Blue Moon: A Swan Song

I wrote this for class last fall and never put it up. A few minor edits, and I've decided to gift it to the internet in honor of the impending apocalypse. xD

Trigger warning for body horror, mortal peril, and general world dysmorphia.

The moon rose full and bright blue the night it happened. People all across the globe started shouting—Look at it! You can see its face! Its dark, pockmarked grin was bare and overly evident on the unnatural glare of the surface. Everybody felt it when they saw that smirk, a pull inside their gut, as if the blue-raspberry man had sunk his teeth in just behind our stomachs. Religious fervor overtook some—they rushed to the streets, weeping, falling to their knees, crying out that the time had come. They never answered those of us who asked, the time of what? Perhaps they didn't need to. Perhaps they thought the evidence spoke for itself: sea levels rising and falling as if someone was playing with a cosmic faucet, animals all around the world howling and shrieking, flocks of birds swooping blindly into skyscrapers and rock faces. Those who doubted the fanatics screamed just as loudly as the believers; these were the ones who had been called dirty and Godless.

Except, by the end of the night, we were all Godless. It was just that no one ever entertained the thought before that God could die, and leave us all here to fend for ourselves.

- - -

Evan turned off the television after two hours of listening to horrified reporters try to pretend everything was having “technical difficulties” and they were sure they'd regain contact with their affiliates soon. After a while, it turned into static with the occasional burst of news, as opposed to the other way around. As opposed to the normal way.

“Why did you do that?” I snapped as he blackened the screen with a touch to the remote. I felt something akin to panic with the constant sound of the news gone. It had been normal, even in chaos. It had been a way to escape. We had both tried calling our families to no avail. His mother in Orlando was just as unreachable as my brother in Portland. We'd kept the broadcast playing to try and glean something about them, to begin with. “I was watching that! Can't you see that this is important?”

“You want to see something important, you just look out the window, Anna,” he said. His voice was too calm, the kind of tone that people adopt when they're just on the right side of shock, and so I followed him to our fourth-floor apartment window, hoping he wasn't going to make me look at the moon again; that horrible, unnatural moon.

The view of the street I was so used to seeing was wrong somehow. At first it was hard to put a finger on why; instead, it was just a feeling of wrongness that got behind my eyes and buzzed. But after a minute or two, my eyes adjusted, like they did when the power would go out, and I'd stumble through the kitchen in the dark.

The buildings weren't standing straight anymore, that was the first thing I noticed. There was an angle there, as if there had been an earthquake, but in the two or three hours I'd been sitting and watching the less and less reliable news, I hadn't felt a single concussion. Not one. When I looked at the paintings nailed to our walls, though, they were angled, too, as if someone had gone through and made them all the same degree of crooked. I didn't notice the people until after I noticed the way cars had been abandoned along the street, as if for some reason, they had all stopped working. Maybe they had. Still, as soon as I saw the cars, I started looking for their drivers; and when I found them, I wished that I hadn't.

They were disintegrating. Not all of them, and not all the same way, but they were. I watched a man with graying hair and a bald spot at the top of his head stumble from the driver's side door of his Volvo, and as I watched, his bald spot caved in, like a pumpkin two weeks into November. I opened my mouth to scream, but the touch of Evan's hand on my shoulder stopped me just long enough for me to whirl and face him. He was holding his right arm with his left, his right hand in front of his chest, except that it wasn't his right hand anymore. It ended in a ragged, bloodless line just above the joint of his thumb, as if something had cut it off.

That was when I started screaming.

- - -

I stayed locked in the bathroom for a while, back against the flimsy wood of the door. I could feel Evan's weight pressing on the opposite side, but some providence was on my side. He didn't ask me to come out. After the silence started getting comfortable, he broke it.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Maybe. I don't know.” I paused. “Are you? I mean, is your hand...?”

“It doesn't hurt,” he said dully. “Doesn't even itch or anything, the way amputations are supposed to. It's like it never existed.” I waited for him to say more, but he didn't.

“What's happening, Evan?” I asked him.

“I don't know, babe,” he said, and I heard him sniffling. I unlocked the door and pushed it until he moved so I could step out beside him. I sat next to him, leaning against the wall, and let him wrap his arms around me. I tried not to think about the way his right arm seemed to tremble against my back, and when he kissed me, I kissed him back.

I wondered how many more times I'd get to do that.

- - -

I don't remember who the first person to suggest it was, only that it got into our heads and spread like a wildfire crossing California, or like the abhorrent disintegration that was striking people at random. The news anchors must have heard it whispered in their ears before the TVs stopped working, because they relayed the words in wide-eyed surprise. Nietzsche was quoted with shaking voices. God is dead. So was Shakespeare: Hell is empty. All the devils are here. I heard people on the street below shouting of the End Times, and I listened the way I had been absorbing everything since the moon rose: under a feeling of numbness that refused to lift, lest my mind crack under the strain. “Do you see now?” someone was screaming from the street, their voice tired and bleeding at the edges, like a scabbed wound scratched open. “Do you see where our evil ways have led us? God will come down and he will give us all what we've earned with our wickedness, and he will take those who are worthy away to our promised land!”

I didn't see Evan come up behind me. I only felt him shove me roughly aside to reach the window and yank the curtains all the way open. He pressed himself against the screen, shoving at it with his good hand, and he shouted back down to the sooth-sayer, “God is dead! Don't you see it, you crazy fuck? This isn't a test! It isn't punishment! No one is coming! Your god is rotting away, and this is what he left us! Your god is dead!” Somehow, in the blue moonlight, with the right arm of his checked flannel shirt now flattened to the elbow and his face contorted with something I at first thought was despair, but then realized was closer to insanity—well, he was hard not to believe.

- - -

Time was hard to keep track of. The clocks in the apartment—all digital—had ceased to mean anything. Some of them moved too fast, and others flashed impossible times in useless neon lines. Sometimes the power went out, but it usually came back, bringing the whine and static of the TV with it. I kept it on anyway, just in case.

Some hours after the candy-coated moon had sunk away, and the sun, blazing orange and just barely too big had risen in a sky more green than blue, I stood at the window, watching the riots and the screaming in the streets without really seeing anything at all. I was trying vaguely to count the number of dead people when Evan called my name from the couch, his empty right sleeve dangling like a dead thing over the edge of the cushions and trailing limply onto the floor.

“Anna,” he said and he waited for me to turn around before he continued. “Anna, what was your mother's name?”

“What do you mean, what was my mother's name?” I asked, annoyed.

“Anna, what was your mother's name?” he repeated, and as I rolled my eyes and opened my mouth to spit her name at him like a projectile, I found myself choked.

“I don't know,” I told him finally, the shock of the statement numbed by the concept itself.

“I thought so. Ask me what two plus two is. Go on. Ask me.”

“What's two plus two?” I repeated mechanically.

“I have no idea,” he said, and he laughed, a horrible, broken-off sound. “Do you believe that, Anna? I don't know.”

“Five,” I said with certainty. “Two plus two is five, Evan.”

“Is it?” he asked me, and he held up his cell phone in his left hand. I leaned forward to see the screen, set to the calculator tool, and read off the display: 2 + 2 = 4

“It must have messed with the electronics,” I said as he pulled the phone away, but my voice was hollow, listless. “Like it's messing with the clocks. It must have.”

“Sure, Anna,” he agreed, but the words were reflexive and empty.

“This is it, isn't it?” I asked him.

He didn't ask, This is what? only repeated himself: “Sure, Anna. Why don't you come sit down?”

“Okay,” I agreed, and I decided not to tell him about the way his eyes had turned black, pitch black, and that his smile somehow was starting to stretch from one eye to the center of his neck, because that couldn't be right, it couldn't; or maybe it was, and I was wrong, and this was how he had always looked, his face dripping over itself like wax.

And so I went over to him and sat down, and I closed my eyes and thought of strange things, like the way Evan's eyes had been brown once; the color of bright green grass in the summer; the shape of the man in the moon.

They were such strange and lovely dreams.