The way Jas’s Ma told it, and her Ma before her, and her Grandma before even her, the Moon would never fall into the Earth.
The Moon was falling toward Earth, and Jas was watching it from her cabin window, holding a white rabbit with grey ears to her chest and its heart beating against her loose fingers. Mathilde didn’t particularly care for being held, but she let Jas pick her up sometimes, and Jas needed to hold something just then. The Moon was falling to Earth, but it’d never reach it—only in the conspiracy theories of the old barge teacher Thelma did it ever fully fall into Earth and cause some extinction or destruction like that of the legendary dinosaurs. Jas’s Ma used to say that she wouldn’t trust Thelma to pour water out of a boot even if the directions were written on the heel. Ma used to say that if the Moon were to get that close to their planet, everyone would die first by the volcanic eruptions and fire that would be caused by it pulling at magma the same way it pulls at water. Their barges weren’t built to withstand magma tides, only the high highs and low lows of the ocean, anchored somewhere over what used to be a place called California. The way Jas’s Ma told it, and her Ma before her, and her Grandma before even her, the Moon would never fall into the Earth.
Instead, it would be torn apart.
Jas hugged Mathilde the rabbit to her chest because there was a full moon—the craterous and pale face staring at her and taking up half the sky and blinding away any stars that may or may not have been lurking behind it (Jas had never really seen stars, thought they were a myth)—and she couldn’t sleep. On the one occasion she did sleep, just for one deep hour, she’d had a dream in which all her hair had fallen out. She didn’t remember anything else, only the feel of its silken weight in her hands, like a length of rope with the vague impression she could hang something with it. When she’d woken, the first thing she’d done was run her fingers through her hair, nails down her scalp. Then, she’d showered. She’d watched the draining water to see if any locks slipped free like slugs sliding down her drain. They hadn’t, and she’d only lost the normal amount of hair she always shed when she washed and brushed her hair. She’d braided the rest of it back into a real rope, hoping it would keep everything together just in case her hair did decide to fall out. Jas scratched at Mathilde’s rump with the hand supporting her bottom to take her mind off of it. The dream was a dream, but the Moon was really falling.
It’d been falling all of Jas’s life, and most days she doubted whether it would ever get torn apart. Maybe it would just hang there, staring through her cabin window like some fleshless Earth thing—gazing bone, the skull of an undead being—like the chicken skulls Jas sometimes saw back when Ma used to keep hens for their eggs. She tucked her face into Mathilde’s soft fur, and the rabbit nibbled at her shirt sleeve. Full moon nights were never really nights anyway.
“Jasmine!” a sharp voice said. Jas’s sister strode forward and pulled her away from the window, whisking the curtain closed in front of it. She whirled on her, clothes rumpled and hair unkempt. Fiona, it seemed, had at least been able to sleep. “Jas, what are you doing? If any of the neighbors saw—”
“I’d pretend that Mathilde is my stuffed animal, a doll I carry around at night because I can’t sleep,” Jas recited.
Fiona clenched and unclenched her jaw, and let out a long breath. She asked, “Did Ma tell you to say that? If anyone ever saw you with Mathilde?”
Jas nodded. She didn’t like lying, especially to Fiona—even though Fiona shouldn’t be worried about anything. Jas and Ma shared the top cabin of their tower unit; there weren’t any neighbors at that height close enough to peer into their window and see her holding Mathilde. That’s how the housing was built on the barges: cube-like spaces with circular windows stacked on top of one another, up and up, where the number of rooms depended on the number of people living there. The cabins were furnished almost entirely by things of recycled plastic that’d been fished out of the ocean when the tides rose, the weather became unpredictable, and humanity’s place on land became a permanent residence at sea. The rest of their furniture was made out of soft things, things you could only grow or get from animals—like cotton and wool, to make pillows and blankets and clothes. That stuff. Teacher Thelma talked a lot about that stuff. She was supposed to talk about it, and Jas was supposed to take tests on it. No animal was allowed on the barges unless it had a useful byproduct, like chickens or sheep. Mathilde didn’t produce anything useful, but Jas thought Fiona was exaggerating the dangers of “illicit bunny keeping.” Ma had come home with Mathilde two years ago, when Jas was seven. They’d kept her a secret the whole time, until Fiona came back home.
“No one ever saw anything,” Jas said, scratching softly at Mathilde’s rump again just to feel her fur. Mathilde didn’t seem to mind. She nibbled some more at her shirt. “She’s a good rabbit. I promise.”
“I know she is,” Fiona said, and sagged against herself. She reached out and drew Jas towards her chest, Mathilde squeezed between them. She wiggled and kicked in Jas’s hands, and she had to push against her sister to give Mathilde room. Fiona was over twice Jas’s age, but for an adult she didn’t know anything about rabbits.
“She doesn’t like to be squished,” Jas said, annoyed as she tried to keep her grip on Mathilde. “Now I have to put her back in her cage. So she doesn’t run off.”
Jas went to the little spot in the corner of the main living area beside her own bedspace. She’d moved Mathilde’s cage to be closer to her when Ma went away and Fiona came to stay. Fiona had been mad that Jas’s bedspace was in the corner: a mattress with a blanket and a pillow and a sheet hung up so she could sleep in private. The first thing she’d said when she entered Jas and Ma’s cabin was: “What, she doesn’t even give you a damn bedroom anymore? Don’t you have a bedroom?”
Jas had shaken her head. “Ma needs the other room for her work.”
“What work, Jas? Ma’s job is in textiles. She doesn’t bring work home.”
She’d shrugged, and led Fiona to the room that used to be Jas’s bedroom, at least until a little while after Ma had come home with Mathilde. The rabbit’s cage had still been in the room—Jas hadn’t moved it just yet, because Ma told her never to move it, and she hadn’t known then that Ma wouldn’t be coming home. Most of the room was overtaken by a bulky metal mass, half-covered in a tattered, mis-sewn blanket—a reject from textiles that Ma got to keep. Fiona’s mouth had dropped, even as Jas went to pick Mathilde up from her cage.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” she’d said, shaking her head.
“Look, Fi! A rabbit! Bet you never seen a rabbit before.”
Fiona had not seen a rabbit before, and Jas had finally gotten to tell someone all about her—everything she’d learned about Mathilde, since Ma had put her in charge of taking care of her. Ma had sworn Jas to silence, so Jas couldn’t ask Teacher Thelma too many questions about rabbits, but now Ma was gone and Fiona was her sister and not Teacher Thelma. Jas didn’t hold back any detail.
Jas told Fiona all about the night Ma had come home late, way after Jas had already gone to sleep. She’d come knocking at Jas’s bedroom door when she still slept there, and slunk through it with a bulky, rectangular shape covered in a towel underneath her arm.
“Jasmine,” Ma had said—had whisper-shouted, really. “Jasmine, dim the lights.”
Jas had sat up and closed the curtains to her round window. It was a new moon night, and Jas always slept with her window un-curtained on new moon nights. She was so accustomed to the Moon’s brightness on all the other nights, she couldn’t sleep in the dark; she needed some bit of light. But there weren’t any lights other than the opened window—no lights to dim, anyway. None of them were on, and the Moon wouldn’t get any dimmer, at least not until it was torn apart. Sometimes Ma just forgot, but Jas didn’t understand how Ma could forget something that had been the same for so long.
Jas climbed out of bed and met Ma on the floor beside the rectangular shape. Ma sank to sit on her shins, and set the thing down beside her, her fingers fisting in the towel placed over it. Jas didn’t hear any noise over her mother’s grinning face. She was almost giggling like the girls Jas sometimes shared Teacher Thelma’s lessons with. She never used to go to Teacher Thelma’s lessons; Ma had always taught her and read to her and had her write out numbers and letters by herself. But Ma had been sending her off to Teacher Thelma more and more. Ma said she was busy, that she needed Jas to start looking after herself a bit more—that Jas was grown up and could do things herself now, right? Jas had nodded along and agreed back then, so she had grinned along with Ma again now like they were sharing a grown-up secret.
“What is it, Ma?”
“I’ve just brought home something wonderful. Well,” she said, and let her fisted fingers pull the towel away, “someone wonderful, anyway. Isn’t she great?”
Underneath the towel was a plastic cage, and inside the cage was a creature Jas had only seen in the books Ma had taught her from. It was a rabbit, with a white body and long grey ears that stuck straight up and a nubby grey tail she’d backed into the corner, all her little feet tucked underneath her. She stared out with black eyes, alert and unblinking. The rabbit sat perfectly still except for the fast-paced heaving of her small sides. She was breathing so quickly, Jas thought maybe she was trying to take off to the air, just like how the spaceships did in all the stories. Or maybe she was trying to blow away the enormous peering faces of her and Ma like Jas sometimes would the fluffy dandelions that creeped into their garden. Jas didn’t think it worked like that. She knew it didn’t work like that.
“I’m gonna call her Mathilde,” Ma whisper-shouted again, sticking a finger through the mesh of the cage to pet the rabbit. Mathilde jumped instead, and hopped away from Ma’s reach. Ma left her fingers hooked through the cage. She was still sitting on her shins, doubled over in almost the same shape and size as the carrier. “She’ll be my little helper.”
Ma turned her face to Jas and smiled, and Jas smiled back. “I can be your helper, too.”
“You are, sweet girl,” Ma said. She brushed a palm over Jas’s head, smoothed her sleep-messed hair. She gripped Jas’s dangling ponytail and tugged. “And no one will know about Mathilde, right, sweet girl? You’re not gonna tell anyone.”
Jas nodded. Her scalp prickled where Ma was pulling, but she knew if Ma pulled harder it would burn instead. Jas nodded and said, “I’m good at secrets. Promise.”
“Good girl.”
She didn’t think Jasmine would throw herself to the waves and the mercy of the tides, but she didn’t think she knew Jasmine half as well as she thought she did anymore.
“Good girl,” Jas repeated quietly, putting Mathilde into her cage by her corner bedspace, Fiona still standing by the curtained window. She tucked Mathilde away and sunk onto her bed, rolling onto her stomach with her head pillowed on her hands so she could watch the rabbit munch the lettuce leftover from her and Fiona’s dinner. She didn’t think she’d get sleepy again with the Moon so full and falling, but the longer she watched Mathilde, the heavier her eyes got.
Jas felt Fiona sink into the bed beside her and rest one arm over her back, playing with her braid and saying something softly. Jas almost forgot about her dream, about all her hair falling out, soft as Mathilde’s fur and as heavy as Ma’s fisted fingers. She almost forgot about the Moon, too, but there wasn’t really any way she could forget something that’d been the same for so long. She’d have better luck wishing on dandelion fluff.
“Hey, Fi?” Jas said, turning her head slightly.
“Yeah?”
“Can we see Ma tomorrow?”
Fiona’s hand stilled in Jas’s hair. She paused. “We’ll have to radio the doctor and see if they’ll let us. Maybe in the evening. Go to sleep, sweet girl.”
“Don’t call me that,” Jas said, voice muffled against her hands.
“Okay. I won’t.”
Fiona waited until her sister fell asleep, then kissed the top of her still-wet head. She hadn’t heard Jas get up, hadn’t heard her shower, and she’d been sleeping on the sofa right beside her corner bedspace. The thought terrified her. Jas could have gotten up, walked out of the cabin, and thrown herself into the sea—and Fiona wouldn’t have known about any of it. She didn’t think Jasmine would throw herself to the waves and the mercy of the tides, but she didn’t think she knew Jasmine half as well as she thought she did anymore. Fiona had been living on a different barge for close to four years now. She still lived as part of the same fleet of barges as this one, but anchored over a place the old world called Oregon instead of over California. She hadn’t come back in all that time. Jas was taller now. And skinnier, somehow.
Their mother had been growing nothing but potatoes and barley in their garden, and Jas told her they didn’t eat any of it. Only Mathilde got to eat some of it—of the barley, of the parts left over. Their mother hadn’t baked a single loaf of bread in ages—probably since Fiona had moved out. She’d been stockpiling the yeast rations instead, maybe bartering with the neighbors for their yeast rations. Fiona didn’t want to think Ma would resort to stealing rations. Fiona didn’t want to think Ma could orchestrate something like this on her own, either. She didn’t want to think their Ma was so deep into the barge’s black market on her own.
Ma had to have a partner—someone to get her the rabbit and someone to get her the stills overpowering what used to be Jas’s bedroom. The stills were metal. Metal was precious. Any and all of it went to repairing the barges structure from any damages that sometimes got sustained at low tide. Maybe her partner was a metalworker, someone crooked and criminal, someone who didn’t care if their whole barge community sank as long as they got their product to turn a profit later. Maybe Ma was in debt, or in trouble. Maybe she turned crooked instead of throwing herself into the sea.
“I had an aunt that threw herself in the sea once,” Fiona’s partner, Casey, had told her just before she’d left the Oregon barge. Fiona had met Casey her first week there. They’d both been living in the public cabin, temporary housing while they waited for the transfer files to go through so they could each get their own private cabin. They lived in the public cabin for a week, then moved into a space together. Casey used to live in a different fleet, one over old Canada. Casey was a librarian, someone who looked after whatever books and art hadn’t been drowned with the old world when the Moon started falling. “She was depressed, or something like that. Or maybe pregnant. She already had two kids—couldn’t have another one. She didn’t have access to termination.”
“That’s an awful story.”
“So’s the one about your mother and sister.”
“Ma wouldn’t throw herself into the sea,” Fiona asserted.
“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a word for it, you know,” Casey had said. “Defenestration. Really it means to throw someone or something out of a window, but we don’t have windows like they used to—nothing you can throw anything out of dramatically enough times to warrant a word for it. I imagine if enough people throw themselves into the sea, we’ll have a more accurate word soon enough.”
“Ma wouldn’t defenestrate herself into the sea, Casey.”
Casey had shrugged, and gone back to making vegetarian chili with some of their bean rations and the mushrooms Fiona had grown in their garden; she’d used fertilizer from their pair of laying hens to cultivate the fungus. There was no meat on the barges, except for the occasional chicken that had stopped laying eggs, the old sheep, or fish pulled from the ocean. Fish chili wasn’t any good. Casey loved feeding people. Plural. It’s what Casey did, even if it was just Fiona to feed. Soon, Jas would be living with them, too. They’d get a bigger cabin. Casey could feed people, plural. Maybe Fiona would find her appetite again.
“Depends,” Casey had said. “Moonshine and non-sanitizing alcohol are about as illegal on the barges as third children are.”
About as illegal as contraband rabbits, Fiona thought, still stroking her sister’s braid, laying on her bedspread. Mathilde was a good rabbit, just like Jas had said. Maybe they could smuggle her off the California barge and into the Oregon barge without anyone knowing. How long did rabbits live anyway? Jas would be happier for longer if Mathilde could stay, if Mathilde died on her own rather than being put to death or defenestrated into the sea. She didn’t know what Jas’s limit was for awful things, and Mathilde’s death for being contraband would be an awful thing. Everything had its limits.
Ma was a criminal. Her body would find itself overboard eventually, one way or another—food for the tides. The barges spared no space for criminals.
The Moon had its limits. It was falling toward one—had been falling toward one for a long time now. Fiona knew the story. She’d heard all the stories about how generations ago, back when people lived on land and only went to sea when they felt like it, the Moon had been drifting away from Earth, a few centimeters every year. She’d heard how the Moon had suddenly reversed its course—had started falling backwards. There’d been some shift in the cosmos, some other planet or maybe the sun or maybe the Earth itself going off its regular course and into another, different course that was irregular enough for the Moon to think it should shift, too. Then, it’d started moving a few more centimeters every year, faster each moment, until it was moving kilometers closer, instead. There’d been nearly 385,000 kilometers between the Earth and the Moon, supposedly. Now there was less than 30,000 kilometers. Less than 20,000, maybe—Fiona didn’t know anymore.
The Moon had been falling all her life, though there’d been a time where she hadn’t thought so at all, back when her mother planted more than potatoes and barley—when she made bread and combed Fiona’s hair and fed Jas from her own breast. Fiona remembered Ma when she would pollinate her own garden—with a bit of her own hair cut off and fixed to a spare bit of plastic to look and work like a paint brush. She’d dip the brush from one squash flower to the next tomato flower, and then later they’d feast on the most glorious lasagna with homemade sauce and zucchini as a meat substitute.
Somewhere along the way, Ma had started gardening with metal stills shut away in Jas’s bedroom, instead, keeping the door closed and sealed and the window open to help manage the smell of enzyme reactions between the barley and the potato mash and the hoarded yeast distilling into liquor. When Fiona had shown up at their cabin door, Jas had still had dirt under her nails from pulling potatoes out of the garden. Mathilde had been chewing on barley leaves, destroying any evidence that wasn’t already put into the stills. And the Moon, always approaching its limit, always falling. The Roche Limit, it was called.
It was a limit around the Earth, really—the thing the Moon would fall into instead. The Earth’s Roche Limit was estimated at 18,470 kilometers away. When the Moon fell into it—when it crossed that line and drew too close—it would tear into moon dust and debris, the gravity holding it together finally weaker than the tidal forces trying to pull it apart. The Moon would be decimated and turn into a ring of rubble around the planet, not unlike that around Saturn. The Earth would tilt absurdly on its axis, unstable, and likely slip into an ice age they could not survive.
That was the science of how a planet could die.
How a moon could die, in any case—one of the ways, at least. The only relevant one. The Earth would live on without them, without people, for a good long while but in a different light. Fiona stopped stroking her sister’s hair, Jas fast asleep. She did not want to take her to see their mother. She’d rather their mother be sick and fading on her own, alone—unable to defenestrate even if she’d wanted to launch herself into the ocean. She wanted to take Jas away from here, to a place where she didn’t have to dig up potatoes so their mother could make moonshine with them, and then make herself ill off the methanol she did not distill or dispose of properly. She’d been drinking her own wares. She’d made them wrong.
“I wanted to taste it,” Ma had said, that very first day Fiona arrived on the California barge to look after Jas, to take her away. She’d visited Ma in the hospital only that once, after Ma had lost consciousness and Jas had panicked and radioed for help, screaming about how her mother was dead and her breath smelled and how she’d thrown up all over their cabin floor. After Fiona had been radioed in as emergency contact. “Needed to know if it was any good.”
“Sounds like you tasted it more than just the once,” Fiona had said.
“Of course. Every time.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“I already told you,” Ma had said, laying in her hospital bed and staring at the ceiling. She couldn’t see Fiona anyway. The methanol poisoning took her eyesight. She was staring without seeing, and the poison had set in too much and too long for the doctors to do anything about it. Not that they would anyway. Ma was a criminal. Her body would find itself overboard eventually, one way or another—food for the tides. The barges spared no space for criminals. Just like third children and rabbits and moonshine, they didn’t think there was any useful byproduct. “To taste it,” Ma had repeated. “To see if it was any good.”
“I meant making it. Why do it in the first place? Why, Ma?”
Ma had sighed, long and slow. She’d waited so long, Fiona thought she wouldn’t answer. She’d almost wished she hadn’t.
“You’re a bastard girl, you know that?” Ma had said. “Jasmine, too. I had one night with each of your fathers, and that was it. Two kids, a decade apart. I thought to myself, ‘I won’t terminate.’ I thought, ‘I don’t want to live alone.’ Well, I’m alone now, aren’t I? Alone at the end of it all. I bet that’s what those people thought way back when. When the Moon moved. When the tides changed. When they couldn’t predict the weather any more than they could predict—”
“That you’d start making moonshine in your daughter’s bedroom? That you’d go out to the black market and get a—” Fiona had stopped. No one knew about Mathilde. No one was going to, except maybe Casey. She’d breathed deeply and stared into her mother’s dying face, whether she could see her staring or not. “That’s not an answer, Ma.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
Fiona hadn’t known—didn’t know.
Jas shifted beside Fiona, and made an annoyed groan against her pillowed hands, said something like “ge-er off me.”
Jas wiggled away from her sister, half-sleepy and half-not. She wiped a bit of drool off her hand and onto her blanket, then went to the window. She’d fallen asleep again—maybe dreamed again—but it was too dark for her to stay that way, sleeping and maybe-dreaming. She opened the curtain, and looked out at the Moon: consuming half the sky and looming over the watery horizon. It was still there—always there, staring like some craterous monster. Jas tugged at her braid, hair still there, too. She tugged at her braid and stared back at the Moon. Cracks profaned its face, and the moon dust and moon debris were already starting to trail around it as the flayed planet, bare as a chicken skull, was torn apart. She watched it falling, and saw across its surface the beginnings of a fracture, the end of the moon, as free floating as dandelion fluff.
Jennifer R. Thornton is a fiction writer from the small Central Valley town of Escalon, California, where she grew up with books, music, and dust. As a 2022 graduate from the UC Davis Creative Writing MFA program, Jennifer currently resides in Sacramento with a mischievous orange cat. “Moonshine, Moonfall” is her first published story, but you can follow along at linktr.ee/_jrthornton.
Header image by Bianca Van Dijk, courtesy Pixabay.
