i.
My wife has left me. Well, not exactly, not technically. She is still here, in our house, moving as she always has through the daily activities of our life, but where it counts, behind the facade of the family we’ve created, she is gone.
I hear it when she shuts the bedroom door, so quiet as not to wake me. I see it in how she looks just beyond my shoulder when we speak, carefully avoiding my eyes. And I feel it every day in the absence of her touch.
I found her heartbreak in the trash, face up, on the backside of an envelope. Her loopy handwriting highlighted by the chocolatey ring of her morning coffee:
I married the moon,
eight phases of mercurial,
a sadness lurking in darkness,
a side I will never
be allowed to see
I tore the envelope into eight irregular pieces. Eight shreds of paper sorrow. Then, I taped the pieces back into a whole and tucked them in my drawer beneath my winter socks.
The poem isn’t a betrayal. It’s an echo calling my name.
ii.
The moon is fake. That’s what the paper said. Yesterday’s headline took the world by storm, soaking us all in an unfathomable truth. Not just The Landing, either. The whole damn thing!
All along, we’ve been basking in the light of an illusion. Believing for centuries our phases are beyond our control.
I want to feel sad. Angry. I want to cry, but this grin won’t leave my face.
i.
I could try. Do what she asks, if only one of the things she asks, like not always eating all the leftovers or playing the TV so loudly while she grades droughty essays on Chaucer. Or not refusing to rinse the sink after shaving.
How hard would any of those things be not to do?
Instead, I ignore the whisper of her wishes and barrel toward my demise, a snowball rolling itself into an avalanche.
ii.
No, they said, in the video accompanying the story, this isn’t something the world was in on together. They actually chuckled a little at the suggestion. Raised their water bottles in front of their mouths to hide their smiles, but the bottles were clear, and so is water.
We started it. They admitted that much, which made me at least a little proud. In the early 1700s, after their telescope discovered Galileo’s debacle. Right then, they said, it was decided it best for everyone to smile instead of blink and move forward with the lie.
i.
I still dream of us. A picnic in the park. Red wine and those tiny, crustless sandwiches. On our backs on a red-checkered blanket with a skyline of skyscraper evergreens above us. Their bristly, pipe-cleaner branches stipple the light, freckling our faces in shadows. The air is alive with the language of birds. Her hand in mine is as warm as the sun. She smiles and says my name.
I squeeze my eyes together and try not to wake up.
ii.
We’d be blissfully bathing in the rays of a lunar mirage if the decades-old, cleverly redacted report detailing Neil’s triumph hadn’t been accidentally unredacted and posted on social media by the AI Report Management System they started using after all of the humans were let go.
It’s very clever, they said, with a resigned shrug, so much more so than the old system, the one operated by humans.
I can tell.
i.
My wife never raises her voice. She never shouts. She speaks in the muted decibels of fluttering butterfly wings.
“You never listen,” she mouths from across the table.
Her words are a vapor. The flicker of the candles is the only proof they exist. What I say next, she can’t hear over the crack of the glass.
ii.
From there, questions were asked. Answers demanded.
Centuries of obfuscation were peeled away, sticky layer after sticky layer. They, it turns out, had us like sheep, staring out our windows, eagerly waiting for paper-mâché to change the tide.
Sorry, they said unapologetically. The weather is bad up there. All of the mystery, mystique, and myths—merely a distraction. We needed time. Repairs are required often.
i.
Holding her gaze, not allowing my thoughts to drift from her olive eyes when she complains about her job, how the quotas are too high, how she holds her pee until she cramps to keep from falling short. Or her mother, how she was left to play alone, even at the lake, in the relentless heat of the Florida summer.
The sunburns that blistered her skin weren’t nothing. The loneliness occupying her friendless days was real.
A simple nod of my head, empty of anything that matters, isn’t so much.
ii.
The phases, all eight, all the work of one guy. They said he came up with the idea while sitting on his front porch sipping a beer and watching his wife whip through the Sears catalog. She didn’t care so much about what was in the catalog, only that what was in it was new. Humans, he reasoned, like change. We bore quickly and always need to look forward. Phases, he thought, that’s the answer.
“Joe’s crazy again. Must be the full moon.”
“The stock market’s soaring. Must be the new moon.”
To its credit, the moon never complains. It takes all our bull and keeps looking down at us with that utterly impassive, cottage cheese face. The best kind of friend you can have.
i.
The flower shop is on my way home. The pastel tulips she likes are the flick of my blinker and free parking in their “Customer’s Only” lot.
“Honey, you shouldn’t have!”
“For you, love, anything!”
I drive past, eyes on the road, arriving home with empty, useless hands.
ii.
The Landing was plotted in the twenties. Filmed in the fifties. On a sound stage. In Hollywood. With the industry’s best-kept secrets as stars. They waited, they said, patient as trolls, to roll it out. We, meaning us, needed to be ready. Only they knew when. They were wrong. Stick a flag in Styrofoam, and apparently, people will believe anything.
Sure, they said, people had doubts—lots of people. Nobody, though, wanted to be the one pointing a suspicious finger at the sky, brutishly suggesting all of it, from the rocket to the walk, was fake.
In the end, they said, the nay-sayers saw the danger in their mouths and agreed to agree.
i.
Dinner is a midnight walk through a deserted city. Except for the crunch of my bread and slight pop of my lips as they pull away from my glass, all is quiet.
My wife raises her head once. She looks right at me. I see the question float across her face, brush her lips. I want to answer: I don’t know why, either.
I clear my plates. Load each carefully into the washer. In my den, I turn the TV up loud, numbing myself in its static light.
ii.
The biggest lie, the lie of all lies, the one I can’t get past: Moonlight! Think about it: How many songs have been sung, how many babies have been conceived, how many monsters have cloaked their backsides, how many enemies have disclosed their location beneath the shimmering magic of that made-up shit?
At first, it was a spotlight. Not just one. They were everywhere. Strategically placed and managed by a team of dedicated individuals. Then it was a plane. One, two, three until there were too many to count. Now, a satellite. An entire sky’s worth.
i.
Tomorrow I turn forty. My wife has invited our friends. Wrapped gifts. Baked a chocolate souffle.
In our living room, everyone gathers around our piano. She plays a song she wrote, one especially for me. The notes are thieves stealing my breath. I blink, wishing away the tears. The applause rattles the chambers of my heart like thunder.
When the clapping stops, I say we need more wine. My wife thinks I mean from the cellar.
I come home to a dark house. My wife is asleep. The party is over.
My actions do not represent my feelings.
ii.
Maybe they are right—this way is better. If the moon were real, it would eventually move on like a lover, or a friend, or a neighbor. Leave Earth’s orbit for a cooler, hipper planet. Satellites, though, don’t have friends. They stay forever.
i.
My wife’s leaving isn’t a betrayal. We’ve made this decision together, though neither has said it to the other. We agree to have grown weary of my moods and can no longer live in the shadow of what might happen next.
ii.
And the moon itself, they said with a collective wink, a trick of the eye. A paper mâché elementary school art project magnified by mirrors. Thousands and thousands of run-of-the-mill, everyday mirrors.
The materials and method, they boasted, never much mattered. The moon wasn’t designed to be an illusion. A reflection, they said, while looking directly into the mouth of the camera, the moon has always been a reflection.
i.
I love my wife. Her love for me is a puff of warm air on cold glass.
I miss her already.
VA lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. Her work has appeared in The Lake, 34th Parallel Magazine, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Lumina Journal, Panoplyzine Magazine as the Editors’ Poem of Choice, The Basilisk Tree, and Figwort. She has work forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Courtship of The Winds, and Remington Review, along with a poetry collection through Kelsay Books.
