The Night & Its Moon

by Piper C.J.

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

Only moments prior they’d had hands full of stars and bellies full of sunshine.

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

After all, what were the sinful to the church other than animals in need of correction.

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.

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