Her grandmother had always said the moon was just a hole in the sky, a cozy place for a white snake larger than the largest mountain to curl up. It ventured out sometimes, of course, as hungry as all snakes eventually became, and so the light of its luminous scales slithered away into the blackness of the surrounding night. Bit by bit, night by night – it only seemed to move slowly because they were so small, her grandmother had said, the way clouds could seem to laze across the sky while truly racing fast as the wind to the meeting place where they would make their next storm.
In truth, the snake was a quick and terrible hunter. It was only ever gone for one night, after all. It always started slithering back after that, filling up that hole again with its gorged length. When she had asked what it ate, her grandmother had only chuckled – chuckled, and not smiled. And asked in turn, not smiling, what she thought it might eat.
Something that big? That far away? Well, it would have to be stars, wouldn’t it? Staring up at the sky, when she’d been small enough for her head to barely reach her grandmother’s stomach, she hadn’t been able to imagine anything else it might eat.
Now, old enough to go alone to her grandmother’s grave, she could imagine too many things. Her grandmother had never really said the snake went away, after all, away into the black. Just out of its hole, and, when it wasn’t curled up at just the right angle for the sun to reflect from its scales, clearly it wasn’t white at all. It slithered into darkness, and became darkness, and could be anywhere.
What if it didn’t slither off into the sky to find an old, weak, slow star to warm its belly? What if, when it stretched out from where they could look up and see it, it came down instead?
