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Moonlight

I still remember the old moonlight people. When we were kids we'd stay up late to watch them come out, their blue skin glowing faintly in the night, delicate as dewdrops. We would watch them dance, and we'd sway in our hearts. Their songs, sung in a language of sighs and baby's breath, were the barest wisps of old stories, nothing we could understand, but we could still weep.

Gradually, the sky clouded over with emissions from the factories and the cars and leaf blowers, and we lost the deep night. Once the moon hid, the moonlight people went with it.

They weren't strictly necessary to our lives, but we missed them. We still needed them to speak to the ancient, silver-tinged corners of our souls. So, a consortium of private concerns launched Moon 2, and there it hung beneath the clouds, its surface mirror-bright, a perfect place to display advertising. It was quite a feat of engineering. Some people thought it was even better than Moon Classic.

And, nobody knew for sure this would happen, but the moonlight people came back. They danced and sang and whispered for us, as they used to when we were children.

Only they were a little different now. When we watched them, they seemed to notice. When we swayed to their dances, they danced a little harder. When we strained to hear their songs, they sang a little louder. They were self-conscious and eager to please. They started coming out earlier in the evening when more people were awake, when the audience was larger.

I was watching TV the other night, and a commercial for a cell phone service came on. The jingle was an old moonlight song I remember from my boyhood, but in English. I was a little offended, but I called the 1-800 number anyway. They were offering a pretty good deal.