Marley remembers the last time she rode atop someone’s shoulders. She was nine, and her father had lifted her up so she could watch the high school baseball game from over their backyard fence. Late in the ninth inning, the Mustangs’ pitcher threw a strike so fast her eyes couldn’t track it. The batter from the Hawks swung and hit the ball so hard that the crack of the bat shook her bones. The ball flew high into the air. She remembers looking up and waiting for the ball to come back down, but it didn’t. Instead it remained perfectly still, resting gently against the deep orange sky. A wispy cloud drifted by and, for a moment, she lost sight of the ball. Time slowed down. Marley had felt this feeling before, once in a dream where the moon was not a planetary object but rather a disk in the sky. The moon grew larger, closer, until she could press her palm against the soft dust of its surface. There she laid to rest a small handprint, right in the center of a shallow crater. Marley remembered this dream as she watched the baseball in the sky grow larger and larger. It grew so fast until it was right in her face — it was then she realized the ball had not grown at all, but instead was falling at a perfect trajectory toward her forehead. She flinched as the ball pierced the bubble of her backyard and struck her with such force that she fell from her father’s shoulders onto the cold grass. He picked her up and examined her face, wondering if it was his fault. “Where does it hurt?” he asked. She pointed to her busted lip. She was missing her two front teeth.
Marley remembers this day in extreme detail as she logs the moon’s equatorial position into the computer. 2019-09-19 03:00 UTC – RA 09h 14m 22.4s – Dec +22:31:08… At some point in her early thirties the numbers began to blur together. She tries with all her might to contextualize the recordings in her mind but all she can think about is how the moondust flowed between her fingers and stuck to her skin like flour.
The laboratory is quiet aside from the hissing of cicadas creeping in through the crevice of the observatory dome. The enormous telescope aims steadily at the moon, a waning gibbous. Marley, having observed the stars solely through the confines of the dome’s shutter, imagines the sky to be a rotating backdrop and the edges of the galaxy to be spindles. She remembers the lamp from her childhood that cast dancing ballerinas of light onto the walls. Her father turned it off at nine o’clock, but Marley waited patiently until she could hear the snoring through the walls to turn it back on. She would spin the lamp shade and watch them dance until she fell asleep. An occasional breeze would drift through the cracked open window, gently swaying the baby-blue curtains over her bed, over her sleeping body.
Marley’s dream is to see the aurora borealis. At least once in my life, she says to herself as she drives home, along the still roads that weave through the hills of Santa Verde. She enjoys these meditative drives after her night shifts, listening to her keys jingling in the cupholder, feeling the rumble of the engine through her seat. As she pulls around a long bend, the sun peeks out from behind a green hill and splashes the car with a golden radiance. Then, just as abruptly, it disappears behind the next lump of earth, then reveals itself on the next bend, hides again, and so forth. The indecisive body, torn between starting the day and sleeping in, remains in its intermediate limbo, and Marley can’t decide whether to keep the sun visor down or not. Frustration sets in and her morning is ruined. She can’t get her radio to work no matter how many times she smacks the console, but she refuses to get it fixed because she’s leasing a new car, or at least planning on it. Whatever. This is nice, she bargains. It’s so nice that she pulls over three miles outside of town on a small stretch of road that overlooks the valley. Her hands grip the cold metal of the guardrail and she takes a deep breath. She imagines she’s breathing air directly from the luscious greenery of the hills, and it heals her.
At home she closes the blinds, turns off the lights, and crawls under the covers. Her tired mind wanders and she thinks of declination coordinates, of love, of her father. The moon, which she systematically examines through the confines of the observatory, from the comfort of her padded swivel chair. Marley wonders if the moon stares back at her, through the internal mirrors of the telescope and into her eyes. Through my pupils, into the back of my eyes. The moon knows her just as well as she knows it. Marley reaches up toward the sky and her fingers graze the surface of the moon. She rises to the tips of her toes and grabs it, like a baseball, and tugs on it — but it seems to be fixed to the sky. She twists the moon as if she were changing a light bulb and out it pops. She holds the glowing rock in her hand and stares closely at the illuminated side, where a handprint rests in the center of one of the craters. She turns it to view the other side, but sees only a void of bluish black in her palm. Marley loses control of her surroundings and finds herself falling into the sky. Rays of blinding green encapsulate her immaterial body as she evaporates into a green dust. Her wispy arms stretch across the stars and her fingertips reach the ocean. She stares down at Santa Verde. There, deep in the hills, on the side of the road, Marley spots herself, who wishes she were up there. Here I am.