Just Another Moon

I will admit the truth. I am beautiful. From birth I've always glowed more than the other girls. Even though the other girls are quite beautiful too, I just had certain qualities that they did not.

I lived with my uncle because my parents were gone. I liked to think that they died in the war but it's most likely that they abandoned me. They probably stumbled out of too many taverns and somewhere got lost and forgot that they had a daughter. But my uncle never forgot me. I worked with him in his shop where he would repair tractors and small motors and even sometimes fix up cars. He had quite a few of them. Most of them were non-responsive, but every now and then he would get one to work. His favorite was the motorcycle. He built a sidecar for me, and together we would drive the country. He would show me all the things that he had ever seen and sometimes we would see new things together. He was a good uncle and he was opposed to me becoming the moon.

But it was obvious that the town needed one. It was also obvious that the only thing brighter than a candle or a torch was me. When the mayor came to me late one night after dinner, he brought with him the muffins his wife had made. They were the most beautiful muffins. They were made with orange peels and marmalade. They looked more like the sun than the moon, and maybe that was on purpose. Who better to propose to the moon than the Sun? It didn't matter. I knew why he was at my uncle's home, and I had already prepared my answer.

“Yes, I will be our moon.” I will sit in the oak tree every night and let the lovers and the late night workers and the crickets and the owls all have a light to guide them from one calendar day to the next. Because until this point, our evenings had been harrowing. There was nothing we could really do to make it that silvery color that makes nighttime so beautiful. Our nights felt like charcoal with a furnace blast or a fire pit that slowly dies. I knew what I could do.

How many days can you walk through the town and have every married man stop and tip his hat at you before you realize that you are the moon? None of them were a bother. But their desire for me was palpable. Most of the time the wives weren't even jealous because they could see it too. Who doesn't like to acknowledge when someone is the most of anything. Who is the best baker? Who is the one you want to talk to when you've got to fix a broken door? Who is the member of the community that you believe could solve your problems fastest? We always want to know the superlatives. Well one of us has to be the prettiest. And for some reason that person was me.

Don't get me wrong. My uncle taught me how to fix things, and I enjoyed working in his shop. In many ways it was a perfect balance. It was dirty work. It was lonely work. It wasn't something that required an audience. And yet I don't think I ever fixed a single machine or sharpened the blade of a tractor or a hoe without an onlooker or two. It was rare that somebody would drop off something to be fixed without wanting to stay and watch me fix it. Sometimes people would come to watch me work who weren't even engaged with what I was doing. They had no reason to be in the shop. They just wanted to see how nimble the moon was with her hands.

I don't know what was more rare about me. My beauty or the fact that I was greasy most of the time. Not many women in our town could handle tools. But I could fix anything. I could fix a clock. I could fix an oven. It was quiet work. There wasn't much reason for my uncle or I to speak to each other. He would work on his side of the shop, and I would work on mine and we would just take the pouches that we had created for each of the jobs that we had to do, and when the job was done we would seal the pouch and wait for the customer to come back. Then we would start with something new.

I knew my uncle liked having me in the shop. He felt guilty about his sister, but of course he always knew what she would become. And when she first got pregnant with me, my uncle promised in his prayers that he would take care of me. He gave up on his sister a long time ago. When they were little, my uncle did all her chores. Somehow he knew he was just waiting for her to get old enough to leave the house and the town and maybe the planet.

Of course my mother could have been the moon. She was pretty as well. Sometimes it's the most beautiful ones who attract the most awful men. The awful men have no humility. They're not afraid to lie, and they're often very good at it. My father was a wonderful liar, and he told my mother every lie that she wanted to hear. He just told them better than anyone else had ever told them. My uncle always taught me how to spot a lie. But he never taught me how to avoid being stolen. That was one thing he didn't think he had to teach me. Because once I became the moon, who was going to steal me? Well…That is the story I'm telling. Because I was stolen.

There was a town not far from ours where they did not have a moon. One night a man came into our village and his truck broke down. He was told to come to my uncle's shop where the truck could be fixed. I didn't usually fix the vehicles, but my uncle was busy and this man was in a hurry. Seeing as it was daytime, I was in the shop and not up in the tree. No one needs a moon in the daytime. And I was free to climb down every morning and do the things that I liked to do.

I liked helping my uncle. So I fixed this man's truck, but he couldn't stop staring at me. I'm used to being stared at but this was something different. He had the eyes of a stranger. He had the eyes of a hawk. When I spoke to him he didn't listen to the words I said. And when he looked at me, he didn't look at my eyes and my mouth. He would trace the glow of me around my shoulders between my breasts and down the curve that was almost invisible in my overalls. A hungry man, however, could see the shape of me. He said, ”You're that moon from last night aren't you? You were up in the trees? Yes?” I nodded my head even though I felt for the first time that it might have been in my best interest to lie. But I didn't. I should have. “Yes. You're very beautiful. I can see why they made you the moon.” He pulled money from his pocket and paid the bill that I had in front of him. I left the keys on the receipt. He reached across and grabbed my wrist and said… “How much do they pay you? How much do they pay you to be the moon?” I shook my head and said nothing. “We had a moon beautiful like you, but there was…an accident. We hung her higher in the air than you. It was quite a fall.” I told him that I had to go because there were other things for me to fix. He indicated that he was impressed with my skills as a mechanic. I said I'm not a mechanic. I just know how to fix things. He smiled wide and said, “yes.”

All day long I couldn't get that smile out of my head. Sometimes when the angles were right I would look like a crescent. I could take on all the shapes of the moon. The people were impressed by that and they deserved to have a legitimate moon in the sky. I did my very best for them because they had always done so much for me. But now the crescent that was stuck in my head was the crooked smile this man gave me as I stood there feeling more naked than I ever felt in a bathtub or in the lake late at night when there was no moon to see and I could swim alone in the blue cold water under the darkness of night.

I never mentioned the man to my uncle, but I wish that I had. My uncle would have recognized the man. But how could I know him? How could I recognize my own father who had abandoned me even before I knew how to do anything but cry. My uncle loved to tell me the story of the very first night that he took me into his home and placed me in the drawer at the bottom of his dresser that he had made up to be like a little bassinet. I stopped crying that very moment, and after that I never cried again. I can't remember ever crying about anything. Maybe my father didn't recognize me because I wasn't crying. But when I think about it now, I know he had to recognize me. He had once looked at my mother the same way. I'm sure of it. He was once just as hungry for her as he was for me. The only difference is, my mother wanted to be swallowed. And all I wanted to do was fix his truck.

It's wonderful to be in a place where you know you can trust the people who live around you. Of course, the weakness is that you don't know what it's like to mistrust. And when those villains come to your home who you shouldn't trust, it's not difficult for them to do the very bad things. The very worst things. And so my father and his men came to the town, and they cut down the tree where I was sitting and glowing. They caught me before I fell and they put me in a sack and threw me into the back of the very truck that I had fixed only a few days before.

They drove me far. They drove me to their town which did not have a moon any more. That Moon was dead. When we got to the spot, there was no well-made ladder. And there was no tree. They simply bound my hands and undressed me and tied a rope around my waist and nailed me to the sky. And I hung there in the sky day and night.

During the day the men would come and just stare at me. I was naked. I could see them touching themselves through the pockets of their pants, remembering the things that they would later think about at night when they were in their beds and their wives were asleep. They enjoyed seeing me hanging from the sky. The women would pretend that their men were not in love with me. But when no one was around many of the women would throw rocks at me. They would teach their daughters to do the same. I guess no one minded the bruises because at night all I would do is glow. I couldn't help it. You couldn't see how beat up I was. My light is that blinding.

So now they finally had another moon. I could hear them talking about the past moons. They had several before, but they felt lucky to have me. Lucky to have two in a row that were so innately bright and beautiful.

Sometimes I would look around the town and I would see the number of things that needed to be fixed. I would think that if they let me down I could fix those things for them. But they weren't interested in that. They couldn't see me for me. They couldn't see me as someone with hands. They didn’t want to see me greasy. The bruises or the cuts or the blood that would sometimes drip from my body were fine. That was all a part of it. In this town they wanted their moon to be humiliated. I was second to the sun. I was a status symbol. In fact most of the people of this town didn't go out at night. It wasn't a safe place to be. They didn't really need a moon in the sky at night for practical purposes. I was dressing. I was there so that they could say they had a moon. I could see them looking at each other if anyone ever mentioned the name of my former town. They were so proud of themselves. Proud that they had stolen their moon. Again. Proud that they had taken two moons from the same little town. Saps.

I was hanging up in the sky over a graveyard. Only it wasn't a graveyard where they buried the bodies. No. I could see the shin bones and the rib cages and the skulls of the previous moons that had hung up in the sky. Whenever a moon couldn't glow anymore, they would shoot it and let its body droop. The townspeople would just cut her down and the bodies would decompose right there in the spot below where the moon would hang.

The last moon was rotting away on the ground just below me. And when I looked at the bones I recognized them like they were my own. They looked like my bones. They were beautiful too. And I knew that I had come back to the beginning. One day they would shoot me and cut me down and my body and my bones would sit on top of the bones that were there now. The bones that were almost identical to my own. I wonder if she was dead when she hit the ground. I hoped. It struck me that this was as close as I had been to my mother since I had been inside of her so many years ago. Her rib cage. Her skull, A dead pile of bones that stopped glowing a long long time ago.