I’ll Meet You On the Moon

There were some cool nights where Clotho stared up into the sky and imagined herself as space dust, and the night where she learned her girlfriend was moving to Germany was one of them.

The sun hadn’t even finished setting, much to Clotho’s annoyance. People should only hear news like that when the moon was out, she thought. That way the silence of the stars could absorb whatever was said, and if you were lucky you could pretend that this was just a silly little earth problem and you could float right up to space and forget about it. But right now there was only the chirping of crickets as witnesses, and Clotho knew whatever you said around them would only get echoed back.

Her girlfriend, Iris, walked near her, stomping on the brittle pine needles and crinkling the leaves underneath her with a little more force than necessary. She snapped away low-hanging branches, sending them flying back and irritating the leaves extending from the bark. The only words she’d spoken that entire night were the ones the crickets were singing right now. Clotho could hear them in the chirps; Germany! Germany! She walked behind Iris, slow in her steps as she thought.

The pale blue of the sky had drifted into an indigo tinged with violet by the time Iris and Clotho arrived in front of the hydrangea bushes. They were nearly ten feet tall, with cherry pink puffs in full-bloom, marking the occasion of fall. Iris went ahead of Clotho and made her way over to the decrepit ladder parked against a nearby pine tree. Iris leaned it up against the bushes, letting the peeling wood settle against the boughs before starting to climb. Clotho followed behind, keeping her eyes on the vanishing sunset while her hands and feet went up the rungs. When she reached the top, she hesitated before crossing over to the ladder perched on the other side, making sure she was balanced on the rungs before climbing down into the clearing.

Iris was already laying on the grass when Clotho’s first toe hit the earth. She smiled and bounded over, flopping down on the ground next to her. This was such a serene place, so quiet. And for as long as the pair had known each other, it had been there's. Eight years old or sixteen, it remained the same.

They laid like that for a few minutes, watching as night ate away at the lilac of sunset.

“What stars do you think will be out tonight?” Clotho said. She kept her eyes fixated on the sky. Her cloud of blonde hair hung in her face, and she did her best to push the curls into her periphery.

“I dunno, you’re the constellation expert. I’m just here for the moon and all the witchy stuff,” Iris replied, propping herself up on her elbow. Her voice seemed different, the usual dry tones strained and raw. She’d been crying, Clotho realized. You could hear the dead tears on her tongue.

Clotho thought for a moment, trying to tread around the subject while answering her question. “I mean, there’s the Andromeda galaxy. And Aries is there. Plus Pisces and Perseus and Pegasus.”

“Tell me about Pegasus again,” Iris said, squinting up at the sky, as if she could see the outline of stars through the veil of evening if she imagined them hard enough.

Clotho smiled and continued. “Well, the name comes from that one Greek horse with wings, the Pegasus. And it was born when Perseus chopped off Medusa’s head.” Iris had closed her eyes, as if she could bathe in the words of her story.

“Then Bellerophon, the Greek hero, harnessed the Pegasus and they did all sorts of quests together. But later, he told Pegasus to bring him up to Olympus, to the gods. Pegasus said yes, but on the way there, Zeus sent a gadfly, which is basically a horsefly, to bite him so he kicked Bellerophon off to his death,” Clotho finished.

“I wonder if I’ll be able to see Pegasus from Germany,” Iris said. A dreamy haze tinted her voice. She was surrounded in the greasy halo of her hair, a black and coily mass that sparked in the moonlight, a direct contrast to Clotho’s muddied blonde. For a moment, Clotho thought she could see the tears welling up in her eyes, but Iris held them back and instead reached out for Clotho’s hand.

“Well, how long until you leave?” Clotho asked, moving her grip to Iris’s hand. She tried to ignore the sinkhole forming in her stomach. Iris grunted.

“Two weeks. And unless one of us chops off my mom’s head and gets me a flying horse, I’m gonna be stuck in Berlin until I’m able to move back here for college,” Iris said, blowing out a breath. Her voice was still raw, but she seemed to have relaxed since they arrived. Clotho tried to think what life would be like for the next two years without Iris. They didn’t exactly have many other love interests, friends, or even acquaintances for that matter. If anyone talked to them, it was for a church charity project. The same train of thought seemed to be brewing in Iris, too.

Clotho tried to imagine what the world would look like without Iris. Too awkward, she decided. That was what she liked about Iris, how much she could fill up a room just by being there. And she was always there. Some people found her stifling, but Clotho personally loved her consistent presence. It was something to cling to, that feeling of even if she woke up to everyone in the world dead, there would still be Iris.

“There’s nothing for me in Berlin, Clotho, nothing. Not you, not the moon, not the stars. I went on vacation there once. The lights were so bright the one constellation visible looked like a corpse. Even the moon looked all dead and gray,” Iris said, a hint of mourning in her voice.

“Well, you can always find constellations in the city lights,” Clotho said, trying to keep her own doubt out of her voice. She realized they wouldn’t even be seeing the same stars.

“That’s only fun when you’re around, no one else can tell stories like you,” Iris replied. She sighed and turned her attention back to the moon. It had lost its white sheen, growing more pockmarked and gray as time pushed it to the west. The constellations were starting to appear against the velvet curtain of the night sky.

Clotho tried to imagine herself as a part of that sky, just a handful of meteor dust in that ever expanding cosmos she loved. She and Iris had always been fascinated by that theory, the idea that everything had once just been starry fragments until it had formed together to form the world around them. That their bones and blood were made of stardust and the night sky was their home. That one day after their death they would actually float back up into space, and still be together. The Greeks even had a name for this: entropy, the idea that everything came from the universe and would eventually return to it. Maybe if she dissolved back into the sky now, then Iris would be able to see her from Berlin.

Clotho sat up suddenly.

“Iris?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think there’s anything like Zeus on the moon?”

“Excuse me?” Iris looked over at her, bewildered.

“When you think about it, if Zeus hadn’t sent the gadfly to bite Pegasus, Bellerophon would have made it up to Olympus to the gods,” Clotho said, jumping onto her feet. She began pacing the clearing, her tennis shoes upturning the grass beneath them.

“Well, yeah, but what does that have to do with anything? Do you want to soar away to the moon on a flying horse?”

“Not a horse, but close,” Clotho said. She walked over to Iris, kissed her on the cheek, and spun around towards the ladder perched on the hydrangea bushes. Iris turned her head slightly, watching with vague interest as Clotho turned the formation of rotting wood over in her hands.

“Well, we’re gonna need ladders and some nails,” Clotho’s eyes glimmered a deep blue in the moonlight, framed by the smile gleaming on her face. “But if everything goes to plan, then I’ll meet you on the moon.”

***

Clotho had wished her girlfriend goodbye in a coffee-stained airport two weeks later. She could tell that the building had been clean and sterile at one point, the correct place to wish someone off with a few awkward kisses. But it had obviously degraded over time, reeking of sweat and stale doughnuts. A flat voice had crackled over a dingy loudspeaker, so grainy and blurred it sounded like an 8-bit soundtrack. As she watched Iris disappear into the airport gate, lugging her bags behind her, Clotho did her best to remind herself that they would see each other soon.

She set off for their grove that afternoon, much earlier than she was used to, a giant basket the width of her torso perched on her arm. She’d stopped by Lowe’s after the airport, and had bought a hammer, about 4,000 nails, and enough wood to rebuild a village after a hurricane. The sky was pretty that day at least, with a sheet of pale blue clouds that shimmered and churned in the sunlight, making the shadows on the ground flicker with the movement. The sun felt thick and warm on her shoulders, like a cotton blanket had been draped over her head and neck. A cool breeze flicked on and off, coming in a waterfall of disturbed leaves, then leaving the forest dead silent just as quickly. Clotho watched this all in disinterest, and decided she liked the blacks and purples of night better.

The walk to the hydrangea bushes felt so much quieter without Iris, and Clotho shifted the leather bag and basket around her arms with unease. She didn’t usually mind silence, but this was the silence of something dead, like all the living things in the forest had been stuffed and only their skins remained as decoration. She wondered how the silence of the night sky would feel.

The sight of the hydrangeas was a welcome relief. Clotho perched the basket full of nails and wood in the crook of her arm, and with the other stationed the old ladder against the bushes. Iris had taken its counterpart over to Berlin, not that Clotho would be needing it anymore.

Sunset was slowly beginning, letting pink and pale orange swirl against each other in the sky like watercolors that had been splashed together on a canvas. She began to climb, balancing herself against her arm. But instead of stopping when she reached the top of the bushes, she calmly pulled the hammer, a handful of nails, and a plank of wood out of her basket. Holding the new piece of wood up to the end of the rail of the ladder, Clotho roughly nailed in the extension. After doing the same to the other side, she hammered in a plank between the two new rails to serve as a rung, stepped onto it, and there began her journey.

The work turned out to be easier than she expected, but still tedious. She soon fell into a rhythm, holding nails in her teeth and wood in her hands. There were a few times where a rung or rail was unsteady and collapsed underneath her weight, or when she hammered her hand and almost fell the hundreds of feet below her, but she kept going. Clotho had no idea how her supplies were lasting her as long as they were when she should have run out ages ago, but she went with it. There was no point in questioning those sorts of things when they were clearly happening, she reasoned.

Clotho climbed deeper and deeper into the night sky. She knew the earth was receding beneath her, all of the landscapes and smells she knew dimming in the vast expanse of night. She paused to look, her eyes widening with surprise. She had never been too fond of the earth, considering the sky much more pleasant and welcoming, but with this view she gained a newfound understanding of everyone who did love its landscapes.

In its entirety, it looked like a stained glass mosaic. Large swaths of blue churned in steep gradients, flickering from periwinkle dotted with ice to rich grays. There were patchwork rainforests and shadowed tundras layered with snow and rock. Lines of city lights so complex they looked like miniature galaxies, deserts that looked like they’d been dusted with tan powdered sugar. Clouds flitted around the sphere like spun sugar, the fluffy structures swirling around the world like seafoam in waves. Clotho went back to building the ladder.

The emptiness around her had changed while she climbed, shifting from pale orange cotton ball wisps of clouds to thick black. The world seemed so much more alive up here, even compared to the earth below her. The constellations were so vivid Clotho could imagine them galloping around the galaxy. Her eyes flicked to her favorites, beaming when she saw Pegasus and the Andromeda galaxy and all the others. The stars looked like a crystalline web, glittering pieces of glass strung between blue and white swirls that glowed with an eerie lighting in the dark. It was all interconnected in some way, like a tapestry woven out of thread. Clotho found it even more believable that it had all been formed from the same dust.

The moon hung like a lantern against the sky, cold and gray. It looked like those photos of cities you see at night, covered in patchworks of dark craters dotted with small flickers of light. Clotho could already see Iris’s grin against the stone, and hurried her ascent.

Clotho smiled to herself and turned her focus back up, to the looming lantern of moonstone and craters that was their new meeting place. All she had right now was the rough wooden rungs, held tight in her palms, and the scent of iron nails floating through the vacuum the pair had idolized for their entire lives.

But soon she would have Iris, and the moon wasn’t the worst place to wait.