When the Moon was Ours(47)

She had wanted to name every one. She named one for Aracely, one for Sam’s mother, and then she told Sam he had to pick one, the one she would name after him. He had brushed his fingers near one at the base of her neck, the shape small but the edges clean and sharp.

He had mapped her body like a new sky. He had known even then that this night was something perfect, without jagged corners to catch themselves on. But it was only now that he knew why. That day, with the foil stars, there was both a reason for him to be touching her, and no need for a reason. They were younger. She didn’t hesitate before she pulled leaves from his hair, and he hadn’t paused before reaching out and placing one of the foil stars on her shoulder.

Sam sat up, pulling away from Aracely’s hands.

“Sam,” Aracely said, his name emerging from one gasp and falling into another.

The lovesickness rushed back into him. It stung every corner of his body. He was a river caught between water and ice. Frozen too much to move. Not enough to stand solid against the wind and the pull of the moons he had made.

His body felt heavy with the lovesickness that had almost gone. Now it hooked into him, its hold deep and firm. It was an animal nearly torn from its nest, and he was the tangles of twigs and thread and grass where it made its home.

If anyone tried to tear it away again, its claws would rip him apart.

“I can’t,” he said, the words choked and small.

Aracely’s eyes flashed red brown. Her hands still smelled like laurel and cloves. “Why?” she asked.

“Because it’s mine,” he said.

It was his. All of it was his. His body, refusing to match his life. His heart, bitter and worn. His love for Miel, even if it had nowhere to go, even if he didn’t know how to love a girl who kept herself as distant from him as an unnamed constellation.

These things belonged to him. They were his, even if they were breaking him.

He slid off the table.

“Sam,” Aracely said, more concerned than calling him back.

“I’m fine,” he said, not turning around. “I’m fine.”

He left the wisteria-colored house, and crossed feather grass fields toward the woods.

The feeling of Miel’s mouth on his turned so solid it felt like the chill of metal. It grew from the brushing of her rose petals to the sting of how the winds blew on the shortest day of the year. It took root in him, digging itself in harder for having almost been torn out. He felt her, warm and alive as the roots of a yew tree.

The way he loved her was his, even if she wasn’t. His names were his, all of them.

The moons he’d made were his, to hang or hide or wreck.

From a scarlet oak tree, he took down one that was the dark blue of an indigo milk mushroom’s gills, the slice of a crescent moon almost lavender. From maple trees, he took down another the gray of an overcast but rainless day, and another the soft gold of the beech tree outside Miel’s window. He found the lilac and pink moons of late spring, the green and yellow ones of the planting season, the amber of fall and the crisp, pale blue of winter. He found ones so small Miel could have hidden them in drawers, and others big enough that he’d forgotten how hard the metal or glass had been to take up the wooden ladder.

There were so many moons. So many lunar seas and shadowed valleys. When they filled his arms and he could not carry any more, he clustered them together at the base of a tree, trying to remember where he’d set each one down so he could come back for them.

The ones near houses he’d leave, so sons and daughters could fall asleep sure the tinted light would keep away their nightmares. But he’d tear down every one he could find in the woods. They cropped up like the eggs he and Miel dyed at Easter and then hid in the church grass for children to find. The only time of year Aracely bought white eggs. One moon reminded him of the ones they colored green with yellow onion. One was the dusk color that came from blueberries. Another was the gold and soft brown of the eggs they dyed with cayenne and turmeric. The next was the deep turquoise that came from red cabbage so purple that the work of the dye seemed like a magic trick.

The woods were grass and leaves, and he was a child trying to find countless eggs. He found one moon, and then spotted another, the trail of them leading him deeper into the trees, until the reds and rust colors were so thick he could barely tell it was daytime.





lake of softness

She fell deeper under the water. She was losing not just the bright gold of the trees outside the glass, but every light Sam had ever made. Those moons were how she knew him. Each year on his mother’s birthday, he hung a moon the yellow of wild marigolds. The greenish cast of a corn moon told her he couldn’t sleep. And a plain white moon, like clean linen, meant he was ready for a new year, breathing out the last of the December air.

He spoke in the light that slipped in through windows. It was his language, his tongue. On her last birthday, he’d left a moon painted dark gold, a honey moon so amber that the light it let off made her sure she had woken up in autumn, months after she’d fallen asleep. When she had a cough so deep in her lungs Aracely would not let her leave her bed, Sam had brought one that looked like sun through lilac blossoms. And each year, during the season when the farms took in their harvest, he hung one that cast a blush over her whole room, to keep away her nightmares of the pumpkins’ vines and ribbed shells.

Those moons had been his way of calling her outside. They’d slipped out of their houses each night to find each other. But now the air between them prickled with warning, and she was losing him. He was every light in the sky, and she was losing him.