The Night & Its Moon

by Piper C.J.

The sunshine tumbled from the sky, down her throat and into her belly.

Being different in any capacity was a threat.

She wouldn’t rob them of their doe-eyed dreams, but in a world so cold, she knew better than to let herself hope.

history had proved time and time again that the world was not always kind to its treasures.

Girl. He hadn’t bothered to learn the name of the child he intended to harm. Her identity meant nothing. She was a pawn in the games of men, religion, and power.

There is a word for the space between moments. It’s a term for the quiet that echoes after each heartbeat, for the emptiness that exists betwixt things, though its name is one that’s been forgotten. The nothingness is much like the gap while one sleeps—when time catches on your last breath of consciousness and releases on your first moment awake. This spell might be minutes or hours or months that stretch into years, everything blurring together as if nothing has happened at all. The word is for the time that passes when no time is passing at all, and yet everything changes.

While the Gray Matron hadn’t wanted to perform such an inhumane punishment, intentions were dust in the face of inaction.

In the midst of pain, there was good. While there was dishonesty and jealousy and agony, there was also strength, beauty, and power.

Could sex just for the hell of it be worth its complications?

After all, every child deserved unconditional love from their family for exactly who they were, not for who they hoped their child might be.

What better way to lure men in than to make them feel powerful, to lead them to a place where they thought they had the upper hand?

The tug between them was a tethering bond. She knew it would snap her in two if it were severed by death.

She was a night with no moon.

She was in the worst kind of love: the one that would never be returned. She knew it, and yet, she couldn’t leave.

What gift is it to be forced to relive heartbreak on an endless cycle until you become so cruel, cold, and desensitized that you cannot love, cannot be vulnerable?

death was powerful, but its influence rested only in fear.

Hope was dangerous. Hope was reckless. Hope was essential.

What if. They were the two most useless words in the common tongue.