Carmine was one of the only people Selene interacted with, since the houses in Eidolon were few and far between. The two neighbors saw each other infrequently. They only met to walk together to The Traveling Market, which stopped by Eidolon for a few days each month during the waxing gibbous phase of the moon. The prosperous merchants and fishmongers of the market always dispersed before the full moon arrived, but smaller, lesser-known vendors tended to linger in the town square during the full moon and offer their wares for substantial discounts. At this time, Selene picked up things for Carmine. In return, Carmine taught Selene how to cultivate a garden and care for various wild beasts. Selene felt indebted to Carmine for teaching her the ways of agronomy and animal husbandry, and as a consequence was happy to do any favors Carmine requested.
Just yesterday Carmine had assigned herself and Selene two errands: Selene was to visit the market (it was that time of the month when The Traveling Market was in town) to buy Carmine a bag of red onions and a pack of smoked salmon, and Carmine was to head to the apothecary for urgent business.
The apothecary’s shop was on the corner of the street bordering the town square, its brick facade enveloped by wisteria vines that had grown out of control. The shop specialized in tinctures advertised to rejuvenate the spirits of ruminants, which were prone to infrequent yet severe bouts of listlessness. Carmine’s ibex had come down with depression and had not recovered within a week. Being a worrywart she had to address the issue by doing anything at all, even if it meant wasting money on tinctures from a quack.
The doorbell rang as she swung open the door.
“Hello, welcome in,” said the lady at the counter. Behind the counter was arrayed hundreds of wooden shelves laden with glassware, inside of which all manner of organic matter festered in preservative fluids. Variegated eyeballs large and small stared through mildewy jars, and entrails so far decomposed they resembled charred meat perched in a display at the front of the shop.
Carmine made a perfunctory once-over at one of the cabinets, then went up to the lady at the counter. She disliked talking to the employees, but this time she couldn’t avoid it.
“Is there anything I can help you with today?” the lady said.
“Yes, uh, do you have anything for ibexes?” Carmine asked.
“I believe so, let me check.” The lady ducked down to type something on her computer. “Would that be Alpine or Western ibex?”
“Alpine.”
“Ah, Alpine . . . and how long have symptoms lasted?”
“Since the waxing crescent.”
“Good, not very long. I have an over-the-counter anti-depressant for Alpine ibexes available on aisle 3 for you.”
“Oh.”
“If you’ll follow me.” The lady wheeled out of the little counter booth and walked to a narrow corridor flanked by adjoining walnut cabinets.
Carmine followed dutifully, yawning. She didn’t get much sleep. On Sundays Carmine usually slept in until noon, but today she woke up early with a chill, her sheets damp from sweat. She turned over multiple times and squeezed her eyes shut tightly, but her nerves wouldn’t let her fall back asleep. She couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out what she was so tense about. Sometimes she just felt like that — nervous for no reason. Another annoyance standing in the way of unconsciousness was that infernal mockingbird outside her window. It had made a shrieking racket all morning, as if it was affected by the tumultuous state of her mind.
“Here we are,” the apothecary employee said as she produced a small flask from the bottom shelf and held it up to Carmine. “I believe this is what you’re looking for.”
Carmine accepted the flask without examining the label. “Thanks.”
The lady beamed. “Of course. It’s wise of you to address this sort of issue early, before they escalate beyond a full moon’s turn.”
Carmine nodded and paid for the tincture, sighing with relief as she exited the apothecary’s shop. The lady’s unaffected friendliness made her feel ashamed of her inability to reciprocate.
Carmine went to Selene’s place for lunch. They used the ingredients Selene had procured at the market. Selene prepared coffee while Carmine served up two plates of lox sandwiches.
“You know what exhausts me?” Selene said, munching on her sandwich. “Talking to people who don’t want to talk to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Went into town on Friday night to meet some old friends. Most of them lost interest in what I was saying at one point or another and I could see their attention deviating, trying to find a new conversation partner after the customary ‘listening’ period was up.”
Carmine made a sympathetic noise. “Oh, I know how that feels. When you spend time with people who don’t bother to be attentive, you end up feeling empty. And it makes you realize, or even reminds you, that being alone is much better.”
Selene sipped from her coffee mug. “I’ve always enjoyed my own company. Do you prefer being alone?”
“I used to . . . but I realized very recently, over the past couple of months, that I can’t bear to be alone, and I hate it because all my life I was fine with it. I thoroughly enjoyed my own company, just caring for my goats and tending to the soil, but lately I stopped feeling satisfied by this routine.”
“I think I get it. You need something to break up the monotony. Is that why you started hanging out with me?” Selene asked with a smirk.
Carmine swallowed a bite of her sandwich and laughed. “I guess so.”
“If you’re secure with yourself, you won’t mind being with other people,” Selene said. “Your friends, your family, your partner; people who love you, hate you, or envy you will all interpret your words and actions differently — as a reflection of their internal state. A happy person will interpret the same thing very differently from an unhappy person. If you keep in mind that interpretation is a form of projection, you can prevent your self image from being fractured by different opinions. So, if what you say and do is essentially good and you have pure or morally good intentions, then no matter how different people interpret your actions, you can still be secure with yourself.“
“I still have to figure out how to become someone that I’m secure with. I don’t want to be a farmer anymore.”
Selene shook her head. “But I like the version of you now.”
Carmine smiled wistfully. “You say that like it’s so easy.” She slid her plate with a half-finished sandwich across to Selene. It made a scraping noise on the teak tabletop. “Wanna finish mine?”
“Okay.” Selene placed Carmine’s sandwich onto her own plate.
Suddenly remembering something, Carmine perked up and exclaimed, “Hey, the other day I went to my favorite place: the secret waterfall I told you about! I noticed that I’ve been dedicating all my free time to my goats, so I decided to head over there for a change of pace and it was so wonderful. I felt perfectly fine being alone. I missed that feeling so much, being able to not feel overwhelmed by my own company.”
“Can we visit it together later?” Selene asked.
“Sure!” Carmine said.
“Were you able to find the medicine?”
“Medicine?”
“For your ibex.”
“Oh yes, I got it. Oh, and thanks for getting the stuff for me.”
“Don’t mention it.”
~
Selene dreamed that she was standing alone on a flat plain. She was looking at a starless night sky. The full moon had risen to its zenith. It wasn’t its normal color, white. It was a ghastly crimson, resembling a sphere of fresh blood. Time sped up, and many hours passed in the span of a single second. This was revealed by the movement of the red moon, which made its round through the heavens until it dipped below the western horizon, but at the moment when dawn should have arrived, the sky turned back to darkness, and the red moon peeked over the eastern horizon and rose again. This cycle repeated countless times. The process began to accelerate, so that by the end of the vision the moon was whizzing by faster than the eye could see. In total, it probably rose and set over a thousand times in one night.
~
I am constantly improving the little things, Selene thought. If she lived in this house for one more year, would she fine-tune her routine even more? If she looked back on this moment, would she scoff at how primitively she used to conduct her affairs?
Drip. Drip. Drip.
At this very moment, she was studying her reflection in the bathroom mirror. For some reason, a dry spot had formed near her chin, below the corner of her mouth. She rubbed the spot gingerly, examining the area in the mirror, but found no blemish. There was nothing there. Yet it felt as dry as sandpaper. Puzzling.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Yup, the dry patch was invisible. Fragments of the conversation she had with Carmine yesterday flitted through her brain. She had been surprised by Carmine revealing her insecurities, which resonated with her own, although she had never had the courage to talk about them so unabashedly the way Carmine did.
Thoughts of the new day’s work bubbled to the forefront of Selene’s mind. Her computer was open on her desk, calling out to her. She sighed, put her toothbrush away, and wiped down the counter with a washcloth.
Why is it that I always get an urge to be productive when I’m busy doing some mundane task?
Drip. Drip. Drip.
As she turned to leave the bathroom she became aware of the sound of a persistent, dripping faucet. She could have sworn she pressed the shower knob down completely. She went back to the shower. A tiny trickle of water was coming out of the bathtub faucet. She pressed down on the shower knob hard. It gave. The trickle stopped.
Good thing I caught that before going out.
Selene tossed her computer into a tote. She visualized the sequence she had been programming last week. The implementation was simple, but it was difficult to unit test. The dependency injection framework seemed to do its job only half the time. Maybe she was using the wrong annotations.
She strode down the hallway to the foyer, phone in hand, playing her new hyperfixation, a sliding tile game. Slide two Deep Evergreens together. Combine into a Mountain Forest. Rotate front face right once, left face up twice, and front face left once.
Selene was putting her phone down to slip on her shoes when an ear-shattering boom sounded outside. A rumbling noise followed, then abrupt silence.
Selene froze, hand poised above her phone, as a sense of unease crept over her. The room had become dim in the span of a millisecond. The windows grew black, but interrupting the blackness at regular intervals were brief flashes of turquoise. Rich indigo shadows spread through the kitchen, dining room, and living room. It was mid-morning, yet her room had grown as dark as midnight. There was no way it could be dark, not this dark, at ten thirty in the morning. This wasn’t some passing storm. Was it a solar eclipse? The darkness was viscous and turbulent, with a looming, unconscionable weight that threatened to suffocate her.
Selene could see a thin strip of light periodically appearing and disappearing near the top slit of the window in the living room. Accompanying it was a wet slap each time the light disappeared. She felt a rocking motion, as if she were standing on the deck of a large ship.
Eventually the realization dawned on her that her house was almost completely submerged in water. Waves lapped up the sides of the house, and as they moved up and down, they allowed brief glimmers of sunlight to peek through the top sections of her windows.
Selene swiped up on her phone screen to close the game she was playing. She tiptoed to the door and went up to the peep hole slowly, as if she thought sudden movements would cause the house to capsize. The peep hole’s view showed nothing but an inky abyss on the other side of the door.
She was trapped. If she opened the doors or windows, the room would quickly flood. She could stay inside for now, but she felt a claustrophobic urge to leave immediately.
I didn’t expect our town to flood this early, Selene mourned. Eidolon was situated on a flat plain by the coast. To the east was a mountain range and to the west, an ocean where the sea level rose ten meters a year. As a result, many fishing towns north of Eidolon already lay underwater. The royal officers sent notices to evacuate almost once a fortnight for townspeople in the cities to the north.
Selene huffed, trying not to panic. There must be a way to get out. She needed to get above the water. She would figure something out from there. Yes, there was a way to get out. The skylight in her bathroom. She could wrench the skylight’s glass pane open and climb onto the roof of her house. She thought about her work again, and her computer. The poor thing, all alone. It would be left in a bag on the floor of her foyer, abandoned. She considered taking it with her but decided against it. There was no point now.
Once Selene made it onto the roof, she could see all around her house. She was in the middle of a vast sea. She couldn’t tell, but after the initial flood, the water level had continued to rise. The birch saplings by her house were gone, deep underwater. She wondered what happened to Carmine and the rest of her neighbors. Their houses were nowhere to be seen.
She tilted her head up. A twinkle in the sky had caught her eye. It grew bigger and bigger until it resolved into the shape of a train, chugging along steadily and directly toward her.
The train had no tracks, and was simply moving downward from high up in the sky and curving slightly to the left toward Selene. She had to squint because the sun shone in her eyes when she tried to look at it more closely. As it approached, the odor of engine steam wafted into her nose, and the shouts of the passengers broke the constant splash of breaking waves.
“Get in!” the conductor barked. “We’re evacuating this district.”
Selene exhaled in relief. She stepped gingerly up onto the caboose, joining the other people who had been rescued from the deluge and were now without a home. She didn’t recognize any of them. As she stared at the unfamiliar faces, she imagined that they were all masks, smiling at each other. After a while, every smiling mask’s joyful expression transformed into a grotesque frown, mouth drooping.
Selene turned around and bid goodbye to her home below, where she had lived for over three years. For a second, grief struck her, and images of mellow days flitted through her mind.
Hanging up linens on the clothesline, writing letters on yellowed parchment, and joining work meetings in her backyard meadow. Sunbathing in the birch groves, abounding with buttercups and dewy-bladed grasses. Carmine featured prominently in many of her nostalgic memories. Selene grieved for her home and her routine. Then, just as suddenly, the emotion passed, and a numb acquiescence settled over her heart. The train started flying upward. Selene’s house receded into a pitifully tiny island bobbing in the ocean. “Do you know if there’s a passenger named Carmine on this train?” she asked, but the conductor was gone. She walked deeper into the train car to find her friend.
The interior of the train cars were beautifully furnished, and sparsely populated. Most were not Eidolon residents. They were probably townspeople from further up the coast.
The train traveled for thirty leagues south until it arrived at the royal palace, curving downward onto the rooftop next to the serving quarters’ turrets. There was a small patch of greenery on the roof, upon which the train alighted. A flank of royal guards marched down the greenway, brandishing signs that said “THE MOON HAS BEEN THROWN OUT OF ALIGNMENT.”
