The meteorologists were always going on about some new type of natural disaster or climate oscillation. There were Snowmageddons and nor’easters and sou’westers and El Niños and La Niñas and Los Primxs. There used to be a beach we’d go to before the Earthkraken. There was the summer of the Fleur es Lava when all the tulips died. We withstood both the Bombogenesis and the Bomboexodus. The Autumn of Discontent was not so bad—I actually thought it was somewhat calm—the way all the lakes froze to rust-red and how lovely the phosphorescent snails looked beneath the bloodsicle surface. But when you remember how many children died, well, perhaps there is an argument to be made there.

It was hurricane season and I was depressed. I’m mostly always depressed, which had little to do with storm systems and more to do with the fact that I had never once in my life experienced joy or motivation beyond some basic instinct that propelled me toward “not-dying.” It was its own kind of natural disaster. Some pain pills I got for a root canal, maybe, once, got me close to euphoria. Not impassioned enough to buy plywood for the windows, or even consider filling the bathtub with water. A storm would come and I would be unprepared. Something would happen though, and I would endure, keep on.

My boyfriend was home, lying in bed, listening to NPR on the old clock radio. I was in the kitchen, feeling overwhelmed by how many spoons were in the sink, and somehow the convex silver surfaces made my sadness magnify. I held one up to the light. Was it concave? It made me feel worse that I couldn’t remember one curve from the other.

I hadn’t cooked in weeks, mainly surviving o" of individual cups of Greek yogurt, but when Strata was home I always had a new restaurant picked out from Yelp. He spent most of his time “in the field,” which also contributed to my despondency. We were both very independent people, but sometimes I just needed to sit in the same room with him, remember that we both loved each other, wanted to be near each other. In terms of caring for another living creature, humans were ambitious. I fed my one plant some leftover ice from a nearby cup as I fussed with the crusted dishes. Like pothos I could do with minimal and do my best to grow, but sometimes I needed light, even if it was artificial. Sometimes I needed to just sit across from him at a bar-top table in public at a three-and-a-half-star eatery so I could perform for the world my unaloneness.

“Can you turn off" that faucet?” my boyfriend asked, not unkindly. A meteorologist was talking, and kept saying the phrase “Moon Tempest.” I asked my boyfriend if he knew what a tempest was and he said, “a violent, windy storm,” but that didn’t quite sound right. My boyfriend was an archaeologist, which in some ways is the opposite of a meteorologist. More bone than sky. More earth than stars. More clay than air and sea.

Strata asked me if I knew what the moon was, and it felt like a trick question, so I didn’t answer. He was strewn across the bed like a ragdoll, wearing a pastel tank top I had gifted him, although for some reason it felt too cold for tank tops. Had our flimsy window unit for once decided to do its job? I suspected it was full of concentrated cat fur and would eventually catch on fire. Strata’s wrists were behind his neck, and his bushy armpits were on display, and although that’s not something that ever turned me on before, I felt it, then. I slid over to him, crawling on the bed, planking across his stomach, to make a rail-
road crossing sign with our bodies.

“What are you doing?” he said in a slightly amused voice.

“I don’t know.” I could smell the sweet-sour of his body, and then, upon realizing I could smell every aspect of our one-bedroom apartment, the other bouquets came to me. The sweet-sour of the lavender-scented trash bag hanging from the apartment door. I also smelled the linen-scented candle and the cat shit and some smell I believe belonged to no thing or no one and had just been inherited with the ancient apartment. All these perfumes of neglect.

“Sometimes I think I’m mad,” I said.

“Mad,” Strata repeated. “It’s an archaic word. Like lunatic. You know they believed the moon caused madness? Epilepsy too.”

“Everyone knows that,” I said, kissing his armpit.

It tickled him, and so he burst out laughing, and Simon came out of wherever cats come out of to investigate. That sudden apparition on the bed in a light pounce. He sniffed Strata, his human, to make sure everything was okay, and Strata petted him for reassurance.

I wiggled and wormed my way on Strata’s torso, shifting to try to pull my phone out of its tight denim catacomb.

“43% oxygen, 20% silicon, 19% magnesium, 10% iron, 3% calcium...” I listed off from my screen.

“What?”

“The moon. You asked me what it was.”

“That’s such a Strata answer,” Strata said. “I wanted a you answer.”

I thought for a second, wiggling to put my phone back in its pocket. “The moon is so many oceans. So many empty oceans haunted by the dreams of humans who dared to look up.”

I wasn’t sure that Strata was satisfied. I wasn’t sure I was even satisfied.

“I thought a tempest was like a monsoon or a tsunami,” I added.

“Those are all different things.”

“So what’s a Moon Tempest?”

A large moth fluttered across the room, and Simon began to chase it. What was the color of the moth? It hurt me not to know how to name a hue. I tried to think of an answer to tell no one. Algae on the surface of a pond. A soccer pitch. This old map of the world from my fifth-grade geography class—and the unblack blackboard—more mildew than anything. The moth landed on the glass of our tallest window that pointed up toward boundlessness, its wings blending in with the horizon off in the distance.

“The sky during a tornado,” Strata said, pointing out the window at the obvious green. I felt slightly patronized and forgot what we were talking about—what we were supposed to be talking about.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think a tornado’s coming. They didn’t sound the alarms.” The moth-green sky made me feel both calm and hungry, but never fearful. “Let’s get brunch,” I said.

*

Outside gave us a nice cold front, dipping into the seventies. It felt winter-dry despite being July, and we both had on matching hoodies the color of my one plants. We went to our brunch spot, although we had only been there three times across a span of two years. I wanted a place where someone would say heyyy (with three y’s) instead of welcome, is this your first time here? I wanted someone to remember our orders, although I could never make up my mind and Strata always picked something from the daily specials, even if the daily specials never changed.

“Kitchen’s closing at eleven, boys,” the waitress said, citing the Moon Tempest. She asked if it was our first time here. She asked us what we knew about the moon.

“Trace amounts of chromium, titanium, and manganese,” my boyfriend said.

“Maria, Maria,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if you pronounced it like horses or Julie Andrews. I said it more like the planet, or the way my mother described the disfigurement on my arm after it was caught in a wildfire as a child. “It means the seas of the moon,” I added.

“Everyone knows that,” the waitress replied.

Strata was looking at the chalkboard. “I’ll have the fried chicken benedict,” he said.

“Where will you go?” I asked the waitress. “Should we go too?”

She nodded, as if the answer to both questions was simply Yes. “Blueberry pancakes it is,” she said, turning her back to me. The ribbon of her apron was tied into moth wings.

The brunch spot was mostly empty. There was a woman drinking a mimosa alone at a bar countertop. The lack of patrons made me feel underprepared, like whenever I go to buy Gatorade or cat litter during a hurricane warning and see all the shelves cleared of water and eggs. It makes me feel like every human is connected to some cosmos except me, which may also be a side effect of what I’ve been told is an extreme chemical imbalance in my brain.

Was I misgauging the severity of things? Or was everyone else overestimating another afternoon of thunder and heavy downpour? Was this a hurricane? A tornado? What was a Moon Tempest? Did we have enough green Gatorade at home?

Our food came fast. I wanted Strata to ask me about our future, maybe even propose to me, but Strata wasn’t that type of person, so instead I ate the bacon mouth o" the pancake face in one bite. The blueberry eyes were unpleasantly warm.

“What did the broadcast say?” I asked, but Strata just shrugged.

“Aren’t all disasters just disasters,” he said. “You either live or you don’t.”

Was he always this brave? Or was he just acting defensively bratty out of fear of what might come? These were the type of things I said, but it sounded more callous out of his mouth. I thought we were both too old to embody that type of invulnerability that only children seemed to embody. Had he caught my downheartedness like a cold? I wasn’t so sure, but the comment made me feel like the entire balance of our relationship was inverted. Maybe I would propose to him instead.

The entire staff was gone by the time we finished our meal, so we just put a twenty on the table and left. I put both the salt shaker and the pepper shaker on top of it, hoping wind would not blow it away. There was a Post-it note on the front door asking us to lock up, and to make sure to put the key beneath a flower pot, the one painted with wizards and moths.

Strata didn’t say anything about the seven McDonald's bags on the passenger-side floor of my Civic. He never did. It was afternoon, but the sky looked like twilight. He rolled the windows down and no people, no cars, were around. The car thermometer said it was in the sixties now. It felt like fall and I somehow tricked my body into getting excited over pumpkin-carvings and spiced lattes, but I knew we still had a few more months to go, and felt sad, suddenly dreaming of Halloween. We passed a costume shop on the way home and there was a wizard costume in the window. I had never noticed the shop before. I wondered if it was open year-round. Parked in front of it during the red light, I focused on the green-glow crescent moons patterning the robe. Like algae. Like leaves. Like tornadoes descending upon a map of the world. Like a state in a country in a map of the world, where only two lovers endured.

The radio said the Moon Tempest would only be hitting our state, and that everyone was on the interstates, the state roads. It seemed presumptuous to say everyone when we had not evacuated. We were not part of the cosmos too? The radio stated everything would be backed up until nightfall, but they
predicted everyone would get out in time. Everyone who evacuated would survive the Moon Tempest. It was the implication of being left in that made something inside my stomach turn.

Our phones vibrated at the same time. Weather alerts. From the sky came the carmine of blinking lights, sirens on loop. The origins could not be seen or heard, but the redness and noise touched everything.

“Perhaps it’s better we stayed,” Strata said. I noticed him looking at the yellow icon of the gas can on my dashboard. I hadn’t even realized, but I could feel the judgment in his eyes. When was the last time I stopped to fill up?

“Right,” I said. “That.” It’s not that I didn’t have the money, despite my rocky employment record. It’s more like that some days even those simple tasks feel impossible too.

*

At home, I googled. There were charts of Moon Bunkers around town, mostly built beneath high schools or haunted plant nurseries. I felt a little annoyed at Strata and expressed this out loud. “You should have known about anything underground.”

“We can still go underground if you like,” Strata said from the mattress, but instead I crawled up next to him, burying my nose in his armpit. Simon was curled on our bureau o" to the side, looking like a soccer ball. Every year they said a hurricane would hit us, and every year it narrowly missed us. This was more luck than anything, but I made it into precedent in my mind. If I told myself there were rules to this universe, I could remain calm. I felt like a yogi or a monk as I managed to convert the blaring sirens to white noise in my ears.

I felt sad about the brunch spot—how nobody knew our names—our favorite orders. I wondered how many people got in cars. How many people, at the very moment, were sitting in cars. Sitting in cars with their significant others and children and pets listening to mixtapes and playing Game Boys in the backseat. There was something so cozy about being next to the one you love during a disaster. What about people who didn’t own cars? Did they go to the Moon Bunkers? Sleep next to their lovers beneath foil blankets? I was worried more about unknowable strangers than myself. Everyone else was gone. It felt like we were the only ones who failed to act, the only ones left in the state as a Moon Tempest prepared to descend like cosmic soccer balls.

I googled some more. Apparently, you could be considerably safer if, while deciding to stay home during a Moon Tempest, you closed all your windows, boarded them with aluminum foil, and never, ever looked directly at the moon.

Simon coughed. Something that looked like a regurgitated Tootsie Roll slid down the side of the bureau towards the $oor. A loose green thing attached to the vomit: what remained of wings.

Strata ate dark chocolate. It looked like the earth. “Manganese,” he said. “Like the moon.” I wasn’t sure if chocolate contained manganese, but I was too busy frantically searching through kitchen drawers for aluminum foil to care. I passed my hand over an old knife that I mainly used to open Amazon packages and thought about shoving it in my body for a second, but I became quite self-conscious that I didn’t know the best place to shove a knife into my body, so mostly I felt like crying, but I didn’t want to cry in front of Simon, as cats remember those types of things, so I began to wash a spoon instead. We were out of aluminum, and I was finally starting to feel self-conscious that the cat was judging me for my inability to act as a normal functioning adult. Were our spoons made out of aluminum? Could we duct-tape them to the windows?

“What do you need?” my boyfriend cooed, perhaps finally noticing the calamity of me.

“Something like the surface of a moon,” I said, sounding more cryptic than I meant to.

“Okay,” he said. “But if we’re going to the store, maybe we can get gas, and if we get gas, maybe we can go to a shelter or another state.” He came over behind me as I scrubbed a glass crusted over with matcha and milk, resting his chin over my shoulder. “I was just trying to do what was the least stressful activity for you, but even if nothing ends up happening I do think trying to escape is better than awaiting disaster,” he whispered into my ear. I both liked this call to action and the ASMR of his soft voice. This was the version of him I loved: the one who showed a little bit of fear. The one who moved toward alertness in the green face of disaster. The one who would save me from my worst self again and again and again.

It was probably too late to get to another state, but at least my boyfriend was throwing me a bone, which was appropriate, as he was an archaeologist.

Strata put Simon in his Simon carrier and placed him in the back seat. He moved the empty brown bags to the trashcan in our driveway so he could have more leg room in the passenger seat. He packed three peanut butter and sea jelly sandwiches. The sky outside had moved from twilight to purple-pitch. The moon was already revealing itself. Was it always out like this? Was there some type of eclipse going on? Syzygy? Occultation of celestial bodies? I didn’t quite know what those words meant. I didn’t quite know anything. For a second, I wished I had dated a meteorologist instead. The moon, a stranger, was out, and I didn’t like it. Its texture looked different, like a soccer ball, or else the eyeball of some winged insect. Covered in thousands of little lenses or hexagons. It felt like winter now. My hoodie wasn’t enough. It was in the thirties. I could see my breath and whatever dream I had inside me for October felt dead.

We drove toward the gas station, which was only five blocks from the apartment. Around the third block, my car ran out of gas and Strata said to take my foot off the brake, so we let the car coast softly through the ghost streets. No people. No sound. Only air and earth and sky. We were in the middle of a densely populated area—yes—that was true, but there were no other gas stations around for miles. I only hit the brake when we had finally rolled up in front of a pump.

I would go to this station sometimes to get a Snickers or a scratch-off or to buy Meow Mix for Simon when I forgot that we were out of cat food. The week before last, though, the gas station itself—at least the convenience store portion—had burned down. It was just a charcoal husk. An inconvenience. There’s a two-star Yelp-reviewed diner down the street where I overheard rumors of an attendant falling asleep in the storage closet with a cigarette in his mouth. I had read the obituaries, looking for a name that reminded me of gas stations, but found none.

Although the building was gone, four gas pumps stood tall, off in the distance on the concrete, their digital screens glowing clock-radio red. I was feeling anxious, and when I slipped in my credit card, the screen asked me so many questions. Zip code. Last four digits of social. First pet. First crush. Birthday. Death day. The name of my cat. I couldn’t figure out how to spell letters into a number pad, so I whispered, “Simon,” into the credit card slot, adding, “Although he’s not really mine.”

An error came up on the screen. It said to see an attendant inside. There was no attendant because there was no inside. I stared at the burnt-down cement shell of what had been a Shell. I thought about all those incinerated Twizzlers and Funyuns. I just needed to get us some gas. I just needed to finish washing the spoons, act like a functioning adult. I just needed to become someone that Strata could love more than he pitied. I needed to update my resume and go to JOANN Fabrics and buy something to make curtains out of, just like I had promised sixteen months ago. I would cover that tallest window, and the world would be mine.

“Fuck,” I said quietly, but Strata was already turning to me behind the glass, rolling the window down, as if on cue.

“What’s wrong?”

“Madness overtaketh me.” I tried to be cute, when all I wanted to do was sit down on the curb and cry. “Do you have a credit card?”

“You know I only carry cash,” he said. I did know this, but I had forgotten, as I often do in a panic. I started quietly singing the word “cortisol” to the tune of the Spiderman theme song. Cort-i-sol, Cort-i-sol.

A lunar moth landed on the gas handle. It looked like an arrow pointing up, or else the glans of Strata’s penis. I cocked my head, marveling at the sky. The cover of the gas station had rusted and rotted out in a circle, and I had a green view of everything. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope, or that time Strata and I micro-dosed some acid in the bathtub. We had held each other in that warm water, staring up at the popcorn ceiling, agreeing the white texture had a strictly angelic presence as the patterns danced before us.

The sky was so much more. It was more expansive than expansive; the celestial bodies were vibrating; stars were magnifying, zooming in and out. Like Play-Doh, they were all pushing themselves through the rust-hole in the gas station overhang at once. Touching me. Touching me in the way I loved. Fibers and icicles. There were moths everywhere. This was the only sign of life besides two young men and a cat. We were the only two people left in this state, and this was the state of our affairs. The moon was growing larger, unraveling itself like a ribbon.

“We should go,” Strata said, suddenly beside me. “I found an abandoned cannister and gassed up,” he added. “It should be enough.” His fingers brushed the concave spoon of my palm.

“Enough?” I asked. Time felt different. “No, stay,” I said, but I was no longer sure who or what I was talking to. Was I alone—a single satellite rotating around nothing?

Simon meowed somewhere in the background. A faint jingle played, like a radio commercial from my childhood, or else a music box I once owned. A forgotten theme song from some cartoon only survived by VHS bootlegs. Simon’s voice traveled toward me from low gravity, then moved farther away. My skin felt on fire: the window unit finally set aflame. Parts of me felt somehow pastel. The softest shade of green.

Something squeezed my palm. The gas station overhang was gone. My eyes were focused on the sky. There was nothing that was not moon. In the distance, the sound of an engine kicked back on, something moving again. Wheels. Soccer balls. Hexagons. The infiniteness of a lunar moth’s eye. The smell of burnt rubber. My freezer-burnt skin. All around me the heavens began to move at such a speed, alien and dark.