Pseudopod 007: Drawing the Moon

[Bdoomed]

Pseudopod 007: Drawing the Moon

By Janni Lee Simner
Read by Jonathan Chaffin

Once the light got in, it snaked up the walls, hundreds of little silver strands of it, and the strands wove themselves into pictures.

The pictures were of his parents. They showed Andrew the night Mom and Dad had disappeared, over and over, until the hurt in his chest got so bad he thought he would explode. He tried closing his eyes, but even through closed eyelids he could see the scenes the moon painted — all in silver, with none of Elizabeth’s colors, but sharp and real just the same. He saw Mom and Dad walking down the city street, holding hands, Elizabeth and Andrew just behind them. He saw the mugger jump out of the shadows. He saw Mom being hit and falling to the ground, where her head smashed against the pavement. He saw the knife go through Dad’s chest.

But in the pictures, Mom died of the falling, and Dad died of the stabbing. That wasn’t right at all.

The moon had stolen Andrew’s parents. So why would it draw him pictures in which that hadn’t happened, in which other things had happened instead? Andrew wondered about that for many nights before he came up with an answer.

The moon didn’t want him to know what it had done. Or now that he knew, it wanted him to forget.

Happy Friday the 13th!

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Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

[Unblinking]

This one was decidedly weird.  I liked the almost-normal world that the kid lived in where it turned out his strangest perceptions turn out to be true.  I did have a little trouble believing this could exist because the moon apparently disappears from the sky and nobody but the kid makes note of it.  I dare say that if the moon disappeared, there would be panic and religious cults all over.

I didn't really care for the recursive ending.  For one thing, he bargained with the moon for it to take away the mugger, so why was the mugger still there.  Unless it was a second mugger.  In any case, I didn't like the circular ending that never reaches a resolution.  If time really got rewritten back and forth like that, the magnetic tape of the space/time continuum would have eaten by the tape deck of the multiverse by now.

One thing that I thought was really funny is that the voice of the Moon sounded like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its flat toneless expression but soft voice.  This was particularly funny to me, since HAL is represented by a red circle, and the moon is a white circle which causes red (the blood of the mugger's attack that was in his sister's drawings at the beginning).  Methinks that HAL and the Moon are siblings, HAL ruling over the rational world, and the Moon ruling the world of the irrational.  When the girl changes from drawing the red (HAL) pictures to the (Moon) silver pictures, she is shifting from the rational to the irrational. 

[Millenium_King]

I thought this one was alright.  It felt like an attempt at the sort of magical realism Ray Bradbury is known for - but I thought it lacked all of his charm and, if you'll excuse the term, all of his magic.  I just didn't find it very engaging.  The story didn't feel terribly original, the threat never felt menacing and the locations were featureless.