The teal sky rippled with waves of shifting light and shadow; its surface webbed with cracks as though it were brittle bone china---forever at risk of splintering under the weight of its own fragility. It was somehow both delicate and alive, quivering and rippling like a bowl of turquoise pudding. The fractures spanned the heavens like a shattered dome, their jagged outlines shivering and vibrating. At times, they oscillated wildly, sudden surges of movement jostling through the cracks with a chaotic energy that seemed certain to push the sky past its breaking point.
By all rights, these spasms should have spiderwebbed into ever-expanding veins, splintering the already fractured surface until it crumbled entirely. I half-expected shards of it to rain down in lethal javelins, spearing the sands below where I passed silently. Yet, inexplicably, not a single new rupture appeared. For all its trembling, the sky refused to collapse.
As I walked beneath this precarious canopy, I considered the rules---or lack thereof---governing this strange dimension. The fractures looked like brittle fault lines, ready to crack open with the next untoward movement, a stray gust, or the faintest brush of a celestial hand. Yet they didn’t. The sky, with all its apparent fragility, held fast. It seemed to announce its own paradoxical nature: a permanence built on perpetual instability.
Everything here teetered on the edge of collapse...and yet, it wouldn’t. The reason why was both maddeningly simple and profoundly strange: the sky seemed to remain intact precisely because it was constantly trying to break apart. Its precariousness wasn’t a flaw---it was the single mechanism sustaining it.
That rule seemed to apply to everything I’d encountered so far. No evidence existed to prove otherwise, and my mind found no reason to argue the point.
When the sun set, it didn’t linger on the horizon like a soft farewell.
It fell.
D
r
o
p
p
e
d.
Instantly, it was yanked with adept precision. A precision I knew and shared with whatever unseen hand that had stolen it. I myself have snatched and will continue to enjoy snatching candy. Right from the hands of unsuspecting babies. The exhilaration one gets from the act of pulling sweets from their grubby, sticky fingers and vanishing into the wind, completely unseen by their parents or caretakers is one of my many talents. The sight of this triggered such thoughts and my skin tingled with satisfaction.
It is important to make places in your life for the simple pleasures---for things that amuse you. My therapist calls this “self-care.”
The darkness left behind was immediate and deafening. It wasn’t like the soft descent of Earth’s nightfall, with shadows slowly blanketing the world. No, this was different. The absence felt violent, as if the light had been punched out of the sky and swallowed whole. It was like standing on the edge of everything, only to find the ground beneath you had been obliterated by the fist of nothingness. The void left in the sun’s wake was so profound, it seemed less like an ending and more like the absence of a beginning itself. I twisted my nipples and licked my lips. Something about the ominosity turned me on just a little bit.
When the stars flickered to life, they did so gradually, unevenly---like old fluorescent tubes sputtering to warm up in an abandoned office, forgotten and left to dust and silence. Their light was cold and mechanical, faintly intrusive, and it cast the vast emptiness around me into sharp, unforgiving relief.
The moons arrived as abruptly as the sun had vanished. They slid into view from opposite sides of the sky, moving laterally in a deliberate, uncanny motion that felt oddly conspiratorial. They stopped only when they hung close enough to whisper across the void about me. Perhaps that sounds paranoid, but I could feel their proximity, their unwelcome attention pressing down on me like a weight I couldn’t shake.
I also heard them whisper about how small my ass was---which is a completely untrue, blatant lie. My ass is voluptuous.
One of them was battered and familiar---our moon. Its silver face, patterned with pocks and craters, had been imprinted in my mind through countless Earthly nights spent stargazing. The second moon, however, was something else entirely: much larger. The surface jagged and ominous---scarred as though by the claws of some cosmic predator. Deep gouges seemed to furrow its face like the hand of someone unhinged had repeatedly dragged a blade across the surface for their own amusement, digging out wounds that never closed. The entire surface seemed to have trenches so profound and shadowed they had the depth required to swallow the light of the stars themselves.
As I moved across the desolate expanse of red sand, the light from the moons cast everything in unnatural tones of grayscale, bright yet lifeless, the glow from the pair of moons seemed to be nearly as bright as an overcast day and the brightness of their light turned the desert around me into a landscape of sharp contrasts. Every shadow ran deeper. Every detail was laid bare.
It wasn’t their light but the weight they seemed to radiate that unnerved me most.
The moons loomed unreasonably low overhead and their gazes felt unflinching. At first, I thought it was my imagination. Then the uneasy sensation of being watched began to gnaw at me. Before I identified the source I could feel the eyes of something sentient, emotionless and hungry tracking my path through the sands that, though red in the daytime, appeared now in silver.. When the sun fell out of the sky, the wind picked up, blowing the sand around me like a shimmering ethereal fog that swirled, moving like something alive.
Despite the soft howl of the wind and the other sights and noises crafted by the slow progress of night here, instinctively I could feel the presence of a watcher in the darkness and I slowed my steps, quieted my breathing and hoped to hear something---some movement or some hint to tell me where this lurking presence spied on me from.
There was nothing.
Nothing moved in the bright dark.
When I looked up, I knew. The feeling of peeling, prying eyes that quietly tore into me and pulled at the loose strings of my layers, leaving me naked and vulnerable in this unfamiliar place wasn’t coming from somewhere near me on the ground, but up above instead. The moons weren’t merely watching---they were judges seated at the bench in the front of the courtroom, weighing my every move with silent scrutiny in the hope that they could render their impartial verdict for any crimes I may have perpetrated unwittingly.
I could feel the cold, craterous focus of their judgmental gazes pressing down on me with an impartial, yet eagerness to render their pronouncements upon me. Their attention was undeniable and entirely indifferent.
Any verdict reached between them would be absolute.
I kept moving, the sand crunching beneath my feet---the only defence available to me was my refusal to stop.