The Moon
BOOM, BITCH! Didn’t know I write short stories, did you? Well here’s the first of…not many, though I have found a reason to write more of them. I got this from the WritingPrompts subreddit:
“You wake up in the middle of the night with a very ominous, anonymous warning that insists on not looking at the moon, but you also have dozens upon dozens of messages from people you know saying ‘The moon looks so beautiful tonight, go outside and look!’”
Alright, let’s boogie.
I awoke to a buzzing near my head. The persistent buzzing developed into a bit of a rattle as I became more aware. Through the darkness, I instinctively reached for my phone sitting on my bedside table where I usually placed it before going to sleep. It was face down, so my hand had to grope in the black for a moment before my fingers found the textured case on the smooth wood. I picked it up and squinted as the screen lit up and burned my sleepy eyes. The blur my eyelids caused made the notifications impossible to read, so I rubbed them to try and induce clarity.
It's not unusual to wake up to a few messages or something, but to have over 100 messages (and more coming in by the second) was definitely unusual. “What the hell could be going on at 1:36am?” I said grumpily to no one as I sat up. I couldn’t make sense of the first few notifications, so I strolled up to the first notification and it made my heart drop: “DO NOT LOOK AT THE MOON”. The question of what all the other messages suggesting I look at the moon might have meant now felt like they may have a duplicitous edge, despite being from friends and usually innocuous brand accounts on social media. Most unusual of the warning message was that I couldn’t tell where it came from. It wasn’t from any app on my phone and it wasn’t from a phone number – not that it was a phone number I didn’t recognize, there was no source whatsoever. To add more strangeness to an already ominous situation, the flood of notifications I was sifting through were all worded the same: “The moon looks so beautiful tonight, go outside and look!”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I gave up looking through the messages for one that wasn’t like the others. My parents, my siblings, my friends, the random people I exchanged numbers with at the pub a few months ago and haven’t spoken to since – everyone sent me the exact same message with the exact same words and even at the exact same times down to the second. This couldn’t be possible. Even emergency broadcasts sent to mobile devices on the same networks and households don’t arrive simultaneously like that. My curiosity was mounting, but there was an ominous sense of foreboding that I couldn’t dismiss.
The buzzing of my phone was getting annoying as messages telling me to go outside kept pouring in in waves. Trusted though the senders may have been, the synchronicity of their arrival was deeply unsettling. The temptation to go outside and see what was going on was mounting, but something primal in the back of my mind was screaming not to do it. Logic insisted that that paranoia was nothing more than just that, how could the moon be dangerous? What could a celestial body, a natural satellite do that would cause such a strange technological phenomenon?
I walked to my front door, considerably more nervous than I had thought I’d be. My hand was shaking as I reached for the antiqued brass doorknob. This was ridiculous! Why was my hand quivering? I chuckled nervously as I tried to shake the anxiety out of my body with little success. I tried to talk myself into bravery, “It’s all in your head; the moon can’t hurt people. Open the door and see nothing is wrong for yourself; nothing will be off when you look outside”. The part I didn’t say aloud to myself, “but don’t look at the moon”, didn’t escape my lips. The seed of fear was already planted and growing, I didn’t need to water it any further.
The door’s hinges creaked slightly as I slowly opened it, being greeted by the dark of night. A pale glow from above, the moon, made seeing a bit easier, but the streetlamps weren’t on for some reason. Still, the moonlight made it easy to see there were people laying on the ground facing upward up and down the entire street, although I couldn’t discern who they were. Peering around the door frame to my left and right, the same image met my eyes: people laying face up in the random places.
It took every ounce of my will to keep from looking up as I walked towards the nearest person, my feet scuffling through the fallen leaves on the ground. Apprehension grew in the pit of my stomach as I drew nearer to the prone figure, my eyes never leaving the eerily still body. With each passing step, the fear in my stomach reached its tendrils throughout my body until it almost paralyzed me. My breath caught in my throat as I quickened my pace to the fallen person just in front of me.
At the moment my eyes saw the prone body’s face, I fell backwards in shock. The face was disfigured, contorted in a scream that persisted through death despite the stillness of both the air and the person. What could have done this? That invasive thoughts came to the forefront of my mind: is this what the moon was doing to people? But if this is what happened how was everyone texting me to come out and look? Surveying the body, there weren’t any signs of distress of any kind, not that I was entirely sure what to look for anyway.
Before my better senses could stop me, I looked over my shoulder, up at the moon, and felt my heart drop to the floor. Why did I look?! An excruciating cutting sensation tore through my eyes into my brain. I swiped at my face trying to remove whatever it was that was causing this unimaginable pain to me, but there was nothing physically there save the agony of a jagged poker being jammed into my brain through my eye. I was pulled onto my feet by some unseen force, my throat raw and burning from screaming. After what felt like hours, ages, the unseen poker was ripped from my head. I felt myself falling backwards, but the sweet relief of nothingness took me before I hit the ground.
