Mojave River Review - Summer 2014

Lori Sambol Brody / New Moon ON THE MORNING OF HER SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY, she checks for wrinkles in the bathroom mirror and discovers her face has turned into the moon. Not the full moon, as luminous as the pearls her husband gave her as a fifth anniversary gift, his fingers sending shivers down her spine as he fastened the clasp. Not the swollen moon she danced under in the Marin hills with the Commune, Elijah’s hands caressing her hips. Her face has become the new moon, dark and deep as a hole. She peers at her reflection – does a brightness outline the darkness, or is that her imagination?

She’s not surprised she can no longer see the contours of her face. The divorced fathers have stopped flirting with her at parent/teacher conferences; businessmen, ties loosened, no longer buy her drinks at the North Beach bar where she meets girlfriends to listen to the blues. Salesgirls ignore her and men no longer assess her, even when she wears black stockings and high heels. She can’t pinpoint when attention tapered off, until it was gone, like the slow turning off of the flow of hot water from a faucet.

She touches her face, feeling not soft skin but rock. Her fingers skim over the surface of her moon. She thinks she can recognize, in the mountains and valleys under her fingertips, the different seas on the moon, the impact of lava flows and asteroid collisions. Sea of tranquility. Lake of solitude. Sea of crisis. She likes this new hardness of stone, the sharpness of the craters’ edges.

When teaching astronomy, she told her third-graders that 89