There
were a dozen moons that night. She counted them from the wheelbarrow as George
raced them around the perimeter of the barley fields, a stray blade tucked
between his teeth in concentration, his hands clutching both handles. Laughing
in delight, counting one, two, three, four, each moon greeted her with a
different expression: the peekaboo moon slotted between the trees, the heavy
gawping orb weighted on the horizon, the undulating glimmer, the milk moon face
of May.
A
siren sounded, catching in the turn of the wheels as George drew to a
halt, howling as if it were drawn from the mouth of the moon, ululating as the
wheels turned once more in the direction of safety. Again they raced, only this
time with an urgency that frightened Celia, the sharp jolts from the earth that
ran with them jarring her vision. Caught in momentum the only constant in
sight was the horizon, now divided between a menacing umbra and quaking light.
The moon arrested her in different expressions: bleeding in dissolution, screaming in its constant, fractured light, gathering form again in permanence, bearing
witness.
Stillness came again that evening, swathed entirely
in darkness but for the swell of light at the curtains. The tide of her heartbeat
roared in her ears of endless mother blood: the moon of eternal knowing, of
inescapable observation. But a daughter in her bed - later a mother - my grandmother,
captured under the moon of countless faces. Passing a century of perspective, this
night and every night yet, I sit beneath the glow of our infinite womanly context.
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