Fake Moon

Amy DeBellis

August in Alabama: air thick with mosquitoes, crickets chirping hoarse and ragged, fireflies blinking on and off like stars gone wrong. My parents live at the end of the kind of drive that looks like it goes nowhere, losing definition as it coils into the trees. Turning vague in the darkness like a softening throat.

On the couch, Mom turns on her iPad—last year’s Mother’s Day present—and, gesturing for me to sit next to her, fills the screen with a video. As it begins to play, she hovers a wrinkled finger over it, as if I might not notice the huge red arrow pointing directly to the right of the spacecraft. A white blur materializes, then darts away.

“Lord. You can see the man’s face! In what they claim is empty space!” Scent of cigarettes on her breath, the smell of home. “Right?” She looks at me expectantly. Up close, her eyes seem to have grown paler with age, lightening from deep forest to a glassy sea green, as though the irises have been bleached.

“Uh, maybe.”

“Hang on, you’ll get another look.” The video zooms in and focuses again on the spot where a figure appears, blurry as a wet handprint on glass—I can make out a jut like a nose, and beside it a liquid, stretching shadow—and then shivers away again.

“Time for the thermal filter now,” Mom says. Her brow is furrowed as she watches the screen, and I realize she’s seen this video dozens of times.

When the thermal filter flips on, every shade changes. The now-navy spacecraft looks like it’s preparing to lift off into a lurid green emptiness. The figure to the right of it appears once again, no longer white but an arterial, pulsing red. But my eyes keep sliding back to the American flag in the center of the spacecraft. The fifty stars aren’t stars anymore; they’re yellow dots blinking and swarming on a red background, making me think of chickenpox, smallpox, plague boils on fevered skin. The stripes are a gummy, artificial blue, and running through them are thinner yellow lines, like plaque-choked veins.

“There he was again! You saw it, right? Oh, sweetpea. I knew you would!” Mom’s rough voice is triumphant, vindicated. It’s the same way she sounded after she showed me the videos of the smoking, crumpling towers, the chemtrails painted across the sky, the looming granite tablets in the neighboring state.

I realized long ago that arguing is pointless. I haven’t said anything in agreement, either, but there must be something in my face, something cowardly and compromising, that makes her believe that I believe.

“It was all a con. We can’t trust anything they put out—not back then, not now, not ever.”

Tonight the moon is bloated, incandescent. I crouch on the floor of my childhood bedroom and squint up at it through a gap in the curtains.

When I was little, I liked to look at the moon and tell myself things like: This is the same moon that Cleopatra saw. This is the same moon that Jesus saw. I would use its presence as an unchanging anchor through which I could dive into history and feel myself a part of everything, could savor a connection to the spiraling, sinking past.

But now the moon looks oddly distant, like it might not even be real at all. Like it might be nothing more than a hologram, a hoax. A searchlight beam trained on an enormous black sheet drawn across the sky.

If anything is real, it’s me—I’m blood and bone and living tissue—but I’m no unchanging anchor, either. I’m made up of my ancestors and the thick of history, all the lives that came before. All those pictures in photo albums that Mom no longer looks at, the images growing blurrier and more muted with each generation, falling back into the vastness of the past.

I wonder what future historians, if there are any, will think of these videos. These YouTube channels Mom has been following for months now. Whether they will survive as a curiosity, or as a footnote for historical hobbyists, or whether some of them will even prove true in the end.

The moon grins and glows at me, floating in the blackness, a severed head. When I press my hands to the window, they look like their own ghosts.