R. Phillip Mayer

Pieces of Selene

Glossary available below Though born long after any living eye could behold Selene’s glow in full, the Kid still remembered a time she hadn't been so dim. The desert today interred more of the Night’s Eye--already pale and broken when the Kid’s mother exchanged her life for his before a name had crossed her lips--than what still glimmered among the stars. The Kid was a stonebreaker, which was just another way of saying he wasn’t a farmer. In the vast and once-barren expanse formerly known as the Australian Outback--more than a century of rainfall following the cataclysm had in conjunction with lunar deposit produced flora unlike anything the ancient naturalists had recorded in their lost tomes--there were only two occupations; orphans with neither name nor kin typically fell into the more hazardous one. Their bodies--some buried, others scattered by four-legged beasts no villager had ever survived an encounter with to describe, much less taxonomize--covered the desert almost as densely as the lunar asteroids they mined for lignite. They were the hunt’s prize and the treasure every rustic marauder saw in his dreams, these luminous gems villagers across the frontier called shine and imagined were fallen stars. With enough lignite and luck--for without luck, no scavenger prevailed against the outback for long--a stonebreaker could trade his pan and pickaxe for a plot of shrub and grow elderberry.