Moon Bearer

I.

Six months before the end of the world, I start exchanging glances with the woman who holds the moon.

Not the woman in the moon, mind you. The woman just behind her, the one who gathers up the darkness every night and wears it as a veil. She’s not much of a talker, not like her bright-blooded companion. But I’m still walking home from work in the dark, these days, and she is…approachable, in a way that the bright lights and waning tides are not.

It takes her a while to catch me looking—and why wouldn’t it, when you have the moon in your arms?

And of course, I don’t know the world’s ending. Not yet. Looking back, I imagine the disaster of it all must have been more than a little distracting, from her perspective.

(But then again, what does that say about me, if I was able to get her attention?)

II.

Three months before the end of the world, I start sending texts to the woman who holds the moon. The seas are rising, I explain, and can she please tell her girlfriend to ease up a little?

I get back a string of emojis I can’t decipher, but it is...something.

So I keep texting her.

I send her exclamation points when Mississippi gives in to the water, and she sends me frowns in return. When I go on an ill-advised date with an ex before the last of the museums close, I whine to her all the way through—because why can’t this idiot see that the sky-scraping circle of radios is actually a modern-day Tower of Babel? What does my date mean, saying that we have better things to do than listen to sound waves pop and fizz?

When the power starts to go out, the woman who holds the moon finally responds with something that isn’t an emoji.

She tells me not to stop.

So she is the last person I text before my phone battery dies. I send her a photo of the big flowerpot in my kitchen, the ones with the peonies that just bloomed.

They burn when sparks fly out of my fuse box—but the apartment smells like the edge of summer for at least a week afterward.

III.

A month before the end of the world, I start having coffee with the woman who holds the moon.

There aren’t coffee shops open anymore, so she provides the brew. It tastes just a shade off, like it’s been kept too long. I don’t say anything, but she laughs when I wrinkle my nose and tells me that she’s borrowed some of the ISS’s supply. I ask if they won’t miss it, but she only smiles in answer.

The moon joins us, now and again. She insists that I try all manner of blends—and her cabinet is immense. In that last month, I have coffee from a dozen different countries, some I can’t even place on a map.

It’s over those cups that the woman who holds the moon introduces me to her perspective. It isn’t just Earth, after all, that she gets to see. She is as at home with our satellites as she is with our galactic neighbors’; she watches the storms on Jupiter even while she is here, making constellations in a coffee mug.

She sees the water rising and the fires just outside of town—but she doesn’t tell me about those things. No—on the best days, when the moon sits in her lap and makes her darkness all the darker, she tells me about fields of flowers blooming in the Arctic. The pinks go on for miles, she says, they threaten to crawl up dying tree trunks just to find a place to stake their roots.

It sounds beautiful, I tell her, in between sips—and I try not to think about what it all implies.

IV.

Two weeks before the end of the world, I start racing with the woman who holds the moon.

She’s a fast runner, let me tell you. I leave behind everything in my little apartment, but even then, I can’t keep up.

We still meet for coffee, of course, and the moon laughs at us both. But as the days get longer—and hotter, and brighter—it gets harder to make the time. In the few hours that we have together, I am exhausted from running. The two of them run their fingers through my hair and heal where sunburn has started to peel my scalp away.

The woman who holds the moon asks me, as the days tick down, what it is I’m running for.

And I tell her. I’m honest. The moon joins her as she looks at me, my heart and soul on my tongue. I watch them take each other’s hands—and it doesn’t hurt, not like I thought it would.

It is impossible, I think, not to love the woman who holds the moon. Not to love the moon herself. Not at the end of days. It’s—good, like the last sip of coffee on a cool and dark morning.

Like the rush of a forest fire, sparking just beyond the horizon.

Inevitable, really.

V.

A day before the end of the world, I say a prayer to the woman who holds the moon.

Standing in what was once Midwest suburbia, I ask her to forgive the coffee cups I’ve left in her sink. To forgive the peonies I left at home. I ask her to take those seeds in their pots and to sow them when I can’t any longer. In a moment of selfishness, I ask her to take away my sunburn.

VI.

Minutes before the end of the world, I exchange a glance with the woman who holds the moon.

And she smiles.

(And the world still burns—but she’s waiting for me in the darkness, her and her cool embrace.)

© 2024 Celia Daniels

About the Author

Celia Daniels likes to toe the line between fantasy and reality by making her damsels, rogues, and knights contend with the complexity of smartphones (or at least the printing press). She hails from Indiana and alternates between spending time with her cat, Achilles, and tap, tap, tapping away on her computer. You can find her work in Timeless Tales, The Molotov Cocktail, and F(r)iction’s Dually Noted. The remnants of her only social media account are on X (Twitter).