blue night red fire , no

I let out a soft audible puff of smoke, the only sound except for sparse mating calls from insects, and it could still be seen in the air for some time before drifting up like a balloon. Dark stumps rose towards the sky; their green hands attempting to pet the stars. No fog, no clouds, no perversion in the perfect night sky besides a large, loving Moon and the bright blue Polaris. The stars flickered with a vivacity that echoed back down to us, preventing the simple act of rest. The land below them all tinted into a fair shade of melancholic blue. Far from society.

“Can you pass me one?” Max said. We didn’t want to talk about why we had come here in the first place, him still shifting his weight back and forth. His hands never stopped shaking.

“Mate, I only got one left.”

“I get you, man, it’s fine.”

“Nah, you can have it.”

I flicked the cigarette towards him, falling to the frosted grass. He scrambled for it as a dog would for its treat before balancing it between his lips. Rising up to the world above, he jumped his legs up and down and shook his hands together before fidgeting with his coat pockets for some time. He exclaimed a groan as a final ditch effort. I threw my lighter and it hit him in the shoulder. A gift. Moving erratically, he barely caught it in a baby-straddling position. I laughed. The red blaze bled across his face as he motioned toward the cigarette still firmly in his lips. Above it, his nose found itself painted in a soft yet harsh pink, only partially from the fire. Woods painted rich. He looked so out-of-place.

He stared up into the trees like nature and all this could answer his pleas once and for all.

“I really thought that everything was going perfectly for me for once, you know?”

“I know, you never stopped talking about how worried it made you.”

“I knew everything would come crashing down and it did. Everything always happens like this, and I wanted to come out here today to do something about it.” His voice sounded certain but his hands still shook. “Thank you for this. I knew I could always count on you.”

…

“Ya still sure about all this?” I said with a slight quiver. I felt for the cold, gray Peacemaker in my coat, hands also shaking but for a different reason (though maybe the same). He began to look down at his feet as did I, the soil moist. The air felt off in a way. Stones must’ve been in my lungs. Everything got darker in an instant. Black suns within my eyes expanded involuntarily. I looked up and he must have too. Stars still shining, unmoving but still flickering from just a moment ago. The Moon Was Gone. The sky had the strange quality of complete incompleteness without its existence in it. The trees fully hid themselves, blending into the dark without a discernable shape, no point to it all, all light snuffed out. Atmosphere ever so slightly colder but enough to cause a deep shudder. My voice choked down into my throat, my body weighed down by the unimaginable. Max recognized it too and sunk down into the ground.

…

…

…

“You don’t think it could be a cloud?”

Soft shake of the head, illuminated by his slowly burning cigarette, the wee fire clear in the night. Observable. Undeniable. Dark. Alone.

He pulled out the lighter from before, lighting a campfire that we had used earlier in the day. The crackle of the fire echoed and bounced around the site. The bark of the nearby trees twisted and curled in on themselves with the red nustling into their crevices. The warmth nibbled on my cheek, lightly fooling with it. I rolled back my shoulders as I looked up once more. I watched my breath leave its mark on the atmosphere before it hid away fast into the dark. I exclaimed out “What will happen now?”, not precisely to Max but he responded anyways:

“Don’t you understand?” he said, his tone shifting to a husky shell. “Everything will be so different and we don’t even know what happened and... I don’t see a world in which I…” He took a deep drag before tossing the cigarette into the fire. These thoughts must’ve been with him even before the Moon. “I don’t even know, man… What are we going to do?” I made a slight mumble, neither positive nor negative. Knowing.

He scoffed at me. He looked away towards the trees. To him, the creeping green leaves curled away from the sky and towards him. Forces invisible to me muffled and pulled apart his heart as his hands shook. I couldn’t see much of his face so I couldn’t tell what he thought at that moment, eyes completely darkened by shadows cast from his cheeks. As for myself, there weren’t any thoughts racing through my mind. I scooted closer to the fire so that if he turned around, I could’ve called it sweat running down my face.

The smell of the tobacco wafted around the fire. As though every single animal, insect, and organism knew the occasion, full gray silence engulfed except for the rustling brown leaves and sticks beneath. “I think I heard something like this happened about twenty or so years back in China. Like the Moon went away for a bit making everyone panicked but it was just a thing with how the light bounced off the mountains weird in some way or something like that…” My thought tapered into a whimper as I looked at him, a helpless dog. “You know, things will get better, they always do?”

He turned and looked intensely straight into my eyes, the reflection of himself he saw in them. His eyes tinted a sickly yellow, yet I couldn’t tell whether that was from the fire or from something else. After only a second, he turned toward the fire and collapsed to his knees. “I don’t care anymore, man. Things just keep happening and happening and happening… and I don’t want to deal with this no more.” His voice rang still like water in an untouched pond. He stared straight into the light while rubbing his hands together. “I want peace.”

…

Undergrowth drilled into me as I sat down beside him. I picked out a small thorny stick from beneath me, chucking it into the fire while Max kept looking down. The fire didn’t grow from the stick's inclusion but it did consume utterly. The thorns did fall off along with the rest of the slender thing. It retained a shape for some time but it had fully deformed into gray ashes by hour’s end. Sparks from the fire jumped up and fell right back down, sounding alike to a clawing animal. As Max and I sat, those trees all around us seemed so, so very tall that one could just imagine that the Moon stood behind one of them, teasing the little creatures below by hiding.

“You still sure about this?” I muttered, my hands moving into my coat. He stood up and nodded. For the last time, I said:

“Look up, Max, at Polaris. Explorers used it to help them navigate and point them North because it never moves from that point. A massive star, far far away from us.” I tried to grab his shoulder to give him some solace but he shoved me away. His intentions were clear to me as he looked up, saying:

“The stars will never go away.” Those stars stood and continued as though the cold warmth of the Moon never even existed in their lives. Rigor mortis crept into Max’s hands, stopping the shaking.

“Y-yeah, t-they won’t...” My voice began to break up and I blinked aggressively until my eyes coated a pinkish-red. I pulled emptiness out of my coat pocket and pointed it to the back of his head. The weight tugged against my wrist and my finger hesitantly moved forward to the trigger. Breathe in. I mouthed wordless apologies for not being able to do more. I did all I could’ve done for him and that would include this. My final gift from one friend to another. Breathe out. Bang echoed with fleeting orange. The maroon mist rose up into the sky before plummeting down onto the soil. But the Moon didn’t come back. Observable. Undeniable. Dark. Alone.

I picked up his body, limp in my arms, and tossed him into the fire. It grew up and up, like a tree of its own. The twisting ends of the fire as branches with thin leaves - leaving behind the charred, beautiful red memories, ones that Max probably forgot. So tall that the whole forest must’ve been able to see the light. A new Moon. Observable. Undeniable. Bright. Alone. If only he could see.