The Moon Only Works at Night

No one really remembers when the Moon quit her day job. Some say she ran a call center in Jersey. Others swear she briefly held office in a district where everyone voted by sighing into jars. Either way, she vanished from daylight entirely the day her light grew too subjective to schedule, turning every spreadsheet into a lament and every phone call into an unheard whisper. She just—left.

Now she lives in a shuttered observatory at the edge of a quiet town that seems to shift slightly with the seasons. Her desk is a petrified stump. Her chair is the absence of a chair. She doesn’t sit. She sort of hovers.

She works only at night. Not because she loves darkness, but because it’s the only time she isn’t expected to explain herself. Daylight demands answers: what’s the meaning here? what’s the goal? who are you for? At night, the air goes still. She can move around without justifying it.

She starts each evening laying her fractured drafts on the floor: unfinished lullabies, apology notes to extinct species, pamphlets for an unbuilt chapel made of spiderweb and regret. Her favorites are in dream languages nobody has claimed. Each one whispers slightly when touched.

Some pages tremble more than others. One curls at the edges when it's alone. Another refuses to be read in sequence. She respects them all.

Tonight she’s working on a new piece. A hymn for abandoned swing sets. She dips her fingers in ink made of archived giggles and writes backwards, from the echo back to the silence. Her rhythm’s off—it jitters, skips. Like a pulse half-remembering itself.

The draft reads:

Chime of rusted joint and breath, we were never still, only tethered. Push me—not forward, but into memory. Push me until the stars squeak.

She scrawls in the margin: Don’t clean this. Let the dirt hold the rhythm.

She glances at a mirror that only reflects potential. In its surface, a thousand possible versions of her flicker. Tonight she lands on the dentist for ghosts.

That Moon wears a fog-coat and works quietly. She fills ghost cavities with lullabies and scrapes out ancient regrets. Her patients hum, never speak. A fine crack appears in the mirror’s surface as she chooses this self. It heals. She flinches anyway.

A knock. Flat and a little desperate.

The visitor’s out of breath. Tie made of old receipts. Laptop gently weeping.

“I heard you’re still making things,” he says.

The Moon doesn’t answer. She gestures. He steps over the drafts like they might wake up.

“I used to be a poet,” he mumbles, unsure if he’s confessing or applying.

She nods. The drafts rustle.

“I can’t write anymore. Nothing sticks. It all feels like resignation, rearranged.”

She opens a cupboard, uncorks a jar: "misunderstood intentions." Something spills—a noise like memory’s cousin. He inhales by accident.

Tears come. Quiet ones, sneaky.

She doesn’t comfort. Not her role. She hands him a blank page.

He tries. He starts with his name. It looks—off. Like it belonged to an outdated calendar. Then he writes a letter to someone he’s never met but misses badly.

The words come. Badly. Slowly. One sentence refuses to end. Another loops: I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what this is...

She listens like she’s reading tide charts.

At some point, she adjusts a draft so its shadow falls across his elbow. Just so.

He wipes his face. Keeps going. The page shivers.

The observatory air thickens, smells faintly of rain on asphalt after too much sun. He remembers it. She might’ve made it on purpose.

Trust doesn’t fall like rain. It sediments.

He pauses. She hands him a chunk of graphite. Smudged, dull. He writes. It’s softer now. He doesn’t say thanks. She nods.

She etches into the mirror:

What is potential if it never hardens? I am every draft that asked for silence.

Another smell now—dust, old nylon. An unopened suitcase sighing open. He’s reminded of something he meant to become. Or never did. Or nearly.

Time sloshes. Light jitters.

Outside, the town murmurs. A post office delivers only unsent letters. A laundromat hums with ghost socks. A garden grows backwards: seed, rot, bloom. He catches the hum—unfinished conversations spinning on repeat.

He briefly wonders if the Moon hears them too. If she collects them like fossils.

His pages loop. They don’t resolve. One says: "I am the hum before the song, but sometimes I am just the static." Another: "???"

He looks up. She’s gone.

In her place: a note.

"Keep what breaks you honest. Return when you forget your function. The swing sets are waiting."

He walks home through blue haze. Laptop tucked under his arm like something warm. In the kitchen, he powers it up.

The screen hums. Not quite a song. Not quite silence.

He exhales. Uneven. Steady.

Somewhere between the hum and the kettle boiling, he hears laughter. Or maybe—just maybe—it’s the swing sets waking up.

Weeks later, he returns.

He says nothing. Brings a manila envelope and a broken umbrella, ribs splayed like tired wings. He lays them down.

The Moon (tonight a torch singer in the mirror) rasps something almost-melodic. Velvet and rust.

She doesn’t read what he left. She doesn’t need to. She slides it next to a pamphlet titled: "On Having Meant Well."

She lingers longer this time. Her hand, barely visible, hesitates above the envelope. A motion like wind reconsidering a direction.

The drafts behind her rustle, reshuffling themselves. One moves aside as if making space.

Outside, the swings lift. No one’s pushing them.

They sing:

Remember us? We were your rehearsal for flight.

In the distance, the observatory hums. The drafts breathe. A single line on his page glows faintly and fades, like it had exhaled.

The Moon places a new blank page beside the envelope. Just in case he returns again.

Then she whispers—so quietly the air barely catches it—“We all forget the words sometimes.”

And for a moment, just a flicker, she lets her shoulders drop. A release. She turns to a draft she never finishes. It contains no ink, only pressure. It’s folded ten times, then once more.

She unfolds it slowly, as if re-learning a language she once knew. Her fingers linger on its creases. One breath. Another. Then she begins to write again—not from echo, but from ache.