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Linkon City Art Gallery was open to all, but twelve-year-old boys on a field trip were never going to be the easiest of visitors. Ten minutes in and Caleb's group of friends had already been repeatedly hushed for being too loud, the reprimands only made them giggle even harder and hurry into the next gallery before they could receive a real telling-off.
Some of the paintings he didn't understand; a huge canvas entirely painted the same shade of red, the same can of soup repeated over and over in different colours, and one he thought looked like the artist had just kicked over a bucket of paint and called it a day.
Some of the older paintings were funny, where the artist had to draw a lion or an elephant having never seen one themselves, only given a second or third or fourth-hand description in a long game of telephone. There was a room full of paintings where all the women looked like men, with breasts that looked like balloons glued onto their chests. They'd run out of that gallery snickering.
The sculpture hall was different. Caleb almost didn't believe that the pieces were solid marble the way they all looked so soft; the touch of stone fingers pressed into the skin of stone thighs, light glowing translucent through the drape of sheer fabric rendered in stone.
In the centre of the room, raised on a dias, the figure of a veiled woman. The fabric that wrapped her looked as though it clung wet and heavy against her skin, highlighting the details of her face, the way her sides curved, made her breasts look to much like real nudity despite the drape of fabric, despite that it was all one solid piece of stone.
Looking up at her shrouded face made Caleb's skin itch hot and uneasy. There was part of him that wanted to stand here and look at the her until it was time to go home, but that stronger part of him insisted that he avert his gaze. She wasn't naked, she wasn't even a real woman—just the image of one—but it felt wrong to be able to see so much of her, in a way that had never felt much of anything before now.
It wasn't like he'd never seen breasts before. Whenever Gran had taken them to her water aerobics classes they'd all changed together in one big room, and whenever they went to the beach everyone would strip off their clothes right there on the sand, but they hadn't seemed that big a deal then. Caleb wasn't quite sure when it had changed, but they'd somehow started to feel a lot more important.
Under the unwavering gaze of cool observant stone, the air grew warmer. There was a pressure growing at the base of this throat, almost nauseous, something he couldn't name, but that felt a little like swallowing down his anger or holding back hot tears. Mumbling an excuse about needing to go use the washroom, he hurried away before anyone could notice enough to question why his cheeks had gone so red.
Comfort came in form of the long corridors lined with landscapes. Some walls held the ocean while others held the sky, rough storms and turbulent waves in one frame, calm seas below picturesque cliffsides in the next. It wasn't any of the huge grand scenes that caught his attention, but a smaller painting, a flash of orange on gray in the corner of his eye that demanded he look closer.
It was a dark sky, the same colour as the sky when it had torn open and rained down death and freedom in equal measure, one made of muted rainbows in purple and gun-steel grey, like an oil slick, the memory still fresh in the tight clench of his jaw. In the midst of that darkness, two bright orange sparks of light traversed the sky in a shared arc, a tail of debris sparking in their wake, their radiance unseen by the world beneath, land still deep in peaceful slumber. They illuminated the night in a way it was never mean to be seen, casting strange shadows in the water below.
"The Meteor, 1860. Frederic Edwin Church," He read aloud. It was all the the little placard by the painting said.
Meteor showers didn't look like this. He knew, he'd seen them, had held his Pipsqueak's hand and wished on them. They were like petals burning in the sky for a brief bright moment before blinking out forever. This meteor was something different, something that refused to die, that burnt so fierce and so white-hot bright it was like someone had reached into the sky and torn the very sun itself in half.
"You like this one?"
Caleb didn't turn to face the gallery attendant, transfixed on that arching curve of centuries old light captured in paint.
"What is it?"
"Well, let's see," she ran finger down the page in her guidebook, "it's thought that this painting captures what's known now as an 'earth-grazing meteor'; meteors that enter and then leave the atmosphere, breaking apart in the process."
"Huh, never heard of 'em," he said, and he'd learned a lot about space. It wasn't too unusual, almost to be expected, for a boy who'd witnessed the fabric of the cosmos go thin and tear apart before his eyes.
"When all the pieces curve into the same shape like this," the attendant continued, raising her finger to the air to trace the shape of the orange crescent before them, "it's super super rare, they call it a 'meteor procession'."
"It kinda looks more like a dance."
"Yeah, I guess it does."
"D'you think…" Caleb's voice had gone so soft and quiet that the attendant had to lean closer to catch his words, "did they stay together when they left the atmosphere, or did they get separated?"
"The meteor?" There was the ruffle of paper as she thumbed through through the pages of the book, as though it might actually hold the answer. "Umm… I don't know," she pressed her lips into the thin smile of an apology, "I'm only an art student, I don't really know that much about Astronomy, I'm sorry."
"That's okay," he said, but it wasn't. It made him feel dizzy, the thought of those two bright suns spinning off into different directions as they finished their visit to the planet, the brief moment they'd been born and burnt in the sky together. A weight began to coalesce in his stomach, heavy with a grief he didn't know how to name
That night, when he closed his eyes, Caleb pictured the meteor.
He watched as it was caught into the pull of the planet's orbit, as it tore through the heavy weight of atmosphere, the rock hissing and screeching with heat and pressure until it split clean in half. Siblings now, they skated across the sky, their skin shedding and burning into the starlight.
How could they part, when they were born from the same celestial body? How could they be given a twin in one moment only to lose them in the next?
No no no, that wouldn't do.
Each would be pulled by the gravitation mass of the other, he decided, they would pull each other around around and around in an double helixed symphony . They could never become whole again, never able to touch their other half, but they would still have each other, and together they would dancing bright through the vastness of space until the end of time at the end of the universe.
Caleb smiled, and then he slept.
