from behind the roof of Audrey’s house.
Not any old moon, not the usual moon, but an enormous white disc like a big Pan Drop, a cartoon moon almost, its lunar geography – seas and mountains – a luminescent grey, its chaste rays illuminating the streets of trees with a much kinder light than the streetlamps. We’re stopped in our tracks, half enchanted, half horrified by this magic moonrise.
What’s happened to the moon? Has its orbit moved closer to the earth overnight? I can feel the moon’s gravity pulling the tide of my blood. This must be a miracle of some kind, surely – a change in the very laws of physics? I’m relieved that someone else is sharing the lunacy with me – I can feel Audrey clinging on to my arm so hard that she’s pinching my skin through the fabric of my coat.
A moment longer and we will be running for the woods, bows and arrows in our hands, hounds at our heels, converts to Diana, but then sensible Eunice pipes up, ‘We’re only experiencing the moon illusion – it’s an illustration of the way the brain is capable of misinterpreting the phenomenal world.’
‘What?’
‘The moon illusion,’ she repeats patiently. ‘It’s because you’ve got all these points of reference –’ she waves her arms around like a mad scientist, ‘aerials, chimney pots, rooftops, trees – they give us the wrong ideas of size and proportion. Look,’ she says and turns round and suddenly bends over like a rag doll, ‘look at it between your legs.’
‘See!’ Eunice says triumphantly when we finally obey her ridiculous command. ‘It doesn’t look big any more, does it?’ No, we agree sadly, it doesn’t.
‘You lost those points of reference, you see,’ she carries on pedantically, and Audrey surprises me by saying, ‘Oh shut up, Eunice,’ and I point helpfully back down the street and say, ‘You live back there in case you’ve forgotten, Eunice,’ and we walk quickly on, leaving her to go home on her own. The moon carries on bowling up into the sky, growing smaller.
The moon makes no sense to me. Eunice can spout lunar data all day long and it would still mean nothing. I can see no order in the moon’s journeys around the heavens – one day it’s popping out of a pocket of sky behind Sithean, the next it’s spinning above Boscrambe Woods, and the day after, there it is on my shoulder, following me down Hawthorn Close. It waxes and wanes with delirious abandon, one minute a thin paring of fingernail, the next a gibbous slice of lemon, the next a fat melon moon. So much for periodical regularity.
I lie in bed and look at my window full of moon. I see the moon and the moon sees me. It’s high in the sky, shrunk back to its normal size, free and unfettered from the earth. A perfectly normal moon – not a blood moon, nor a blue moon – it isn’t an old moon with a new one in its arms, just a normal April moon. God bless the moon. And God bless me. Faraway, in the distance somewhere, a dog howls.
WHAT’S WRONG?
Summer has begun to take over the streets of trees, clothing everything in green again. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘if one year the summer didn’t come? A world of eternal winter?’
I awake from an unpleasant dream in which I found myself walking up a hill, a Jack-less Jill, to fill a bucket of water from a well at the top. As we know, trips to the well are fraught with the danger of alien kidnapping, so my dreaming self was quite relieved to find it still existed when it got to the top.
I lowered the bucket into the well, heard it splash in the water and hauled it back up. There was something at the bottom of the bucket, I’d fished something up in the water. I gaped in horror at its pale lifeless appearance – I’d caught a head.
The eyelids of the head were closed, giving it a passing resemblance to Keats’ death-mask, but then the lids suddenly flew open and the head began to speak, its nerveless lips moving slowly – and
Not any old moon, not the usual moon, but an enormous white disc like a big Pan Drop, a cartoon moon almost, its lunar geography – seas and mountains – a luminescent grey, its chaste rays illuminating the streets of trees with a much kinder light than the streetlamps. We’re stopped in our tracks, half enchanted, half horrified by this magic moonrise.
What’s happened to the moon? Has its orbit moved closer to the earth overnight? I can feel the moon’s gravity pulling the tide of my blood. This must be a miracle of some kind, surely – a change in the very laws of physics? I’m relieved that someone else is sharing the lunacy with me – I can feel Audrey clinging on to my arm so hard that she’s pinching my skin through the fabric of my coat.
A moment longer and we will be running for the woods, bows and arrows in our hands, hounds at our heels, converts to Diana, but then sensible Eunice pipes up, ‘We’re only experiencing the moon illusion – it’s an illustration of the way the brain is capable of misinterpreting the phenomenal world.’
‘What?’
‘The moon illusion,’ she repeats patiently. ‘It’s because you’ve got all these points of reference –’ she waves her arms around like a mad scientist, ‘aerials, chimney pots, rooftops, trees – they give us the wrong ideas of size and proportion. Look,’ she says and turns round and suddenly bends over like a rag doll, ‘look at it between your legs.’
‘See!’ Eunice says triumphantly when we finally obey her ridiculous command. ‘It doesn’t look big any more, does it?’ No, we agree sadly, it doesn’t.
‘You lost those points of reference, you see,’ she carries on pedantically, and Audrey surprises me by saying, ‘Oh shut up, Eunice,’ and I point helpfully back down the street and say, ‘You live back there in case you’ve forgotten, Eunice,’ and we walk quickly on, leaving her to go home on her own. The moon carries on bowling up into the sky, growing smaller.
The moon makes no sense to me. Eunice can spout lunar data all day long and it would still mean nothing. I can see no order in the moon’s journeys around the heavens – one day it’s popping out of a pocket of sky behind Sithean, the next it’s spinning above Boscrambe Woods, and the day after, there it is on my shoulder, following me down Hawthorn Close. It waxes and wanes with delirious abandon, one minute a thin paring of fingernail, the next a gibbous slice of lemon, the next a fat melon moon. So much for periodical regularity.
I lie in bed and look at my window full of moon. I see the moon and the moon sees me. It’s high in the sky, shrunk back to its normal size, free and unfettered from the earth. A perfectly normal moon – not a blood moon, nor a blue moon – it isn’t an old moon with a new one in its arms, just a normal April moon. God bless the moon. And God bless me. Faraway, in the distance somewhere, a dog howls.
WHAT’S WRONG?
Summer has begun to take over the streets of trees, clothing everything in green again. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘if one year the summer didn’t come? A world of eternal winter?’
I awake from an unpleasant dream in which I found myself walking up a hill, a Jack-less Jill, to fill a bucket of water from a well at the top. As we know, trips to the well are fraught with the danger of alien kidnapping, so my dreaming self was quite relieved to find it still existed when it got to the top.
I lowered the bucket into the well, heard it splash in the water and hauled it back up. There was something at the bottom of the bucket, I’d fished something up in the water. I gaped in horror at its pale lifeless appearance – I’d caught a head.
The eyelids of the head were closed, giving it a passing resemblance to Keats’ death-mask, but then the lids suddenly flew open and the head began to speak, its nerveless lips moving slowly – and
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