Melania and the moon that needs no full face

A literary legend written for Ask the Signs. The witches are fictional and nothing in the story predicts a future.

Natalka asked when it would finally get easier. Melania said the cards do not answer the question when, only how, and took her up onto the roof.

In Konotop they said the witches there read cards better than anyone, and Melania read them only after dark. She lived in an old windmill behind the pond, where the sails had long stopped turning, but right at the top there was a little window that opened straight onto the sky. She slept by day, ate pears at any hour, and for forty years kept a notebook in which she wrote down, every night, what the moon looked like. There were so many notebooks by now that they stood on the stairs like a second banister.

She was ironic and quiet, and when she laughed she did it without sound, with her shoulders only. The children of the town were a little afraid of her, but only until one of them crept into the windmill and came away with a pear and a short lecture on why the moon always shows us the same side. "Because it is shy," said Melania. "And because that is comfortable for it. Everyone is entitled to one side they do not show."

Natalka came in October, late in the evening, with a basket of unfinished shirts on her arm, because she had nobody to leave them with. She was a seamstress and the mother of two, sewing by day for a shop and by night for neighbors, and for months she had been sleeping four hours a night. Under her eyes she had shadows the color of plums. She sat down on the stairs between the notebooks and asked one thing, without preamble: "When will it finally get easier?"

Melania did not answer at once. She peeled a pear, gave Natalka half, and then laid three cards out on the chest, by a candle shielded with glass. The first was the Moon: a pale disc with a face, a dog and a wolf howling at it, a crayfish crawling out of the water and a path disappearing between two towers. "Fog," said Melania. "Fears that are bigger at night than by day. Tiredness turns a cat into a tiger and a bill for firewood into a verdict. This card does not say things are bad. It says you cannot see the road because it is dark, not because there is no road."

The second was the Four of Swords: a knight lying at full length on a stone tomb in a chapel, hands folded, three swords hanging on the wall above him and a fourth beneath him. "He is not dead," Melania said, before Natalka could be frightened. "He is resting. This is the only card in the whole deck that tells a knight to lie down. A knight, do you understand? One in armor. And you think you are not allowed." The third was the Queen of Pentacles: a woman on a throne in a garden full of roses, a rabbit at her feet, holding a gold coin in her lap the way someone holds a kitten. "Care. Plenty. But look, she is sitting. She is not running around the garden with a watering can. She sits, and the garden grows."

"I asked when," said Natalka, a little irritated, the way very tired people are. "You are asking when," agreed Melania, "and the cards answer how. That is their habit. Come." And she led her up the creaking stairs to the very top of the windmill, to the little window that opened onto a small wooden platform. Over the pond hung a thin crescent, barely a fingernail of light. "So skinny," sighed Natalka. "Skinny," agreed Melania. "And tell me, does anyone down there shout at it that it is not trying hard enough?"

Then she brought one of her notebooks and showed Natalka columns of drawings: crescent, quarter, almost full, full, waning again, down to the black circle of the new moon, and then from the beginning. Forty years of drawings. "The full moon lasts one night," said Melania. "One. The rest of the month the moon is growing or shrinking, and for several nights you cannot see it at all. And in all those centuries nobody has ever said there is too little of it. You want to be full every day, Natalka. Even the moon cannot do that."

Natalka began to cry, quietly, into her sleeve, the way people cry who have not cried in a long time. Melania did not comfort her with words. She sat beside her and peeled a second pear. When Natalka had calmed down, Melania gave her a task: once a week, on Thursday evening, she was to be a new moon. Nothing sewn, nothing cleaned, no promises made to anyone. Just a dark, quiet circle in the sky that nobody had to look at. "And the shirts?" asked Natalka. "The shirts will wait. Shirts are patient. I know, I have talked to them."

Natalka did not believe it would work, and she was partly right: on the first Thursday she started darning socks instead of resting. But Melania had expected that too. The next day she stopped Natalka's children in the street, gave them each a pear, and announced with a stone face that the moon had personally requested their mother be left alone for one evening a week. The children believed her. Children usually do.

Did it get easier at once? No. The bills still came, the shirts still waited. But in Konotop they say that after a few months Natalka began sewing more slowly and better, that she raised her prices because she finally saw what her work was worth, and that the neighbors paid without arguing. They say the shadows under her eyes changed color from plum to ordinary human. And that Thursdays in her house were called new moon from then on, even when the sky was full.

Melania wrote the story into her notebook, between the drawing of the crescent and the quarter, in one sentence in her small handwriting: "Natalka learned that rest is part of the cycle, not its failure." When someone still asks her when it will finally get easier, Melania answers the same way she always did. "You are asking when. I can only tell you how."

The moon is not full every night and nobody calls that a failure. Rest is part of the cycle.

Cards from this story

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