Totality

I set my alarm wrong for the lunar eclipse last night, but luckily my mum woke me up. There were clouds which drifted across, making the shadowed moon fade in and out of view. At one point, the patchiness of the cloud allowed the stars around the moon to shine more brightly than the moon itself. Odd to think of the mammoth shadow cast by our entire planet neatly shading the bright penny disc of the full moon. And then I remember how big the moon is after all, and I remember this:

"Hush, my darling," he whispered. "Little bird, little fish, shhh." As though she had been a baby.
I'm not a bird," she sobbed, trying to feel indignant.
"My bird," he lulled her. "My little bird, my little fish, something dear and loved and rockable."
"As big as a huge old jenny-ass," she cried. "Like I'd swallowed a melon."
"Or the moon, or the sun, or a bale of hay," he crooned, the chair creaking as it carried them back and forth, a pendulum swinging. "Or an ancient elephant or whale. Leviathan, behemoth, huge she is, like the spread of a tree or the girth of a watering trough. Big as the moon. Monstrous huge..."

-- Sheri Tepper