I Am the Moon
by Jules
I am the Moon. I shine like an eye in the perpetual twilight over the island town of Replenine. I make this harder than it needs to be for the Lighthouse that stands near the coast where black cliffs shred white waves.
The Lighthouse stands uncompromising, striped red and white around its length. There is no keeper. There is only the Lighthouse, only me. By this time, the residents of Replenine don’t know why the Lighthouse shines or how it does. They only know it keeps them safe.
My light shatters on purple ocean water. It falls on the massive backs of nameless creatures breaching in the sea. It reflects in their eyes blinking suddenly in open air. They stay far away from the Lighthouse’s searching beam. My light falls behind breakers and lights them from within.
My lidless eye sees the beach where stones, licked by the waves, look precious. They are precious in my light. They are translucent, gleaming, before the sweeping beam of the Lighthouse shows them as ordinary pebbles.
When the Lighthouse’s beam swings toward the beach, I see what the residents of Replenine see: a grid of streets with ranch-style homes. They have nautical ropes rather than fences. Life preservers hang on the sides of their houses. To the north, past the Lighthouse, they see a mainland lit up with yellow windows trailing toward the sky in the twilight, so tall that the buildings seem to curve over with the bend of the horizon.
The residents do not look out at the real mainland, to the south of them, where the Lighthouse’s beam does not reach and my light shines unheeded. I see the nautilus spires. I see the crystal bridges. They’re too far away to be killed by the Lighthouse’s beam.
From high overhead, my single eye shines through the windows of Replenine. The Lighthouse shows the residents’ faces in the grain of the wood paneling on the walls. My light shines on a young woman, Karin, who sees the woodgrain figures: the long-necked man and the laughing witch and the figure with the sagging mouth. These faces have been called out by her and others like her, countless others who have stretched out to sleep in this room.
They have always done this, children and adults alike. Everyone in Replenine calls out faces in clouds, trees, postboxes where no mail ever comes. Nothing is too inhuman for them to find the human in it.
The people of Replenine believe they are a bastion of sanity in a fallen world. Children play in grassy yards. Women play at keeping house. They bustle in sensible heels. Men play at going to jobs. I watch the adults stand and stare at the Lighthouse, holding briefcases in loosely curled hands. They see offices and three-martini lunches. Staring into that light makes them tipsy.
When the Lighthouse’s beam sweeps away from them, the townsfolk of Replenine close their eyes. Their lives are divided by long moments of blinking. They do this without thinking. They have been trained to do this from babyhood, the way they are trained not to touch a hot stove and to stay away from the bridge off the island. If they did not close their eyes, they might see the true faces of those around them.
I see Karin, who is so sick of the faces in the ceiling, so sick of playing house, that she keeps her eyes open. She is restless, reckless. She sees what I can show her. She sees rugged slopes where the orderly streets are not. The houses are gone. In their place, she sees strange, semitransparent shapes. There are domes and stacked globes like bubbles. There are structures like huge, radiating crystals wrought into interlocking puzzles. She knows they have always been there, at her peripheral vision. She hasn’t acknowledged them until now.
As she looks at them squarely for the first time, I see something inside her unwind like muscles easing from contortion. Karin has been trying to un-see these her entire life. These nonlinear architectures do not fit with the rows of orderly houses around them.
She leaves her watering can in the tall grass and makes her way to the nearest milky, bath-bubble structure. It winks in and out of existence as the Lighthouse’s beam sweeps past.
Karin runs her fingers along the surface, feeling it more consistently than she sees it, for the Lighthouse turns its surface into vinyl siding. Karin taps the structure with outstretched fingers to hear the sounds. Glassy ringing makes her heart ache. What right do they have to be so strange and beautiful?
“These are only the dead ones,” I want to tell her. “They don’t grow anymore. They were killed by the Lighthouse.”
“Houses sigh when settling, even when they’re no longer there,” Karin says aloud. Then she turns south to look across the channel to the true mainland. Huge seashell structures are growing, inhabited, alive. They throw off thriving, writhing purple glow. Crystal columns twist toward the sky. My light casts living shadows that dance among them. Messengers made of lightning arc from column to column.
Karin stands with her jaw dropped.
I know it is difficult for her to decide what to do now. Will she stay and be lulled by the familiar Lighthouse beam cast back over an imagined past? Will she get away to the mainland? What kind of person will she be if she goes? Will she be human at all?
The Lighthouse sweeps away again. Karin sees her face reflected in my light cast on the cluster of bubbles in front of her. Her face is long and narrow. Her eyes are upturned at the corners, white with wavering violet pupils that shine in the twilight. Hair like foamy seawater floats around her head. Her tongue uncoils from behind her big, pointed teeth like a tentacle. Darkness runs down from her eyes.
I show her that her true face is beautiful. She is enchanted. She loves her own strangeness. She is not afraid of herself, but she dreads being the only one who sees. Even now, she knows her father is staring up at the Lighthouse with his briefcase in hand. How will they speak when she visits home for Sunday dinner? What will she tell her family, over the roast?
Karin tilts her head back and howls up at me. She howls with a new voice she did not know she had. She would howl even if I were the only one who heard her, but this is not the case. There are others like her. She hears a faint chorus of ecstatic shrieks rise from the mainland. Their harmony draws her to them as surely as fishhooks in her ribs. She cannot deny them any more than she can deny herself or deny me.
Karin walks across a narrow crystal bridge that the Lighthouse would have everyone believe is not there. The nearest part of the bridge to Replenine is the hardest to cross, for it is invisible when the Lighthouse shines on it. Even my light shows it is dead and crumbling, killed by the Lighthouse’s beam. Closer to the mainland the bridge is alive. It is so pearly it looks pink, with arches twirled like a seashells.
When Karin reaches the mainland side of the bridge, she stares up at nonlinear structures filled with iridescent light and color. A crowd has heard her howling and has come to welcome her with open, many-jointed limbs and white, brilliant eyes welling over with darkness. They move as if they are dancing.
Karin tilts her head up again to meet my eye. This is the way things really are.
Copyright © 2026 by Jules
