Thirteen women living on the moon, and you god-damn know the moon is full. A billion years ago, or yesterday. It's hot all right, you might say. Yes, but it's a dry heat.

You think I might be messing with you. I'm a woman of the thirteen women of the moon, that baker's dozen. That cool planet you know now has been cooling a million years. We are keeping it warm.

The fire fountains spit high in the afternoon, a full earth rising, the tired no-gravity sky circling above us like that, what else could we do but bleed?

Three of us are bathing downstream on lundi when the Aristarchan Volcanoes erupt. The lava seeps toward us like warm water and we wait. When it reaches us, we wash our hair in it. It turns red and spits high, hundreds of miles up. We hear that at the right speed, a motorcycle can enter our orbit. If it's true, we haven't seen it.

If you ask about the man in the moon, I will say: he is not here. There is no man on this moon, though perhaps, Jupiter might give you some leeway. I will plead the fifth.

When you see us waning, the fire fountains are the most incredible. When you see that little sliver, that white slice of unknown fruit, we are gathering. We bathe ourselves in the sand, push the little granules into our skin, and when we bleed, the oceans bleed with us.

You might say; we belong to you, we depend on you, and this would be your failing. This would be why we stay here, rather than return to that troubled oxygen spinning, ozone depleting waterball we left you with. We are of the moon. We have no need for air.

There are so few of us, there are thirteen, and the plateau is so small. Who would choose this place? One must live in the heart of things, the fire fountains bleed, the heart of the moon spits high. The lava channels merge our blood, the release of that hot red fluid coagulating together with our blood, and we are one. Billions of years of that heat, who wouldn't want to live dark side?

You, you were just beginning to crawl from the water, you were still breathing with gills. Unencumbered. No simple tools. Cells, splitting, we saw it all.

In Schroter's Valley, the thirteen of us sit, no need to light candles: Isis and Nephthys, Yemaya, Sarasvati and Kali, brown eyes as big as small meteors, Venus, Asherah, Virgin Mary, Kwan Chin, Tonzantin, Oya, the give and take of all of us, the Spider Grandmother, and Oshun, our sweet river daughter running to the lava channels. Two hundred miles an hour they come at us, and we choose to wait.

No one knows how much lava came at us, or how many times, but we felt it every time. There were twelve of us then, the first time it happened. Most of us slept, and the rumbling plateau shook us clean awake, no time for sleepy eyes, and three months later, Oshun was born. The first time it happened, the fire fountains gave us a chance to go, they went easy on us. The lava channels cut right through our camps,--adapt or flee, so we adapted. Lived with what the land begat us. The second time, we were prepared. Sunglasses, fire extinguishers, liability. But the second time, they were more violent.

Our jobs now are in the calculations. A coven of actuaries. Ticking off the scars as they surface. How many? Too many, we will tell you. Read Harper Lee. Read the bible, the part where they say, be silent, fear god.

Today, you are working on it. You are counting. You are gaining on us. When you get here, maybe we'll stay, maybe we'll go.

Oshun has grown into a young woman before our eyes. The rest of us came here together, somewhere between 25 and 39. But Oshun has just begun to cross that line, she is twelve now, a million years later and she is twelve. How soon it happened to her. She watched the film about how things move on the straight lines of her skin, how they arch around themselves, a red rock canyon at dusk. Oshun asks us, how was I born, and we have to answer. The spider grandmother tells her; the rest of us cannot hear it. We are counting. Three thousand one, three thousand two. Which scar are you?

Mary isn't what she seems. Forget that demure look the Ghirlandaio's and Boticelli's gave her. She's a rip of a thing, a ball of light. The spider grandmother stays away from her, generally, a survival tactic. She and Isis argue over breakfast coffee. You might paint her without that pale face, that's not her. We won't talk about your other icons. God and Santa Claus? Who are you kidding?

We built houses that collapse with a flicker. We are mobile. Our books float around us in the evenings. Dinner is always take out.

Soon after we arrived, Oya got restless. There she was, traveling around exploring every crevice, our hungry tigress, her eyes looking right past us. For so long, Oya begged to go home, and none of us would go with her. Home to what? Who could leave these craters?

Now she is a slip of herself, so thin, and grown so tall, she barely notices what she has left behind. An efficient model of herself, and we have forgotten the words that please her, now she chants them to herself, over and over in the light. She is what she has left of herself before us. When you call to her, she doesn't hear you. Stop, she says, stop. And you don't stop.

That is why we came.

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Kathrine L. Wright

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