Free Borrowed Light by Anna Fienberg

regular. This family needs a bit more order in it.’ She sighed, and shrugged her shoulders. ‘But try telling any of that to Caroline …’
    I glanced back at the wire door. It had stopped swinging,but I could feel a presence, ‘a spirit’, as Caroline would say, that was as strong as my mother’s real flesh. Clinging in the gaps of the wire was another Caroline, almost speechless, hardly there. I could just catch her outline if I joined the dots of her words, rough in the soft night air.
    Ruth and I looked back at the moon. It was round and full tonight, a circle of silver. Grandma breathed out with pleasure, and smiled. ‘The Greek philosopher Plato said that the sphere is the most perfect geometric shape because it contains the largest possible volume within a given surface area.’
    I gazed at perfection. It was a relief. I agreed with Plato.
    Grandma gave a sudden chuckle. ‘Did you hear the one about getting fat? Well, a scientist once said that you shouldn’t worry about becoming rotund, because it means you’re approaching a more perfect shape!’ And she patted the gentle hill of her stomach. For someone who was so taken by the skies, she didn’t look very ephemeral. Her two legs were planted firmly on the grass, as solid as tree trunks. Only her hair looked a little wild, the way it sprang out of its pins as if pulled furiously by some invisible alien force.
    I grinned politely at her joke. But I didn’t want to think about human flesh right now. I wanted to stay on the moon. It was like watching a movie that you never wanted to end. Up there, I’d have a different address, different parents. They’d be powerful and perfect, without flesh or gravity. Tomorrow night I’d point my telescope at the moon, and have a good look at it. I’d fly toward that cool shining place, unstained by earthly words or mysteries of feeling. I knew that no matter how long I looked, no matter what storms or explosions occurred around it, the moon would remain itself, untouched.
    And that was something to rely on.
    We drew the black canvas over the Eye of the Universe, and walked back into the sleeping house together.
    It was years later that I remembered my mother’s words that night.
Your grandmother always spent more time looking at the sky than she did at me.
When I found her diary, and sneaked into her bedroom to read it, that remark was like a footnote, helping me to make sense of things.
    Y OU NEEDED FOOTNOTES , or maybe ‘A Guide to the Living Dead’, if you wanted to understand my mother. She told me once I was just young and cynical, and if I focused on my spiritual life, I’d understand. I told her that if she thinks
I’m
cynical, she should meet old Caligula. I got the dead bird gaze, so I quit.
    Luckily, I had my own language. When I was fifteen, I decided that Caroline was made up of dark matter. She was no longer a moon. The particles of her skin and heart were derived from foreign substances which were unable to absorb or emit light. She held up a shadow to the world.
    On the Friday night following my discovery at the doctor’s, I decided not to go out. I felt so sick. Just the thought of green ginger wine could make me vomit. I remembered when we were kids we’d sometimes chant
greasy pork chops
fifty times, and see if it would make anyone throw up. The nausea was worse at night, strangely enough. Weren’t you supposed to have morning sickness? It figured, though—of course I’d be different from most women, wouldn’t I.
    The other reason I didn’t go out was that, if a quiet moment came, I thought I might tell my mother. It was only a strand of a thought, but the urge to tell someone was becoming overwhelming. The roar of the undertow was deafening,
What will I do? What will I do?
and I wanted someone else to hear it, this awful thing, and tell me everything would be all right.
    But Mum had a friend