I'm writing this based on a very silly conversation that I had with a friend earlier this evening. This is based on the idea that astrology - and the moon, specifically - can determine the kind of person that I will marry. The problem is that I'm unlikely to marry, and am not actively dating anyone regardless. The conversation devolved from there, and included the concept of a reluctant moon goddess, of sorts, who inadvertently causes the moon to either fall out of the sky whenever she looks at it, or move closer. This is being written on the fly, with no plan, outline, or even goal, so it's likely to be a fragment. This might be a chapter draft if I get more of an idea on where to go with this, but still less likely to be more than a fragment.
Amanda Wilson considers herself to be a rational person with a few normal-enough quirks. She goes to sleep at a boring hour, she wakes up early, she goes to work on weekdays and doesn't go out much. Thin, with mousy brown hair and a sensible, feminine wardrobe that doesn't stray far from "basic bitch." She enjoys biscotti with her morning coffee, and relaxes with a bowl and apple-scented bubble bath when she has had a particularly trying day. Casual dating makes her uncomfortable, and since her neighborhood café only sees her in the morning or when she's on a date - once, an awkward combination of both - she's been getting unsolicited dating advice from the staff for months.
She's taken the week off from work to help her reset after the budget for the upcoming year was finally submitted, and less than a day in, she's bored. Grabbing her purse, a book that she's been meaning to read that's been gathering dust, and her keys, she begins the short trek to Saudade Coffee for a leisurely few hours on their back deck. Settling into the book and over the course of three hours and two lattes, she's interrupted by a woman sitting carefully next to her on the deck's bench and speaking.
"...?"
Blinking owlishly through the eye strain at the newcomer, Amanda's mind takes a moment to catch up. "Sorry? I'm afraid I didn't catch that."
"You look like you need a break. Do you want a reading? Free?" The woman gestures at a notebook and deck of cards. Long, wavy black hair that's greying at the temples, sensible wire-framed glasses, with an undefined and a "refined bohemian" look about her, the stranger looks friendly enough. "Only, I've got some time to kill, I need to practice, and you need to relax your eyes, if the way you're squinting at the pages is any indication. Name's Kezia."
"Oh. Uh, Hi. I'm Amanda. I'm afraid that - " Amanda pauses briefly, unsure how to avoid offending this lady, deciding that there's no way around it, and grimaces as she said "Sorry, I just don't really believe in 'witchy' sort of things. No offense."
Kezia smiles and takes a sip of her coffee, her eyes wrinkling at the corners. "Oh, that's fine. Like I said, I need the practice, and it's just for fun. Who knows? I might be able to help you find that missing hairbrush and maybe get you out of this dating rut you seem to be in."
Amanda blinks again, shrugs, and dogears her place in the book. "Sure, might as well, I suppose. How do you do this, anyway?"
"It depends on what I get a feel for at the time. Sometimes, it's cards and a glance at your hands. Sometimes, we enjoy a bit of tea together. Sometimes, I flex my math skills. Today, I think, we'll have a chat and work out way through a few options. Might want another coffee for this, love."
"Oh. Okay." Amanda, still unsettled, takes the opportunity for what it is and walks back inside to order another latte and a fresh espresso for Kezia. Unsure what she's gotten herself into, she arrives back to the table to find a table full of cards, a large notebook, a necklace with what looks like an inverted teardrop hanging from it, and a smiling Kezia.
The hours pass, and by the time it's over with, Amanda's head is spinning as she walks back to her apartment alone. She'd switched to decaf around 4pm, and now, at 9pm, is feeling an odd combination of wired and utterly exhausted. The "readings" did not go as she expected; a sensible person, Amanda was truthful when she told Kezia that she didn't believe in "woo" things, favoring empirical data over spirituality. The readings - she's sure this isn't the right term, but isn't sure what else to call this fortune-telling session - contained some very specific things that a virtual stranger would not have known.
Once inside her apartment, the book, purse, and keys find themselves unceremoniously dumped into the bucket seat next to her window and she walks to her balcony with barely a pause. She's known since Kezia told her that she is a moon goddess and that she would be marrying the newly-hired senior dev at work in several years that this is a bowl-and-bath night. After slowly getting high and staring at the trees swaying in the breeze down at street level for an hour, she decides she's finally high enough to consider running the bath and stands up to do so. As she turns to open the door, she glances up to find the full moon. She gasps as she sights it - it's huge.
It isn't close-to-the-horizon, optical-illusion huge, the moon is unnaturally large in the sky. It's holy-shit-it's-going-to-hit-the-earth large, and it's blood red. A blink, and it's gone, with no slow fade into the clouds, with no transition at all - it's just gone. Shaking herself, she's now more determined to have that bath than she was before, thinking that she needs it just a smidge more hot than normal, with more bubbles than normal, and some good, calming piano music. Maybe she'll take a toy with her tonight.
It's a relaxing bath. She nearly falls asleep in it, and it's gone cold, and the bubbles have nearly disappeared by the time she's ready to get out, which she supposes was the point of the bath in the first place. She's certainly less worried about what she'll see when she steps back out onto her balcony for one more session with her bowl before she crawls into bed. Relaxing into her comfortable chair and propping her legs on the end table, she looks slowly at the sky, where she sees the moon, nice and normal. Waxing gibbous, normal albedo, just floating right where it should be, just how it should be. Sighing, she gives her bowl the side-eye and chews on the long conversation she had with Kezia earlier.
"Moon goddess," she nearly hisses. According to a chance encounter with what she can only describe now as a fortune-teller, she's a demigod, she found the missing hairbrush while waiting for her bath to fill, and she is doomed for at least a few more months of disastrously boring dates - but many of those dates will broaden her horizons, lead to new friendships, and prepare her mind for actually being a person that would fit with Mark "Call me Mickey" romantically. It's been a long day, and she'll be writing a doozy of a journal entry about everything tomorrow, but for now, it's time for bed.
She looks up again as she stands up, and sits back down heavily. The moon is closer. It's not as large as it was before, and it's not blood-red anymore, but it's appreciably larger in the sky, like it would look at moonrise while it's at perigee. She takes a moment to take stock of herself - still high, still relatively relaxed, and she doesn't think she's hallucinating - and then decides that yes, she will keep staring at the moon, and maybe she'll try to figure out what's going on. "Moon goddess," she yawns.
She wakes up in the early dawn, covered in dew and shivering. She's not ready to face the day yet, so she walks blearily inside and decides to take a quick shower to warm up before crawling into the covers of her much-more-comfortable-than-patio-furniture bed.
Hours later, as she's dunking her first biscotti into her first coffee, she scrolls through her morning news feed. Her eyebrows raise at the first headline, "Surprise 4.1 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Piedmont Region, Atlanta Residents Report Shaking." Thinking that odd, she nevertheless scrolls past once she's sure there are no gory details to read. Rolling her eyes at the political headlines as she scrolls past, she slows at the mention of another earthquake. "Unusual 4.9 Quake Shakes British Columbia, Vancouver Residents Report Strong Tremors." Scrolling more slowly now, Amanda feels a bit morbid intentionally seeking out stories of natural disasters, but she's powerless to prevent it. "Strong 6.2 Earthquake Strikes Southern Sweden, Rare Seismic Event Shocks Residents." She frowns at the next headline, "Catastrophic 8.5 Earthquake Rocks Chile's Southern Andes: Widespread Destruction, Tsunami Threat Looms." She clicks into that one, morbidly curious now.
This Andean earthquake is just one of the more than thirty major quakes that struck within the last 12 hours, leaving experts scrabling for explanations. While aftershocks continue to rattle the region, the world holds its breath, fearing what might come next. Scientists are closely monitoring fault lines worldwide, but so far, there are more questions than answers.
Amanda stops scrolling and takes a sip of her now-tepid coffee and winces - she'd forgotten the biscotti, and now her coffee is more mush than drink. On autopilot, she prepares another coffee, and heads out to the balcony for some sunlight while she thinks and attempts to talk herself out of believing her escapades with the moon last night had anything to do with this. Surely, she would've seen news stories about that, at least - if the moon had changed its position in physically impossible ways. Determined to finish her coffee before the news consumes the rest of her day, she relaxes in the sunlight.
Like a dog with a bone, though, she can't relax for long, the nascent idea that she's somehow caused all of this destruction is gnawing on her mind. She sits at her kitchen table, opens her laptop, and starts doing some research. Some hours later, when the shadows have stretched long enough to be called "dusk," she rubs at her eyes and looks up from the computer. She's now sure that what happened last night was real, that it caused all of this, and that somehow, nobody else noticed the moon doing acrobatics last night. The tides have been playing silly buggers with coastlines, there have been several power grid failures across the planet, and all these earthquakes.
She needs to control this. Lost in thought, the only thing Amanda is sure of is that she can't let this continue to happen, and while it feels silly and she barely believes it herself, she needs to at least try. She absentmindedly packs her bowl and watches at the spot the moon should be visible in shortly, and concocts a plan. Does it react to her mood, or her thoughts, or to a direct command? Can she change the effects?
Yes. She is, she's now convinced after two days of testing, either specifically insane, or a moon goddess. She can change its color, and she's learned that other people can observe the change, but believe it to be normal - "Yes, I can see the moon. What do you mean 'what color is it?' Purple, of course, like it always is." She can change its shape to nearly anything, with similar observations of those she asked. She can even distill moonlight into a drink, somehow, though she's not been brave enough to actually drink it, yet, and has instead been using a few filled wine glasses as night lights.
Of course, Amanda also had to try to control the more dangerous changes, like the position of the moon like the first evening, and making the moon disappear entirely. She had to test her hypothesis, which she did on the first day once she discovered the link, feeling that any additional natural disasters that occurred would be better, like ripping off a bandage. She first managed to move the moon further away until it was barely noticeable in the sky, and then moved it back, all the while furiously checking breaking news stories. Then, she made the moon temporarily blink out of existence entirely. The damage to the planet was severe, of course, but she now has her answers.
She may be an ordinary, unremarkable woman, but she's also a goddess, and a destructive one, at that. Perhaps Kezia was onto something - the confidence boost she's getting from this will certainly change how she interacts with the world from now on. Maybe she's in Mark's league after all - she'll test that once she's back at the office.
After sleeping on this, I think it needs one more chapter that's far more in line with the silliness that I initially had in mind.
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