Letters from the Moon

by Nikki Ervice

Dear Friend,
Today I ate a whole ear of moon corn. Moon corn is untrustworthy, but I couldn’t resist. Please don’t judge me for being unsafe. It tasted like normal corn, but grayer. If you can’t imagine what gray tastes like, picture the drainage ditch under the dirt road where we used to crawl as kids. We could see light on either side, but in the middle we were squeezed by a giant esophagus. Moon corn tastes like the middle part, where the fear that we might not make it to the other side forced blood-bile onto our tongues. Onto my tongue. I know you hate when I speak for you; when I think we remember things the same way.

I should be okay, but if this is the last letter from me, you should assume I am not. I guess if I never come back you can assume that, too. Although, how could you know for sure until your own last moments on Earth, when I might show up over your shoulder when you least expect it, when you’re trying to slip out the seams of your life? Haha.

I’m sorry. I know you don’t like when I make morbid jokes, either.

Could you have guessed the moon is covered in corn fields? And could you have guessed that I’d end up on the moon, eating impossible corn?

The corn was my friend’s idea. Even though we were warned not to eat it, and we have plenty of preserved food from Earth, we craved freshness. It was good to feel the kernels bursting between our teeth instead of the styrofoam we pretend is food. Like, hey man, this was a strawberry once. Now it’s a freeze-dried husk; a strawberry void of hopes and dreams. Not that I think strawberries have dreams, but what if they do? What if they dream of other strawberries? Of love?

Anyway, I think the corn might be getting to me. The gray feeling is spilling from the bowl of my pelvis, down my legs. I’m going to try to hold in the seepage, but I can’t if I’m using my hands to write.

I’ll send this letter in the morning. The morning comes all of a sudden, here. The sun shoots from the horizon, violently. It’s scary. The earth rises, too, but I’ll tell you what that’s like another time.

Goodbye for now,
Your Friend

. . .

Dear Friend,
Surprise! It’s me again. The moon corn didn’t kill me, but it did make Jerry sick. Jerry is my moon friend. My least favorite, but don’t tell him that. I know you can’t, but I still worry you might find a way. You’ve always been bad at keeping secrets.

Anyway, Jerry treats me like I don’t know anything. It’s probably because I’m the only girl here. He calls me “Kid.” When I have suggestions, like, hey, maybe you shouldn’t smoke so much, where the atmosphere is thin and you gasp for air, Jerry, he’ll smirk through his personal haze, coughing. Jerry shouldn’t be able to light matches where there’s barely enough oxygen to breathe. But Jerry manages things he shouldn’t, like sneaking away to the craters, which are off limits, for hours and hours. Like calling me Kid when I’m 23 years old.

He hasn’t been able to stand since we ate the moon corn. I wish I could tell you how long ago that was. One day on the moon is equal to 29 Earth days. We don’t know whose measurement of time we live in, anymore.

Jerry is sick and I’ve made a bed for him in the regolith—it’s so soft—and he stares out at the stars. They twist in the sheen of his eyeballs. He doesn’t blink. I measure his breath by the rise and fall of his belly.

When he was still talking, Jerry told me about an afternoon in Memphis where he bet on a skinny, toothpick-boned gelding and won. Right after the horse crossed the finish line, it broke its leg. The vet put it down right there on the track, in front of everyone. It was so hot they couldn’t keep the track wet enough that day; the horse sent up great clouds of dust as it died. Jerry collected his $600 and went to the fanciest steakhouse he knew. He couldn’t stop crying. He doesn’t even like horses, but the ribeye kept turning to horseflesh on his plate, a bisection of powerful, glossy flank. When I asked him what’s the difference between cow and horse, really, he looked at me with his wicked Memphis sun, our un-special star, wheeling in his corneas and said, lots.

I disagree. They eat horses in France like it’s nothing. A problem of perception, what we allow ourselves to love. See, I’m only 23 but I’ve got wisdom.

Jerry said his daughter was supposed to meet him at the restaurant, but she got caught up. If I had to bet, I’d say that was the real problem. I don’t like thinking about big, lumpy Jerry, of stubbly face and spider fingers, stood up by his daughter, the CPA. She’s busy. He’s proud of her; he’s also proud of the long nights he worked the line at Tennessee’s best diner so she could go to a good school and forget him, little by little.

Mostly, though, Jerry is annoying. He smells like cigarette residue, loamy cousin-smell of dog shit. He opens his mouth too wide when he laughs, uvula thrashing, a cartoon character. Don’t worry about Jerry, he’s too gross for anything bad to happen to him.

I should go. It’s time to sleep. I place baggies of dried corn kernels over our eyes to block the light. Maybe I’ll never see darkness again, unless I wander out to the shadow side, into the craters where it’s so cold you get hypothermia within minutes. I don’t know what Jerry does out there, but he always comes back. If he can survive the craters, he can survive some stupid corn.

I hope things are going well at your new job. Did you get the right salary? Does Mary still bring egg salad for lunch and spill it on her cardigan, so you have to look at her semen-looking mayonnaise stains all day?

I’m sorry I didn’t ask more last time we went out for drinks—I had so many of those Mai-Tai things. I rambled on and on. I made you retell the flash flood story, how we got caught on the far side of the creek and you carried me on your back and how midway across you stumbled and we both went down. You said I pulled you beneath the surface by the collar of your shirt, leveraging you to get my head above water. I was too drunk to argue, but I don’t remember it like that. I steadied myself so I could pull us both to the bank. You know I’m afraid of drowning, but I saved us. You said your t-shirt was so stretched out, gaping at the neck, that you threw it away.

(You said I called you a workhorse, which isn’t something a child would say. I have always been broader than you, with frizzled hair and a stubborn set to my bones. You are sleek and fast, a show pony. I wouldn’t miscategorize you like that.)

The whole thing happened while clapboard houses looked on. If anyone was home, they turned away, absorbed in the churn of the laundry or the cracking of an egg, their small lives. I know you think I’m dramatic, but we could have drowned in our backyard.

Now I see the whole of Earth. It is bluer than I imagined. So much water, so many opportunities to drown.

I hope you write soon, but I know you’re busy.

Love,
Your Friend

. . .

Dear Friend,
How are you? I’m trying to get better about asking. I ask Jerry every morning, but he offers nothing.

I’m beginning to think it’s just me and Jerry up here. My memory is corrupted. There were hundreds of eyeless, big-booted men when we arrived, tromping over the silt, gesturing at the earth, sucking oxygen with their roomy mouths. They told us the rules; mostly things we couldn’t do. Don’t walk alone; It’s too easy to become disoriented, then lost. (Jerry thinks this rule is stupid. He draws lines behind him in the dust with a titanium walking stick. The whole of our territory is crosshatched with Jerry’s trails.) The atmosphere doesn’t slash and destroy like it does on Earth, so it’s weird that I can’t find the mens’ footprints anymore. They should have at least left those behind for us, proof of their existence.

The men told us not to eat the ears of corn, even though we’d be tempted. (Speaking of ears, I’ve always liked yours. Your teardrop lobes, fat like precious fruit, used to stretch under the weight of the monstrous earrings you wore in high school. I watched you under the pulsing gray light, wondering how it would be to bite into one. No, no. Not like that! Really. But now that I’m up here, I feel like I can say things plainly. And you had two of them, after all. One to spare.) Anyway, let me tell you about the corn. There is no wind to move the stalks, they are always straight. You don’t think you’d miss the wind, but you do. When I pick the ears they snap from the stem, just like normal corn. The fields cover half the moon’s surface. When we first landed on her soft, nearly mammalian coat, I thought we are so rich. We can make it here, after all. 

When Jerry was good, he asked me if my period was extra strong up here. I told him to shut up. I didn’t tell him I have stopped menstruating altogether, as if on Earth I was jealous proof of the moon’s tidal power, but on her face I am unuseful. I don’t know why we imagine the moon as a woman. From her piebald face, I know her as a trailing rat, swept in Earth’s second hand gravity.

 Jerry used to joke with me in a fatherly way, but I’m certain that, given enough time, he’d try to fuck me. I am lonely, but it is a strange blessing that he is incapacitated, now.

Do you remember how I got here? Did I say? I know only that I swayed, shoulder-to-shoulder, the pressure of other bodies holding me upright. We must have traveled for days. Maybe on a bus out of the City Center? Lord knows we spent enough time there after school, buying candy and tabloids from the Hudson News with meager bills, reading on wooden benches like perfect little adults, nowhere to go.

Bye for now,
Your Friend

. . .

Dear Friend,
We are running low on water. Jerry still idles beside me. I put the bottle to his lips, and pour inside. A sip for me, a waterfall for Jerry. I started following his crater trails. I don’t know what else to do. There must be something good out there, a way home.

I still think it’s weird you named your hamster Cookie. It made me want to eat him. I know I write too much about eating: your earlobes, the corn, your hamster. Anyway, I’m sorry about Cookie. I know I promised I wouldn’t talk about it anymore, that we would forget. But it’s the only explanation for your disappearance, now. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I was experimenting. It hurts me, too, to remember him upside down, swinging by his tail like a yoyo, clawing at nothing. Kids are vicious by accident. We can’t know the consequences of our cruelty, yet. Is your silence my consequence?

I know that I ruined pets for you. I hate that. Do you hate me, too?

Your house smelled like cinnamon cookie Yankee candle. You said mine smelled like burning metal, and once, when you were mad at me, like moldy mushrooms and cat pee. We never had a cat. I couldn’t smell my own house, so I trusted you to smell it for me. I realize now that you found me repulsive, in small ways. You wouldn’t walk barefoot on our carpet; hair and shrapnel would stick to the bottoms of your feet. Your mother vacuumed every morning at 7am, pink bathrobe cinched around her waist. My mother worked nights at the hospital and came home with iodine under her fingernails.

It doesn’t smell like anything on the moon. Maybe Windex, if you close your eyes.

I hope you’ve noticed how clean my apartment is. Feel free to look around, you have my spare key. You can open any drawers you’d like. I didn’t take much with me. My whole life is laid out for you. You can borrow my clothes, even my underwear. Out here, I wear the same outfit every day. I don’t sweat, I don’t secrete from any pore or orifice. It’s so dry, I might snap a finger, if I’m not careful. But I am careful. I don’t smell. Not like mold, or mushrooms, or cat pee. Not like anything.

Love,
Your Friend

. . .

Dear Friend,
At first, the craters were scary, so dark and cold. From high on their crusty lips, Jerry’s body looks like a cherry Jolly Rancher in the distance, all red. I shouldn’t say his body. He’s not dead, but he is vacant. I rub his hands between my palms to warm them. When I talk to him his eyes move back and forth, like he’s reading my words. I tell stories and imagine him scanning them onto the transcript of his mind. Maybe he’ll tell them back to me in perfect order after we get out of here.

In the first crater I found nothing but my own sadness; swaths of pocked, alluvial powder. If I tumbled from the lip, I would have rolled and rolled til the center of the moon ate me up. Buried, unsatisfied and hungry forever. I used my finger to botch out the line that led me there, erasing Jerry’s web of work, little by little.

In the sixth crater, I found ice. At first I thought it was my own death, an implacable cold. I excavated it from the dust and rocks with my hands, my fingernails; the others took the tools when they left. Or there were never tools, never others. Who cares? Not me.

I make a sling of my shirt and carry hunks of ice back to our spot. I’ve started to call our spot The Palace, even though it’s a square that I’ve drawn in the ground, big enough for us to lay in. I pretend the lines are walls, that we have high ceilings. We have good, kind neighbors who invest in waving and borrowing, acting out neighborly rituals and barbecues. 

On Earth, Jerry lives in a duplex with a shared wall so thin he can hear the old woman next door sneeze and fart. He can hear her pick up her car keys, hesitate at the door, place them back in the dish on the table.  A younger woman shows up once a week with armfuls of groceries, and they speak in Spanish for exactly 30 minutes before the younger woman must go, lo siento. Jerry says he can hear the younger woman counting down the minutes. His hearing isn’t that good, but I know what he means. After she’s gone, the old woman watches soap operas until she falls asleep. Jerry waits for her gentle snoring, an assurance.

I wonder what the elderly woman knows about Jerry, what noises he makes in the night and the comings and goings he telegraphs. If his tooth-brushing is awfully loud. I bet it is. I wonder if she misses him, now that he’s gone quiet.

I have to sign off. I need to make water. I seal ice in an old food bag, lay next to Jerry, and place it on my belly. The sun works from above, my waning heat from below. It doesn’t take long to gestate a bladder of potable water. It tastes mercifully refreshing, un-gray and soft.

I hope you’re well. Sorry to write so much about myself. I know I can be self-involved, but I haven’t heard from you. I can only picture your life, very pretty, pearl-pink, crushable like a shell.

Love,
Your Friend

. . .

Dear Friend,
You might laugh when you read this, but I’m building a way out. I work in the crater, to keep things cool, fashioning a vessel of ice and dust. I use my warmth to sculpt and press the ice into sheets like window panes. I paper them with corn husks. I give myself to them like a lover.

I know you hate that word, but I’m not afraid to use it now. I’m not afraid of the things I used to be afraid of—your cold shoulder, your tepid nature. I’ve never had a real lover. I don’t mean that I haven’t had sex. I have. You know that. I didn’t lie to you, those many nights over drinks. But holding the ice, willing it to succumb is so painful, every tissue burns. I’m inside the chamber of my skin for the first time.

Haha. Sorry. I think I’m losing it. Please ignore what I said about lovers. The ship is halfway done. I build for hours, until I can’t stand the cold anymore, my fingers curling into claws. Then I stumble over the crater’s edge to Jerry. My path is well-worn. There’s no getting lost. I nestle into him and siphon his heat. I would ask first, but I have to take his generosity on faith.

I find ice worms, sometimes, while I’m sculpting the ship. They’re almost impossible to see until they burrow, creating filigree doilies in the walls. Life on the moon. There’s more of it than I imagined. I worry that the worms will weaken the integrity of the vessel, that it will burst apart on takeoff. But I like their wiggling and their appetite. I like that they survive on water and dust.

And if they make me less alone, they can’t be that dangerous.

When it’s time, I won’t be able to move the rocket. I’ll have to move Jerry, instead. It’s about a half-mile from The Palace to the lip of the crater. I’m going to thread the legs of my pants under his arms, cradle his shoulders, and drag.

I’m weak but I don’t have a lot of options. I could leave him, but I won’t.

I should confess. I’ve been eating the moon corn. We’ve been out of food for a while now. I only eat a few kernels at a time. It keeps me alive and the grayness manageable. If I pop them before sleep, I replay the things you said to me over and over, so I don’t do that anymore. Out of curiosity, did you mean you never wanted to see me ever again, as in, for time unbound, even after our cells break down and reconstitute, diffuse into other plants and animals and maybe even inanimate objects, like a dining room table? Or did you mean a period of time that feels like forever but is a rolling epoch, one of many births and deaths that come and go in a lifetime? No worries either way, just wondering.

You know, if you just stopped returning my calls I would have gone on at my little job, waiting tables, wiping up ketchup and the ghosts of sweaty glassware. The hope that you would come around wouldn’t have killed me. I had other friends, work friends. Our shoulders bumped together late at night, counting tips. I have Jerry.

Sometimes I eat the ice worms. I swallow them alive so I can feel them squirm in my throat, making a home of me before my acids and the meaner parts of me dissolve them. I dared you to eat an earthworm once. You wouldn’t do it, so I cut it in half with my fingernails and offered to share. The worm continued to move, its halves trying to find each other in my hand. You looked at me like you didn’t know me. I am aware now that where I saw generosity, you saw gore.

Jerry’s body uses so little energy that he doesn’t need food anymore. At least this is what I tell myself, because I can’t bring myself to feed him more corn after what it did to him, and the ice worms are so few and precious. So few.

The rocket should be done soon. Even if you prefer I don’t return to Earth, please wish us luck. We need it.

Love,
Your Friend

. . .

Dear Friend,
Today is our last day on the moon. When the sun exploded from the horizon this morning I was grateful. When I saw the earth whirling beside it I was sad in a way I cannot describe, because I am certain you would be unable to relate. If I tried to tell you how my bones keened at the sight, you would call me dramatic, then forget to return my texts for days. You have never been this far from home, from the backyard in which I saved you from drowning. In that way, you are poor and I am lucky.

The rocket is finished. It looks silly and phallic, like a moon boner. There is a hole in the side that is just big enough to shove Jerry through. I will seal it before takeoff. I have dried hundreds of ears of corn. I will light them on fire with Jerry’s smoking matches and the force from their popping will propel us from the surface of the moon, right as earth moves over the tip of the rocket. I will have to be precise or we will miss the earth and die somewhere even lonelier.

It could work. It could. And what if you laugh, thinking me dead and foolish, and I show up at your door? What then?

I have Jerry all set up in his sling. It will take several hours to get him to the rocket. I will be shaking and frail. The unmitigated sunlight will burn the back of my neck. His eyes will scan the star maps. When we get back he will recount them for his daughter, who won’t believe him, who will think he was on a gambling bender.

There’s risk involved. A lot could go wrong. I’ve never piloted a ship before. We could burn up before we leave the moon.

I am going to aim for Memphis, so I can drop Jerry at his daughter’s house. I’m sure he’s been gone long enough for her to miss him properly. Once we hit Earth’s atmosphere, the rocket will melt away, exposing us like the ugly center of a Tootsie Pop. Hopefully we will land somewhere gentle—a spongy bog or a pond, even the well-manicured median of a freeway will do. When we cross the roadway, we’ll let the cars glide around us, zippering back together. I won’t be too picky. I have faith there are more soft places on the planet than hard.

The tips of my fingers have begun to go gray. I wish I could take a photo of what I look like now, to remember. To show you my desiccated lips, my brittle nose. My blood is deserting my edges, gathering around more vital organs. Maybe when I land it will explode out of me, extravagant and lovely red, knowing you are close, finding the valence of your own bloodstream, despite your best efforts to purify your memory, to purge yourself of me. Our history will twine back together, I will find you mid-step, moving about your day with your self-assured nature, and you will see me, your old, banished friend, and wave, whether or not you mean to, whether you like it or not.

Nikki Ervice is a professional dancer and writer from Alaska. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Nashville Review, PANK, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She was the 2021 runner up in the Iowa Review Award for fiction and is an MFA candidate at Brooklyn College where she received the Creative Writing Award.