Moon — 1
She raised her head and looked up at the moon. The sky was yes clear, but there was something obscuring the heart of the queen of the night sky. She wondered. The moon had come out of hiding, but it was not at peace. A sigh came over her. There were no wolves howling, but she wanted to hear them. Maybe their cries would clear up the face of the moon, and she could see her again in her brilliance, outshining all the stars of the summer sky.
She was standing by the side of the pathway that led from out of the village into the wilderness. One side of it was covered in low bushery and thistle, the other opened to a large field of clovers. She reached her hand into the bushery and broke a branching sprig of thistle.
The clover field extended as far out as the blurred light of the moon could show. She knew the land, too, and had gone into the field blind at new moon nights in winter, when it was cold and the earth was damp under her feet and sometimes suffocating and bitter like a marsh and yet she had went out bare.
She bit into the thistle with her sharp teeth, some of which were chipped at the tips from having bitten into rough wood and stone. Because when she did her work she wanted to bite into it, lick it, not to taste but to touch with something from the deeper and softer parts of her body and become visceral with the act.
Thistle was bitter and rough, a taste like the taste of sour rotten cherry pricked her tongue. She spat the kernel toward the field with a soured face like a mad child. The moon was hazy still. Light was fuzzed and uneven.
She waited for a howl, or for a bird of omen or a snake to hiss silently by among the bushes.
“It is the sea!” She said, mumbling and clumsily, like a learning child trying to speak. It is the sea!
Suddenly a cold breeze blew apart the strands of her soiled hair and when she opened her eyes again against the gust the clovers in the field had bent down their heads in submission, and the bushery whistled. She looked up and a cloud that was the color of the juice of blackberry had covered yes entirely swallowed that heavenly pearlescent countenance that ever shines its dark false secrets upon the lonely face of the earth. Yes the moon had gone. Cloud had covered it.
“It is the sea!” She said again. The moon like a fish of aether in the firmament that only eats aether and breathes stardust could not now breathe again in the waters of the sea, wherever that sea might be (for it was not here anywhere near where she was or had ever been), and would drown. It might very well have been the sea, and the moon a fish, had fallen from the sky, dry, and drowned.
The animals are calm, as is the night. She thought, and looked up again, towards the East. There was a thick fog by that way crowned over the horizon line.
She had wanted to go into the wilderness again tonight but could not now with the sky covered. No not the sky not entirely anyway but the heart of it. The moon of it. Now anymore that it was covered that she could go in to the depths of the dark and lie over crawled and cradled between large roots of ancient trees that scared and comforted her at one breath. She would go mad.
She wanted to stay and would, but where? The land was all bare beside the woods and the village was a way down about an hour and a half of walking. Maybe into the clover again and lie there down flat against the heavens and count the minor stars. Yes.
No hills or no mountains. Nowhere to hide. Her country was bare and flat. The village too had nothing to flank it, only built between two forks of a shallow brook.
A car of oxen went to and off across the path out to the city, once a month. She threw pebbles at it and sometimes climbed on its back and stole fruit. Trees of pomegranates they had in the village, sweet like lovemaking in the warm rain.
A snake slithered a couple feet away from her, finally, hissing poison.