Fiction River: Moonscapes (16 page)

With one last dance, they kissed and walked hand-in-hand to the transport, not saying anything.

He kissed Dot one more time at her cabin door, then with a promise from her that she would help him with his applesauce at breakfast, he went to his cabin and took off his uniform, slipping back into his old nightshirt and crawling into the coffin.

The very next thing he remembered, he was being carried by Lieutenant Magusson from his sleep chamber.

His old stroke-damaged body now part of him again.

Dot and Lieutenant Sherrie met them at the transport chamber.

Brain so wanted to reach out to touch Dot’s hand, but he could no longer move his arms hardly at all.

The cold air of the Chicago night hit him as the transport beam let them go in the nursing home center court.

Above him the golden moon was full in the crisp night air.

He stared up at it as the Lieutenant carried him toward his room.

“Not so pretty any more, is it?” Dot said.

She was right. It wasn’t.

After this mission, he wasn’t sure if he would ever look up at the moon in the same way again.

It was amazing how seeing the universe and defending Earth could change a person’s perspective on things in such a short time.

Simple things, like staring up at the moon.

Introduction to “
The Moon Was Bitter and Hungry”

JC Andrijeski writes in a variety of genres. She’s currently writing a new adult series called
Allie’s War
that’s romantic alternative history, a dystopian series called
The Slave Girl Chronicles
, and the
Gateshifter
series about shape-shifting aliens and a tough-girl PI from Seattle. In addition, she writes nonfiction for such places as
NY Press
and holistic health magazines. She’ll have a story in our upcoming special edition,
Crime.

She has no idea how she came up with “The Moon Was Bitter and Hungry,” but I’m certainly glad she did.

The Moon Was Bitter and Hungry

JC Andrijeski

It had waited...many years now. Too many. Far too many to count.

Mistakes had been made. It knew that.

Glaring, unfixable,
unforgivable
mistakes.

Mistakes that now could only wait for outside intervention to be made right, which infuriated It to no end. It had to wait for the outer world to intervene now, to give It renewed purpose, to give It something to chew on, to push against, to create friction or pressure or anything but the inertia of endless rotations on a dizzyingly dull path to nowhere, where all of the good stuff remained tantalizingly out of reach.

It hated this teasing headfuck of a purgatory, forced to watch the living planet spin mindlessly below, endlessly inviting, but unable to take even a tiny mouthful from where It hung in the sky overhead, like a slavering and desperate voyeur.

It felt like It had spent aeons like this, on an enforced hunger strike with a television smack dab in front of It, stuck only on the food network, where some mammal in a ridiculous, white, fluffy hat chopped up dead animal carcasses right in front of It, pausing only to season that carcass with dried herbs and sticky sauces before throwing the whole mess on the grill to belch dense, aroma-filled smoke.

It could almost smell the thing, cooking.

It didn’t have a lot to do, so It watched a lot of television.

Really, the advent of television and the satellites buzzing around like annoying, blinking insects, belching their inane chatter and flashing, coma-inducing images should have improved things for It.

It didn’t.

This moon, this horrid rock, could not have been worse picked.

***

The mistakes It made were threefold, really.

One, It miscalculated the level of advancement of the dominant species of the planet associated with the moon itself. Namely, It thought they were on the verge of space exploration, when really, they were barely above cave painting trolls.

So yeah, bad research.

That coupled with a splash of arrogance, impatience...and possibly just run of the mill, home-grown and sheer stupidity.

Two, It waited far, far too long to travel from the previous planet It devoured in that particular solar system...meaning, the shiny, red one, the one the mammals now called Mars, after one of their war gods, an unfair name if It ever heard one. It waited too, too long, napping there, enjoying Its fill with a bit too much smug satisfaction. It should have immediately moved on to the yummy blue one, particularly since that blue planet was the last one worth eating before It took off looking for a new system to devour.

So yes, It waited far too long...thus making it impossible to reach the blue planet in one go without making a quick pit stop at the blue planet’s solitary moon. Back then, that moon had been a nice pink and green color, and a perfectly delicious-looking snack.

And that moon had been. Delicious, that is.

Which was all well and good, and would have been fine, sure.

But then, It made Its third mistake.

It fell asleep for too long after eating that snack.

When It woke up, It found Itself too weak to make the final leap to that tantalizingly close and extremely meal-able looking blue and white world, at least without risking being pulled apart in space like a hand-sparkler when it tried to cross over that nasty, crispy atmosphere that the blue planet held around itself like some kind of electric blanket of death.

So yeah, stupidity piled upon stupidity telescoping Its options down to a few aeons of mind-numbing boredom and hunger.

Many, many rotations had gone by since It found Itself in this mess.

But It had few options. It needed outside intervention.

So It waited.

And It waited some more.

It watched television. In those first few decades, It enjoyed
I Love Lucy
and
Gunsmoke
as particular favorites, although It got a fair bit of pleasure out of the advertisements as well, and the occasional episode of
The Twilight Zone,
although It could scarcely comprehend the last of these and often blew clouds of white chalk over the surface of the moon to expel Its puzzlement.

Before the advent of television even, It developed a fondness for screwing with the world’s oceans at every chance It got, back when the blue world’s mammals were more primitive and easier to freak out with mundane displays of natural force. Later, It turned sinister colors and giggled while they read portents into Its changes, thinking the end of their world was nigh...(
If only they knew!
It thought gleefully). Later still, It listened in on radio transmissions, then satellite phones, literally centuries of endlessly dull conversations, military movements and surveillance. It would interrupt transmissions on occasion, garbling messages at critical moments just to watch a few more of those mammals get crispy fried by their own tiny planes and dropping bombs.

Later, It watched
All in the Family
and
The Dating Game
...and decided It had a special fondness for Burt Reynolds and Lindsey Wagner.

It watched
American Idol
and screwed with the voting buttons. Then It chuckled and threw more chalky dust around gleefully as the mammals groused about who won.

It occasionally got into a huff and shut down cell phone reception in different regions of the world, or sent pornographic images to the Christian chat rooms and watched them type angrily at one another in cyberspace.

Its diversions never lasted long enough, though.

Nor did they change the inherent limitations of Its situation.

It got increasingly grumpy, but It had no one to blame but Itself.

***

The mammals eventually sent up specimens to their solitary moon.

It considered eating them.

It really, really wanted to eat them.

Its stomach growled, or Its stomach-feeling equivalent.

On It, however, those sensations of hunger and stomach and food and desire comprised more of an all-body thing, not easily remedied with Pepto-Bismol or even a lot of deep breathing. Rather than something It felt as part of a primitive, combustion-based gastrointestinal process involving yucky acids and foul smells and noises, It luxuriated in a mind-altering but smell-free longing that made every particle of Its energetic field shiver and groan with want.

It didn’t eat them, though.

They looked yummy, but they were too small.

Far, far too small.

It had to be practical.

To be practical, It needed to plan for a permanent vehicle out of this hell-hole, which meant It needed enough sustenance to jump from the moon to the blue planet and then It had to eat very, very fast and then run. It had to go without so much as a teensy-tiny nap this time, to ensure It make the distance to the next solar system containing enough yummy, carbon-based life forms for It to eat. It needed, above all, to make that jump...to reach somewhere new and exciting and significantly better stocked than the chalky white moon.

So It didn’t eat the tasty-looking mammals.

It didn’t eat the mammals for one reason, and one reason alone.

It wanted more to come back.

***

It waited for more of them to return, to stomp around on the chalky surface It had left behind from all of Its eating and grinding and eating again in Its hunger over the many years. It waited for them to return in larger numbers, to set up Holiday Inns and Denny’s restaurants and food courts, to grind more of their footprints into the soft ground and play moon volleyball in giant space suits over pink and purple bikinis.

It waited, and It waited.

At first, the signs looked relatively promising.

They sent up more mammals after the first bunch.

They landed their little toaster-like space ships, and proclaimed victory over the radio waves, and mammals on the little blue world cheered.

They stomped around, jumped and played in the lesser gravity well, they left little flags like toothpicks with colored hankies. They made proclamations and stomped about a bit more and then they left.

They sent more of those tin cans, sans mammals.

It liked those less.

Not edible at all.

It even tried with one, thinking they wouldn’t miss just one of those little, spidery, metal-tasting things, at least not all that terribly much. It gambled that they wouldn’t get upset enough about
that
to stop wanting to visit their nearest tourist attraction in the solar system at large.

Tasting just one of those metal, crunchy things only confirmed Its suspicions about the lack of the metal probe’s relative tastiness, as compared to the other things It had eaten over the millennia. It would, in fact, have given the metal spider a score on that scale that fell into the decidedly not good range.

Blech, as the mammals would say.

Even so, It was surprised when no more of those tin can spiders came after a few years, either. The lack of metal probes did not appear to stem from Its one and only taste-test, either, not from what It had overheard on the communications systems between the ground and the sky when It finally took the plunge and chewed on that crunchy red one out of sheer desperation and curiosity.

No, they simply seemed to develop a serious lack of interest in the chalky white moon revolving around their much yummier planet.

It wondered...what was their problem?

Other species always wanted to stomp around on new worlds, even boring, chalky worlds like this one.

This particular moon, ugly though it was from Its endless chewing and grinding and gnawing, wasn’t even the very ugliest that It had seen...and besides, the floating rock moon had room for many, many more colorful flags and volleyball nets and moon resorts with sushi bars and indoor pools and tanning booths and goofy golf courses and television sets.

So what, indeed, was their problem?

It pondered this as the years passed, growing more and more grumpy as additional little ships blasted up past that ouchy atmosphere into space, but none of them began building Earth-side resorts on Its moon to watch the sunset from or to eat sushi while getting massaged and then playing basketball in less gravity.

It grew very bitter.

It began to really hate those crawling mammals and their stupid television shows and their bungee jumping and their bathing suit calendars and their tall lattes with extra foam.

But It couldn’t do anything about that, either.

It felt ineffectual.