The Breaking of Dawn

THE BREAKING OF DAWN

by Jennifer Howell

Edited by Natasha Ramoutar

Dawn breaks in New Orleans. She is eager to get into the city, but it is a slow, difficult start. Night and Day press together tightly; her siblings demand her presence but leave no room for it. Dawn winces as their sharp edges scrape her shoulders raw. Then she is through, her scruffy pale hair a mess, the strap of her tank top pulled down. She rolls her shoulder in a movement familiar from centuries of slipping togas. The strap slides into place. 

She steps forward into the city. 

Shadows across Lower Ninth Ward burrow sleepily into door frames and under car frames as the goddess walks across Lake Borgne, the water’s surface rippling pink and blue behind her. Dawn skips down the highway. Outbound truckers snap sunshields down to block her light. Click, click, click. Their visors; her heels.

The city thickens like a roux, growing darker and richer as she dances into Freret. Buildings cluster too tightly for her touch to reach into the alleys veining between them. She runs her fingers up the curve of the Superdome, watching a man’s tie flap against his chest as he flags a taxi just ahead of her light. She begins to hurry now, dashing quickly over the highway ramps. 

He is not far.

There, just before she touches the Mississippi’s next bend, in a coffee shop with an orange door and floor-to-ceiling glass windows facing east, a man is serving coffee. His messy blonde hair loops and swirls, each pillow-fuzzed curl a testament of hours spent under her brother’s care, restless and unsettled. Night refuses to tell her why. Secrets are her brother’s first love, tightly clutched and closely guarded, but that does not stop Dawn from pestering. 

She draws nearer as slowly as she dares, enjoying her own secret. A wish: that the reason he doesn’t sleep is the same reason she dances. His hand scrubs at his curls while he counts change, a half-forgotten movement. His face is weary, dark half-moons like upside-down crowns below his eyes. Dawn touches the window. Her light streaks across the floor, racing up the counter to touch his hands, his aproned chest, his chin, his hair. 

He looks up, squinting against the brightness of her presence. A smile breaks across his features. She lingers. His smile turns from her to a woman waiting, her hand held out for change and cup. Dawn catches her bottom lip between her teeth. It isn’t fair how quickly these moments pass. 

Just once more, she whispers, the same thing she’s whispered every day since she found him. Day presses hot on her back and Night groans, anxious to be swept away, but Dawn tucks her light into the corner of her smile.

The silver bell on the door rings as she steps inside. 

His eyes meet hers. At first, the look on his face is the simple lines of a man doing his job, welcome and how can I help you? written into every angle. Then his smile deepens, blooming inside her chest. This one, she hopes, is only for her. He reaches across the espresso machine to a green cup tucked against its side. “Right with the sunrise,” he says, the same thing he’s said every day since she found him. 

She takes the cup from his hand, watching him over the rim. The coffee is sweet and minty. 

The first time she saw him through the windows, his hair was swept carefully across his forehead, a single curl nestling just above his brow, she had paused so long that Day seared a black burn across the nape of her neck. She had dimmed and ducked inside to protect herself. 

He’d asked for her order that day. She blinked, confused. He stretched. Day glared through the windows. 

“Want to try a house special?” he’d said. 

She’d drunk that coffee as she stepped over the Mississippi with her siblings, startling a fisherman asleep on the prow of his ship. Today, she takes a sip while looking at him looking at her lips. 

“Do you like it?” he says. 

Dawn nods, her tongue darting out to lick foamy milk from the rim. His lips press; her eyes widen. A new expression, one of Night’s secrets hidden at the back of his eyes. His hair falls over the right eye, hiding it. She wants to tuck the hair carefully behind his ear and look more, look deeper, but already she’s spent too long. Tomorrow, she tells herself as she pays instead, pulling mortal money from the back pocket of her jeans. 

He waves her offering away. “A birthday treat, on me.” He is already moving, grabbing a cup from under the dripping stream of espresso and swirling it, etching a spiked leaf. 

“It’s not my birthday,” Dawn whispers.  

He peeks around the espresso machine at her. “It’s mine!” 

Dawn feels herself start to warm beneath the brightness of his smile, light pressing at her seams. She steps backward toward the door.

“Old man at twenty-four!” A coworker whoops, raising his hands toward the ceiling. 

A day just for him, and she’s here. The fullness of this—it has happened twenty-three times before, but this is the first one together—makes her beam in wonder. He looks at her then away, a blush colouring his cheeks. 

“Customer,” a man says from behind him, bitter-voiced and cross-armed. “Waiting. Again.” 

He ducks away, apologies on his lips. She leaves, her glow as rosy as his cheeks. The coffee boils in its cup from the heat of Day’s gaze. Dawn flings herself across the city, spilling droplets of coffee and cream into the Mississippi. 

Illustration by Julia Louise Pereira

The next day, Dawn breaks and the first thing she thinks about is him. She will tell him her name and watch him scrawl it across on the side of her cup and the tip of his tongue. A car backing itself down Broadway swerves and takes out a mailbox with a red cup dangling off the mail flag, the driver blinded by the sudden brightness of her light in his rearview.

The coffee shop’s door stands open. Dawn dims without pausing—one step, a goddess; the next, a woman—and ducks inside. 

A young girl, eyes lined with boredom and blue shadow, looks up at her. She sighs and shifts to stand in front of the register. Dawn searches behind the bar. He is not there. The girl taps the register, staring at her. 

“Where is…” Dawn falters. “The other?” 

The girl shrugs. “Got fired.” 

Dawn stands alone in the middle of the shop, surrounded by strangers. 

“Do you want a coffee, lady?” 

The door crashes against the wall as Dawn stalks out, glass cracking where it meets the frame beneath the force of her push. The girl yells at her. A woman on the sidewalk backs away, her small dog yapping at Dawn’s heels. Day glares at her. Dawn spins in the street, her hands pressed to her ears, blocking out the whispers of her sibling’s thoughts.

“It’s my birthday.” She knows next to nothing about him. Her edges fray and melt beneath her sibling’s needs. Morning after morning now it will be her pressed between them, breaking over and over and over—

“No!” The Mississippi trembles at her shout, thrown from its slow saunter. Dawn runs. Yesterday, she danced on the waves. It was his birthday, and she celebrated by giving each arching crest a kiss. The waves sang back. Today they howl, churning beneath her racing steps. 

She catches Night crossing the Yangtze River. Dawn grabs the tail of his robe, stumbling on the tip of Shanghai Tower. Please, she thinks to her brother, far from where their sister can hear. Please.

He pulls his robe from her clutching fingers. The lights of Shanghai blend with her own. She waits. Just before he begins to walk again, Night nods. 

What do you want? he thinks to her. The boy?

She scrambles after him, nodding and tiptoeing past farmers woken too soon. 

His name? 

Dawn bites her lip, her light trembling. He is twenty-four. 

That is an odd name, Night says. 

Dawn kicks at the sand of the Gobi Desert, catching some in her hand. It melts, dripping glass icicles between her fingers. This close to Night, all her light is trapped inside. It presses too tight, suffocating. 

It was his twenty-fourth birthday yesterday, she thinks, and that is all I know of him.

This is a lie. She knows he trims his fingernails to lie perfectly at the edge of each finger. She knows he drags out names with an R in the center, his tongue curling to force out the hard sound. She knows he has a tattoo of a koi fish curled against his left chest, the tail flicking up across pale skin when he left his top button undone one morning. Thoughts of him, folded into little pieces, tucked away and hidden deep inside where her siblings cannot hear.

I cannot make him love you, he says, that is your sister’s work. 

Love. Is that what this ache in her chest is? Dawn doesn’t think so—if love is of her sister, it is a cruel, burning thing. This is a swell, lapping quietly against her lungs, taking up space just before each breath. She decides not to give this feeling a name. Let him be, she says to her brother. I only wish to know his name. 

Night hums. I will have to take them all, he says. 

I will help.

You will break, Night says. 

Dawn slides down the snowy side of the Rockies. I break daily, brother.

Night spreads his hands as if in surrender. Above them, the sky opens. Stars shine with their teasing laughter, watching her and her siblings walk their paces over and over. 

You are strange, sister, Night says. She places her hands in his. He wraps his fingers around both of her wrists and pulls. 

Dawn breaks. 

Between the stars, in the dark spaces that Night never gifts to Day, he spreads her light. Dim, glistening jewels begin to appear, one by one, until they flood the night sky. Each one has a voice; each one shouts, confused, filling the heavens with the chorus of hundreds of thousands of voices. Male, female, singing and shouting in myriad languages. Night has stolen them all and thrown them into the sky for his sister. 

Find the one you want, thinks Night. And stop this nonsense. 

Dawn can no longer run. She feels, instead. All of her, scattered across the sky in a million new stars, each one only twenty-four years old. Their hopes, needs, questions shimmer. She drifts from one to the next, patiently waiting for the one that knows her. 

Day is coming, Night warns. 

There are so many of them. The world is full of people, but only a few that look up. Dawn hunts for these, faster now, each glimmer tossing her to the next, until one—Dawn stops—until this one, this quiet blue star in the vast dark of space glows warm as she wraps her desire around him. Warm as a smile, kindly turned toward the morning sun. 

Dawn has found him. Together, they fall. 

Night catches her. He gives her the form of a shadow and presses the star between her teeth. The star rolls over her tongue, tasting of coffee and beignets. Dawn swallows, sliding between Night and Day with him safely nestled beside her heart. 

Day tears at her shadowy form with jealous fingers, but Dawn slips easily past and into New Orleans’ dark streets. She runs into an alley beside Bruno’s Tavern, where people younger and people older than her star lean against tables, lips red with wine. A TV glows softly in the corner. A newscaster with perfectly combed hair stands in the center of the street talking to a woman in curlers, their conversation muted. Across the bottom of the screen words scroll. ALIEN INVASION OR THE RAPTURE?

Dawn can feel him still, a warm knot shifting inside her shadowy throat. She turns toward the alley wall, where a street lamp sketches the blurred lines of her shadow against the white brick. The heat inside her grows. Her shadow narrows, sharpening—then begins to thicken. The edges shift. Shoulders broaden. Hair slides into finger-curled peaks. 

Hands made of shadow meet. She kisses the center of his shadow’s darkness, where his heart would be. The shadow ripples. She steps to the side, no longer blocking the light. His shadow steals colour from it, bending the waves around itself to form hands, then arms, chest, legs, lips. 

A smile, warm, wanting—so much more than a well come—slips over lips, pink with life.  

“I am Dawn,” she says. She presses the tips of her fingers to his lips. With no counter between them, she can see the way his lashes tangle together in the corners of his eyes. She bites her lip. 

He places first one hand, then the other, on her arms. His fingers tremble, an unsure breeze across her skin. Together, they breathe, just that, nothing more—her, waiting; him, learning—and then his grip tightens, thumb smoothing the soft underside of her arm. Her form shifts, melting beneath the weight of his touch. 

“I’m Henry,” he says, when he should ask any of a thousand questions. His voice is quiet, the cheer of an order request replaced by something more still and sacred. 

“Henry.” His name is soft as midnight. She holds it carefully on her tongue. 

He lets out a breath, the air tickling her skin. She twines her fingers with his. A hopeful question, made of secrets that want out and into the light, forces its way into her eyes. She tucks his hair behind his ear with fingers edged by smoke. 

Sister, Night nudges. Day is coming. The sky sparkles with a million extra stars, but their light alone cannot hide Day setting fire to the horizon. Are you satisfied? 

Dawn peeks at the man standing beside her. She nods, not even trusting her thoughts. Her brother sighs and shifts his shoulders. One by one the stars fall, burning from myth back into mortal as they near Earth. The sky is aflame. Each meteor shifts as it falls, growing arms and legs, spinning and flailing in fear or wonder. 

New Orleans catches them easily, scattering them all down the length of Bourbon Street. Young men and women land, staggering, steadying themselves on light poles and wrought iron balconies and each other. A bar owner throws on his white apron and kicks at the saxophonist sleeping on the porch, arms wound like yellow jessamine around his instrument. “We have customers,” the owner says. “Hurry! Play!” 

The musician sputters. He sits, then stands, then wraps his lips around his instrument. The sounds of shock and confusion are met with the sudden, smooth caresses of jazz. The star-struck men and women shiver, then settle. 

Their light slips from them, racing back to Dawn. She begins to glow. Henry holds his hand up to shade his eyes, and the gesture—so brilliantly familiar—makes Dawn laugh in unabashed joy.

Day shatters Night suddenly, marching hot and blinding on their brother’s heels without Dawn between them. The people shout. 

Clean up your mess, Day shouts into her sister’s thoughts. 

Dawn stands on her tiptoes and kisses her star on the cheek. “I have to go,” she whispers. 

He catches her wrist, then drops it, already too hot to hold. She shines brightly, eager to rise. The streets are full of dancing. People clasp hands, clang glasses brimming with orange juice and rum, and pull themselves up onto bougainvillea-laced balconies asking to use a telephone. 

Her star alone is still, his eyes fixed on her. Their heat burns away any questions she still held inside, leaving only warmth. “Where can I find you?” he asks. 

She leans back, standing for a moment on just the heels of her shoes. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she says. “Every morning.” 

“But where?” he says. 

“Here!” She knows his name, and now, he knows hers. She will find his upturned face and warm it with her own. Dawn drops her hands and spins, laughing as a dress as blue as the sky above her unfurls around her waist. 

His smile turns to matching laughter. “Alright,” he says. “I’ll see you in the morning, then.” 

Dawn looks up. “Every morning?” 

He turns his face towards hers and kisses her, his lips and cheeks reddening from her heat. Henry gasps. 

She steps back, her hand pressed to her lips in wonder. 

“Every morning,” Henry promises. 

Somewhere behind them, a glass falls, shattering. Voices cheer. He looks over his shoulder at the city beyond. 

Dawn ducks, dancing around Day’s swat. 

Every morning, she thinks to Night, I will see him every morning. 

You are a strange one, sister, Night thinks back. 

The stars laugh. Dawn dances.