Moon Trees

Rory’s eyes burn. He rubs them with a closed fist. The medicated drops help some. From the lunar dust, the doc had said, like finely ground glass. It coats the moon’s surface in a thin glittery crust, and although the base is airtight, manages to infiltrate their living quarters.

Every time Rory walks on the crunchy layer of dust, clad in a base-issued pressurized suit, he is reminded of winters in rural Pennsylvania.

A time in his life that now feels lifetimes ago.

An alarm sounds. Constant sunlight at the Shackleton crater makes it difficult to track time. Rory’s rackmate, a long string bean of a man, springs from his top bunk, stretching.

“Another day in paradise, eh?” Pavel says.

“Yeah.” Rory scrubs his eyes again. “Something like that.”

They enter closet-sized shower stalls. Rory relishes the hot spray, a luxury he never tires of. Afterward, he and Pavel take turns shaving at the sink, a daily task to ensure a tight helmet seal.

“Do you still think of her?” Pavel asks. Static crackles in Rory’s ear. They are suited up and waiting inside an airlock chamber. There’s a beep and the door in front of them opens.

“Sometimes.”

A lie. Rory thinks of her constantly.

“What was her name? Leah?”

“Laura,” Rory says.

“Ah, yes.” Pavel says. “What a beautiful name.”

They step onto the surface of the moon. Pavel begins to recount his list of sexual conquests. Rory’s heard these stories before but chuckles at appropriate intervals.

The sun, a glowing sphere at some distant point on the horizon, causes the crater outlines on either side to burn.

Lunar dust crunches underfoot.

Rory thinks of her then. Barely teenagers, they’d met in secret, under a large oak in his parents’ backyard, snow clinging to bare November branches.

He’d told her it was a Witness Tree.

“What’s that?”

“A tree that was here during the Civil War.”

Its trunk thick and bent, like his grandfather’s arthritic back, the same grandfather who’d told him the oak was a Witness Tree.

“How long ago was the Civil War?”

“Almost a thousand years ago.”

The moon, a cold, unblinking eye, hung above them.

“Do you think there are trees on the moon?”

Rory had brushed snow from her blonde hair and said, “I hope so.”

“Rory!” Pavel’s voice pierces his memory. “Have you heard anything I’ve said?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry, I’m tired.”

Pavel makes an amused sound.

More static crackles.

“Are you driving today?”

Rory tries to rub his eyes. His face shield is in the way.

“Maybe you should.”

His rackmate laughs and they climb into the lunar vehicle. It reminds Rory of a large metal centipede crawling across the frigid, desolate landscape. The craters are black and bottomless; no light will ever reach their depths.

Rory thinks of Laura again, in a casket underground on Earth. After the car accident, he’d fled, putting as much distance as possible between himself and their hometown.

Eventually, he’d ended up here.

No, Laura, Rory says to himself. No trees here.

The ice mine entrance appears. Harvesting ice not only sustains human life on the moon settlement, but is also converted into rocket fuel. Pavel drones on about a fuchsia-haired hooker in Amsterdam when every nerve ending in Rory’s body hums.

“Look out!” Rory screams.

It’s too late.

A meteor streaks across the sky. The impact is quick and Rory is thrown from the rover. Trapped, Pavel burns in the wreckage, flames superimposed over the sunlit horizon.

Screams and static fill Rory’s ears. He crawls desperately toward the rover and his dying friend, but the velvet expanse of space closes in, swallowing him.

The last image he sees before losing consciousness is Laura’s pale face.

The same doctor who’d prescribed the eye drops stands over Rory when he wakes six days later.

“Good,” he says in a clipped tone. “We weren’t sure if you were going to wake up.”

Rory’s head is bandaged. A traumatic brain injury, the doc explains. Rory can barely hear him over the ringing in his ears.

“Pavel,” he asks. “Did he survive?”

The doctor’s pointed face, a face that reminds Rory of a fox, shakes sadly.

He is cleared to return to work in a few months. The headaches have mostly subsided and he has a new rackmate. A mountain of a man named Igor with little interest in conversation.

The only question he asks Rory those first few weeks is about the trees.

Rory has sketched them on every available surface as paper is a luxury they do not have.

“I dunno.” He rubs the back of his skull, much like he used to his eyes. The intermittent pain inside his brain eclipses any he’s had before.

“Makes my head feel better, I guess.”

“You an artist?”

“No,” Rory says. “I mean, not before this.”

In truth, how Rory sees the world, or more specifically in his case, the moon, has changed since the accident. He views everything in an interconnecting system not unlike roots.

Trees spring forth from his imagination as if living, breathing entities. He can’t control them; he is merely a medium ushering them into existence.

Rory isn’t sure what makes him take his pick to that first chunk of ice. To free the form inside. All he knows is when he looks at the clear block, he sees a trapped tree.

The other miners revere him as a kind of savior, one of their own who has transcended death and been reborn a prodigy. The people in charge don’t stop him, either. It’s in their best interest, Rory decides, to allow the miners their wedge of misplaced hope.

He works at a maniacal pace, only stopping to eat or sleep. Before long, Rory chisels an entire forest from ice, and the miners arrange his sculptures near base, outside the rim of the Shackleton crater.

Exhausted and exalted, Rory stands, clad in a space suit, admiring his work. Lunar dust clings to intricately carved branches like snow.

He is the witness.

“Yes, Laura,” he whispers. “There are trees on the moon.”