the moon’s revenge

s. muir

One night during the recent pandemic, a woman who had grown old together with a man came home, got out of her car, and stared. In her yard, revealed by the parking lights, a figure hung suspended over the ground. She stared up at a gutted carcass from which a tar-like strand of blood spooled around the base of an oak. The head was an antlered stag’s, the white fur in its ears stirring in air. The old woman knew at once that her husband had climbed into the deer stand where, for years, he’d photographed animals as they went safely through his woods. But this time, he’d picked up the unused crossbow.
 

Over the treetop sailed a full October moon, bright but deep, shining into the stag’s open eyes. Fear struck her hard. Then, as if she were a little grandchild scared by a fable, she told herself that this stag did not belong to the moon. No hunter would be torn to pieces in revenge. She reminded herself that the moon was just a big rock in space, a thing, not an intelligence.
 

Later, her husband said that the stag had walked right up to the deer stand, and he’d killed it with one arrow to the heart. It was, he declared, the shot of my life. At these words, the old woman bit her tongue nine times and refused to eat the stag’s flesh. A numinous person was stashed in her freezer, in butcher paper packets labelled BACK STRAP and GROUND. This had never happened before. Her husband had a buddy who hunted, and on New Year’s Day, the two of them would go out with their bows and beers to practice rowdily on a wooden target. All the other days, her husband preferred shooting with a camera, bringing home the forest’s secrets.
 

The kill provided meat for three years. But she did not like to cook it. Whenever the meat greased her fingers, it felt tainted. Her knowledge that deer were prey, the moon was a rock, and fables were lies, did not help. Maybe, she thought, we’ve gone back to basics—my superstitions, his hunting—to feel safer in the pandemic. By the time the venison was all gone, she had other worries.
 

Chief among them was the death of her mother, for whose grave she had ordered a modest marker of domestic limestone. At last, after months of waiting, she was able to buy flowers and visit her mother’s grave. It was October; the leaves of shedding maples rode the air like spirit boats. There was the carved marker with her mother’s name and dates. She remembered the open coffin, how she’d wept over the sunken eyelids from which the light of her mother had flown. Her mother, down there, who’d birthed, suckled, loved, taught, fought with, looked after, and spoken to her all her life. She laid her hand on the stone. It was like a door cemented into time.
 

Kneeling by the grave, arranging flowers fussily, she gave a deep, refreshing sigh. Then her phone tinkled, and the caller wouldn’t be ignored, kept trying. It was her neighbor, the farmer across the road, who reported that her husband was in the hospital and could not pick her up at the cemetery as planned. Instead, the neighbor came in his van. Buckling her safety belt, she glimpsed her husband’s clothes in the back seat, soiled and wet, as her neighbor related his exciting story.
 

Her husband had been scooping fallen leaves out of their quarry pond with a long-handled net, standing on a rock outcrop that jutted over the water.
          “I warned him,” she burst out.
          “Guys do shit like that!” crowed her neighbor. The outcrop had broken off and chased her husband down into the pond. But he’d kept his wits, managing to scramble partway over the giant tumbling rock. Only his ankle had been crushed. He’d pulled himself up the quarry wall, then crept on his belly to the phone left in the grass. “I came right away. Man! The pain he was in; he was soaked with cold water and still sweating!” She
made a sound, and the neighbor added, “He’s all right.”
 

Arriving home at dusk, the old woman covered her mouth in shock. Her asphalt drive was pale as milk. Over it loomed a huge moon, like a white tunnel about to swallow her house. She thanked her neighbor, fled into her own car, and drove to the hospital where every face was masked as if the pandemic year had never passed.
          “The full moon brings ‘em in,” the nurse said, as she collected her fractured and moaning
husband.
 

He lay abed all day long, his foot and shin inside a medical cage of four steel bars, anchored lengthwise by four pins driven through his skin into the bone. Twice a day, with sterile swabs familiar from Covid tests, she cleaned the open wound around each pin—one pin went through his heel, two through the twin wounds on either side. As she worked, her husband’s face and brave small talk seemed remote. Holding her breath, she drizzled saline on flesh that looked inhuman, like glazed ham or orange vinyl; his discolored toenails, stuck in swelled toes, resembled chips of the rock that had attacked him. Especially the dead big toenail, stained like limestone. The moon’s revenge was to have turned a limb of her precious mate into a mindless thing like itself. Yet how could a thing take revenge? She kept her thoughts unspoken.
          “Accidents happen,” she comforted him.
          “I’ve stood on that rock for thirty years,” he said over and over.
          “Well, what made it break?” she ventured, looping gauze over the steel pins and pushing it down on the wounds. “Was it a full moon thing, d’you think?” She waited but he didn’t answer. Then he sighed.
          “Freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing,” he chanted. “The water in the pores of the limestone swells when it’s frozen and cracks the rock, that’s how.”
 

Each day her husband spent hours on his laptop, watching videos he’d taken on their land, a forested ridge that nurtured mature oaks and wildlife. The videos brought back seasons. Fuzzy ducklings crowded an old woodpecker hole, then jumped out by pairs, tiny wings touching tips, toward the pond where their mother crooned and gurgled. A buck in the pond ate water lily stems with gusto, slinging and slurping them like noodles. Under a doe standing guard, a spotted fawn rocked up on teetering legs.
          “Fawns are the cutest,” he chuckled. His wife, also watching, asked if he remembered the stag he’d shot. Of course he did.
          “Remind me why you shot him?”
          “I told you,” he replied. “It was the shot of my life.”
          “Did you think that then? ‘The shot of my life’?” He scrolled through rows of forest pix. His wife waited.
          “I didn’t think. I just did it, that’s all.”
          “But why?” she probed softly. What was the change inside her husband, years in the making, like the fissure in that rock? But he couldn’t tell her.

His wounds developed personalities. Two were complainers: weepy, red, prone to scabs. Another was her good boy, yielding just one swab of yellow serum. The mean twins looked innocent, but when she touched them her husband hissed. They all tried to stick to the steel pins, and with swabs, she trained them not to. In time, even the complainers stopped yearning for the pins and grew in tidy, elastic rings. Guiding their changes, the old woman no longer thought of the broken limb as a mindless thing. She began wondering if change was a type of intelligence that did not need a mind. And remembered the giant moon. And wondered. Was there something that the moon and the quarry rock shared, to explain her sense that they were in cahoots?
 

“What sort of rocks are on the moon?” she asked, as he enjoyed the best moment of his day. His dinner on its tray smelled of fresh toast, and his hair had been washed as gently as if it were a head of dandelion. His wife sat beside him as he searched the Web.
          “Looks like . . . the same stuff we have on earth,” he reported. “Makes sense.”
          “But not limestone, right?” She knew that limestone was made of seashells—calcium, the same stuff he took for his bones—but there was much she did not know. His cheeks puffed in the way she’d found offensive during their first ten years.
          “Of course not,” he drawled.
          “That’s what I thought.”
          “Now, here’s something; there’s ice on the moon.”
          “Yeah?”
          “Yeah . . . now get this. It’s the same water that the moon carried away when it split off from the Earth. Who would have imagined that. Four and a half billion years ago.”
          “Wow. Old water.”
          “Old, old water.” The two chalked up another small accord.
 

When she rose, he asked her to bring home a motion-sensitive camera strapped to a crabapple tree by the quarry. He wanted to see if it had pictures of his fall. His sad eyes showed his need to examine the moment that had felled him. Lifting the tray, she felt her hips hurt like fire—it was her mother’s bursitis. She looked at the curtains’ lace eyelets holding the night. A sigh of effort passed through her, and if she’d been a cattail, she’d have swayed.
          “All right,” she said.
 

The old woman threw on coat, boots, and a headlamp. Outside, her first breath filled her with freedom, moist air scented with sleeping trees. Her caregiver’s back straightened. Hello, outside!
 

The night was still and cold. To each side of the drive, a wall of mist rose halfway up the trees and pressed between them. Switched on, the headlamp encased her in shiny vapor, so she turned it off and followed the path with muffled steps, under the glimmer of clouds. A pair of tall oaks, whose boles mounded the turf, framed the clearing where the quarry lay. Tonight, mist hid the ground beyond the oaks. She waded in. Mist engulfed her waist, and her booted toes felt forward among points of rock. Ahead, due south, she recognized the crabapple tree by its drooping, fine-branched top. But it faded from view, and she stopped, fearful, until the shadowy canopy returned. With all her concentration, she tried to avoid stepping or even looking west, toward the quarry pond.
 

When the crabapple tree solidified, the old woman rested against it, closing her eyes. Gently, she stroked the bark’s damp plaques, not the chopped sponge of oak nor the hard twill of ash. Hello, apple. She slid her palms down to the camera strap and felt for its clasp, without success. The clasp wasn’t there. It would be around the tree, facing the pond. The thought of moving nearer to the quarry, not ten feet of mist between her and its edge, made her murmur in dread. At her age, anything might happen—a stumble, disorientation. The crumbling rock. But an accident could befall her going home empty-handed, too. And she could not bear his disappointment.
 

She worked her way around the tree holding it with both hands. Then she crouched, feeling around, grunting. Pain grated in her hips. It was like a miracle when an LED light glowed before her eyes; the camera had taken her picture! That made her snort. Now her fingers held the plastic clasp, but the insert stuck; squeeze and wiggle it as she might, it stayed stuck. And her hip joints were hot coals. The old woman struggled up and leaned her brow against the tree.

She was wondering what to do, when the night’s stillness broke. A high, eerie wail roused a chorus of shrieks echoing from all points, and startled, she looked west. The air seemed clearer. She saw coyotes, two or three darkly bounding around the quarry. Withered crabapples, like black raindrops, clung in the bare trees. And filling the quarry, a sea of mist overspread with soft light. She looked up. Haloed in blue, the full moon lit up the margin of clouds, ragged and immense, racing toward it as fast as an avalanche. Yet continually as the clouds verged on blotting out its face, the moon annulled them. Alone in the sky’s turmoil, without blot or stain, the moon gave the earth a long, matchless look.
 

The old woman barely heard her neighbor’s sheepdog give a warning bark. The moon’s expression held her rapt. After a second, another sheepdog barked, but it took much longer till the old woman heard him.
 

Instead, she heard a train approach from across the fields, and the double drumming of its wheels conveyed infinitude. Watching the blue-haloed moon, she heard the train’s rumble grow louder, its rhythm tremble in the earth faster and faster. Suddenly its beat halted and she was nearly thrown to the ground. But she held on. Blood hammered in her brain. The moon had a face of longing—never had it stopped being the rock split off and slung far into space, gazing backward across nowhere to the lost earth. When the loud sound resumed, it was the sound of the universe approaching and passing. By her small tree, terrified of stroke, the old woman faced time’s door. And the limestone grave marker dissolved into motion, motion and longing that was all.
 

Then she heard the second dog bark.
 

Her heartbeat settled down. She inhaled and exhaled. She felt her face, moved a little; nothing was numb. Oh, good. In the still night, branches creaked, and the air smelled of a deserted hour. She felt somehow changed, without a word for it; nothing she could tell her husband. In moonlight, on the crabapple’s trunk, the plastic clasp glinted. After a while, with one booted foot, she scraped and knocked at it till she’d freed the camera. And holding its cold weight, she walked home.
 

S. Muir’s debut novel, Invisible Beasts, was praised in O, the Oprah Magazine, as a “Title to Pick Up Now,” and was a finalist for the Orion Prize. Her latest fiction collection, Animal Truth and Other Stories, won the 2022 Publishing Lab Prize for innovative fiction from the University of New Orleans Press. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Bernard F. Connors Prize from The Paris Review, four Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence grants in poetry, fiction and nonfiction, most recently in 2024 for fiction; and other awards. Muir has authored five books including poetry, fiction, and memoir. Other writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and numerous periodicals.