tell their stories. A polar opposite of our protagonist Bessie (our anti-heroine), Celia is psychotic, mentally unhinged, and primed to sabotage Bessie. In the novel (spoiler alert), Celia has some of her diary entries stolen by an unknown mercenary (playing both sides of the game) and these important documents wind up on Bessie’s porch for safekeeping. Each documented body jump is vital information in an ethereal war that Bessie is unwittingly caught up in, and the clues are in the adventures. Here is the first diary entry of our nemesis Celia. This diary account is now in Bessie’s hands and has been documented in her own diary. This is the first of Celia’s entries found in the novel, so I thought I’d give you a sneak preview. For Beta readers who’ve already read Bessie, you will find Celia’s voice is quite different to Bessie’s. For starters, she’s totally bonkers, and she loves all things twisted and vile. Whereas our beloved Bessie is streetwise and has a dark sardonic wit. Enjoy!

Oh and, by the way, Bessie’s adventures always end with a bumper sticker and a catchy slogan to summarise her adventure. But Celia doesn’t have bumper stickers. She has tokens. They do not necessarily make any sense even though they do relate to her experiences.

The Girl Who Saw Stars

Diary Insert

Celia’s Epistles

JUMP 1,00-60,7

She was five, Emmanuelle. An only child and brilliant. Every morning at half past six she would peep through the voile fastened to her capacious four-poster bed and swivel her delicate little feet on to her immaculate white carpet with the dusk-pink shaggy rug. Stretch her tiny pallid arms, hitch up her long nightie, and scream for Mother.

Every morning, at seven, Emmanuelle enjoyed a soft-boiled egg with toasted soldiers and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

Emmanuelle was home-tutored. Emmanuelle had rabbits. Hamsters. Guinea pigs. White mice. Emmanuelle had a swing. A pond. A slide. A treehouse. A pet duck. She had a china tea set, a toy cooker, a dollhouse, and a motorised toy car that she drove about her enormous garden.

She terrorised trespassing cats. Aimed her car directly at them with puckish glee. Once she succeeded to mow one down: a pretty silver-grey Maine Coon. But Emmanuelle was never blamed for the hit-and-run accident-on-purpose, on the account of her being only five, even though she was fraught with flaws that no one saw – or chose not to see. I’d say she was deliciously nasty. Spectacularly vicious. A sick soul whom I’d had the pleasure of inhabiting.

This kid trapped wasps and fed them her mother’s homemade jam. She kept them in old ice cream tubs with kitchen-knife-stabbed holes in the lids and a little carved-out plastic trapdoor, so that she could place dollops of jam on cotton wool balls inside. There was a time, when I was particularly proud of her, when she’d collected an entire tub. I tried to pass the time counting them through her eyes. It was fun, you know, like guessing how many jellybeans there are in a jar at the fair. I reckon I guessed right. There must’ve been at least forty-eight and three-quarters of those fierce little creatures. Or maybe that’s wrong. It might’ve been forty-eight and one half…

Anyway, there was a woman a few doors down whose Maine Coon was dead and flattened. She suspected Emmanuelle of first-degree ‘moggy-murder’ and had said as much to her mother. But Emmanuelle’s parents saw her through rose-tinted glasses. She was only ever seen that way. There are no ‘mud-lenses’ where parents are concerned, you know. Not like this Ethel-woman. She saw the child as clearly as mud through her muck-glasses, with her sullied mind and soiled judgement. I wanted to rip her throat out, at her accusations, picking on a little kid that way, especially one as awesome as she was, but… this is not my story.

So Emmanuelle hated her neighbour after that. She spent the hours concocting up all the ways she might destroy the woman. If she could’ve hit-and-run her like she did the cat, that would be satisfying. But, alas, she was only five and her car was just a toy. Mostly, she ran over ladybugs and frogs – once she hit a thrush. I believe the Maine Coon was the biggest thing she’d ever targeted. And, well, they’re big cats – aren’t they? – and it was quite something to take it down the way she did. Its head all flattened like a pressed flower. Grey fur speckling the lawn. Blood-spattered daisies. I’d say that was creative. She loved squashy things. And she wanted to squash Ethel.

But sadly, Ethel was too big to be squashed by a five-year-old girl in a toy car.

The pink pedal controlled the acceleration. The blue pedal was a brake. But it didn’t get used much. Emmanuelle liked to crash into stuff when she needed to stop because that meant she got to smash and destroy and squash and shatter – all her favourite pastimes.

On one particularly hot summer’s day, Emmanuelle caught the eye of the sun-god, gleaming with piqued interest at the child and spotting a firecracker-talent. She was destined to be a child of fire, for sure. For the sun-god blessed her by zapping her heart with 4.26 million metric tons of solar energy. It took but a second to do it. I gave a little shrill cry of excitement when it happened. She couldn’t hear me; she didn’t know I was even there. But I felt it all the same because immediately it was like being wrapped in a comforting, thermal blanket. Despite the summer heat, it was sublime. I’d received, albeit secondary, a hug from the sun. Imagine my delight. I was drunk on sunlight – and for a moment there, a little bit squiffy.

But there was no time to revel in this unexpected and illuminous, canonised happening. Oh no there wasn’t. For little Emmanuelle, who was – let it be said – a ruthless force of nature for one so young, opened the garden gate and drove her car down the street. She lived in middle-class suburbia. The street, like many others of its kind, was lined with crab-apple trees. Neat lawns behind white piquet fences. Grand houses stood proudly boasting wealth and good taste. It really is a nice place to live. And I can honestly say that I truly did cherish my jump-time here. Ah, it brings a plump tear to my eye just remembering it all.

Anyway, on with the record: Her right shoe, white-paten with a silk bow on the toe, pressed doggedly against the pink pedal. Her left shoe was left behind on the lawn. Her left foot rested in the well of the toy car with no need to use the brake. Riding with us, perched on the back seat, was the tub of wasps – the one I spoke of earlier that was filled to the lid with those fuzzy, vibrating spikes.

Ethel loved sleeping late, and she was still asleep when Emmanuelle arrived outside her house. She allowed the car to crash into the gate that had been left ajar by the postman. This slowed the car down somewhat, and as she took her foot off the pedal, the car slowed to a halt at the front porch.

Emmanuelle got out and ran across the lawn towards a little plaque marked Tiddles Sylvester. She gave it a satisfying kick, knocking it to the grass. Then she jumped up and down until the plywood snapped in three easy breaks. My kid let out a squeal of delight and promptly marched back over to the porch, reaching for a small jar of jam in her dress-pocket. She smeared red jelly across the front door, making a slimy mess. Allowing little lumps of cooked strawberry pieces to stick to the wood panels and doorknob.

I could feel her stifling a giggle. She was trying her best not to make too much noise. And so the laughter was expelled through the nose instead, in little piggy snorts. She was still pig-snorting as she procured the wasp-tub from the car. The next bit was so much fun! She stood there for a good thirty minutes just shaking the tub. It sounded so funny. The knocking of all those little buzzing bodies against the plastic walls, and how it resonated! The fizz of it intensifying the angrier they grew. And angry was an understatement. Oh, those wasps were perfectly peeved, I can assure you.

Emmanuelle then rang the doorbell for ten years. Her finger turning purple under the pressure. The button melting beneath her newly anointed, solar-powered touch. OK! I know what you’re thinking. Ten whole years is an exaggeration. I get that. It felt like it though. But, sure enough, old Ethel Cuthbertson did eventually get out of bed to answer the door.

As soon as the kid heard approaching footsteps she carefully removed the lid of the tub, a fraction of an inch, kept the tub covered but left the lid loose. When she saw the doorknob twisting, she gave the tub a good, hard kick, then sprinted to her car and sped off down the street.

Turning the corner, Emmanuel listened to the cries of her neighbour confronted with forty-eight wasps. I doubt the half-wasp had much to do with it. Oh those jam-beasts with their needle-arses. And old Ethel feeling like a pin-cushion. She was a poppet now. A thing with all the pins stuck in her. Only she was no poppet. And they were not pins. They were wasp stings. Oh how she cried. And cried. And cried. That will teach her not to go round accusing little kids of knocking down stinky old cats.

Emmanuel could never do anything wrong. Even though wrong was all she ever did do, because she could. And she could say, ‘I didn’t do it,’ and she did. And the more she could get away with it, the worse she got. The darker she got. And now you couldn’t even spot her darkness because it was hidden behind a shield of magical fire – a gift bestowed upon her by the sun-god. The kid was pure fire and her light hid her dark core.

Now let me make this clear to you. It is important that you know this: all adults, everywhere, mistook that light for something pure, something angelic, something good.

All she really had was a burning flame. No more than the type you get in Hell. Sure, it was sometimes a furnace of fury roaring in her heart. But the light she emitted was no different to the fires of the underworld. And she’d been blessed with a sunspot. Now, I know, there is nothing dark about the sun. Hands up! I’m the first to admit it. So don’t go looking for the dark side of the sun, all right? You just won’t find it. Why? Cos it’s not there, silly! But, the core, if we could see it, would look black to us because the energy produced there wouldn’t be visible. So no, there is no darkness only what we might perceive to be darkness. And, thus, it is our own perceptions projecting a non-existent darkness upon the sun (in my theory). That is the only darkness you’ll find there. Huh. Confused? Well dah! We are talking about a very powerful sun-god, here. And the sun-god is a clever trickster indeed. For when our little Emmanuel goes looking for darkness in everything, she looks for it in the brightest thing she can see: the sun! The sun-god sees her doing so, recognises her conflagrant heart and projects her perceived projections right back at her. Zap! Pow! She’s got solar flares in her eyes now! Get it? No? Come on, you’ve gotta keep up if you’re going to keep reading. I mean, I don’t want to be documenting all this crap if you’re simply going to give up now, do I? Lightweight.

One thing I did notice during my stay inside Emmanuelle’s body was this: her mother would sometimes remove the rose-tinted glasses and see the real horror of her ghoul-spawn, fumble nervously for those specs, and quickly put them back on again in a fitful state of denial. She did this, I reckon, because… well, who actually wishes to see the real kid here? Cos it’s a bit like how you don’t want to directly stare at the sun. Emmanuelle, looked upon too closely, would burn your retinas right out the back of your skull.

Both dear old Ma and Pa didn’t want their kid growing up to hate them or criticise them or find any fault with them at all. They were both far from perfect. To say the least. They had a lot of money, most of it laundered, but at five, that was not Emmanuelle’s concern. So the kid got whatever she asked for and did whatever she pleased because she must always love Mummy and Daddy. The pair who gave her everything and the freedom to do as she pleased, whether it was right or wrong. A little irreverence – or any act of ‘juvenile delinquency’, for that matter – was immediately overlooked because her parents were the ‘good guys’ and she was going to grow up loving them – god damn it! Oh yes, she was.

So the sickness festered. The fire burned her brain, seared her heart. Her mind warped as it melted in the molten heat. Flames bending to her every whim. She shone so brightly that the sun-god was able to see her everywhere, even at night, watching over her from the depths of space.

Oh such fun. Did I have a ball during my stay inside Emmanuelle! I could document every incident with the poisoned rabbits and the severed dog’s foot. That squirrel head in her father’s Rice Crispies. The maimed leg of that refuge collector who accidentally threw a cherished doll of hers on to the back of his truck. But, you know, once you’ve written about one dead rabbit, you’ve written about them all – and the same goes for all the other unfortunate ordeals. This stuff gets a bit tedious after a while. Quite literally. And when it does, nobody ever feels sorry for me. I mean, it’s gotta be fun for me or, really, what’s the point?

I was still crammed up inside this little skin-bag of blood and bones when it reached its sixth birthday. And that bloody sun-god decided to gift her phosphenes. You know what those are? Normally they are like little lights or colour images that you can see with your eyes closed. Normally it happens when you sneeze or rub your eyes or something. I don’t know. But this was more like she actually had stars – in her eyes.

Things got really interesting again. I might say, ‘thank my lucky stars,’ because I could see the stars in her eyes. Emmanuelle had fire-stars at six years old. Impressive. That sun-god must have really liked this kid.

Now how did she receive this gift from the god? I will tell you. This is how it happened: On this special occasion, her parents saw fit to invite Hannah Beaver over to share their happy garden space. She lived in a cul-de-sac a few streets away. Her mother was a Brown Owl and her father a Scout leader. Brown Owl had met Emmanuelle’s mother, Trudy, at speeding school.

Hannah Beaver arrived boasting a large box wrapped in brown paper with a red ribbon. Emmanuelle heaved at the lengthy sash with alacrity, casting it aside like a dead snake and shredding the box lid with eager nails. Inside the box was a monkey. A chestnut-brown monkey plush with a smooth plastic face. The eyelids opened and closed when the head shook. It had a voice box too. If the monkey was dropped it would suddenly activate. Vigorous shaking would also do the trick. The freaky little monkey would say: ‘Have a banana.’

Although Hannah Beaver was blatantly jealous and begrudging of the gift, Emmanulle was, conversely, displeased – not realising the sun-god was ‘in’ on the surprise. Her face darkened behind the effulgent blush of faux gratitude. Rage foaming inconspicuously at the corners of her mouth. Hellfire searing juvenile eyes. I could feel her snarling and the exterior illumination working overtime to shield it. Fish in the nearby pond swam to the furthest edges of their pool, to the shadiest spots, to avert their gaze from the disapproval of the sun-god’s daughter. Birds took flight to trees in other gardens. Worms burrowed deep. All creatures and all nature bending any other way but in her direction.

‘Well, what do you say?’ said her father.

Impertinently, Emmanuel said: ‘I’ve already got one of these!’

An explosion of innocuous retort from both parents broke the momentary awkward silence. Her mother insisted she did not already have a monkey toy. Her father added that she did not have a monkey of any sort. But Emmanuelle was resolute in her childish ingratitude and shook her head. She shook it and shook it and shook it until it fell off and rolled across the lawn. Not really! But that would have been a laugh! I could feel her brain knocking against her skull. For me it was like being upside down on a rollercoaster, totally naked.

(Trust me, I’ve been there!)

That’s how it felt. Not that I could feel anything for myself. As you know, I can only feel what the body I’m in feels. So I simply imagine that that is how I would feel. Anyway, the head shaking continued for about fifty years or so. Time stood still so nobody noticed half a century passing them by – and they didn’t age, nothing changed, and all fell silent until she was finished.

After a while, I realised she wasn’t so much shaking her head as she was jolting it. Like demonic possession. You know, exorcist-style. I mean, the head wasn’t going all the way round, but it wasn’t natural. It was violent. And she did this kind of pig-grunt, at the back of her throat. It reminded me of that time when I was occupying a giant and I squeezed a pig between finger and thumb. It popped and liquified and made a similar sound. I guess what I mean is this: Emmanuelle made a noise like a dying pig. There, I should have just said that. But I didn’t. So fucking what.

Emmanuelle was a demonically possessed pig on the brink of hurling herself off a cliff. God did it go on for such a long time. Fifty bloody years might’ve really passed. When she finally did stop, she threw the monkey at her father’s much-loved rockery and screamed and sobbed. Pressing tiny fists into her eyeballs so hard I thought they might implode.

‘Have a banana,’ chimed the monkey punctually.

I must admit, by now, I was hoping something interesting would occur, as the party had seemed irrevocably dull. Hannah Beaver was a tiresome six-year-old. A naff guest. And probably half the reason Emmanuelle was acting up so much. So much!

The sun-god deliberately triggered this scenario in order to get the kid to rub her eyes. Oh, my stars, just to rub her fucking eyes. What a trick. For when Emmanuelle took her fists away and opened her eyes again, all she could see were stars. Zillions of fireballs. The furnace in her heart now spangled those large orbs in her head. And yet I was the only one to notice. Everybody else sang Happy Birthday and handed her cake. And Hannah Beaver stayed for one thousand years. Then the parents got bored and drank too much wine. Sloshing the words of their inebriated conversations. Rendering the two girls alone. Unwatched.

Emmanuelle had never met Hannah Beaver before this day and instinctively knew she was no fun. That would need to change. Hannah Beaver didn’t like to squash things. So my kid brushed past her and skipped to the pond where the carp did not meet her starry eyes. She dipped an arm in and grabbed one by the tail, lifting it dripping into the air and slapping it down on the lawn. Its glistening scales undulating. Its gills collapsing as it arched and slithered and wriggled on the grass. Slowly suffocating. Three minutes later it was dead. And Hannah Beaver witnessed the entire thing while suddenly finding herself feeling exactly like that fish.

My kid prodded it with an index finger and glanced up at Hannah with a crooked smile. ‘It’s dead,’ she sniggered. But Hannah behaved as though the girl’s actions were beneath her and turned her nose up to the mid-afternoon sun. Holding each end of her neat auburn plaits to give off a kind of ‘I-don’t-approve-and-that-is-that’ stance. ‘Come on, your turn. We’re playing fishing,’ pressed my kid.

‘No, thank you, I shan’t,’ said Beaver. Her beady eyes twitched with irritation and fear. ‘I have a stomachache,’ she lied.

Emmanuelle threw the fish in a bush and shrugged. ‘Wanna see some mice?’

‘No. Mice are horrible.’

‘Guinea pigs?’

‘Fine.’

Beaver reluctantly followed my kid through a grove of trees and into a more secluded part of the garden where there was a shed built purposefully to hold as many pet animals as possible that would keep a spoilt child entertained. But it wasn’t the pets inside the shed that held any interest for Beaver. No, it was the motorised toy car, parked discreetly down the side alley between the shed and trees.

Her beady eyes narrowed and she licked her lips. ‘I want a go on that,’ she snapped.

‘OK,’ said my kid. And she wheeled it down the alley, new girl in tow, round the back of the shed to a clear stretch of lawn. ‘I’ve made an obstacle course. You have to steer round it and get back here in record time. Fastest one is the winner.’

The Beaver-kid stared at the lawn in abject horror. Her jaw lowering slowly as she scanned the macabre obstacles that had been strategically positioned by the scapegrace hands of the birthday girl. A dead gull, two large stag beetles – deceased, a mutilated bunny, five headless mice, and one severed guinea pig – oh and a fox’s tail. (How I wished it belonged to one certain fox. I’m naming no names, but you get who I mean, right?)

‘What’s wrong? Don’t you like the game? If you like, we can go in the shed and get some live ones. We can play knock-down-ginger instead?’

‘That’s when you knock on doors and run away,’ said Beaver, surprising herself with the steadiness of her voice.

‘No. That’s for stupid kids. My version is when you name all the live animals Ginger. Then you get in the car and see how many you can knock down. It’s fun! Do you want to do it? Or do you want to do the obstacle race first?’

Oddly enough, the Beaver kid developed stomachache at this moment and refused to do anything other than stubbornly sit cross-legged on the lawn. She was forced to watch the birthday girl whiz in and out of the lifeless, and somewhat rather pungent, corpses dotted about the lawn. After a few minutes, she threw up. So Emmanuelle relented and suggested they go inside the house and play dolls.

But the colour was draining from Hannah Beaver’s face. The longer she stayed there, the worse she felt. And going inside made no difference. As soon as Emmanuelle opened the dollhouse, Beaver started screaming and stomping her feet. Claiming there were spiders crawling in her hair. She slapped her hands about her head and clawed her face as hot tears streamed down her ruddy cheeks. In a blind panic she shook the imagined spiders from her head.

Finally she stopped freaking out and stopped to see what the birthday girl was doing. Up to now, her host had not paid her the slightest attention and lacked empathy for her arachnid-infested dilemma. She had not imagined the spiders at all, she supposed, because the dollhouse was comprised of the creatures. And many different species at that!

My kid was feeding them flies. Her head swivelled round so that she could face Beaver, dead Bluebottles studding her lips. Cobwebs worn like a mourner’s veil across her face. We smiled with a metallic grin and blew Beaver a blow-fly kiss. We patted the chair beside us in an attempt to calm the child down and she moved silently across the room in robotic compliance.

Beaver accepted a plate of dead flies but did not attempt to eat any, claiming she’d already had too much cake which had already given her stomachache. Therefore she would not be able to manage a single fly and would prefer it if Emmanuelle fed them to her spiders instead.

Each word emitted from her quivering lips was tombstone-heavy and weighted in monotones. A mere whisper. Breath on cold air. Freezing the muted dread in her bones like a corpse in a bag of rocks at the bottom of a frozen lake. I liked it that way. It was better than her ordinary girly voice. She was better subdued.

But Emmanuelle didn’t share my inclination to ‘like her better’ this way. She wanted to play dollhouse. Or play anything. Anything but with that ridiculous monkey plush. She was still angry about the birthday present. And on top of that, Hannah Beaver didn’t want to go fishing, play obstacles, do knock-down-ginger. She didn’t even want to play dollhouse.

It was supposed to be her birthday. She should get to choose the game and Beaver had to play along. But Beaver refused. So Emmanuelle scooped some flies off the plate, sticking them to her fingertips, and shoved them into Beaver’s mouth.

Hannah Beaver gagged and spat. Staggering away from her chair and pressing her back against the wall. This act was the trigger. The final thing to test my kid’s patience. And, at six, you can hardly expect anyone to have much of that!

She went into a rage. Spikes sprouting from her skull. I felt them. They were like poppet pins going out instead of in. Mini devil horns. Then I felt her eyeballs firing up. The heat! Great balls of fire! Eyes blazing like the Sahara sun.

Swiping a spider-heaving doll from inside the house, she ran at the frozen Beaver and shoved the entire doll down her throat. ‘Eat this!’ she screamed. And she made her swallow it whole. I’m surprised Beaver didn’t choke. Especially on the rubber doll-shoes. She held a hand over the gagging mouth until she was certain that Hannah Beaver had gulped the doll down completely, and that was when the flares began.

Solar flares as powerful as the sun, blasting out through her infant-eyes. Sharp weapons, like shuriken throwing stars. And as the sun-god blew flares off the great fire-star in the sky, so did those phosphenes burst from her eyeballs.

Throwing stars hit the dollhouse, striking the table and the carpet and sending everything up in flames all around the two girls. All was alight. Spiders, toys, the toy cooker in the corner melting to plastic mush. But, surprisingly, Beaver did not scream. Instead, a slow, serene smile grew peacefully across her freckly face.

But my kid, on the other hand, kept those throwing stars coming. A steady flow of flaming weapons spewing out of her eye sockets like mini-Catherine wheels. Emmanuelle didn’t stop with her room. She dragged Beaver by the arm and went outside. Shuriken swirls spilling from her tear ducts. Firey, wheeling stars speeding over the lawn so fast that Hannah Beaver’s father did not have time to comprehend the fire-star slashing his right ear off in one searing blow. As his burning ear lopped to the ground and embedded at the bottom of a garden trellis adorned with climbing clematis, fire ripped upwards in a sudden rush of flame. Burning the purple petals clear off their stems.

Mayhem and pandemonium struck the garden wherever my kid chose to direct her eyes. This was a sun-god-given gift after all. Now the party wasn’t boring anymore, it was time for me to leave. Typical. Just when things start to liven up, I can feel my soul preparing to separate from its transient vessel. 

Flames licked the patio and garden furniture. The adults screamed. Trudy was tugging at a garden hose which was already partly on fire. And all the while, Beaver kept calm. Her eyes like two gold coins – a reflection of the blaze. Oddly, her expression was unreadable, as though trapped in a far-off daydream. She didn’t even blink. And that weird ethereal smile… slapped on like a plaster covering a meaty gash. It was as if, somehow, she’d been hypnotised by my kid to watch it all burn. To bear witness to this solar power. This gift.

Hannah Beaver smirked as her mother’s skirt caught. Watched her through ocean eyes as she skittered across the lawn. The smell of burning flesh and the sound of panic in her cries. Watched as her mother threw herself into the carp pond. Smiled at the steam rising there.

My kid stopped throwing her stars and blinked the fire from her eyes. ‘Who am I?’ she asked the Beaver kid. ‘Who am I!’

And Beaver replied. Cool as a clear sky at midnight. ‘You are the girl who sees stars.’

Token #£%.1.J057494645545566257457– Fight fire with fire unless it’s with your pants because that just makes you a liar – ha-ha!