moon garden // consequences

When I see stars out the window, I know I’m not in Michigan anymore where the lake effect creates warm moisture-rich air that wraps stars in thick, gray clouds. I never knew how much I could miss the stars, those bright, distant points, constellations of my own galactic vitality. I’m not at the diner anymore. I’m in the back of a black van, my ankles and wrists tied with a rope, and there are three men in the back with me, two wearing black SWAT uniforms with machine guns holstered to their thighs, and another right next to me, in a plaid shirt and cargo pants, silver eyes in the moonlight. He’s holding my hand in his, stroking it like an albino tree frog–when did my skin get so pale?–and his touching calms me, magically, like he’s got some hold over me, like I’m stunned into submission.

“We’re transporting you to another facility, a shabiri orphanage with a counter-AMGEN medical facility,” the man in plaid says as he draws gentle circles in the soft white flesh of my palm. “You were severely injured in the storm two nights ago. Your children are dead, or have turned into shabiri. You were nursing them, yes? It seems the storm changed the functionality of your milk, reversed its capacity, weaponized it. I want to help you understand your new body, to guide you in using it for the cause.”

After I’d had my girls, after all the oxytocin and high-dosage Ibuprofen wore off from my Caesarean and I could walk again, I’d wear my twins on me in a wrap, knotted against my heart by an infinity shape. We’d go through the loops in my suburban subdivision, and I’d say to myself, You’re a mother now. Everything in your life will be different. Sometimes they’d cry and the only thing that would calm them would be to take them outside, the physical shock of the cold would cancel out their need to shriek. Their pupils would widen until I could see the moon in them, and they’d look at the shapes of the world so strange in sudden darkness, the sharp edges and barred shadows, the ombre calling everything back to the ground, and they’d drink from me as they watched the world curl into its new form, drinking from me what they saw outside of us, feeling safe against me in the night.

Certain flowers only show themselves nocturnally. I’ve always wanted to make a moon garden: ipomoea alba, gardenia jasminoides with its juicy, yellow stigma, epiphyllum oxypetalum–I am the queen of the night, nocturnally flowering, and oh what a sweet smell my milk, seeping through my shirt, veining along my arms and down my stomach, across my body, white petals seeping, to my wrists and ankles, melting off the rope that binds me. I look down to where the plaid man’s cargo pants bunch at his groin, then up to his silver eyes. “And who are you?” I say. “I’m Reed.” “Well, Reed, I’ve always wanted a moon garden, and you can either help me make it or have a consequence.” “What?” he says. “I said, do what mommy says or you’ll have a consequence.”