The Second Moon

The second moon rose at the end of the crush, when the air smelled of burnt sugar and the cane fires had painted the sky orange for a week.

Tom saw it first. He was nine and should have been asleep, but the heat had driven him out onto the verandah, and there it was: hanging low over the eastern paddocks, smaller than the real moon, paler, the colour of milk in a glass. It did not shine so much as glow, as if lit from somewhere inside.

He woke his sister. She saw it too. Their parents, called out in their pyjamas, stood on the verandah and looked straight at it and saw nothing but the ordinary dark.

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By the end of the week, every child in the district could see it. They compared notes at the bus stop. It was bigger now. It had moved, a little, from the paddocks to above the mill. Some of the older kids claimed they could make out markings on it, faint grey lines like the creases in a palm.

The adults grew uneasy, the way adults do when children agree too completely on something. There was a meeting at the hall. A doctor came out from town. Nobody could find anything wrong with anyone.

At night, the children lay awake and watched it come.

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On the ninth night, it was close enough to hear.

Tom heard it first, again. A sound like a held note on a church organ, so low it was mostly in his chest. He went out barefoot into the cut paddock, stubble scratching his feet, and stood with his face turned up, and the second moon filled half the sky above him, close enough now that he could see it was not a moon at all.

It was an eye. Vast and pale and very gentle. Looking down at the cane country the way you’d look at something small and precious you had been searching for a long time.

It blinked once, slowly.

Then it was gone, and the sky was only sky, and the real moon was setting over the mill as if nothing had happened at all.

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The children stopped talking about it after that. They grew up. Most of them forgot, or decided they had.

Tom didn’t. Every harvest, when the air turns sweet and smoky, he goes out into the paddocks at night and looks east. He isn’t afraid. He only wants to be there if it comes back, so that whatever was searching will know that someone, at least, was waiting to be found.