blood moon

by Ioana Barbulescu

I’ve been unwell for days. It’s the blood moon, my husband jokes, and I wonder if chewing on his liver would quench my anemic thirst. Unread emails from my editor keep piling up in my inbox. I wake up every morning half-expecting to hear of some mountain vomit up rock in cyan, magenta and yellow, sick with the mega servers hosting my emails and footage of genocide. By the time I’d make it on site to cover the story, the mountain will have flattened, bed-ridden with progress. Free Palestine etched on its tomb by pocket knife.

Tomato soup? my husband asks, and I sniff affirmatively. Lately I’ve been obsessed with the dirt under my fingernails, how I can never fully scrub it off. It seemed like a good idea, growing our own tomatoes, but as I lie back at night under his heavy panting, staring at my own hands limply hung over his shoulders, I can’t remember why.

There were times I didn’t know if I could do it, playing house in the village I grew up in, minutes away from my mother and her chickens and his mother and her chickens, bottling enough tomato juice to last us all through the rapture. A bunch of times I almost left, had it not been for the kids, or the thought of sleeping on someone else’s futon in the city.

So I stayed and got fixated on how the internet’s materiality silently poisons our environment instead. Marginally more marketable when written by someone like you, I guess, my editor commented on our first meeting. She got on board since, mostly thanks to a quote we got from a news agency on my latest lead.

@cloudless49, whom I met on r/SnowdenTheAlps, claimed they could personally drive me to the forest-hidden entrance of a secret data center near Gstaad, where our collective digital sins are allegedly kept under military surveillance. Whose military? I asked, and @cloudless49 answered If you must ask…, which made me dread the ride over.

But I had promised a cover story. The mouth of the data center unnaturally coming up for air from deep within snow-covered mountain rock, guards absently pacing before it against the backdrop of what I hoped would be Christmas trees. The whole scene lit up by a sky-swallowing blood moon I had carefully planned for.

A bit on the nose, don’t you think? my husband asked when I laid out my plan to him. This made me even sicker.

@headintheclouds: sorry, need to cancel trip. bad flu.

@cloudless49: stupid bitch

@headintheclouds: okay then!

Do you want us to stay? We had planned for my husband to take the boys to a friend’s cabin while I was away.

I’ll be fine, go, go!

Having the blood moon to myself gives me new breath. I nap without dreams of the tech-hole in Gstaad. Instead, I submerge to the memory of my first colored moon, a flustered pink that made the playground taste like cotton candy for the afternoon. My sisters and I were playing magic hopscotch, the kind where you leap and it means something that means something else, like an exquisite corpse fairytale. We continued believing one of our spells had touched the moon even after being explained lunar eclipses. I repeatedly failed to impart this magic onto my sons. Maybe the blood moon is just for the girls, my husband kept suggesting in the kind of tone that breaks a spell.

I wake up late to the house bathing in crescent moonlight, crimson defiantly splattered against the walls. I lift a hand in front of my eyes to see that I am alive. My blood seems to be reaching toward the light outside my contours, then falls back through my veins just to attempt again.

I feel an urge to be by water, to witness the moon weave the fabric of a wave.

There’s no way I can reach the sea in time, but I can hike about an hour to the closest lake, a glacial formation stuck in the valley between two mountain peaks. There are no waves on a lake, my husband’s voice scratches the inside of my skull, though what does he know of moon water?

I down a heavy dose of cough syrup, layer his thermal underwear over my own, and leave with nothing on me, as if for a summer stroll. It’s a terrible idea, and there is no one to discourage me from pursuing it. I relish this freedom for the first half of my journey.

Then, as an avalanche, it catches up with me. I’m alone in the woods at nightfall. The emptiness floods my ears, makes every sound feel muffled, underwater, gives it a depth it didn’t possess before. Trees creak in the wind like recalcitrant doors not meant to be opened. My steps echo as if walked by many others, invisible to my eyes. I can hear the moon being lifted by massive cranes, or pushing against the crumpled paper of the sky, still out of sight. I stop myself from pondering the imminence of an earthquake.

I’m afraid and overheating. I find it harder to breathe with every passing step, though my feet keep moving. My skin crawls with cold and hot sweats. Water starts to drip from secret springs under my breasts. It lands on my lower belly, then lazily rolls down my thighs in uneven streams. The wetness overwhelms me. I do the only thing I can think of. I strip naked.

Where I should be close to my own end, I feel unchained. Clothes abandoned in the middle of the path, I walk forward, now certain I shouldn’t, but unwilling to stop. The light sinks lower and lower, and soon I must squint to make out the way in front of me. Occasionally, the skin on my shoulder splits ever so slightly as it brushes against pine needles, and the stinging reassures me I’m not dead.

As soon as I step into the clearing, I see her. She’s more blood than moon, the shade of a glassy cherry lollipop. She’s the size of the lake she emerged from. At first, I think the hypothermia might make me hallucinate, as she’s coming in and out of focus, with a subtle pendulum swing. I close my eyes to settle my senses. Before I even open them back up, I can hear it. A heartbeat.

I eventually come to see it clearly, the back and forth of flesh holding hot life. She’s calling to me, my own skin fed through her pumping.

As I advance through the clearing, gaze fixed upon her, I make out other silhouettes from the sides of my eyes. There must be a hundred or so of us, only on this end of the lake, and there’s no reason to imagine we stop at the periphery of my sight. Hundreds of us making our way on frozen levelled grass from hundreds of paths like the ones I just walked on, going down hundreds of forests on hundreds of mountain spines, leading to hundreds of homes like the one I just left.

We’re all naked, moving at the same pace, to the beat of the moon’s blood rush. The more I approach the others, the more familiar they seem.

There she is with the soft eyes, the one who’s scared, terrified like she was under a blood moon night she spent alone, praying she would start bleeding, praying she didn’t fuck everything up on that one night back home, when she needed things to feel easy again, when she found comfort in past arms as the future seemed so scary, until it occurred to her this may cost her living next to her mom and his mom and their chickens, possibly forever. She prayed so hard, the moon made her bleed violently that month. It’s when she started taking iron tablets.

Then the one who’s infinite, cheeky with promise. A different mood on a different night, beer bottles clinging, chips being crunched on, tanned bodies simmering in summer light. You know I want to get out of here, I just need a little more time. Figure some stuff out, like where to live. Arrested looks, an arm grazing another, a long sip of the bottle. A woman’s voice, you’re welcome to sleep on my futon until we figure something out.

Furthest away from me, the one feral with grief. The woman she loved had finally had enough, was done waiting, and though she’d promised to leave in the morning, before dawn broke, she had a feeling, and in her panic, she checked, and when she checked she knew there would be no leaving, not for her, not for a long time. She spent the next day ravenously chasing conspiracy spirals that could keep her from her own mind, from thinking of this other woman waiting for her at the train station, from dreading the moment she’d understand. She was deep into ancient tunnels used by alien giants to travel through mountains when this reminded her of something real she heard once about ‘the cloud’ being figurative speech for something that in reality was stored somewhere and that somewhere must have been somewhere and why not all the way up in the Alps. She decided she would not think about anything else until she figured this out.

We stop in unison as our feet hit water. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. I look over to the others, but they seem to be waiting for me to make a move. I look up at the moon, I steady my breath to her heartbeat. I wonder how the blood doesn’t burst out of her flesh, so red I can almost taste it raw on my tongue.

I’m ready. I take a step forward and watch the others do the same. We keep walking until the lake runs deep enough, then dive in. As the blood moon watches over us, we swim towards the bottom, and disappear into the abyss.

Small tides ripple at the edge of the lake. They feel like waves to me.

Photo of Ioana Barbulescu

BIO: Ioana is a lesbian Eastern European writer, wrapping up her MFA in fiction at Columbia University. An alumna of two summer sessions at Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Dykes of the Roundtable workshop, she writes for personal and collective liberation. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in tongue.etc and The Gotham Guillotine.