Moon Whisperers

Mother bellowed at a rat like son, tail tucked between his thighs, that he was a bad bad boy; one that did not deserve any supper. Her anger trundled down the heavens like a canister tripping down unending stairways, unto another stairway. On and on, the words burned bright, as many a defeated sun and moon feigned sleep or ran away or pulled alibi rabbits out of their fiery hats. They knew that they had to be ready when the Mother would confront them next, once she was done throwing the boy to sleep.

And on that day of many confused eclipses and quick mornings and quicker nights, that were too many in one place and too less in another, they had but been playing a stupid game of hide and seek. The whisperer’s boy had been their leader; he had whispered them out of their daily and nightly watches; lured them like a piper. And like plagued rats, they had danced and played, as he hid and sought and laughed and mocked. And the laughter riddled the heavens like a dark unseen epidemic, and at the end of the fit, one could not find the moon. The boy called out to her, in chuckles at first, telling her that the game was over and that they weren’t playing any more. But as silence rang like a clang in an empty room, they got more serious. The suns were whispered north. The moons south. The warty odd asteroids and comets, flew everywhere. And the boy, but a child, started bawling for the lost moon. No one could stop his tears, as he raised a melancholy poem amidst his sobs.

And one day, we were playing with the moon,

Who was white and pretty to the piper’s tune.

But another day, she chose to hide.

Away; and far, away…he cried.

But the moon won’t come back. And the worlds alike, sat singing their dark night away, waiting. And that was when the Mother found the boy, surrounded by job-forgotten suns, whimpering and sighing to his tragic tunes.

And that was when the screams, unmistakable as rattlesnake fizz, scared the light out of simpleton sun-moon bodies. But then something happened. The shouts halted without a traditional brake-screech. The astral bodies exchanged glances, as the people on their earths sat wowing at this sudden spectacle.

The Mother was whispering to her son. The son was beaming in a newfound knowledge. In a gentle pursing of his lips, he murmured a song that brought the white moon from out of nowhere. The moon, sheepish and bored, jogged back to the world where he ought to be.

He dreamt the song over and over again.

But where could you be, why did you part?

I shut up and close the worlds away.

In a silent breeze, I could hear the heart.

For what is wanted, will come by day.

By day.

And the lovers kissed beneath an imaginary moon. All they had done was want it. Among the many suns and moons.