The Star

The familiar smell of the water feature was centering for Breelyn Murphy as she took a seat on its ledge. She’d been walking the length of the mall for some light exercise and this was the perfect spot to sit down and recuperate. Despite loving the healthy movement, she couldn’t do it for too long: it seemed both using and not using her feet caused pain. What could you do.

With all the monsteras, glass walls and Grecian columns, this shopping center felt almost like the indoor malls of her youth. They’d gone completely defunct around the 2030’s, many video essays covering the subject of their demise. But every year they were making improvements to The Shops at Railingsville that enclosed it bit by bit into a discrete building. A grid of pale wood beams stood overhead to support the tasteful track lights, now not in use as it was three p.m.

Leave it to the young to light a match and think they’d discovered fire. Ha!

Breelyn leaned forward to stretch her dogs. Oof, she’d needed that. She was wearing a dusty pink workout set: power-fit leggings and a long sleeve shirt in the same slick material. Her white tennis shoes had a swipe of pink in the same shade. She knew her look was hopelessly out of fashion, but if it ain’t broke…

She sat back and observed the scene around her with a benign countenance. The women were rushing, pushing strollers and talking on the phone. She remembered being them. Couldn’t pay her to do it again. Back then she made everything so important that nothing was, unable to appreciate the marvel of the in-betweens. She played a game with herself about whose face was natural.

As good as the procedures had gotten these days she prided herself a Botox detective, pointing it out mischievously to her granddaughter Imelda wherever they went. Gram-Gram, she’d say with contempt, twelve and embarrassed by everything. That’s not Botox, it’s Juvederm.

Breelyn didn’t even completely believe it worked. Though these girls’ skin showed no sign of wrinkles, they still looked their age somehow. Their age, just with work. Their age but perfect. And she knew so many on the treadmill now, always going in and getting something done. It seemed like what the really smart cookies did was wait it out and get one good facelift at the end. She’d never give in though, risk her life for vanity — couldn’t do it to her parents, humble working people, God rest their souls.

She felt around her mouth with her tongue. Dry, could use something. Her head was in her purse looking for a Werther’s when someone cleared their throat.

It was a young man looming over her, his frame so tall and dashing but his face (and hair, and clothes, and shoes…) so juvenile. He wore asymmetrical earrings like a K-pop boy, one stud and one dangling cross. He grinned at her expectantly, his popsicle-red lips stretched over square white teeth. In his slender, ageless hands he held a luminous orb. It was violet-black at the edges with a flickering light at the center. It was a star.

Not really a star — that would be too big to fit in the mall. But it was an adopt-a-star type thing, a live hologram of that celestial body’s activity somewhere in space. It was something kids gave their sweethearts, like a rose or a truffle flight.

What was this about? If it was a prank, Breelyn didn’t have time. If it was genuine, she didn’t have time either. She didn’t need the trouble of changing her routines if she’d picked up another stalker somewhere. She considered the logistics of getting help should he really be bad news. She knew she did so at the risk of going viral for being a huge bitch. Due to her age people tended to assume she was, tensing whenever she asked about the menu or the current sales. Either that or they treated her like a little dog that’d learned to stand.

And what the hell would she do with it, anyway? It was pretty, sure, but she knew from years of running a home you had to be ruthless about how many dregs you let through the door. She used to keep everything: pinch pots, hand turkeys. At least those had meaning! This was what her dear mother, Jennifer Nicole Sciore (Santino), would have called “crap”.

The kid cleared his throat again, which triggered a massive cough. When he and his hair were finally composed he began his valiant speech: “Ma’am, I just thought you looked so beautiful…”

Breelyn rolled her eyes with her whole body, throwing and dropping her arms in consternation.

“…in this mall today. And I just wanted to give you something, as beautiful as you.”

Breelyn tisked bitterly. Beautiful. Because she needed to hear it, right? There was a time when this might’ve worked, maybe when she was younger and thought she was old. But life had disabused her of the notion that she was or that it mattered. Getting married, working like a mule, burying people who’d just been laughing and standing in your kitchen. It all made those twelve years between illegal and invisible seem even shorter — but no more fleeting or precious. Just insignificant, like a first pancake.

She knew from experience, by the way, that the runway was much longer than thirty. Even into her fifties and sixties she would get interested suitors at the doctor’s office and on cruises she took with Bryson. That your boyfriend? her husband would say at the hot bar, sneaking up with his tray and his Irish-American mirth. She’d laugh and hit him with her purse, their bodies fitting perfectly as they backed up the line.

Her whole life she’d been admonished by movies, magazines, men and useful women. Warned that her beauty was something fragile, an expensive object she was sure to ruin with incompetence and mishandling.

Despite having seen people before, Young Breelyn believed this. Who was she to say? Rubbing your eyeliner off couldn’t be good for you. Neither could side-sleeping, back-sleeping, drinking through a straw. There were humiliating names for what would happen to her—even things that happened to men too—like “teacher arms.” So as she reached each inconceivable age, she remained pleasantly surprised how much she still looked like herself.

She found that true of most women: no longer naively pretty, but retaining the things that made them beautiful because those had nothing to do with facial fat deposits. It was her big eyes, just like her father’s. Her nose like her mother’s. Her compact, mathematically-pleasing midface. Men on the other hand…they had it so hard. The hair went, and then the hats came out, and they all just started to look like each other.

Her Bryson, though, oof! He was a different breed. When they met he looked just like her favorite TikTok star. To this day he still dressed sharply in gray sweats and Reebok Club C’s. He had the best smile, and he pulled off the horseshoe baldness fantastically.

Breelyn’s hair was short, yes — but not short-short. It was chin length, all one length, and nice. That had surprised her when she got here, that she wasn’t required to shear it off in apology. Turned out lots of things were optional. She’d stopped coloring it seven years ago because it was a pain in the ass.

Alongside her youthful fear had also been the healthy delusion that she’d never age: her generation was so good about sunscreen, of course, so naturally the skin under their clothes would never slacken or go purple with veins. Anyone who fell into the “growing older” trap clearly deserved it. Celebrities who looked different than memory must have been alcoholics or on drugs. Breelyn was sure she’d be devastated if it ever happened to her, forced to retire from view and refashion an identity from what was left. What actually happened was that she stopped caring about these things as soon as they occurred.

The threat of aging had just been a cudgel, something to keep her in line. It was a bloodhound for hungry advertisers and guys she didn’t want to dance with. It was the warheads that’d held humanity hostage until 2045, when Russia finally released them on the world to great anticlimax: a lack of funds had let them fizzle into uselessness. Breelyn had called up her girls, who were in college at the time, and told them they didn’t have to do it. Do what, Ma? they’d said, snapping gum into the receiver. They hadn’t seen the news and she was scaring and annoying them.

“Any of it,” Breelyn said, her long, wavy hair vibrating with fear. It was the tremble of someone who’d nearly got flattened on their morning walk. “The way things are going, babies, marriage…you don’t have to do any of it. Nawt if you don’t want to.”

She was raised by the book, knowing exactly where in importance she fell with respect to her siblings, her parents’ relationship, and God. She tried hard to be a good Italian girl, feeling it easy because the alternative — disappointing people — felt so bad. She waited until marriage to have sex without a condom.

But the world started to look different as she got older. Listening to audiobooks about rockstars and their teenage muses, which put a new, disgusting spin on her favorite songs. Packing up her parents’ house with her many sisters and communing over old photos, realizing how much their mom had forgiven in order to have a family. As she learned more and more, she wanted different for her daughters if not herself.

So it was funny to her when people assumed she didn’t know about feminism because she was seventy-three. Mel was always getting on her for not knowing all the terms. Well, the young lady forgot who she was talking to! Did she know, for example, that Grandma had participated in Slut Walk? Worn just a bra and panties in front of the whole quad?

“What! It’s natural!” Breelyn had said. The tween was covering her eyes and ears. The eight-year-old remained blissfully unaware, fortressed by headphones and his big rubbery iPad.

“I hate that word,” Imelda said, meaning panties.

Something registered in Breelyn’s field of vision like a predator moving through tall grass. It was the kid’s dumbass friend in the middle of the food court, dressed identically and holding his phone out with concentration.

Videoing me, she thought. Because there hadn’t been enough violations.

The video as planned was a shoo-in, destined to go viral between his own numbers and the softball subject matter. Old Woman Is Called Beautiful. You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.

This would have been enough, something heartwarming everyone could agree on. But what happened next was why it set fire, forged a new legend, why it was viewed billions of times instead of just hundreds of millions:

Breelyn accepted the glass ball and gently chucked it in the fountain.

And when she finally spoke she said, simply: “Fuck awf.”