“When I am dead,” he said, “you will stand here with your own children, on this crumbled cliff edge. As the ocean whispers in your ear, you will point to Orion’s Belt and the Plough, and look at the lights of these same smattered towns under the same moon and stars.”

I wanted to tell him about erosion and the speed of dying light, as I stood at one end of the moon’s white pathway, laid out across the oil-dark sea. The road, pale and cold, thinned to a point on the horizon.

“Where are your children?” he asks, as I flee to the other hemisphere in muted defiance. Where an upside-down moon, a blush and juicy nectarine, hangs in the sky, and through the prism of midnight clouds her beams are no more than puddles of golden smudges, that ripple in the dark.

Published by Moonchild Magazine, November 2018