On a distant beach was a house the color of grapefruit flesh and hidden in beach grass. In this house lived three in harmony and bound by that divine number. The past, present, future. They were birth, life, and death. The beginning, the middle, and the ending, but they erased distinction between any of it. Three star princes of the star-realm, though she was their queen and they her twin princes of the stars. A constellation. Their world was one of hot, equatorial winds and endless montages of sun and moon shadows, generous loops of frosting sunrises and sunsets and they lived there in the gold like gods.

In this hidden house they spend entire afternoons making beautiful things: keema curries and loaves of bread and passionfruit panna cotta, and glazed tarts like mosaics. They could reach through nearly any window and pluck heavy fruit so juicy and overripe they were drunk on it. They floated days away in the pool pushed up over the dunes like a balcony to the beach. They played wild games of hide and seek as monsoon rain smeared the sea from the windows. They did strange and wonderful things to each other in bed. They etched masterpieces in the dusty films atop the dining room table, the tops of bookcases and the windowpanes and then blew them away.

The house was a vacation property passed down through two generations and left to the star princes. Nobody visited in years. Nobody even asked. An older cousin drowned there, presumably. Whisked out to sea with a sudden rush of waves never to be seen again. The star princes remember this. They remember her hand, still holding her cocktail above the water, growing fainter, and they remember the shoreline murmurs, followed by calamity, and the water settled serene. 

* 

The star princes couldn’t be told apart. They were like a trick of light, like double-vision, like the bloom of sun after the blackout dark of a movie theater. Even still, the three wedded in the sea spray and in the golden ring cast by the sun. Their veiled vows were in a dark closet, as the palm trees scratched the screens.

They honeymooned in the pool. Reedy plants and small crabs claimed the sapphire haze. It was warm and looming with trees with their bowed branches so fecund that dark, enormous fruit bobbed the surface. Their watery jungle. Her star princes marveled over fruit and her. They searched for differences between the forms and finding none, they promised to eat all their meals off her.

Because they abandoned the yoke of time, there was no telling how long this might go on for.

And, after all, there was nobody else around for miles and miles and miles.

Soon the phone rang, drifting out with the breeze across the beach, merging with the sounds of late afternoon waves softened by the dunes. It was an old phone, soft pink and snug in its cradle, resembling an ear or a seashell.

The first time the sound was so unfamiliar the three leapt in simultaneous terror. They’d stared down the hallway with the immense window at the end, like a bright white doorway opened wide. Looking upon the ringing phone, they realized how much like a shrine the table was upon which the phone sat: chipped champagne glasses painted with pouty-lipped fish, dried flowers, a half-peeled orange. The star princes remarked they had not known the phone was plugged in.

Lately, the star queen answered.

Hellos thrown out into the ether. She passed the phone round to listen and giggle and offer a couple of lewd remarks. On the other end there was a rustle. The star queen thought it sounded like the receding of a wave. A star prince suggested the whisper of palm fronds.

“Sssucculent,” said the phone’s voice.

“They lisp,” she said to her star princes, palm over the mouthpiece.

“All I heard was trees and breeze,” said the other star prince.

“Upstairsssss. Walk the leavesss,” said the voice on the phone.

*

It was one of those nights. One when it was all silver and bejeweled, and they climbed over dunes and crept through the stretch of beach woods to find the caimans. On some dark walks, they never found the lagoon, as if it moved or folded into the sands. But on clear nights like this, with only the soft hush of their feet on the sand, they followed the minerally scent of the lagoon and the sweet flora it sustained. Caimans smudged the surface, catching moonlight and flowers and vines hooked onto the ridges of their backs and their eyes glowed like citrine and planets in another sky. The star queen and her star princes swam in this lagoon in the dunes overhung by banana trees and pinkened by azalea bushes and brushed against the saurian beneath the surface.

It was one of the hottest nights, one of those nights when the heat rippled above the water in silver steam and rose to the moon in tendrils. And this shallow, hot lagoon was like the days, barely moving against the commotion of the love-frenzied caiman and water snakes in endless replication.

*

In the tub, and lit by low lamps:

“I dreamed last night I was in a river,” said a star prince. “There were coconuts in the trees and stairs under the water.”

“A river of stairs,” the star queen marveled. 

“You are the river of stars,” said the star prince without the dream.

“I had to climb through the water. I couldn’t swim,” said the dreaming star prince.

“Was it a nightmare?” she asked. “I love to hear nightmares.”

The waves called through the screen. They went straight from the bath to the beach. Night unwound in shimmering fog and starlight illuminated their path and the dark silhouettes of caimans followed them along the slope of the dunes. Ferns and other creeping plants buried their bare feet, so they carried seedlings that would bud in the next season. Miniature forests in full born over and with red planets like strawberries spinning above. Luscious white foam offered itself over and under the churning black sea, warm as the bath they’d abandoned, and its waiting maw.

They became jaguars and moved like them too on the sand. They were jaguars, snakes, sucking leeches, ravenous and drooling dogs, all the insatiable night beasts they could name. None could tell when the night ended, and the dreams took over. The caimans barked at the night sky, and everything quivered with love sounds. They awoke sticky with the blood rush of dawn and the echo of the phone.

*

There was a knock at the door. From the top of the stairs, they watched Virgo invite himself in and sit on the couch. He sparked up a blunt and sighed.

“I’m coming down with something. Head thing. Chest thing. Fucking with my back too. A real bitch.” His eyes riffled over the trio perched on the loveseat across from him.

“You see the edge?” asked the star queen.

Virgo patted his pockets, bleary-eyed, coughing, and clenching the blunt between his teeth. 

“Something like it. Wanted to bring your goods before I cross the desert.”

“That bad?” said the star prince to the left.

A hacking cough. “Yeah. Anyway. Least I could do.” Virgo passed and produced. A payment. The interaction was exhausted. He was on his way out when the star queen asked,

“You ever get any phone calls you’ve found…strange?”

“Sure,” Virgo said easily and turned. “You know, my line of work and all.”

“I mean calls like where the caller sounds…abnormal,” said the star queen. She stretched out into sunrays streaming in the screen door. Outside, everything was green, drifting, shadowed. “Like half-wild.”

Virgo blew his nose and moaned into his sopping handkerchief.

“You’re getting those sorts of calls?” he asked weakly.

“Should I be afraid?” asked the star queen.

“Hear about the one where the calls are coming from inside the house? Upstairs or in some closet…Happened to my cousin and he still has the voice in his head.”

“So what should we do?” asked a star prince.

“I wouldn’t sleep ever again,” said Virgo as he passed through the screen.

Then they were all alone, all over.

*

There were signs that a snake was lurking about, like thick patches of jungle flattened beneath immense weight weaving beneath the tree’s shade. Birds quieted and made themselves scarce. There were serpentine paths in the beach and grooves in the dunes. There was the caiman, swallowed whole and regurgitated, and left at their doorstep atop the porch stairs, like an offering, and its form covered with a sticky film. From a high, corner window, the star queen saw a long snake’s shadow reaching to nibble on a piece of fruit and traced the slinking shapes in the crooks of the trees. In late-afternoon, gold sunlight painted the living room with thick panels, and the only sounds were the sighing shift of the creeping jasmine, and wisteria drooping in the heat like half-closed umbrellas.

The star princes fed their queen grapes, halved by teeth, and poured water and wine onto her tongue with their lips. They colored her mouth with softened raspberries and buttered bread so thick she left marks with her teeth. Plum yogurt on a shared spoon and Christmas chocolates in tinseled wrapping and honeydew sorbet melted down the night table in a green stream.

“The woods?” asked the star queen. Though, she did not know what they might do in the woods they could not do in their bed with sunny mountains of pillows and cool places between the sheets like valleys.

“We can play hide and seek,” suggested the star prince who was feeling bold. Draped across the bed under the whir of the fan when the phone trilled and the star queen took the sun-warmed stairs two at time and caught the phone mid-ring. 

“Soar ancient meadowsssss,” the voice whispered.

“Let’s go.”

“Come.”

“I love to.” She glanced at the window.

“Sssea, skiessss,” the voice sighed and something creaked above, more like a step. “You in the middle.”

“Keep going,” said the star queen. She looked at the screen door and how flimsy it appeared. The hook was latched, but a solid kick would do it in. Then what? The jungle overflowed up onto the porch.

“Do you tell liessss?”

“Uh-huh,” she nodded. And she did. She loved to lie. Lying was a thrill. She built lives out of lies.

A shadow fell through the screen and across the floor. She looked and waited, expectant. There was a sliding sound from the porch, a sneaky, slithery sound on the wooden planks.

“Where are you?” she asked. She tapped her toes on the sandy floor to remind herself she could run.

“Everywhere. Nowhere. In the ssssea. In another life.”

“Look, I’ve got a big, mean-ass dog and all it takes is one word and he’s—”

“You let him shit all over your houssse?”

“What?”

“Never seen you walk him.”

She hung up the phone. Yet. At nightfall, she snuck out to the porch and down into the dunes, placing bowls of water to catch the moon and sate the thirst of the snake. The dunes like deserts stretched silver on and on and on.

* 

The star queen liked to see herself in the mirror. The mirror was her dizzy maze, and she spent hours wandering. She brought strawberry ice cream in mugs and sat on the counter and ate before herself in the nude. She watched until she lost perception, and she could see herself like another being entirely. 

Her star princes joined on occasion and the three charted the map of her. The dark pools of her eyes, the rosy curve of her mouth, hills and plateaus and the shadowed forest of her heart, gems and arches and bridges and countless shadows and glowing sunsets.

Evening’s shade crept over the dunes and darkened the wiry shapes of the trees. She carved a valley in her ice cream and wanted to stick her tongue in it. For the better part of her cognizance, she liked to remind herself often that she was alive, so when she looks back, there are many lives in the catalog of her existence. Which of these lives will she look back upon and say was real life? Which is the life where it began?

When she was sixteen or seventeen, her mom said something that stuck in the heat of a finger-jabbing fight. Everything started over a grade but grew the depth to reach all the way back to childhood. Her mother went silent for a beat, and the star queen was feeling like she won the argument. She was feeling pretty powerful.

Then her mom turned to her with eyes narrowed and called her “man-crazy.” There was the way her mother looked at her when she said it too, with the obvious disgust predicated on shame, but there was also pity. And that latched in her psyche. That stark recognition shifted something on a tectonic level.  She realized her mom was right and she went with it.

Her mother knew what she was, and the star queen did too. She remembered coming home after the first time she’d ever had sex a few years before that, her hair still in a towel from the pool and her stomach leaping, and her mother came round the corner of the stairs and went “hey!” and because the star queen knew she’d been up to no good, she whirled around.

“What’d you do?” Her mother sneered, dragging her eyes up and down and tilting her head like she could smell it.

It takes a woman to just know.

She went with it.  She would prove it, show her mother just how right her assessment was. First it was boys then it was men. Men. Once it was men there was nothing else. She was obsessed. She was hooked. She couldn’t ever get enough.

She yearned for them in their shapes. Their shoulders in shadow. Men’s faces in the glow of movie lights. The movements of their shoulders and the curve between their ribs, and hint of their chest beneath their clothes. How they held pens and how they drank water. She could look at every man and find something that made her want them. She liked catching a glimpse of their torsos as they leaned over and how they pulled on their pants when they sat down. Their wrists. Their ankles. Their hands resting on knees, awkwardly on tables, and reaching, flailing, to scratch their backs. She liked that sleepy, dreamy way men looked at her when they wanted something and how they sat with their legs spread open, because they could, and because they made all the rules.

She liked men who came to night classes after surfing all afternoon with rosy cheeks and smelling of salt and sweat and made drowsy by the sun. And she, drifting through lectures on bottle green waves, her whole body clenched.

She loved them. She could not ever get her fill.  She liked blushing boys, older boys, the ones who showed off tongue tricks with cherry stems, men’s nipples in honey rouge, caramel, wine, umber, tea, peachy-pink. She liked pretty boys and quiet ones, ones who bent their faces toward her when they wanted to talk close. Broody men, the ones who tried to make her laugh and the men she passed in apartment mailrooms, and the ones who grew bold with tequila and positive affirmation.

The best was when she felt like she was about to fall off a cliff. She liked infatuation and lust with a perpetual undercurrent of nausea. She liked when she couldn’t think straight. She liked obsession that made nights agony and she liked putting herself together after agony and deprivation too. It gave her an immovable trust in herself and now there was nothing she could not overcome. So for some years, she pushed this and lived in the peaks and valleys of her own creation. Passion changed everything. Through passion, her vision fogged over, went hazy, and her focus became singular. And when passion burned out, like all fires do, she saw better than ever. The film was lifted and in its place was the truth.

What it all came down to was that she understood men. She got men. There was a man that lived inside her mind whose eyes she saw herself through. Who gazed at every breath she took, every move she made, and saw her beyond closed doors and between the blinds.

 But she knew that to be true for all women.

* 

She woke after Virgo’s visit with his cold. Her star princes prepared her thin vegetable soup and pureed fruits and flowery teas. They begged her to sneeze in their mouths and cough on their faces. They sealed the bathroom with towels and turned on the shower and tub and squeezed lemons into bowls so the steam in the bathroom was sharp and stinging, but her fevered limbs ached. They carried her to the porch to be warmed, splayed under the sun, so she would stop shivering. They placed flowers all around her and drizzled pool water on her pinkened cheeks and lit candles, swelling in beach breeze.

From her low vantage point, it was like she stumbled into a world of trees. Trees of all sorts towered over her in endless curves and crossings of branches etched across the sky. She pushed herself up onto her elbows. The star princes fanned her and licked her sweat.

She could hear the hungry lunge of the sea, not far off, and she looked at the drooped vines and knotted thorny plants like pupils in the eyes of the trees. She saw shapes, heard the sliding sounds. There was a snake in the tree. She was certain. It was a Burmese python and striped and perhaps twenty feet long. Maybe thirty. Such things were not unheard of. Some great-grandchild or great, great grandchild of someone’s pet; escaped or grown too large and bored for its lackluster tanked existence and let go in mercy.

She wiped sweat from her eyes and strained to see. The python was created to vanish, be invisible, to become flora. But she could hear it, and she dreamed of it nightly: sliding down the trees, and through the path it carved into the woods, the fruit groves, the beach grass, and thump, thump up onto the porch, cross the front door without invitation and up the stairs, thump thumping, maddeningly, until it slipped beneath the sheets to her. She dreamed this and woke certain the snake followed her from her unconscious. Searching through the star princes for mambas basking in moonglow, cobras coiled in blossoms of sheets, and feeling the weight of the python’s dull caress. The cool of the spade-shaped head sliding down her belly, still damp from the water she left.

And the other end of the phone sounded so like these fronds all around her. Her mind ran through the phrases and words that lisping voice whispered to her. The things the star princes couldn’t make out: sssseven million treesssss, sssssssail through the cosmosss, upstairzzzzsss.

“I see a snake. There. Between the trees,” she whispered to the star princes. They squinted, searching.

“When I was little, I wanted to live in a place entirely made up of trees. Shady and quiet and cool,” she said and stared at them both. The sun overhead; the star princes vanished in the gleam. But she felt them, soon enough. Leaves murmured and the shadows stretched out toward evening. Shadows became evening.

It was a world of trees. In twilight, they were alive. Everything swelled and moved, like the earth was breathing deeply, expelling the scent of the colossal jasmine bush on the shady side of the house. Eyes of nocturnal things stirred and sparkled.

Back inside, a pair of candles atop the phone’s table provided the only light. Fiery shadows cut across the star princes’ faces. They were laughing, grim, worried, then angry, lustful, uncertain, leering. She looked away and to the window, waiting. Her hand was on the back of the receiver, so she felt its ring before she heard it. When she put the phone to her ear, the voice was already speaking and sighing.

“How did you get this number?” she whispered.

“Thank you for the water.”

“Where did you come from?” asked the star queen.

“Where do you think?”

“A shadow, a sea, or a closet that never ends. I look between pages or on a beach towel, right at the gulf.” In the reflection of the window, she was surrounded by the trees, curling with fruit and alive with animals. She looked round her shoulder for her star princes. Touched the warmth of her fevered forehead and saw she was alone. “Where are you?” asked the star queen.

“Why…upstairsss. In the dark of a forgotten bedroom. Thisss whole time.”

Beyond this house, past the trees, and over the dunes and across the lagoon, and up into the cloudless night sky, was a world without objects or thought, and endless space. She saw its corridor, blending up from the sea and merging with the sky. A place of beauty infinite and layered reflected only with itself and its memory. She caught glimpses of this place, but only glimpses. Beams of light caught in a glass.

Just beyond, the python wound up a palm and ascended toward the moon and the planets, now out in full in the velvet embrace of night. The candlelight glimmered off the snake’s spots and got caught in the eyes, winking at her. The line went dead. The line wasn’t even plugged in.

She touched her face and felt tears. Her star princes were at her sides once more to lap like dogs.

“Diamonds,” the star princes sighed, mouths opened at her cheek. The stars, married in the dark above, stared and shimmered like eyes eternal.

Taylor Melia Elyse Mahone is a fiction writer from Central Florida and a recent graduate of the McNeese State University MFA & MA program. Her fiction deals with reptiles, relationships, the sublime and the cosmic, & Floridian landscapes. Her forthcoming fiction in Salamander Magazine is nominated for the 2025 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.