The Legacy of Moon-Watching

Flash fiction: "They came to your town every new moon..."

St Mary's Church in Krakow Wawrzeniecki, Marian (1863 1943)

They came into your town every new moon. Their shadows preceded them, spilling like ink from the woods, swallowing fields and fences, devouring rooftops. A watchman scrambled up the church tower to heave the warning bells, which echoed through the hills.

You knew it would start when the last bell stilled. Your father closed the curtains and pinched the candles, hushing your sister in his arms, hand pressed softly over her mouth. The whole town swallowed its breath in the dark. All you could hear was the rush of wind through wheat fields.

Then came the footfall. Deep, echoing booms rattled dishes in their cupboards and sent dust trembling from the rafters.

Tall enough to blot out the stars, they strode slowly through your town. They were as old as the river, as old as God and larger still. Lanterns swinging, creaking like ships, they marched. Prowling. Searching.

The next morning, no one spoke of it. Doors unbolted, animals wandered back into the fields and one family wept. Nobody helped them scrub the blood from their doorstep.

You were a child. You copied those around you and didn’t ask questions. The day after every new moon, you unbolted your door and fed your chickens, head down. Perhaps your fence had been crushed underfoot, but you never complained. You fixed it. You cooked soup. You moved on.

For nineteen years, you lived to the percussion of sliding locks and swishing curtains, the wet scrape of rags on red doorsteps. Your heart tightened as the moon thinned, slice by slice, but you learned to live with it. You carried the dread easily. It sat inside you like a splinter and your body grew around it.

It was only when the letter came that anything changed. A tailor from the city needed an apprentice and he knew the farmer who sold eggs to your uncle. Coins changed hands.

You boarded the carriage at dawn. The town shrank behind you with every turn of the wheels and you couldn’t help but wonder if the shadows would follow, hungrier now for what was gone. Tall buildings sprouted from the black dirt ahead. The mud roads became cobbled, the cows became stray cats, and the warning bell never tolled. Not here. The city was far from the woods. Safe from the smell of turned earth and blood, you thought.

The tailor’s shop had big windows and the sun melted in like butter. The customers were equally warm, too well-looked-after to be cruel, and life in the city was comfortable. There were things to worry about – pickpockets, swindlers, drunks – but nothing that turned your stomach to stone.

A man came in one day for a lavender waistcoat. His muscles tensed when you stretched the tape across his shoulders and sweat gathered at his hairline. The scent of his lilac soap lingered in the shop long after he left. You prayed he found the note you slipped in his pocket.

At night, as you lay in your narrow bed above the tailor’s shop, your body buzzed with the phantom thud of footsteps that never came. You checked the moon, but in the city the sky was distant, blurred behind the glow of street lamps. Your hands trembled as though you’d forgotten some vital task.

The man returned the next day for a green waistcoat, freshly shaved. Sweet orange oil had joined his soap scent. It was the smell of a comfortable life, one you wanted, so you smiled enough for him to come back the next week, and the next, and the next.

His waistcoats became an excuse. He leaned over the counter as you unwrapped the soft paper of the gifts he brought you. First, it was shortbread in coloured tins. Then tulips. By the time the summer’s heat began to settle, he brought you a diamond ring.

You married him, of course. His family came, bright and laughing, clinking glasses in a candlelit hall. He bought you silk clothes, perfumed soaps and small pastries crowned with cherries. The days folded into each other like soft, velvet blankets. There were no fences to fix, no sisters to hide, no bells to brace for. You learned to paint and you never used red.

The memories gnawed at you sometimes, jagged as a branch snapped underfoot. They came strongest at night. As your husband’s breathing slowed, soft and regular, your eyes drifted to the window. You never learned how to sleep well.

Two sons came to you, summer after summer. You raised them in this steady world, cocooned in pastel shades. They never knew their grandparents or the rituals of your town. They fell into good jobs, a clerk and a banker. They married women who wore pearls and lived in homes with neat hedges, owned cats with little bells.

Only one thing perturbed your sons and puzzled their wives. You passed down a strange habit, harmless enough to sweep under the rug, a nightly ritual. Each brother would, without fail, pinch the candles and walk to their windows. They would stand in the dark, looking up, while their wives waited by the bed, arms folded.

Outside, the moon hung above them, a pale, lingering scar.

Note from Sitara: I dug this piece of flash out of my drafts for a collab with the Chill Subs team. The point was to polish an old story, send it off for submission and document my rejections and (let’s hope) eventual acceptance process.

I remember writing this with the goal of portraying intergenerational trauma. A struggle I had when writing it was that if I let the protagonist forget their past too much, I felt like the tension of the piece was lost. But it needed to happen to some extent in order to make my “point” (i.e. the sons carrying the moon-watching habit despite having good lives).

How would you have gone about it? Let me know your thoughts! Comments mean the world to me.