“Must Have Been Moonglow” • by Jeanne Van Slyke ~ Stupefying Stories Magazine

Darla walked out onto the deck late at night. The lake was just below, but she couldn’t see the water.

It wasn’t fog, rain, or ice that covered the water, but phosphorescent outlines of every lily pad, frog, or insect that grazed the surface. It was like nature had sprinkled too much glitter everywhere. The niggling kind of glitter you find six months after you put away the Christmas decorations. Even the swampy tamarack trees and water hyacinths shimmered in the night.

Darkness.

That was just it, there was no more darkness, my old friend. The only way Darla knew it was night was by her wind-up clock that she dared not let go unwound. She was glad she could remember what it was like to see the stars in the clear night sky, and the phases of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun. Nature was Darla’s jukebox—birds, crickets, bullfrogs singing in chorus. She’d spent her entire life tracking the lives on this lake, deep in the middle of Quetico. She could read her journals, close her eyes, and remember the image of the moon rising pink—changing with the elements sifting through the air on a given day-into-night.

Gone were the gentle sunrises that turn to glare, and the slow sunsets that calmed the day.

It was always bright as day, with too much glittering reflection shimmering from every surface of every thing. Unnatural as hell. Darla had never cared for disco, but now the whole world was a mirrored ball.

She could see the zig-zag tracks of lake birds that tried to traverse the water, bravely seeking breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Every living being’s circadian rhythm was lost as it attempted to live through the fallout that coated the world. Every meal could be breakfast, or the last.

Darla journaled every day, wearing dark glasses to see the page. The phosphorescent fallout of the Moon’s explosion had left no surface uncovered by its toxic glitter. Writing with her fountain pen, she heard the scratching across the page and realized the nib was wearing down from the friction of the added texture. She looked at the pen in disbelief, but was glad she had several more fountain pens, nibs, and inks. These were an artsy pleasure for her. Even if she wasn’t the best writer, she felt like it, by virtue of writing with a fountain pen.

Fallout. She decided to journal more about it, since she felt slightly guilty for living so far away from civilization. Quetico was a vast unspoiled wetland, but even this sacred land could not escape the fallout. The giant cities of the world must now lie empty, she thought, the radio signals gone quiet, wars ceased, leaders dead. All that would be left were crumbling outposts like hers, on Lac La Croix. Wooden canoes were the first to disintegrate, then the aluminum ones were pocked with holes as the radiation burned through them. All that was left for her to navigate to the next island was her trusty We-No-Nah fiberglass canoe, which crackled across the glitter, making grooves in the lake.

Naturally (ironically!), a man-made material would be what survived this man-made catastrophe. Not even plastics could last, they just melted in the glittery glare, and in time evaporated. Finally, a way to escape the eroding scourge to the planet! Sadly, it had taken this planet-changing event to begin to eradicate plastics and microplastics, but it was now too late for scientists to turn it into a benefit for humanity.

Fall-out glitter. How could anyone or anything escape an explosion of such magnitude from the Moon? The explosion of nuclear waste shipped to the moon was a blunderbuss, in every sense of the word. A short-barreled muzzle-loading shotgun can be stuffed with any number of projectiles. Shaped like a megaphone, the particulates scatter far and wide.The scientists were the true blunderbusses, who dared to think the Moon was safe at all for inorganic and chemical waste storage.

The Moon exploded into nothingness on September 13, 1999. It didn’t matter that the toxic waste was parked on the dark side. Even Pink Floyd could write a song—name an entire album—after that mysterious place. When a roundish object explodes, Darla wrote, it’s going to send stuff spinning everywhere into space. Since the spinning Earth is its closest companion, every revolution scatters toxic moon dust over every mountain, lake, river, stream, meadow…you get the drift. Toxic drift. She underlined it. Quite different from Jed Clampett discovering black gold, “Texas Tea,” and becoming a hillbilly millionaire!

Darla remembered the old 1970’s sitcoms, but knew none of that technology could have survived the toxic glitter. It got into everything, jammed-up silicon-based computers, and much like microplastics, got into our blood. She walked into the decrepit library in her cabin, only to see the paper of the books turning to glittery sand. Hardback books were empty shells, and starting to crumble while her special-treat magazines, Vogue and The New Yorker, had bitten the dust weeks ago. She didn’t need to ask what the world was coming to. It was already coming to an end.

From her perch on the blinding outdoor deck, Darla realized school children wouldn’t have schools to attend, much less living teachers. The A.I. Era had fixed that problem. But now that computers no longer functioned, parents would have to spend quality time with their children, until the final moments before the Earth itself glittered into space. Too late for the parents who’d missed their children’s plays and recitals! All those photos were dust. Those grown children were now raising their own babies, trying to describe the beauty of a moon rise, the sun set, and clear water to the horizon and beyond.

Darla’s own darkness overcame her. Enough of this self-protection malarky!, she thought. Standing on the deck, she took off her dark glasses, expecting to squint herself into a horrible headache from the brilliant glitter.

To her surprise, the brightness had dimmed, and the glitter subdued to flickers. The flickers were like fireflies; she never knew when the next one would sparkle, so she broadened her gaze to see what was happening.

All the outlines of the lilypads, frogs, and insects were gone. The glitter was solidly coalescing across the water like a glassy pond. Darla tip-toed down the dulled-glittery grass to touch the water. She swiped the back of her glitter-burned hand across the surface of the water, to see the depth of moonglow. It was like trying to scrape the wax from the top of a jar of home-made mulberry jam. The glitter had congealed to a level of about 9 inches, but beneath it was clear water! Darla could see the tadpoles and trout, all kinds of Northern fish swimming below the glitter level. She wondered how the waterbirds might survive at this point, without ready access to fish, but plentiful insects large and small swirled in confusion through the darkening air.

What kind of sign is this? Darla wondered if she should become hopeful. From her outpost in Quetico, far from the rest of civilization, she decided to try communicating with the outside world. If there indeed was any world left…she’d felt like the last woman on Earth.

She took an old toothbrush to her transistor radio (one she’d had since grade school, still in its leatherette case) and started to scrape all the dulled glitter out of every part. Tuning it was tricky, but she got a fuzzy AM radio station with a tired-sounding fellow out of Grand Marais. He announced that NASA had launched a satellite similar to the Moon, but with plenty of room to allow for more toxic waste. Giant snow plows in the North had been piling up all the glitter they could, and loading it onto this moon-like satellite. Like electric linemen, the plows were dispatched all over the world, mystifying remaining souls into deep gratitude.

Darla hoped they’d thought to line the inside of the thing with fiberglass, since that was the only material not eaten away by the toxic glitter from the Moon’s explosion. The news reporter scratched on, saying a team of eco-scientists had studied all of the natural and man-made fibers for the satellite, and that indeed fiberglass was the main component! Glory be! Darla thought there must have been a Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness expert on the team, since her We-No-Na Canoe was still intact after all of this mess.

Darla hoped, wondered, and rejoiced, but decided that nothing was going to make her leave Lac LaCroix. She hoped that she could clear off a useful area of the congealed moon glitter around the dock, to pile it up until collection was solved. This old cabin had been her haven her entire life, except for a dalliance or two getting University degrees.

What good are those degrees when it comes to survival? she wondered. She rejoiced that there might still be a chance for Earth to be refashioned into a healthier, albeit changed planet, with a makeshift Moon.

Jeanne Van Slyke is a Renaissance woman, who has degrees in music, writing, and literature from the University of Wisconsin, St. Catherine University, and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. An independent teacher in the arts for 25 years, she loves to garden, and has won several awards for her watercolor paintings.