TO OUTLINE THE MOON by Kirsten Reneau
Full Moon
I have a hundred memories that all feel like falling asleep. There is the smell of logs burning in a fire pit and the taste of burnt marshmallow on my tongue and the sounds of men’s voices talking the language and laughing. At the time, almost every man I know is a father or an uncle and everywhere I look there are mountains.
As a child, still genderless with youth, family members teach me the language that nature speaks, show me how to follow moss and recognize bird songs and make fists out of rope. I learn to lay my body down against a canoe and trust the river to rock me back and forth as if I am still buried in the depths of my mother. On long trips down river, we dock our boats on muddy shores and take turns jumping off rocks and sinking lower and lower and lower into the water until it becomes so dark I can’t see.
Before there are apps that can outline constellations, my father does it with his hand. We sit side by side in grass turning wet by the night and he points out the triangles and circles that hold stories in their imaginary lines. The moon hangs center, bright and swollen full. He asks me to consider the impossible: What would it be like, to walk the hills of space?
My father is a big man. His laugh fills a room. He holds court among his friends offering sweeping, open gestures with one hand, cradling a home-brewed beer with the other, and gives practiced tellings of a personal history that I can recite like a myth. He is the youngest of nine children, the products of a teacher and a preacher. He goes camping with his brothers once or twice a year, for weeks at a time. He only has daughters. He loves looking up. Once, he woke me and my sisters up at midnight, moving quietly between our rooms. “There’s a meteor shower,” he says. “Come with me.”
We drive to a field nearby and we lay on the grass where the country fair will be held later in the summer and watch the balls made of dust and ice trail across the sky. We stay out there for three hours before we go home again. When I wake up again it feels like it had all been a dream.
Waning Gibbous
I once thought I saw a blood moon, but it was only the reflection of a pit fire.
It looks down at me during an early July night, while firefighters run for their gear, shove their masks down, tighten their gloves. I must be at least a hundred yards from the flames, but the heat still threatens to lick me clean. The men go to help hold the hose that attempts to extinguish the flame, which is bright and wild and threatens to eat us to the bone.
It won’t, of course. The whole scene is playing a trick on our senses. I’m spending my summer working to help train firefighters at camp, a job I have no qualifications for except my knack for ropes and love of poker. The flame is carefully contained to a hole in the earth that we helped dig earlier in the week. The firefighters are only practicing putting out a large flame together and I am there to hold glasses and cell phones, as they take turns going in to kill the pit fire.
I take a picture to show my dad later; he had worked a similar summer gig as a teen and was the one who encouraged me to apply. We mostly fight, my dad and I, and my mother says this is because we are too similar, not because of the actual content of the argument.
We’re like a trick coin with two heads, both headstrong and angry people. We even look alike; our baby pictures get confused for one another. We don’t really know how to say I love you, but sometimes we sit together in his truck, a rust-colored Ford older than I am, with the windows down, and sing Hank Williams songs and that feels close enough to saying it that I don’t think either of us mind.
The fire goes out and the heat disappears alongside it. It gets relit in the pit again so a new group can run in, a circular dance of light and loss. The empty part of the moon could be just a sliver of a smile.
Last Quarter
My dad and my Uncle Jim taught me how to shuffle cards and play poker. My Uncle Jim taught me a lot of things, I know that, but what I remember is him sitting across from me at the picnic table, our pennies rusted dark, the crickets loud. A bug zapper lights our faces. He plays many roles: he is an uncle, a son that mows my grandfather’s grass every week, a sibling to eight others, a father to my cousins, and my middle school principal. I always wave to him in the halls and I can never skip school.
My dad gives me ten dollars in pennies with the promise that I split my winnings with him. Other players – cousins, aunts, more uncles – join the game just to leave again. The moon is cut as clean as a deck of cards. I practice his stance, my elbows up on the red checkered plastic tablecloth that covers the picnic table, my eyes moving to follow his. The plains of my uncle’s face hold his mouth in a permanent look of seriousness. I tilt the corners of my lips down to become his other half in hopes of being taken as an equally serious player.
What we talked about has been lost to time, but we played long into the night and I walked away with thirty dollars in change, fifteen after I gave my dad his cut. Later we sit around a fire, and I listen to my father and Uncle Jim laugh and speak in a language of intimacy, talking about memories and plans. They figure out the logistics for their backcountry Canada trip. They tell me about their hometown, which is also my hometown, and the changes it’s made and the ways it’s stayed the same. They talk about the hikes we did that day, the bike rides we’ll all take together tomorrow.
When I get up to go to bed, they are still talking and their voices become one sound.
Waning Crescent
I feel like water circling a drain, around and around and around and around, trying to understand my father. He sells the truck. I move a few states away to flatter land. We do not fight anymore because we don’t talk much at all. Not on purpose, just as part of never really talking to begin with. The distance makes me all the more interested in trying to understand who he is, and how that informs who I am.
As an adult I call to tell him that I’m going to the Grand Canyon next summer and he tells me it’s the trip he always wanted to take but never did. I feel him take over; he’ll send me a tent, the same one I camped in with him growing up. He’ll do some research for me. He’ll make me a camp box if I let him know the dimensions of the back of my car.
“You won’t believe the stars out there. And the moon!” he says. “It’s gonna be hot. Do you have a good sleeping bag? You’re going to have to start hiking again, if you can find any places to do it down there.”
I welcome his intrusion, the shadow he casts. It is the only way I know how to feel close to him.
New Moon
There are nine phases of the moon. The new moon is the zero, a phase marked by nothing, a dark placeholder for where the light will be. No one breaks out their telescopes or looks up in awe at the empty space.
The first time I remember my father crying was just after our family dog passed. The second time is when he calls me to tell me Uncle Jim has died.
“It was so fast,” he says to me. Five days between the diagnosis and death. As quick as a lifetime. I say nothing back because my mouth is nothing but a black hole, a gaping space where sound becomes lost.
They’ll fly me back to say goodbye, he tells me. There won’t be a casket. They’re going to spread the dust of him back into the earth, so he can rest in the wilderness forever.
He and his siblings help prepare the memorial for their brother. The slideshow clicks through pictures. One shows all nine children standing together on the stairs of their parents’ house. Jim stands with a half-smile in the shadow of a tree. He is the one dark spot compared to his eight siblings, who stand in varying degrees of light.
Waxing Crescent
I know that the grief will live inside me for the rest of time, the same way I survive with a small rock in my knee and a silver scar across my knuckle, markers of a life spent outside. I inhabit a body intent on living.
I go home to the river and I lie down in my canoe and let it rock me and wonder what it would feel like to flip, to sink so low into the water I can’t see.
My father tries to learn to talk about Jim in past tense.
My chest feels like it carries a weight hanging between my lungs.
I dream I get a tattoo of the phases of the moon across my ring finger. It ends at the waxing crescent.
First Quarter
In October, my boyfriend and I go to a wedding in his hometown, in the backyard of a beach house. Everything is white: the house, the lights, the wine, the sky covered in clouds threatening to bathe us all in what I imagine would be salt water from the ocean. The ceremony takes less than ten minutes, and we spend the next hours dancing and laughing at memories I don’t have and after everyone else leaves, we go to the roof to watch the Atlantic at work.
The moon blends into the stars that blend into the light bouncing back off the sea. We toast to the past that made us and the future that we will become. The next morning I call my parents and my father tells me about hiking up to deer camp to spread my uncle’s ashes.
“It’s one day at a time,” he says.
Waxing Gibbous
In the middle of winter I track through mud that holds onto my footprint. For a moment I realize I could die this way; one misstep and it could be a broken ankle or worse, no one would find me until I’m half-frozen, why did I forget to put on gloves?
The air is crisp in the way it only is in the mountains, and the moon isn’t quite full, but it’s enough. There’s a meteor shower tonight. The trees are honest and bare in its light, and I follow the moss to the river, where there will be a clearing. I can feel my heartbeat under the coat I borrowed from my father. The walk isn’t long, and I can hear the waterfall.
I’m not going for any particular reason, other than to try and count stars as they run their way across the sky. When I finally reach the waterfall, I know without touch that it’s cold, but my body wants to dive into it anyways. I dip my hand in and the shock of almost ice against my skin is enough.
Full Moon
I know I will never completely understand my father, but we both have a hundred memories that all feel like falling asleep, and that is enough.
Months after Jim dies, my father and I find ourselves talking intently about a time in my childhood when he took me camping up and down the east coast for a summer. He says it was his brothers that taught him the secrets of nature, what wood burns best and how to tie bags of food to where bears couldn’t get it. They showed him how to stand, foot on each gunnel, and balance on a canoe’s edges. He says before there were apps that could outline constellations, Jim would do it with one hand.
It’s easy to imagine them driving to the same field my father took me to, where maybe they listened to Hank Williams and parked on the grass where the country fair would be held later in the summer. Maybe together, they rested against the dirt of the earth and watched the balls made of dust and ice trail across the sky.
Kirsten Reneau’s essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, (mac)ro(mic), 433, Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, Epoch Press, and The Threepenny Review.