A River of Moons

By Thea Liu

In a land of darkness, a river of moons twines between hillocks the shade of freshly split obsidian. Color exists beyond its shores in only the faint, lapis iridescence rimming hills and trees and flowers… and in the girl wearing scarlet shorts.

But who knows how long she will last?

She’s crouching beneath an enormous sphere with red clouds scudding across its pitted surface, a jujube-colored moon slung over her shoulder in a grass-woven net as she pokes through the river. Though her hollowed-out chest aches as it always does, she pauses for barely a moment to touch the serrated edge of her wound with black-tipped fingers before returning to her task.

On this, the one thousand one hundred and eighth day since she woke amidst black geraniums, she still hopes to find her lost moon.

This section of river is awash with amber from the cloudy giant, except for flickering pockets where smaller, fast-cycling moons wax and wane within moments. Reaching beneath the surface, she explores by touch, trusting her instincts. When a pebbled surface warms her darkness-bitten fingertips with the sensation of home, before memories pop in her mind like soda bubbles:

Chlorine in her hair. Her father’s smile. The vendor outside the swimming center. Pork sausages turning on a grill. The first, crisp, too-hot, perfect bite.

Bright colors on a TV screen. Her brother’s delighted, gurgling toddler laugh. Her knees tucked against her mother’s lap. A warm cat curled by her leg.

With a gasp, she tosses aside the jujube moon to push her arms into the river. She doesn’t need this look-alike anymore, not when the crater in her chest will soon be filled and she will be complete.

She will finally go home.

The moon she unearths smells like salt the way all moons do, with a tinge of cooked ginger. Its size is perfect, just large enough for her hands to lace across its belly. She’s about to hug it when she notices its surface is too rough, its glow apricot instead of silvery yellow.

This is not her moon; anything less won’t match the topography of her loss.

She flings it away, screaming at its deceitful familiarity as it rolls down a slope—then her chest erupts with pain. Darkness nips at her fingers, crawling up beyond her distal joints. Her memories of chlorine and her brother’s laugh dim, then disappear, snatched from her mind. Around her, trees reach for her with jagged branches. Grass entangles her ankles.

Spinning around, she realizes the jujube moon has disappeared within the river, even its netting lost to sight. Disappointing as these look-alikes—these lures, as she calls them—are, she needs them nearby to keep the abyss from noticing her incompleteness and turning on her.

She scrambles after the apricot moon. A malevolent root trips her, and hungry flowers latch onto her wrists to steal every memory of before from her mind. Tearing free, she tumbles down the hill in a way that would’ve broken her bones if they could be broken here, rolling until she slams against a banyan tree. There, the apricot moon rests against its trunk.

She clutches the lure with fingers that have become half flesh and half obsidian. Immediately, her pain recedes; the trees still; the flowers slump. As she stands, her shoe snags on something caught beneath the banyan’s roots. Its lapis lines form the curve of a shoulder, the crescents of closed eyes, the jut of a knee: a human, as unbreathing and unresponsive as a rock.

Shuddering, she turns away from this reminder of what she almost became.

Of what she will become if she doesn’t find her moon.

#

She climbs a slope covered with black geraniums and opens a door set in the hill, the apricot lure in her arms nudging against the rounded collar of the shirt she is thoroughly sick of wearing.

Inside is a tiny room, walled by rock and bright from multicolored lures piled in a corner. She has left marks here: a mattress woven out of grass, a shelf built from boulders and branches, moon-dust doodles on the walls. But this isn’t home. This is just a hole she sleeps in when she grows tired of searching for her moon.

She tosses the apricot moon onto her mattress and, with a shard of rock, etches another day’s tally onto the wall.

(It must be admitted that her timekeeping is inaccurate; the moon she uses as a clock was chosen because the length of its cycles matched what she felt was twenty-four hours. Right now, it’s an eggplant-colored half-sphere. Come “dawn,” it will be full and lavender.)

Though her feet ache—it takes hours to reach unexplored sections of the river now—she is hungry for remnants of home after losing more color today. Carefully, her fingers more numb than before, she examines the before possessions laid out on her makeshift shelf.

Copper coins. Gliding automatic doors. Biting into a chocolate ice cream cone. An aquamarine marble, orange whorled in its center. Sun-warmed pavement. Victorious laughter. A pink rubber eraser. Buzzing fans. Scratching pencils. Raised voices—

She tries to pull free, but her thoughts are water swirling down a sink. She remembers equations swimming on paper and in her brain and admonishments to do better. She remembers hiding in her room and trying to pretend she can’t hear the arguments. She remembers itchy black sleeves and her grandmother’s still face and her parents shouting, always shouting. She remembers her bed denting around her body as she let sleep steal more and more hours from her.

She doesn’t remember her final day before. Things were hazy by then, seconds becoming hours and hours becoming seconds.

All she knows is she had woken in lapis-rimmed darkness with pain tearing her apart. As she screamed and scrabbled at the chasm of severed muscles in her chest, the geraniums turned on her, their petals turning jagged as they sought her mouth and eyes. When onyx claimed the white crescents tipping her fingernails, her desperate thoughts of home blurred, fading at the edges like an old photograph.

Terrified of the darkness hungering for her color and her memories, she instinctively fled toward the river and hugged the moon that felt most familiar. Though the contamination slowed, it continued to spread. Her memories continued to wither.

She might have been lost, then, on that first day, if not for the boy.

Say your name, he had said.

She startled, noticing a pair of light brown eyes circled by ivory skin. The rest of him was charcoal, his edges barely discernible from the grass at the river’s bank. He ordered through black lips, Say it every day.

Too frightened to question his advice, she obeyed, and the geraniums grew gentle.

Home, she had sobbed, demanding to know her way back, and in the final moments before his eyes shut forever, he gestured at his hollow chest.

Your moon, he whispered. Don’t forget your name.

One thousand one hundred and seven days later, in the hole in the hill she inherited from the faded boy after following his path in the grass, she drags herself out of before and goes to her mirror—a smooth, silver moon—to perform the daily recital of her name.

Usually, she takes a moment to drink in the color of her skin: light brown, freckled like a painter had flicked their thumb across a brush. But today her reflection unsettles her. She doesn’t know how to look past the moon’s distortion to remember herself in detail. She doesn’t even know if she remembered yesterday. Has she forgotten for a while, or was it today’s accident that stole her face from her?

Say your name.

Her father’s surname, followed by two words her parents plucked from a list deemed auspicious by a fortune teller. Three syllables to keep her safe.

“My name is—”

She pauses. Sometimes it takes a moment.

Three syllables. Say the first and the rest will follow.

“My name is—”

Her wound throbs, slow and then fast, a quickening heartbeat. She tries again, but it’s futile. One misstep, and the abyss took her name. Soon, the rest of her will follow.

She wants to scream, but in the end all she does is cry.

*

When she wakes at dawn (let us annotate dawn and dusk as she does, despite the lack of a sun here), she is floating in a pool of her own tears.

In that fleeting moment between consciousness and sleep, she had assumed she would close her eyes and they’d never open. She would become a charcoal statue, her features outlined by thin lines of blue.

She stands, her wet shirt clinging to the contours of her hollow chest as she wades through knee-deep tears to the mirror. Her relief that her face is unclaimed lasts for only a moment. The hands she laid over her wound to hide it are black up to the wrist, her name is still lost, and all that’s left of her past are divots on tide-swept sand.

Slamming doors. Muffled voices shouting I hate you at each other.

Curls of eraser shavings. Scarlet ink. Do better. Do better. Do better.

I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

She throws herself backward. Above and around her, her moon-dust doodles and their reflections twinkle like stars. As she bobs upon her own sorrow, numbness travels up her hands and claims her elbows and shoulders and thoughts. Not even her wound hurts anymore.

She’ll never go home now, but what had she been yearning to return to? Screams loud enough to traverse walls? Loss sharp enough to excise a heart?

Oblivion would be better, and she’s at its threshold.

When a lure drifts between her arm and hip, she tries to shove it away, only to unbalance and sink and come up spluttering, the apricot moon wrapped in her embrace. She wants to throw it away, but its scent is warm ginger tea slipping down her throat. Softer memories well up and, despite being reduced to a disjointed jumble of chlorine and sunlight and laughter and apple wedges, they drive away the numbness.

The ache returns, reminding her what can bring back her name, her past, and her home.

Her moon.

With a long, shuddering breath, she goes to her shelf and pockets the currently lavender moon-clock, her eraser, the little discs of metal and tiny glass sphere, even though she no longer recalls the words coin and marble. Then she wraps the apricot lure in a net of grass and heaves it over her back before leaving her hole in the hill, her tears spilling in rivulets beside her.

At the river’s shore, she looks back at her abandoned lures, visible through the door she left open for the next hollowed-out person to find. She looks at the boy who saved her, frozen in the same position as he was more than a thousand days ago.

A young willow is growing through the hole in his chest.

Ignoring grasping branches and shifting so the grass can’t tangle in her shoelaces, she touches the boy’s shuttered eyelids in farewell. There will be no returning. Either she’ll find her way home, or the abyss will consume her too.

*

She walks and she walks and she walks.

She walks past hillocks previously explored, then follows the river as it twists about the bases of viciously sharp spires. She examines every moon of appropriate size, an arduous task with her clumsier and clumsier hands.

She doesn’t stop until she reaches a boulder-scattered plateau overlooking a treacherously steep valley; she’s been walking for a full turn of her celestial clock and her limbs feel brittle, though that could be because her feet have succumbed, black replacing the original white of her shoes. Yet, curling around the apricot lure to rest, she finds the rock beneath her a softer pillow than anticipated.

It’s a girl made of obsidian, eyes closed and mouth open.

Shuffling away to find a better spot, she notices elbows locked around knees; spines curved into hooks; empty chests bearing ancient trees. What she thought were boulders are people, a graveyard of countless others who failed before her.

A root snakes around her ankle surreptitiously, trying to tie her down.

She scrambles up so quickly she doesn’t notice the coins rolling out of her pockets, then enters the valley, trying to clutch rocks to steady herself, but sometimes seizing a protruding shoulder or upturned cheek. When she is devoured up to the elbows and knees, she abandons her clock in the river. There’s little point in keeping time while she can barely keep her grip on the apricot lure and the trees are trying to eat her and she’s tripping more than walking and the throbbing of her wound is gradually kindling into flames.

She walks until the river grows shallow and wide, its base blanketed with moons smaller than her fist. Stumbling amongst them, her exhausted gaze jumps from potential moon to potential moon as if skipping stones. In a smooth, golden behemoth, she glimpses what she has become.

The black of her hair has bled down her neck, soaked her white shirt and red shorts. Her limbs are the color of the geraniums she first woke in. Her eyes and nose and forehead still cling to vibrancy, but their edges are encroached upon by charcoal freckles.

Looking up from her reflection, she sees that the river runs dry at the foot of a banyan grove, and that she has reached the end of the world.

One might argue there is little difference between lapis-limned black and pure, unrelieved darkness. But to her, the line where the shivering blue halts and the void begins is a shock so abrupt it knocks her to her knees.

Instead of screaming, she tips her head back.

She has walked to the end of everything yet is still stranded. It would be better to be nothing, feel nothing, than stay incomplete for another moment. The flowers cease tugging at her limp hands and instead brush against her coaxingly, as if sensing her defeat.

Beneath her changed skin, however, her spine is still hers. She can’t help but stare beyond the river’s end at the silver-yellow light splicing lines between the banyans’ air roots.

It is the color of her missing moon.

Pain floods back into her, terrible and fiery, but so does determination, and she drags herself upright—kicks away the flowers, voracious again, to place one colorless foot in front of the other—shuffles past moons the color of every jewel imaginable—leans against rough bark to keep herself upright—

There, in a copse at the edge of a starless land, rests a single moon.

She has forgotten her past. She has forgotten her name. But she could never forget her moon, her heart and her hope. It fits perfectly in her arms, tucking against the curve of her throat. Every crater and bump is precise, unchanged.

I found you.

Though she has forgotten the words, she shouts them through clasped fingers and bowed shoulders, through the pulse surging beneath her skin.

I found you I found you I found you.

Any moment, her moon will fold back into place and she will be whole again, and freed from this terrible, hungry realm. Yet her chest remains empty. When blinking doesn’t peel apart the nothingness to reveal home, she clutches at her wound.

Its edges, so raw once, have crusted over. Despite the absence of her moon, her body had healed the crater as best it could, coagulating vessels and skinning over exposed flesh to smooth the borders of its devastation.

But it was an aberrant growth, one that altered her loss irrevocably.

She reaches for her moon again, but her emptiness no longer aligns with its shape.

*

Her despondency becomes a river.

Her tears run toward the edge of the grove and the void beyond gulps them up greedily. Her grief cannot be contained; it pools about her moon. Her perfect, useless moon. She kicks it, hating its reminder that she caused her own failure.

The moon rolls up a dirt mound, hovers for a moment, then crashes into the apricot lure she had thrown aside. The two tumble toward the consuming void. With every roll, their light recedes, and darkness creeps down from the trees, seeking the final bit of color around her eyes.

Though she throws herself after them, her moon is swallowed. The apricot lure threatens to follow and would have if not for the netting that slowed its journey. And for her hand, unwittingly placed into the weave’s snare.

She gathers it to herself, desperate for any anchor against the tides of despair.

Even through her numbed skin, she can feel that the lure is rougher than her lost moon. Yet it is warmth and light, and a gravitational pull solders her cheek to its surface. A curious sensation leaps from her hollowed chest, like black geraniums blooming beneath her abandoned hole in the hill.

It takes her a moment to understand.

Hope.

She touches the tip of her clavicle and draws her finger down to the rim of her loss. Before, in her anguish, she had not so much explored as torn at it, but now she maps the new and unwelcome shape of her chest. She catalogs every spot where her wound scabbed too thickly, condemning them as culprits, until she notices a dip that matches a plateau on the apricot lure.

An indent between her second and third ribs on the right aligns with a fissure line.

The sharp cleft at the base of her lungs corresponds with a peak.

If she twists her arms just so, the apricot lure would be a near-match for the partially healed chasm in her chest. There are corners that would remain hollow, scabs that might be torn loose, but her wound would be stoppered—

She leaps away, hands curling into fists.

What would it mean to carry a moon that isn’t hers? Will it return her colors? Will it bring her home? Is feeling not-quite-right forever better than not existing at all?

Perhaps there is peace in surrendering to the abyss. She imagines sinking into a pool of ink. A sapling emerging through her. Her shape eroding with time, until her scattered flecks become a leaf upon a tree, or grass on a hill.

No ears to cover. No tears to shed. No heart to break.

Nothing would ever be able to hurt her again.

The thought is so tempting she almost follows her lost moon into the void. But the hope in her chest is restless, curling and uncurling. It puts the tangy flavor of goji brew on her tongue and the spicy warmth of incense in her nose, and though she no longer knows what goji or incense is, a spark lights in her:

Three syllables she thought had forsaken her.

She drops to her knees and embraces the apricot moon.

*

She is on the street she once walked every day.

She knows every bit of it: the corner where she used to play with the grocery store’s black dog, even if it meant sprinting to get to school on time. The intersection where she held her brother’s hand to prevent him from running into beeping cars. The street vendor’s cart, laden with sticky blocks of peanuts trapped in malt sugar.

It’s familiar, and it isn’t. Her eyes flinch away from neon signs to settle on the cool shadows pooled in an alley. When a bus blares past, she claps her hands to her ears before letting them drop to her collar. Her skin is suffused with the apricot moon’s warmth, even where it’s dented from the hollows hiding beneath. Her thumb, pressed into the notch of her sternum, brings up a slow ache instead of a shriek of pain.

She doesn’t understand her new topography yet, but she intends to map it.

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Thea Liu (she/her) is a Taiwanese fantasy and horror writer, cat mom, and hobbyist photographer. She enjoys listening to moody music, petting stray cats, and has been known to rescue hurt pigeons.

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