Total Penumbral Lunar Eclipse, January 31, 1999

We stumbled out of warm cocoons at the urging of Daddy’s voice, fingers fumbling with shoelaces, half excited, half asleep. “They call it a blood moon,” said Mom from the front seat, where she balanced thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate. “Ew,” said the middle one of us.

From the bluff above the river we shivered and watched, the moon a bloodshot eye. The youngest was afraid of the pines behind us, as if he saw his future in their straight and rigid bars. The oldest thought he tasted the copper of the moon in his mouth, and the sky became ink, oceans of ink, to that distant rocky shore where the atmosphere is death to foreigners. The middle one sat on the blanket, snuggled in her coat, and leaned against Daddy. She collected the thermoses and Styrofoam cups when we left.

“Blood moon,” wrote the middle one in her paragraph response the next morning, “I guess because it’s red.” “It was very dark,” wrote the youngest. And the oldest wrote, “I wish there were people on the moon so that I could go there and be a travel writer. I would write about the moon-food and the moon-drinks and all the little moon-caves and the moon-king, and whether or not he was good.” And the oldest forgot about the strange taste of copper in his mouth.

First Published April 12, 2015 in the Journal of Microliterature.