The Moon Girls' Spawning
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The key came with a letter she couldn't read, written in her grandmother's hand but dated three weeks after the funeral. When Nikki pressed the tip of the instrument into the lock and turned it, she was overjoyed to hear dead metal groaning and springing back. Her relief lessened the grief momentarily. She examined every inch of wood until Judge appeared, then went up to catch a catbird singing in the jacarandas. One followed and ran to the dog water, which was lapping in an inch of rain.
She found all the boxes in the shoe store, as well as the loft above and behind the counter. She searched the whole place through and through. Packed inside every piece of shoebox was a letter, a torn-off envelope—just a few words, too.
Nikki ended up sitting in the shoe store, picking pieces of paper off the wood floor and wondering where missing envelopes should have passed.
She had found her mother's orange envelope in the floor of the loft at the shoe store. She drove around in a daze, remembered and then forgot that her mother's hands, made up in eerie white with distressed nails, had sorted her things into boxes slowly knowing she wouldn't be alive to unpack them.
The envelopes, or letters those envelopes enclosed, kept turning up missing and Nikki recalled images from her childhood that terrified her. The spawning in her mother and grandmother's oceans, synchronized like a maternal ballet, beat Nikki's heart and frightened her. She kept holding the orange envelope between her gloved hands, reading Must I Like it in bold letters, staring at the woman who wrote it. Must I Like it. The phrase haunted her, a song she had memorized in Venice at the onset of her obsession.
Now she knew that the bride on the beach, the stones of the island, were Jess. She had written Must I like it on Nikki's gloves, the white letters ambulatory, mouthless but not brainless. She was behind the wheel of Diane's car. "Your mother and Bethie are descended from Malta, too. From the moon girls." There was a skeleton on the beach. Jess and her brother stood on the outcropping. They took their humans down to the shore, the boy under his mother and the daughter under hers.
Nikki tried to sleep but she kept sleeping. In her dreams she watched everyone she knew together in the water, black banded above them as they were below. This must be what it felt like to be a human being, strapped for air, swimming for the surface Romans on their island. She didn't believe Jess, couldn't think of Jess as her sister in this way, couldn't imagine it their sole mission to be mother and daughter to humans. There was no mother moon acting through her animals to carry out the same rituals she had been born into countless lifetimes. Impossible.
Jess on the silver beach, skin copper and fluorescent, her own body a story deep enough for a girl or a man, not the wrong sex because boys had shaped her, too, but Jess was underage, eleven, seventeen by Maltese standards, human years◆ About the ending
❧ About the title