[TONE: Bleak Reflection] 

Adjusting The Moon’s Brightness Settings By Matthew R. Wright  The moon lay dead, shattered into uncountable pieces, amongst the stars and the night’s sky. We all remember why. She held a special love for the moon. It was her namesake. 

She was Luna, and now she was alone. She mourned, harder than anyone else.  

She’d been teaching herself to NEVER look up, the hurt too painful, but she simply couldn’t stop. When she slept, which was often, she’d struggle to rest without her moon. Since birth, it was always an open-window away. Its light would always beam down with its perfect glow, and send her into some deep and peaceful sleep. Luna, now an adult of twenty-five, had to purchase those ugly black-out curtains, for what she saw out those windows led to her unbearable grief.  

Curtains closed, it was a different darkness that now surrounded her, with a strange stillness. Haunted, by the lingering presence that once beamed from behind those curtains.  

It was her mother, who had planted that seed, that love of the moon. How she nurtured that love – nights in the garden, glow-in-the-dark night’s sky decorations, something they shared. She always told her story, Luna’s mother, a tale of a single parent living in such a big city, being pregnant but alone. How, on the night that Luna was born, her mother had opened up her window for fresh air and beheld that peaceful silent beauty the moon provided, and how it calmed her, how it kept her company through that long and exhausting night. The moon had been a constant presence to both Luna and her mother in that moment and in the years and moments that came after.  But her mother had been gone for a year, and the moon only a few weeks. 

She stroked at the generated image from her iPad, a 3D rotating model of her once-whole moon, spinning away in artificial peace. Its brightness burning her eyes.  Luna gripped her bed sheets tightly, trying not to burst into tears again.  

She was Luna, and now she was alone.  

No-one else could ever understand.