Where the Moon Goes

The old upright clock struck nine. Thomas flinched at the sound, knowing perfectly well what came next. Sure enough, with a light step and the smell of something called perfume, she came into the room.

“You’ve brushed your teeth Thomas?”

“Yes, grandma,” he said, unable to keep the sour note out of his voice. Adults never believed that he was not tired and could stay up longer. Then they did some kind of magic to put him to sleep. And not brushing his teeth before they asked was not a trick to make them let him stay awake. It just got him hurried into the bathroom to brush and then it was straight to bed anyway.

“Alright,” she said, ruffling his hair in a way he was determined to not like. But grandma hands are a magic all themselves. Like warm hugs or kisses on a booboo. “Get on up into bed, dear.”

He did as she asked, lay down, and looked up hopefully. If he did have to go sleep, then maybe he could get something special. Usually his mom would read him bedtime stories, favourites of hers since he was a little too old, “mature” whatever that meant, for younger books. But his grandparents told different, wonderful stories.

“Grandma,” he said, “will you tell me a story please?”

“A story,” she asked, already sitting beside him, gently stroking his hair. “Yes, I think I can do that. But which one? Hmm… Oh! I know, I can tell you an old story. Very, very old. One that I heard when I was about your age and asked a question like the one you asked me at dinner.”

“What question?”

“The question of where the moon goes,” her smile was warm and her words gentle and soft. “Would you like to hear that?”

“Yes, please!”

“Alright then,” she made herself comfortable, cleared her throat, and began.

-0-

Once upon a time, there was a little boy who loved the moon.

He would stand at the top of old Willow Hill and stare up at her as she hung in the clear night sky. She was beautiful, and he loved to reach high over his head, tracing her valleys and seas with an outstretched finger.

The moon noticed the boy whose name was Jack one night as she hung full and round among a glittering sea of millions of stars. With delicate hands, the girl in the moon, whose name is Luna, grasped a shaft of her own light.

Sliding down the light like a normal child might a firepole at a playground, she came to rest behind Jack and watched him as he looked up at where she had been with great wonder.

His finger stopped, and slowly his arm fell to his side as he stared up at the moon. For a long time, he was completely still, and if she could have seen his face, she would have seen that he was scared and confused. Something was different; and not just different, missing.

You see, only so much of the moon’s beauty and magic is the thing itself. The rest of it belongs to Luna. And she had come down from the moon, leaving it as something like a very pretty, empty chair, and now stood behind Jack.

For a long, silent time, he stared up at the empty moon before saying in a whisper of a whisper, “where did you go? It’s not time for you to leave yet.” In the whisper she could hear a deep sadness, a confusion and a worry that she did not fully understand.

Luna reached out and touched his shoulder, asking with a soft voice, soft as moonlight on summer leaves, “what are you looking at?”

“The moon,” said Jack, turning to look at her. “But what are you doing down here?”

She did not answer him as the empty moon slowly slid towards the horizon and a dim light began to grow over the eastern rim of the sky. She simply looked at him, for it had been a long, long time since she had stood so close to a human and she was as interested in him as he was in her.

Finally, moments before the first light of day broke over the eastern horizon, she took hold of the moonlight again and began to rise. Jack, stunned and despairing, reached out and grabbed her hand, holding her still and asking, “will you come back?”

Luna did not answer, instead she marveled at the contact, the feel of his hand against hers, the sense of weight pulling her towards the ground.

He let her go, and she sailed back to the empty moon and as he watched her vanish into the dawn sky, the moon glowed again, regaining what had been lacking before. Because Luna is not the moon itself, not the physical thing that hangs in the sky and reflects the light of the sun. Rather she is the soul of the moon, and the beauty that we see in it is all from her, and her alone.

The next night, the boy stood on Old Willow Hill again, and watched the moon rise. He always stood there, had always stood there and watched as she sailed through the sky. He loved to see her, to trace her lines and valleys, but he wished more than anything that she would come down to him again.

For a reason he could not explain, all through the day that had brought him back to Old Willow Hill, he had thought about her. Not the moon as he had known it, hanging huge and beautiful in the sky, but the girl with radiant hair who had stood beside him and asked what he was looking at. No one had ever asked him that before.

Clouds made a patch work of the sky that night, and Jack thought with despair that he would not be able to see the moon. Even if Luna did not come back down, though he hoped for that very much, he still wanted to be able to gaze at the beauty of her as she hung in the sky. His mother always told him not to stare, that it was rude, but the moon was so magnificent, how could he do otherwise?

With a slow solemnity, the moon crested the edge of the sky and bathed the hill with shining light. Smiling broadly, Jack lifted his hand to trace the lines of the moon as he always did, but froze. Though it glittered and shone, though he could see its valleys and seas as clearly as ever – when it shone between the patchwork of clouds – it was not the moon he knew.

Behind him, he heard, or thought he heard, the gentle tread of feet on soft green grass. Turning his head, he saw that Luna was standing there, her white hair framing her face, and white dress billowing in the gentle breeze.

Again and for a long moment, they were silent. The same kind of awkward silence that had marked their meeting the night before.

She was nervous to be seeing him again, had thought about it all through the day. That day, spent in the moon’s secret place away from the sun, she spent remembering her meeting with the boy on the hill. Her hand still tingled where he had touched her and she thought she could still feel the weight of him, holding her close to the Earth.

“Are you the moon?” The question felt awkward on his lips. Of course she was the moon, who else could she be? Had he not seen her fly away on a beam of moonlight just the night before? But a person cannot take back a question once it has been asked, one can only listen for the answer, if any are given.

Luna considered the question. She had never thought about what she was, you see, because she was herself, and that had always been enough. She knew the answer well enough, however, and told him that she was what people saw in the moon, the wonder and life and magic of it. She is the light that illumines the path home, and the beacon by which sailors read their maps. She is the one who answers the wolves when they howl, and the –

“You’re the one I’ve been looking at.”

The statement took her off guard, derailing her description of herself, but it was true in a sense. He could not have been looking for her before, since he had not known that she was there. But she was what he saw in the moon, what everyone who looked saw, though he looked closer than most.

“You’re the most beautiful thing in the world,” he went on, and the rising blush in her cheeks deepened the shade of the moonlight around them. “I’ve spent so long looking at you, and every time I see you up there, I find something new to like.”

Suddenly abashed, he looked away, up towards where the empty moon hung almost motionless in the sky.

Deep breaths brought her colour back down, and slowly the moonlight faded back to its normal hue. She said, tentatively, “what is it you’re looking for, when you look up at… the moon?”

“I’m not looking for anything,” he said, with all the open frankness of a boy his age. “I’m just looking at you, though I didn’t know it was you before.”

“Why do you look up at me?”

“Because you’re beautiful.”

Again the light that bathed them changed as colour rose in her cheeks. Neither understood why, but they liked being close to one another. He liked being able to look at and talk with her so close, and she liked how he spoke and what he said. Each of them moved a little closer together, and though each was aware of wanting something, they could put no name or action to that desire.

Time passed and Jack slowly grew taller. Each night for years he stood at the crest of Old Willow Hill and watched as she rose over the rim of the sky, waiting for her to glide down to him on her shaft of moonlight to speak with him. At a teasing word from his mother, after some few meetings, he brought with them a warm blanket to spread on the ground. That night he touched her cheek as they sat on that blanket, reaching out with trembling fingers to trace the lines of her face the way he would have had she still hung in the sky.

Her blush turned the moonlight red for a moment, not the red of anger or anything else wrong or bad. But the red of shock and nervousness, and a secret desire for that same to happen again. His hand snapped back like a recoiling snake, and he apologized most politely.

Slowly, in that pleasant kind of slowness that is all at once gone in the blink of an eye and terribly lingering, Jack grew older. Luna did not understand this, she was ancient even in those far away times, but as he grew, she noticed changes in herself.

They met every night on Old Willow Hill for years upon years. And though he once asked if she could spend longer with him, she was forced to shake her head, to stay during the day was impossible for her. The moon, though sometimes visible as a dim reflection of itself when the sun is high, must bow to the greater light and force of it.

When he was ill, as sometimes happens to humans, she would come to his bedside to visit him. He smiled the first time this happened and asked her not to wake him from his dream of her visiting him. She leaned down then, and shared a kiss with him, compelled by something to which she could give no name.

More and more they learned together as they grew, and finally, when he was old enough to understand the words, Jack met the moon again on Old Willow Hill. He told her that he loved her, and she – though surprised to find it was true – returned his feelings.

He beamed at her, and took her into his arms in a tight embrace. They had long since moved past the trembling nervousness of first contact, he had traced lines of her face many times, enraptured by her beauty. Though in that embrace, they found something new between them and explored it many many times. (I’ll tell you when you’re older.)

Sadly, though not completely by surprise, no children could come from their union. He promised his life to her, one night many years after first the moon had spoken to him, and though she would have liked to return the gesture, she possessed a growing understanding that their time together was ending.

A slow end, apparent only to those for whom time is endless. Though her growth had matched his for many years, his began to outpace hers. Never once did he open his mouth in protest of this. Never once did Jack, the boy who loved the moon, complain of the growing gap of age between them. He was saddened by the knowledge that he must leave her, and begin a journey she could not follow; but when the years finally ran their course, and she stood weeping beside him for the last time, he was glad for his part that the long, long journey was finally over.

Ten years passed away, with the moon hanging dull and desolate in the night time sky. Her light was grey and bleak, and offered no comfort to wanderers or wolves or sailors. Luna could hear the people lament, she could hear them wonder what had happened, what had changed. But she had not the heart to go down to them again, save when she would sit beside a lonely grave in the shadow of a tree, atop Old Willow Hill.

Determined to follow, if she could, Luna turned her face away from the world. The sun rose early, disturbing the ebb and flow of life, to try and comfort and protect her, but she was deaf and blind to all he could say.

It is no mean feat, to turn the moon away, and it takes some time to spin it fully round. Once she started it on that course, the spinning to and away from the Earth, she could never stop it. The spin took her face around to the Other World, for it has no true name, and showed her a man standing on a hill gazing up at her.

Jack stood, staring at the point in his sky where he thought the moon should be, and you can imagine the wonder and joy he felt when her rotation took her out of the human world and into the one where he now lived. Of course he was worried, after all, the Other World is the place of those who are gone, but she explained his fears away. She is only a visitor in that place, much as she was a visitor to him on Earth before, and must always return to where she belongs.

On that first turning of the moon, she grabbed hold of a shaft of her own light and sailed down much as she had done so long before, to land on a hill with a tree to meet with a boy who loved the moon.

-0-

Grandma finished her story, and pulled Thomas’s cover up to his chin before kissing him gently on the head.

With a small yawn, he said, “I don’t mind if the moon visits Jack. But I’m happy she comes back.”

Grandma smiled and switched off the light before walking back through the house to where Grandpa sat, reading by a table light. Outside, the sickle moon shone bright and clear on a hill with a drooping tree at the very crest.

Sometimes, when she had been young, Grandma had thought she could see the figure of a girl in white at the foot of that tree. Though her mother had always insisted that such a thing was foolish, since there was nothing there to look at, except an old, weathered stone with a rounded top.