When the Moon Was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

She seemed to have been made of water one minute and the next, became a girl.

He never asked her what she meant. Even then, he knew better. Her feeling that the moon had slipped from her grasp seemed locked in a place so far inside her that to reach it would be to break her open. But this was why Sam painted shadows and lunar seas on paper and metal and glass, copying the shadows of mare imbrium and oceanus procellarum—to give her back the moon. He had painted dark skies and bright moons on flat paper since he was old enough to hold a brush, old enough to look through the library’s astronomy atlases. But it wasn’t until this girl spilled out of the water tower, sobbing over her lost moon, that Sam began painting so many copies of the brightest light in the night sky. He would never let it seem lost to her again.

The closer she got to him, the more she felt it in her roses, like a moon pulling on a sea.

The water had barely cleared from Miel’s eyes when she saw the moon, caught between last quarter and full, disappear behind their heads. Even against the not-yet-dark sky, it lit up the red and gold and orange of their hair. From where Miel stood, her eyes feeling new, blurring everything, it looked like the moon had vanished into them, like they’d absorbed it. They had taken all its light. And Miel kept screaming, wanting to warn the boy standing in front of her that the moon was a thing that could be lost.

Because she saw him as something different than anyone else did too. She had seen him naked. Almost naked. And she understood that with his clothes off, he was the same as he was with them on.

And she stood tall enough that she looked like she could meet the gaze of the sky out on the horizon.

They would realize how beautiful this odd boy was, how the moons he hung in the trees at night glowed like a bowl of stars.

When they saw each other in Aracely’s indigo room, when they both realized they were heartbroken enough to want the love torn from their rib cages, they touched each other with their hands and their mouths, and they forgot they wanted to be cured.

Miel was a girl stained with rusted water and the blood on her hands of two people whose names she could not speak.

The petals vanished under the surface, and the water rippled like the hem of a dress. The moon refracted into a dozen sickles.

The only thing she wanted more than she wanted Sam was for her mother to know that Miel forgave her. That she understood why she did what she did. That she knew her mother loved her.

“Isn’t it worth it to you?” Chloe asked. “So everyone doesn’t find out all the terrible things she did?” Of course it was worth it to Miel. If people told those stories about her mother, her mother’s spirit would feel it. She’d be haunted, weighted by all those lies. Her spirit would never find any rest. She was already weighted down having a daughter born with roses in her body, a curse that spurred those petaled children to turn on their mothers.

He wore pressed slacks, nice enough for church, and a gray sweater in a knit too heavy for the weather, like he was trying to protect his heart from the thing he was paying to have done to it.

But this man was no different from any other visitor on Aracely’s table. His heart was swollen and sore with unwanted love. It fluttered inside his rib cage like wings. When Aracely took it out, it might flit around the room, running into a cabinet, bothering the apricots in the fruit bowl. But then Miel would fling the window open, and she and Aracely would chase it out the window like a bird that had wandered in.

Light filled the window, and she felt as far and unreachable as the moon.

The night air covered Miel. The cold threaded through her, and in the hollow of the wind she heard the sad murmur of her mother’s voice. To everyone else, it would sound like the warning of a storm. But if Miel listened, if she shut her eyes and found that humming under the wind, she heard her mother, caught between this life and leaving it.

With each wink of glass the moon found, her mother’s song sounded a little sharper, a little more like weak sobbing.

I am not your garden, she said, the words no louder than the thread of her mother’s voice the wind carried. I am not one of your father’s pumpkin vines. You do not own what I grow. The wind, and the crackling sounds of leaves and vines, answered her.

He kissed her again, hard, and it felt like him telling her that they could forget this. He would forgive her. Not even forgive her. He would let it go, treat it like the accident it was.

She could not move. In the woods, that stained glass coffin waited. And here, all these pumpkins, both made of jewel-colored glass and made of the same kind of flesh that held her years ago, pinned her in, keeping her from running. She could not cross these rows of glass.

The world was made of everything that wanted to take her in, and make her disappear.

He wanted to give her every light that had ever hung in the night sky. He wanted to give her back what she thought she’d lost years ago.

She might have slipped and fallen into the river. She might have once loved water, and swam with the current, realizing too late that it did not love her the way she loved it. Or she might have been small enough to see the moon on the surface, and think she could wade in and catch it.

“She loves you,” Aracely said. “She loves you as much as a daughter and a son and everything in the world put together.”

To this whole town, she was odd and unnerving. To them, she was the motherless girl who came from the water tower and grew roses from her wrist, a girl whose skirt hem was always a little damp even on the driest days. Whatever they said about her liking girls or liking boys was a handful of water next to the whole river. It could not make her stranger, more unsettling to everyone else, than she already was.

As though the truth of his body was any of their business, as though they had a right to consider how he lived an affront to them. As though who he was had anything to do with them.

But that stark beauty made her want to kiss him so badly that the lack of it made her lips feel cold. Her tongue was ice in her own mouth. Her breath was winter wind that stung every surface inside her.

He recognized her touch, the way she dug her fingers into his sides. He tried to fight her, to let her go like she was a moon the sky could take. He didn’t want to be the thing weighting her to the earth.

She could see the things living inside him, dragging their sharp edges.

She had held nothing back just because she wanted to keep it from him. His was a world of painted moons and feather grasses and trees that bloomed in autumn. She didn’t want to bring into that world the awful, half-remembered things she grasped at when she had a fever. She wanted to be the girl who belonged under his moons, the girl whose skin he’d set foil stars on in constellations that mirrored the sky.

She knew him no better than the landscapes in those library astronomy atlases. He was as distant as the lake of summer and the marsh of sleep and the ocean of storms.

Miel beat her hands against the water. Her fingers clawed at the current, even though she knew it wouldn’t feel it, that she never hurt it the way it had hurt her. She could never take from the river as much as it had taken from her.

It took her down so far she lost the moon, and all its distant light.

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.

He had the gravity of the moon in the sky. He could pull on oceans and rivers. He could drag lakes across deserts. There was enough force in him to turn the river that held her to light. He drew the water out of this place where she was forever slipping from her mother’s hold and drowning in the dark.

She breathed in the warmth that clung to his skin, her forehead on his shoulder, her cheek against his shirt. If she stayed this close to him, he was the whole world.

But now she was too broken and brittle to take it. She wasn’t a soft place he could fall. She was all edges, all fierce rivers and panels of stained glass. Only joints of rose brass held her together.

She remembered the pattern even better than her mother’s face, the flowers that must once have been yellow but that had faded to cream. That kitchen had held more of her mother’s laughter than anywhere else in the world.

The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.

His heart was not a dead thing, not weak from lack of use. It was hard and tight, a muscle that would not give.

With his weight on her, she was water and he was a moon, his gravity pulling her closer. He was a world unmapped, a planet of valleys and vapor seas no one but he had a right to name. If he let her, she would learn the bays and oceans of him. She would know him as well as he knew the maria in the moon atlases.

Miel threw the lids off more of the pumpkins, freeing their light to spill into the air. She had to be in one of these. There had to be somewhere she could find the body that had been hers. The more she heard her mother’s wailing, the faster she worked.

Her wrist stung and throbbed. Her body took in all this brokenness, all the lies, and through her roses released it, so the weight of it wouldn’t break every one of her ribs.

This was the one thing he was good at. Painting moons, leaving them in trees where they shone gold or silver, the night sky claiming them like stars. This was the only way he knew to tell her that without her, he wasn’t Moon. Without her, the girl they called Honey, the girl who licked her own name off knives when Aracely wasn’t looking and off spoons when she was, he was as diminished as an almost-new moon. He was nothing but a young moon, the thin thread of light that clawed its way along the edge of a dark new moon.

He wondered how his mother thought of his father now, maybe as some vibrant, shimmering visitor who stopped by a few times for dinner and then disappeared. A man who belonged to them so little she did not miss him.

These things she remembered were swirling, forbidding stars. If Miel ran fast enough, she could break out of their gravity.

She set her face against the blanket, trying to press herself down into the dark, where she was nothing but a girl who spilled from a water tower.

Her body was not a garden. It was not earth waiting to be rid of brambles and weeds.

He was losing her, this girl who built with him each night a world so much softer and more beautiful than the one he woke to in the morning. She was the wild blossoms and dark sugar that spoke of what the world could be. She was the pale stars on her brown skin. She was the whole sky.

All the strength in her body she let pour toward her fingers like sand. The night would not turn to water and tear his hand from hers.