The Reasonable Ogre

by Mike Barnes

  She looked above her and saw the moon, full and shining white. Banking like an airplane, she steered toward it, flapping hard and with a steady rhythm.

  She flew without stopping for a night and a day and another night. The moon ahead grew larger and larger, until it filled the sky and she could see nothing else. And then she was at it—at the moon—flying above its gray dust and black craters. The sky was not blue, of course, but she could breathe the air, which was very cold and had a faintly sweet taste, a bit like peppermint on a winter’s day. Why had no one ever told her that you could breathe on the moon? And why had they always said that no one lived there—when she could see now tiny dots of light in the craters below? True, they weren’t very bright, not even as bright as candles, but there seemed to be as many of them as she had seen above her city on earth. Most of them were in the deepest craters, with only a few in the smaller craters and none at all on the surface. After flying around the whole moon once, she aimed herself toward the largest, blackest, deepest crater and flew in slowly narrowing circles down into it.

  As she descended, she saw the little lights wink out one by one. At the bottom of the crater was a faint pearly glow, a milky gray, and in this half-light she saw the small bunched shapes of people gathered beneath her. When she got closer she saw children with upturned faces and raised arms pointing at her. She swooped lower, and they scattered as if at a signal, running into holes like caves and into the deep black shadows behind rocks.

  She landed on the soft gray dust, her wings stirring up small puffs of it. It felt strange to stand again after such a long flight. Her wings settled down along her back, sliding and tucking close like fans folding up. She saw that the soft gray light came from the moon’s dust, which from up close had a low pulsing glow, like a candle flickering in slow motion. The milky light hovered near the surface, a fuzzy gray quilt pulled up over ancient rock and dust. Above that was the deep black velvet of space, with the faraway earth shining in it like a blue-and-white streaked marble. The moon’s air was cold but not freezing. And absolutely still, without any wind at all. As Moira stood there, with her toes curling into the soft old dust, she felt the eyes, many pairs of them, watching her from the black shadows.

  At last, a tall, thin shape came out from behind a rock and walked toward her. It was a boy, a few years older than Moira. He was very tall and terribly thin, so thin that Moira thought he must almost disappear when he turned sideways. He had yellow hair, dark sad eyes, and silvery skin. His skin was the dull gleaming gray of the mercury in her mom’s old thermometer. His name, he said, was Edgewick. He was the oldest child on the moon.

  Now the other moon children approached from all sides, the littlest ones holding hands as if they were crossing a busy street. They stood in a circle watching Moira closely. They all had Edgewick’s solemn, dark eyes and silvery skin. Finally, two of the smallest children, a boy and a girl, walked over to Moira and asked if she was hungry. A little, she answered, and they led her, each taking one of her hands, across the bottom of the crater to a cave that became a tunnel that led downward deeper into the moon.

  At the bottom of the tunnel was a cavern they called the Jampot. It was huge, bigger than a church, and filled with a softly shining white light, like the glow from a giant flashlight inside an enormous tent. It was the light, Edgewick told her, that made the milky glow above, seeping up through cracks and tiny holes in the crater. The floor of the Jampot was spongy; with each step, Moira’s feet sank into it a little, as if she were walking on marshmallows. The children led her to the wall and showed her how to break off a piece with her fingers. They nibbled at the edges of it, and so did Moira; it tasted sweet but dry, like a cross between angel food cake and stale white bread. All around the huge space children were taking little handfuls of the wall and nibbling on them. Each handful made the cavern a wee bit larger, hollowing it out a little bit more. After a first bite, most of the children took their piece to a pool bubbling in the centre of the room. It was filled with a thick, bright red liquid that looked like jam thickening on the stove. But when Moira dipped her piece into the sticky red, she found it was cold, and all she could taste was sweetness, like red syrup. Jamcake, the children called the bready handfuls dipped in the syrup. It was the only food on the moon.

  Moira felt full after only a few mouthfuls, and she noticed that none of the children ate very much. Edgewick didn’t eat at all, which told her how he had got so thin. After the snack, they lay around on the soft floor, which was, Edgewick told her, made of the same stuff as the walls, but dirty and packed down by people walking on it. Everyone resting after eating reminded Moira of quiet time after milk and cookies, except that these were the most serious, well-behaved children she had ever seen. They seldom spoke, and when they did it was in hushed voices. Someone might smile, a little sadly, but there was no laughing or joking. There had been no running or pushing on the way down the tunnel.

  “Why are they all staring at me?” she asked Edgewick. Wherever she looked, she met another pair of eyes watching her intently.

  “They’re wondering when you’ll start to take them back,” Edgewick answered.

  “Me!” Moira said in surprise. “How did they get here in the first place?”

  Edgewick looked away, and his voice when he answered sounded sadder and more solemn than ever. “Everyone comes here the same way,” he said.

  If that is the case, Moira wondered, why do they need my help to get back? But before she could ask Edgewick, her two guides came to show her something else. All around the sides of the Jampot cavern, children were disappearing into small round shadows that Moira guessed were the entrances to other, smaller tunnels. She went down one of these now with the children, followed by Edgewick. In places the tunnel crossed other tunnels, and looking down these, Moira saw other children walking, sometimes disappearing suddenly as they turned down another passageway. Each child seemed to have its own route, and she wondered why the boy and girl leading her were always—

  “Twins,” Edgewick whispered from behind her, as if he could read her thoughts.

  The tunnel they were in got gradually smaller, so that Moira’s shoulders brushed the sides and she and Edgewick had to duck their heads. Just when it seemed that it might close up completely, it opened into a room, a snug, nest-like chamber that was obviously the twins’ home. A little round window in the opposite wall glowed with a pale blue light. In front of it was a ledge of rock, like a bench, and the twins motioned for Moira to sit down on it. When she did, she saw, so clearly that it made her start, a small Chinese woman hanging a checkered shirt on a clothesline. She reached down to get another shirt from a hamper on the ground, picking up two more clothespins from a basket beside it. She was small because she was far away, but still Moira could see the lines in her neck when she turned her face up into the breeze that made the clothes sway. She took a few steps across her yard to a tree that was beginning to flower. Moira saw the pinkish blossoms so clearly she could almost smell them. The window seemed to follow the woman like a camera, and when she put the empty basket on her hip and turned to go into her house, pausing to examine a potted plant by the door, Moira felt the twins nudging her to get up. They slipped behind her and sat close together on the little bench, watching in complete absorption as the pale blue light rippled over their faces.

  Edgewick tugged at Moira’s sleeve, and they left the room and walked up the long tunnel until they were again on the floor of the crater where Moira had landed. There Edgewick told Moira about the window and what she’d seen in it.

  The pale blue light was earthlight, he explained. The earth reflected sunlight back to the moon, just as people on the earth saw reflected light they called moonlight. The little round window was the eyepiece of a long, long telescope that went all the way out to the surface. Each child on the moon watched one person’s life on earth.

  “Just one?” Moira asked.

  “Only one,” Edgewick answered.

  Moira thought of
all the people she saw on the street below her window, and the millions and millions of other people going about their lives. One was a better number than nothing, but it was still a very small number.

  “How can anyone pick just one?” she asked.

  Edgewick shrugged. “In the end you just do,” he said.

  He showed her to a room that was empty, and Moira began living her life on the moon. When she was hungry she walked down the tunnels to the Jampot and ate some Jamcake. She pulled a little piece from the sweet white wall and dipped it into the bubbling red. Other children lay around the Jampot floor, but after the first few days, the older ones stopped watching her closely. Even the little ones paid less attention, glancing over whenever she came in but then seeming to get bored and looking away. In her room she sat in front of her telescope and watched little scenes from the lives of people on earth. A boy tying his shoelaces, an old man reading a newspaper on a bench in a park, a well-dressed woman getting on an elevator. Each view lasted only a few seconds and then switched to another, like a television running rapidly through its channels. Moira understood now why eventually you had to pick one person. It was better to have one full meal every day than a hundred tiny bites. When she got tired of the constantly changing views, she climbed up the long tunnel to walk on the floor of the crater.

  Edgewick was always there, walking through the milky glow that came from the slowly hollowing Jampot far below them. As they walked together, Moira occasionally saw glints of light from the steep walls of the crater. The angle had to be just right to see one, and it flashed like a signal and then was gone. These puzzled her at first, until she realized that they were bits of earthlight flashing from the lenses of the telescopes trained on earth. Those were the lights, the lights of a city of moon children, she had seen as she flew over the crater. All of the children stayed below, eating Jamcake and watching through their telescopes, and Edgewick was the only person she ever met on the surface. One day she asked him why.

  “The others will come out for a landing. Like they did with you,” he said. “But once they start watching an Otherone, they don’t like to leave for too long.”

  “You leave,” Moira said. “Don’t you like to watch?”

  “I don’t need to,” said Edgewick, and looked away quickly as if he was embarrassed.

  After a few days on the moon, Moira felt that it might be time to fly back home. She liked Edgewick, and she liked being able to walk about and see other children instead of staying by herself in bed—but she missed her mom, and she even missed the tops of people’s heads and the birds hopping among the maple leaves beyond her window. She still hadn’t picked an Otherone to watch. She was afraid that if she did, she would never see her mom again. Edgewick seemed so sad and lonely that she thought it was better not to say goodbye to him. Up on the surface, she unfolded her wings and flapped them once, hard. Nothing happened. She flapped them quickly, so quickly she felt a pain like fire in her shoulders; this time she rose a few inches and bobbed unevenly along, but she had to beat her wings wildly, and the moment she stopped, she plopped back down in the dust.

  Edgewick found her sitting on a rock with her face in her hands, crying.

  “They won’t work here,” he explained when she had calmed down enough to listen. “Your wings, I mean. After a while, they get small. They get weak. Then . . . they go away completely. They disappear.”

  “But you said the others were waiting for me to take them back. Why would they think that?” Moira asked.

  Edgewick gave one of his slow, sad shrugs. “The little ones forget. They can’t remember how they got here. They think a hawk brought them. They have nightmares about bad hawks snatching them from their rooms, and they have good dreams of friendly hawks taking them back.”

  “And the older ones?”

  “They just hope. Without knowing any more what they’re hoping for. Nothing lasts very long with them . . . not even hope. They just get used to eating their Jamcake and watching their Otherone.”

  “But not you,” Moira said. “You’re up here walking. Why aren’t you down below with the others, watching?”

  Edgewick looked embarrassed again at the question. “I told you, I don’t need to,” he said quickly. “And I can’t now, anyway.”

  Moira was still confused, but she was too upset about her own shrinking wings to question Edgewick further. When she tried to fly the next day, she jumped up high, once, like someone taking a first jump on a trampoline, but then dropped back to the moon and couldn’t leave it again, no matter how hard she flapped. When she reached around behind her, she felt the wings getting smaller, drawing back into her shoulders the same way they had emerged. She felt so miserable that for two days after that she didn’t leave her room, not even to get Jamcake. She was faint with hunger when she went up to the surface again. Edgewick was there, walking in his slow, thoughtful manner.

  “How can you stand it?” she asked, after telling him of the pains in her stomach from not eating for two days. “I’ve never seen you eat a thing,” she said. “Don’t you ever get hungry?”

  “I’m hungry all the time,” Edgewick said.

  “But you never eat?”

  “As little as possible,” he said. “I starve and starve . . . and then, when I can’t stand it anymore . . . I take a tiny bite.”

  “But why?” she asked.

  Edgewick didn’t answer right away. He looked up out of the crater, up at the blue-white marble planet floating in the black sky, and then back down at Moira. “It’s an experiment,” he said. And then paused again, as if deciding whether he should say more. “I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else.”

  “I promise,” Moira said.

  “All right. Flap your wings.”

  “What?” She shook her head; she’d had enough of that sadness. But Edgewick insisted, “Flap your wings,” and so, reluctantly, she did. She arced up into the air and hung high above Edgewick, who in his thinness looked like a flagpole planted in a pool of pale pulsing light. She started to circle, but then felt suddenly tired, and cruised in a tight spiral back to the ground. When she had got her breath back, Edgewick explained.

  “It’s the Jamcake,” he said. “Something about the food here . . . as soon as you start eating it, you have to stay. I don’t think anyone else knows. They just think they lost their wings. Or they forget they ever had them. I didn’t know for a long time. And then I stopped eating and found out. By accident, like you.”

  “So you can fly again?” Moira said excitedly.

  Edgewick looked as if she had just slapped him. He looked too sad even to cry; otherwise, Moira thought, he would be spilling buckets now.

  “It might be too late,” he said quietly. “I think I waited too long. Here, see for yourself.” He turned around and lifted up the back of his shirt. Moira saw two small, blackish mounds, like stumps with scabs, with a few limp feathers hanging from them. They looked like the remains of wings she’d seen on dead birds lying by the side of the road.

  “They’re growing,” she lied. “You’ll get them back.”

  Edgewick shook his head. “No, not now. At first I thought so. I could jump up, and even glide a bit. But it didn’t last. They shrank back. After a while it gets permanent.”

  “But you’re still not eating,” she said.

  “No,” he said dully, “I’m not.” They walked for a while in silence, sometimes crossing the trails they’d left on other walks, their footprints clear as photographs since nothing disappeared on the windless moon.

  “Listen,” Edgewick said suddenly, with a brightness in his voice Moira had never heard before, as if, just now, he’d finally found something worth saying. “It may not be too late yet for you. Let’s do another experiment. Let’s try.”

  Moira agreed. Part of her wanted nothing more than to stay on the moon, walking through the chilly pools of light with Edgewick, nibbling Jamcake and watching some Otherone live a life on earth. But with another part she lon
ged to flap with the strongest wings she could find back to her own life on earth, even if it was just to sit in her bed, watching through her window and colouring pictures and listening to her mom hum along with the radio while she cooked their dinner.

  For the next few days she didn’t eat a thing. Her stomach grumbled and cramped terribly, and all she could think about was food. But then the worst cramps passed and she felt mainly empty in her middle and weak and easily tired. Pictures of food came into her head constantly, but often they made her feel a little sick. She was getting out of the habit of eating, Edgewick said. They walked together on the surface every day, stopping every few steps to let Moira rest. Walking made the wings grow faster, Edgewick told her, and it kept you away from Jamcake and the sight of other children eating. Sometimes she felt faint and dizzy, her head spinning from hunger, but she also felt the stirrings again of the muscles around her shoulders, the wings bunching and twitching there like colts desperate to run, even as the rest of her body got weaker and weaker. The blue-white marble in the black above looked different now that she hoped to visit it again. She couldn’t say how exactly. But it was like a dot on a map you plan to travel to, which, once you know you will visit it, goes from being a dot like any other dot to a dot that is really a city filled with streets and people and new things to see and do. Of course, she didn’t mention that to Edgewick, who seldom looked at the earth, but whenever he did, looked sadder than ever.

  After two weeks of not eating, she was too weak to walk and had to stay on the ledge in her room. She lay with her back to the little blue window, which made her head spin with its quickly changing scenes. Each day she didn’t eat, she scratched a mark on the rock above the bench. There were fifteen lines scratched there now. Edgewick came every day to visit her. This was the tricky time, he told her. Her wings might not be strong enough yet, but if she didn’t leave now, she would have to start eating a little, just to stay alive. Little nibbles of Jamcake would keep her going, but would also slow down her wings. Everything would happen much more slowly, Edgewick said.