When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

His next breath turned into a laugh. “You named it?”

  “Her,” she said, prim as a teacher correcting a mispronounced word. “I named her. And yes.”

  “What happened to her?” Sam asked. “You took that thing everywhere.”

  Peyton sighed, but not without humor. “Lady Jane Grey, like her namesake, was beheaded after a tragically short reign.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “The pumpkin was turning, and my sisters were afraid I was gonna carry it around until it rotted,” she said. “So they convinced me she wanted to be part of a pie.”

  Convinced. Three Bonner sisters against one. They’d probably cut the pumpkin open without Peyton’s permission, and had to talk her down from wailing by telling her this was an end worthy of Lady Jane Grey.

  “You know, I never meant to scare her,” Peyton said.

  Sam shook his head. “What?”

  “The night at the water tower.” Peyton’s eyes drifted toward the place on the horizon where the old water tower used to stand, a silhouette against the sky. “I never wanted to scare Miel with the pumpkin. I just thought she might want to hold her. I thought it might make her feel better.”

  Peyton’s face was so open, almost apologetic, that Sam felt like they were at the water tower again, Peyton standing with her sisters, Sam slipping his jacket onto Miel. They had all been children then, so he’d never considered just how young Peyton was, the smallest of four sisters. A girl offering to share her favorite thing with a girl she did not know.

  It wasn’t Peyton’s fault, how much Miel feared pumpkins. But with the four of them all lined up like that, it was no surprise that Miel had seen Peyton’s first step toward her as a threat.

  Maybe if Peyton had just been Peyton, instead of one of four bright-haired girls, she would have seemed more like a friend and less like a force. But they would always be the Bonner sisters, a truth that both guarded and isolated them.

  “You don’t have to tell her that,” Peyton said. “But I wanted you to know.”

  lake of goodness

  Tonight, half the town was putting pumpkins into the water, the way they did every year. They had hollowed out pumpkins they’d bought for the occasion. Dusky orange Estrellas. Deep blue-green Autumn Wings. Gray that was almost violet, and the off-white Luminas. They had emptied their shells of seeds and flesh, and then carved patterns of leaves and lace lattices. When they set candles inside, the cuttings glowed. One by one, they let them float on the water, the wide, slow current reflecting the light.

  A little farther down the bank, Miel saw Sam’s mother, watching the same children she persuaded to practice their euphoniums and cellos. Her skirt almost swept the ground as she bent to talk to them, the glimmer of her eyes and her slight smile drawing them as if she were about to tell them a secret.

  Sam had to be around here somewhere. He usually helped his mother keep track of the sons and daughters she’d been charged with taking to see the pumpkin lanterns. Miel looked for him, but even when she didn’t see him, she felt the pull of him, the certainty that he was close. That they would touch again before the heat from their hands faded off each other’s bodies.

  Miel stood with Aracely at the edge of the river, unashamed of the wet hem of her skirt. She let it brush her knees, and did not try to hide it.

  The weight of pumpkins filled their hands, the candles inside them warming the shells. The one Aracely held, round and green, she had carved with swirls like the tops of fiddlehead ferns, the shapes traced in light. Miel’s, a cream Lumina, glowed where she had cut out little rounds for the light to come through. It looked like one of Aracely’s favorite dresses, pale fabric dotted with coins of gold dye.

  A few old women, the ones who argued about whether milk helped pumpkin vines grow bigger fruit, the same ones Miel thought would have been first to gossip about her, watched her, and smiled.

  Miel thought her rose would burst into petals. They would spill from her sleeve and cover the ground. The whole town knew she was afraid of pumpkins. But she never thought these señoras would be proud of her for carrying her own floating lantern.

  She had never thought this town held even a handful of people who cared if she was afraid.

  “You ready?” Aracely asked.

  Miel nodded. Aracely crouched alongside the river, and set her pumpkin on the water. It drifted into the dark, the current carrying the swirls of light.

  Then Miel knelt, looking into the water, and watched the pumpkins floating down the river. A pale one dotted in light spun near the bank. One so dark green it looked blue bobbed along the current. A flatter orange one with the billowing shape of a fairy tale pumpkin looked like its rind was glowing.

  Miel let the Lumina pumpkin go. The cream-white round floated, casting coins of light on the water. It rode the current and joined the clusters of other pumpkins, bumping Aracely’s so their light flashed and skittered.

  But the soft rush of the river was sharpening, deepening like a knife cutting down through the earth. It held the thread of her mother’s screaming. It cupped the small breaking of Miel’s sobs, her begging her mother to let her out, or not to hold her under. The sounds swirled through the water like the hem of a dress.

  Part of Miel was still in the water.

  Both she and her mother and Leandro were lost down there.

  So many women had given her mother advice on what to do with her. Draw a star on her forehead every Sunday. Mallow tea at sunrise. Say the prayer of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, and then, when she is older, buy her a dress as blue as the Virgin’s veil.

  The history of Miel’s family had said that, one day, she would turn on her mother, the roses growing from her body a warning of her treachery.

  Held within all those sounds was her father’s voice, a memory of him yelling that existed only in the distance. When she tried to look at it straight-on, it vanished.

  Her unease broke and brightened in her stomach.

  She was inside one of those pumpkins. Her body, small as when she was five, was inside one of the bigger ones floating on the water. Or maybe she was in the smaller ones. Her hair in a white one. Her rose in one as orange as Ivy Bonner’s hair. Her hands in a blue-gray one. She was in pieces.

  Miel waded into the river, the water splashing up to her waist. She pulled the lids off the carved pumpkins, grabbing at every one she could. But she found each one empty except for the candle set inside.

  Even within the walls of the stained glass coffin, she’d been able to keep away the truth of why her mother did what she did. Even when she remembered the small space inside the pumpkin, or the wide, rough river, she kept these things as far as her hands could push them.

  But now, surrounded by all this water and all these pumpkins, her memories shook off the film and haze of so many years.

  Her mother had put her inside a deep gold pumpkin, the biggest she could find, to try to make her good.

  Miel’s roses were proof of what her mother already knew. Miel’s brother, Leandro, had made her mother beautiful and happy. But Miel had made her mother ugly. Her mother had been beautiful since she was a girl, looked at by men years before she was old enough to marry. And Miel had not turned out the same. Miel had left her mother’s body misshapen from giving birth, her face tired and worn, and Miel had not stolen that beauty for herself.

  And her mother had forgiven her for that, for stealing her beauty and not even taking it for herself.

  But then the roses had come. They had declared that Miel was not a daughter but a possessed creature. And all those voices, the priests and the señoras and the gossips, had told her mother what heartbreak those roses, and any child who grew them, would bring her.

  Her father’s yelling, the only memory she had of him raising his voice, spread out through the dark. She caught just enough of his words, the sound like clouds tumbling over, to understand.

  You don’t know what she’ll do to you when she gets older.

  I’m
doing this for you, don’t you understand?

  She’ll turn on you.

  The words came with a pain in Miel’s wrist, small but deep. It felt like the point of a hot knife, held against her skin.

  Miel’s father and mother had argued, about her roses.

  He had left, because of her roses. He was gone, because of her roses. The things that grew from her body had scared him off, driven him away.

  Now there was nothing left of Miel but her roses.

  Miel threw the lids off more of the pumpkins, freeing their light to spill into the air. She had to be in one of these. There had to be somewhere she could find the body that had been hers. The more she heard her mother’s wailing, the faster she worked.

  Miel had not only cost her mother her beauty, and her husband. She had cost her Leandro. Her mother had lost her son all because he’d tried to save Miel.

  This was the brittle core of how her mother had died. She was looking for her son, always looking for her son, and when she knew she’d lost both Leandro and Miel, she must have stopped fighting. She must have given up, stopped kicking and grabbing at the current, and let it have her.

  Miel only registered the flash of Aracely’s hair before Aracely grabbed her arm.

  “You’re fine,” Aracely whispered. “You’re fine.”

  But Aracely shouldn’t have touched her. Anyone who touched her, she would take down with her. If Aracely held on to her, if she tried to save Miel, she would die like Leandro. The river may have saved Miel but it did not save Leandro. She could still hear her brother yelling, looking for her.

  Miel elbowed Aracely in the ribs, and broke away from her.

  Sam caught her upper arms.

  “Hey,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  Miel stilled, his touch bringing her back to the first day she met him. The feeling that she was small made him seem the age he’d been when they met.

  That day, Miel had come back to life. Her eyes felt new and raw. They stung with all the minerals in the water, dimming everything she saw so that everyone watching her looked like a nightmare creature.

  Sam’s voice had been so gentle, his hair black and his skin dark enough that she mistook the blur of him for her brother. But the moment her vision cleared, letting her see his unfamiliar face, she heard the echo of her brother’s voice in the water, and knew he was gone.

  This was the worst thing, the thing she could never tell Sam, that this was how Miel thought of him, always. Even before she thought of him as Sam, or Samir, or Moon. The first one willing to touch her, and the one who had slit her open with the truth that he was not her brother. The first one who did not recoil, thinking she was the cursed child of a river spirit or the omen of a coming drought, and the one who made her realize how much she had lost.

  A hundred eyes shone in the dark. The air vibrated with whispers. Miel felt them wondering, out loud but in hushed voices, if she was the witch who had turned those pumpkins on the Bonners’ farm to glass. They had already ruled out the Bonner girls, who exonerated themselves by being afraid to touch those glass pumpkins.

  But Miel and Aracely wore the name bruja on their skin.

  Now everyone watching wanted to know if the girl with the roses had turned those pumpkins hard and translucent, if she had left some curse that would spread across the fields, chilling the flesh of every vine and its fruit.

  Next those eyes would sweep over to Aracely, blaming the woman who pulled lovesickness from weary hearts. Aracely would have to hide in the violet house, fearing who might be waiting in the side yard or at the edge of the road, and Miel would carry with her the truth that she ruined everyone she loved.

  Miel looked from Sam to Aracely.

  In Aracely’s face, she found the things that had been missing from Sam’s, the absences that had told her Sam was not Leandro. Aracely’s arched eyebrows. The smooth, unbowed line of her lips. The hair that was straighter than anyone’s in their family; Miel saw it now, even though it was gold instead of dark.

  Aracely half-parted her lips. She looked caught between speaking and deciding not to.

  Miel fell back toward every moment she’d thought Aracely might ask her where she had come from, or why she feared pumpkins as though they had teeth. Every time, Aracely had opened her mouth with a kind of hesitation that made Miel wince, and then had shut it.

  Aracely had never been trying to ask Miel anything.

  She’d been trying to tell her.

  But she hadn’t told her. All those times, and she hadn’t told her.

  Miel had never been able to figure out why this woman had loved her when she was a strange girl made feral by water.

  But Aracely cared because she knew the dark places Miel had been.

  She remembered them better than Miel did.

  Miel looked back at Sam. In his face was sadness. Not confusion or shock.

  What she’d just realized, he already knew. The regret on his face was so settled.

  He’d known all this for so much longer than she had.

  The boy she loved and the woman who looked after her had told her so many lies.

  Miel looked at Aracely, her face stricken, eyes frozen wide.

  “You are my blood,” Miel said. She turned to Sam. “And you…”

  His eyes fell shut. He was surrendering to what she knew, not defending himself.

  She wrenched her arms out of Sam’s hold, and ran.

  “Miel,” Aracely called.

  They tried to go after her, but she lost them. She slipped away from the river and into the trees, cutting through farms and skimming dirt paths.

  Her wrist stung and throbbed. Her body took in all this brokenness, all the lies, and through her roses released it, so the weight of it wouldn’t break every one of her ribs.

  sea that has become known

  He painted mare frigoris, the sea of cold, and then lacus somniorium, the lake of dreams, sure he felt Miel across the open land, sure he could find the perfume of her roses. Just a thread of it, carried by the wind. It made him brave and reckless. It drove him to cover every brush he had in color, flicking them over metal and glass. He wanted to send out into the night his apology, made of paper and paint and light.

  An old tarp and newspapers covered his bedroom floor, brushes and paints scattered over the canvas. He wanted to hang a dozen moons, each painted dark, nothing but a slash of light at the edge. One covered in deep violet, edged with a rose crescent. Another hunter green, with the grass-colored thumbnail of a corn moon. Some smaller than young Lumina pumpkins, and some big enough that Miel couldn’t pretend she didn’t see them.

  This was the one thing he was good at. Painting moons, leaving them in trees where they shone gold or silver, the night sky claiming them like stars. This was the only way he knew to tell her that without her, he wasn’t Moon. Without her, the girl they called Honey, the girl who licked her own name off knives when Aracely wasn’t looking and off spoons when she was, he was as diminished as an almost-new moon.

  He was nothing but a young moon, the thin thread of light that clawed its way along the edge of a dark new moon.

  The moons had always told her what he did not know how to say. When he was too much of a coward to tell her he loved her, the blush of a rose moon, or the washed-out red of a strawberry moon, or a pinkish purple of a flower moon, spoke for him. And now these dark moons, edged in light, were his weak try at an apology.

  But there was no true apology in telling her that even though he was sorry, that he wouldn’t have done anything differently. He knew that.

  If all this had been his, if it had belonged to him, he would have told her. He’d given her his hands, his real name, every story his mother ever told him about Kashmir and Peshawar and even Campania, even the clan of fishermen who’d made the father he did not know. He’d given Miel his family’s fairy tales about banded peacock butterflies, and he’d given her a body he wasn’t even sure of possessing.

  He gave her all of it. If i
t belonged to him, it was hers.

  But this hadn’t been his secret to tell. Even if Aracely and Miel belonged to each other, even if they were sisters in a way Miel did not yet understand, he could not have made this his choice. It had never been about him. It had been about so many secrets Aracely kept unspoken that Sam wondered if she would burst into a hundred thousand butterflies.

  If he didn’t want everyone in this town knowing that his mother had given him the name Samira and that underneath his clothes he had a body that matched it, he couldn’t tell anyone, not even Miel, that the woman named Aracely had once been called Leandro.

  But Miel was hurting too much to see that. She hated him. She hated Aracely.

  Now he’d worn himself out painting, sitting on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands, fingers combed into his hair. Every free paper and glass globe he had, he’d covered in color. Paint smudged his forearms. He’d brushed his hair out of his face, and left an arc of dark blue on his forehead.

  Her words still spun through him. And you …

  Even when he shut his eyes he saw her glaring at him.

  His fingers left streaks of paint in his hair, but he didn’t move them. Painting another moon, and another, hadn’t made him forget. Ink blue and pale gold only reminded him of the nights he’d snuck outside with her.

  The smell of turpentine made him remember being in bed with her, the self-consciousness of wondering if his skin and his sheets smelled like it, that bitter smell like new leather.

  A soft but sure knock clicked against the door.

  He got up and pretended to blend a dot of umber into yellow. “Come in.”

  His mother had barely stepped into the room when she had the heels of her hands against the window, easing it up. “This paint. You’re going to give yourself a headache.”

  The wind rustled the edge of the newspapers.

  She clicked on a lamp. “And you’re going to make yourself blind.”

  Sam squinted against the light. He painted with as little electric light as possible, seeing by candles in tin holders, or the moon itself when enough of it flooded through the window.