The Dust of the Moon

You’re a part of this moon.

The Dust of the Moon

A fistful of squirming critters, held tight in your craggy, leather palm. Skin, roughened from work and sun, scraped against brittle legs and wings that yearned for the freedom of open air. You gave them the freedom of the void.

Your dirty porcelain chewing sounded like cracked molars, brass tacks, and bug juice. An open-mouthed wet crunching of carapaces and limbs that ended in the finality of a swallow and sucked teeth. A coughing fit that left you breathless. A glob of bloody phlegm spat into dirt whose dust consumed it immediately, turned it solid as rock.

The cycle of life. From dust you came, and to dust you shall go.

In the apple tree, a Prophet Bird trilled. They always sang now. It always stormed after. A warm breeze blew through the field of looming, purple corn stalks surrounding your shack. A chorus of moon cicadas buzzed.

The days were an endless cycle of fighting decay, of trying to sustain an existence on a planet that willed it otherwise. You wiped the morning dust from the panels that took energy from the sun to power your fragile life. You’d wipe it again in the afternoon. It filled in the canyons of your wrinkled hands until you slapped them together and watched the grey dirt hang suspended in the air. The must of gunpowder clung to your tongue. The taste of death.

Regolith, they called it. You remembered a time in a lunar frontier classroom when life had possibilities and you learned that word. When you were young and smiled easy. When the air was recycled and purified and breathing didn’t kill you. When the dust didn’t cover everything.

Incidental exposure side effects may include lung, eye, and skin irritation. Shortness of breath and increased heart rate are common. Minor reactivity found in some lunar regolith samples may cause acute toxicity reactions.

The terraforming was a success. Engineered plants grew in the soil of the moon and gave birth to a floundering atmosphere. But the biospheres failed. Bastions of cleaned air where populations flourished were slowly worn thin until the newly birthed environment burst inside to live with them, to kill them.

Prolonged exposure side effects include respiratory function decline or failure, loss of motor control, memory loss, certain types of cancer, stroke, death.

What do you do when the company crumples, when the money stops? When damage isn’t something you repair anymore, but just the new normal? When you’re left behind on a planet whose microscopic dust, those razor blades born from an endless barrage of meteor impacts, tears the pink flesh of your lungs with every gulp.

You grow corn on your father’s farm. You cultivate cicadas for protein and eat them until the juice runs down your chin and into the dust you wipe off solar panels so it can gather again. You live a life on repeat. You survive, for no other reason than that’s what you do.

And when the saviors come down in their fiery rockets, blazing with logos of some new corporate master, here to save the ragged survivors with their money and smiles and recycled air, you hide. You stay still in your father’s shack, in a closet, quiet and unresponsive as they wander the field and call out. It’s an instinctive thing, but one you consider all your remaining days.

You’re a part of this moon. You're the buzzing of cicadas and the rustle of corn stalks and the singing of a Prophet Bird in an apple tree. You're the storm, and that soft quiet after the storm. And soon, you’ll be the dust. Everywhere, unstoppable, always present.

Sometimes, the death you know is better than the life you don’t.

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One of the fun things with open mic nights is the absolutely unhinged prompts that we write to. This one was suggested by a friend of mine—Brass Tacks and Bug Juice. Apparently he meant some sugary drink that he had as a kid, but all I could think of was juicing bugs like Jack LaLanne, and here we are. These little vignettes are always fun micro-explorations of character, plot, and world-building for me. It’s like shining a flashlight into a cave and then wondering afterwards how far back it goes.

I’ve been writing about the dust of the Moon a lot recently, with me working on a new novel set there, but I also like it a lot as a metaphor for the poisons we consume, for the small deaths we accept. The idea of an environment that’s actively hostile to human life, like the one we’re creating through climate change, always creates a quiet desperation.

Cover image taken from Robert Thornton's Temple of Flora. Public Domain.