My Name Is Venus Black

by Heather Lloyd

We all feel so destined. It had to be me, we think. But the truth is, we all just barely made it here. Thousands of other combinations of your mother’s egg and your father’s sperm just missed their chance to connect, and one small change in circumstance could have wiped you out before you began.

Just because you put me in a room with Inez doesn’t mean I have to talk to her. Which is something I never thought about before, how you can force people to do a lot of things, but speaking isn’t one of them. You can’t grab someone’s jaw and move it up and down and make words come out.

Here I’ve gone and done the worst thing in my life and she can’t even ground me. No wonder she’s so upset.

But when they start to ask about that night, I throw a white sheet over my brain so I can’t see a thing. I’m like a child wearing a ghost costume with no holes cut out for eyes.

That’s another thing that got me here. Nothing is as it appears. It’s like that with space. Objects that look round might not be, and stars that look close to each other might be billions of miles apart. And it’s the same with people. Only instead of standing too far away to see the truth, you’re probably standing too close.

What I can’t figure out is why good memories hurt as much as bad ones. Maybe it’s because you’re not on guard against them, so they hit full force, like a slap from a wave.

I’m named for. At a great distance, Venus is beautiful, the brightest of stars in the sky. But what NASA discovered when they orbited her is that she’s actually an inhospitable planet, a boiling cauldron of poisonous gases. Come too close and you’d fry.

When people told her she was brave, or wondered aloud how she managed to keep going in the face of so much heartache and loss, she wanted to scream. Brave had nothing to do with it. It was hope that held her hostage.

She didn’t become religious or start going to church. But she did start praying. She never once gets on her knees—God forbid. She never prays when she doesn’t feel like it—because why bother? She never prays for herself, because fuck herself. But she prays for Leo and Venus many times a day.