Look Upon the Stars

The universe held it’s breath, solemn, anticipating. Lover’s hands entwined in the farthest reaches of the lonely rock and children snuggled into their maternal bosom. A hush fell over the crowded streets, men put aside their drinks, as though to look away would be to miss it. A billion eyes hypnotised by the void inside the television, transfixed on the white noise, waiting. A crackle. A hum. The soft mutter of a radio. Then life.

The grainy TV glow lit fire in Gaia’s eyes, it pooled into the blackness which, like a heavy mist, billowed through the cracks in the windows as the somber night sky weighed down upon the unkempt farmhouse. She freed her breath, letting it dance with the dust, and fizzle into the silence. Humanity is a curious race, she thought to herself, or perhaps; greedy. She rose. The surface was steady beneath her thick boots, her helmet weightless on her shoulders. She was weightless. The cold desert stretched out, out into the empty corners of the void. The darkness relented to the floodlights of the shuttle, humanity’s beacon into the perpetual night. Life sprouts from the soils of the earth, death rots away below the surface. She felt as though she could crush humanity beneath her feet. Such small cities they build! Backs breaking beneath the weight of the heavy crumbs, an offering to no queen but themselves. Bustling through colonies of sand which are carried away and scattered in the breeze.

The impression of her sole laid to rest in the crumbled kingdom of the desert moon. The surface bore no breath to disturb the only footprint for a hundred thousand miles. Here, time went cold. The stars shiver, suspended in eternal winter. Each sun holds it’s warmth in it’s nurturing womb, which birthed the earth so many years ago. A lineage of a thousand burning mothers watched over her, and she longed to take their guiding hands.

“One small step for a man.” Humanity clung to the radio-static buzz of her every proclamation, “One giant leap for-“

A wolf howled. Musical, soft at first, then wild, desperate. The symphony filled her, rolled off her tongue in an ancient dialect dead to all but the lonely astronomers who beseeched Artemis’ guidance through a vast and empty desert.

The moon embraced it, conducting it’s howling orchestra. It cut through the velvet sky with bony fingers, reaching down into Gaia’s living room. It caressed her through the window, and just as the wolf had sung to it, it sang to her. The moon took her hand, wrapped around her waist, tugging her out into the night. It fell over her in waves, it rushed between her ankles as she waded into its depths, rising to her knees, her waist, until it carried her. Each wave drew her closer, almost in it’s reach. It’s calm tide took her away, afloat on its gravity to the centre of a frozen pond by the farmhouse. She braced for the cold burn of the ice beneath her bare feet, but it never came.

“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969AD. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Gaia had once dreamed the moon would someday walk the earth. She outstretched her hand, albino skin like stained porcelain, like cracked ice, emanating a soft glow which brightened with her smile. Platinum hair braided with thin silver bands. Galaxies surged in her eyes. The moon had no need for clothes, for she bore no humanly shame. Gaia too had left her shame behind her. She had dreamed that her lungs were bedrock, and vines grew within her veins, or more - she wished it, so that the moon and her could waltz eternally in orbit.

Her fingers were cool around her wrist, and she slipped her hand into the Moon’s. An embrace not new but a thousand years past. Two were once one, ripped apart at their birth by astral devastation. They are children of the stars. And to the stars they will return.

The wolf again, the music.

Her glow brightened. Wordlessly, she asked Gaia to dance. Gaia moved as though each step were the lyric of a lullaby, she would remember every line but not where she learnt it. They were trees tangling in the wind, sea flowers beneath ocean tide and stars flitting across the sky with children’s wishes snug upon their backs. The moon’s touch was cool on her bare skin, their faces inches apart, hands pressed against her back. She could taste stardust on her lips. They spun, it’s glow pulsed with the rhythm of her heart, as they swayed with the melody of the night. Her gravity was strong, Gaia felt it tug her soul. And her gaze was caught in orbit, unable to pull away. The wolf howled once more, louder, much nearer, singing out with the beating rhapsody of the moon. She pulled her close. The moonlight filled her. It spread through her. It lit her heart, surged through her veins to her finger tips. Each wave grew stronger. The moonlit sea reared up. It crashed down unto the sand. And there, beneath the night, they sang with the wolf.

When she opened her eyes, she was not stone nor soil, but flesh and lungs and bone, breathless upon the ice as the horizon began to glow. Remnants of her hymn hung in the air, entangled in the breeze;

Soft Moon,

Embrace me with your ebony cloak

Your ice within my heart

Love, in the morning dusk awoke

Till death do us apart.