The day the moon fell

The day the moon fell is the same day you realised all your secrets had fallen from the top cabinet of your small yellow kitchen

      (you tended to put them in a shabby old cider bottle, whenever they got too frantic, whirling around your brain like carefree children in a play park)

The two facts weren't correlated, you had decided later, but still an odd certainty had struck you at the time that one simply could not have occurred without the other. After all, what were the odds of your painstakingly concealed

                 (pushed meagrely out of sight on the dusty top cabinet, you remember)

                                                               bottle of secrets toppling over and smashing right at the very moment the moon itself had also decided to topple right off its axis and dance into the hitherto unknown eons of space? Highly unlikely, you had concluded at the time, though you, of course, firmly objected against this later. Your secrets had smashed on the cold tile floor and all the yellow paint and sunflowers in the world hadn't been able to make you feel any better. The strange thing was, no matter who you spoke to they only seemed to care about that dastardly, traitorous, runaway moon. You understood why, distantly, of course. But your secrets had fallen too and why couldn't anyone see that that had to matter too? The moon wasn't even here with us, you had sulked. Not on earth, not even really a part of our day to day. After all we had lights now, didn't we? Artificial moons to keep us satisfied. And it wasn't like the sun had gone anywhere, was it? That you could've understood the fuss about. But no. Just the sun's underachieving night owl younger sibling, making her great escape

                        (isn't that what all the underachieving black sheep siblings do anyway? And didn't you just know a little something about that)

                           and we were all in a huff about it. You had wandered a lot that summer. Picking wildflowers from places they had no right growing. Slicing oranges on small blue side plates and offering them to strangers who didn't obsess over the mystery of the missing moon. You had felt lost without your secrets, despite the happy fact that they had burdened you enough to banish them to the highest, dustiest most unkempt depths you owned. You felt things half remembered that had seemed important enough to shape who you were, or should have been, right at your molten core, but grasping the details felt like clutching at thin wisps of smoke with ones clumsy, oafish hand. You had never had oafish hands, you thought bitterly. Everything about you had always been willowy, and smoothly dexterous. But suddenly you felt too tall, too clumsy, too lanky. 

 The nights were darker now. You, personally, didn't mind. The animals hadn't liked it. The cats especially, had rebelled. You hadn't given much thought why. You began laying a saucer or two of milk out in the evenings at your front door, in quiet lamenting support. You had always liked cats. You had owned one as a child, but something had happened. You weren't sure what but the gaping, ragged hole in your memory swirled with anguish and grief and you could only assume the worst. If only I hadn't smashed that damn bottle you had thought to yourself irritably one night, scratching behind the ears of a lazy tabby that had taken to visiting your yellow house often for a lick of cream and a head tickle. By now you had stopped picking wild flowers for yourself and begun placing them at hairpin turns on the road. Nobody had ever asked why. You didn't expect they ever would.

                                                        (You continued to offer the oranges, but people were less and less inclined to take them)

The night the moon came back, was the night the tabby died. You had returned back to your house (yellow) with a small bushel of wild flowers and a tin of peaches. You had been placing flowers across bridges for hours and your brow was slick with sweat, despite the cool evening breeze

  (after all, you thought grimly, someone has to do it)

         and you stumbled upon his thick, mangled body. It had been dragged unceremoniously to the side of the road, it's midsection nearly completely flattened, it's wet and bloated organs spilling behind it 

                                        (like the train of a ghastly wedding dress.)

 The cloying, heady smell of summer decay had hit your nostrils then, and you had bent right on over and let your small lunch of almonds and ravioli go right there on the pavement. After a moment you bustled inside, casting your surplus wildflowers and pitiful dinner aside and grabbing several towels and a blanket. You had returned outside in nearly enough of a hurry that you half convinced yourself you might be able to save your poor, hours dead and decaying tabby. The world had been different once you stepped outside, and it took a moment for you to gather quite why. 

It was back.

That big bloated traitorous moon, was back. Floating pallidly in the sky like a hovering spectre. You had screamed at it then. Screamed at it to let you and your tabby alone, to have some damn decency and let you grieve in peace. It did not, of course. It simply hung there. Like a fat corpse in the silky blue blanket of sky. You watched me suffer before you left and now you're back to watch me suffer again. You hated it, you decided, quite simply. 

 For weeks all anyone would talk about was the moon's heroic and triumphant return. It looked different, of course. Not noticeable at first but, if you looked closely enough (you hadn't) you could see a thin purple hue now hung around it (like a bad smell, you thought). One or two people claimed they had seen it blink. You almost hoped that was true, because that meant it could see when you raised your middle finger to it every night through the yellow window of your yellow kitchen. Things had moved on now. The moon was back, new and improved. You continued laying wildflowers

                  (someone had to do it)

                                         and instead offered small, neatly sliced strawberries to those who would let you tell them about the times you had once shared with a magnificent tabby. You went home each night and drank tea with honey and made sure to carve out time for your nightly ritual to the new moon, in all her blinking, secretive glory. 

And on the nights when the fresh secrets became too feverish and frantic in your brain

             (like a carefree child in a playpark)

                                             you would reach gingerly to the top cabinet of your yellow kitchen and pull down a small, perfectly preserved cat skull, and wretch them into there for the safest of keeping.