Nadia Born
The Lunar Phases According to My Flat Earth Lover
New moon
I’m chewing on an ice pop, the kind that comes in a plastic sleeve and pushes up like toothpaste, when I see you. You’re walking through the brush towards the sandbar where I sit. A tricky path in the semi-darkness, lined with liquor bottles, lube, and lanyards. Like the others, you’ve come to take a piss without waiting in line for the bathroom. No judgment, the International House only has two public toilets on the ground floor. You go far into the brush, farther than the rest, and I watch you waver between staying put or taking a few more steps towards the water’s edge to pee into the lake. You jostle quickly across the beach to relieve yourself, standing in full view of where I’m diligently turning my tongue blue.
You’re humming to yourself and I’m betting you won’t notice me. Good thing, too. I was at that same party, but after one beer decided I didn’t want to loosen my thoughts in front of my new friends. So I grabbed a popsicle from the common room freezer and wandered down to the beach to clear my head. I learned this habit from my father, who used to sit on the back patio to—as he put it—hang his thoughts out to dry. I once told a drunk American classmate this and he replied that his parents owned a drying machine.
When you finish, I hear your zipper amid the meek lapping of the lake. You turn and squint through the dark at me and my half-eaten popsicle. A blue drop dots my kneecap. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” you say, “you scared me.” I shrug. “Sorry,” I say. My indifference startles him and he comes closer. I realize my mistake at once: failing to show enough interest here makes boys stick around and try to earn attention. I try to smile at you to rectify my error, but it’s too late. You sit down beside me. I curse you, but my mouth is full of popsicle.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Enjoying the view,” I say, which is not entirely untrue. There’s no moon tonight, the sandbar is lit only by the lamp posts along the sidewalk behind us. I’ve always liked the new moon, that black slate of sky. Everything within sight is mellowed by the thickness of the dark, like we’re on the fading edge of a photograph.
“You one of those astrologer types?” you say.
“I study physics.”
“Hotshot,” you say. You wait for me to ask what you study, but I don’t feel like it. I lick the blue juice from the wrapper and sit on my hands.
Just my luck—you don’t get bored, don’t stand up. It’s unusually warm for October, so not even the cold will drive you back inside. I wonder how long you’ll hang around, but it doesn't matter. I’ll be up all night anyways. My insomnia has gotten so bad that I power off my phone at night to avoid knowing how late it is. Even now, watching you kick off your flip-flops and bury your feet in the sand, I’m trying to guess how long I’ll spend awake, belly up, shushing myself so that my heart stops beating so hard.
“You hear about the flat earth theory?”
“Theory is a strong word,” I say.
“Oh, but it’s just my kind of fun,” he says.
“Fun?”
“Yeah, arguing an untenable position. Just for the hell of it.”
I hear the music at the International House being turned up a notch and for some reason this makes me feel alone. I don’t mind missing the party—it’s the sight of the full house, lit-up, the walls vibrating slightly that gets me. Inside, I can imagine the tangle of students, their lazy smiles and sweat-bloomed armpits. I wish I had their ability to surrender to distraction. The living room must be full of bodies by now, the floor sticky with margarita mix, and light bulbs blinking from the thrum of the music. All I can think about is my parents’ house, which according to Google Maps, is 9,077 kilometers away.
“What's your name again?” I ask to the dark.
“Teddy.”
“Ok, Teddy,” I say. “Give me one good argument.”
You pick up your flip-flop, hold it even in the air. I know where this is going. “Look,” you say, “it makes a straight edge. If the world were round, wouldn’t the flip-flop curve?” You pick up other objects to show me: a twig in the sand, a cigarette butt, my hand. I withdraw it from your grasp and snatch a fistful of sand, letting it run through my fingers. Even the beaches here are different, with pebbles mixed in, making a dirty blonde color. Nothing like Uruguay.
“The world's too big for us to see it curve,” I say.
I first learned this lesson in my parents’ house, shooting marbles across the floor. “It’s crooked,” I told my mother, letting my marble purr along the slant. “Hm-mm,” she said, eyes glued to the 6:00 p.m. telenovela. “Look,” I said, following the path of the marble as it knocked into the mate she had set by the leg of her chair. The gourd tipped, the yerba dusting the toes of her sandals. “Sofía,” she scolded. I stared at the spill, waiting for her punishment—her sense of justice had always been too original for my taste—and trying to see the bend in the boards with the naked eye, but I couldn’t. “Far time you learned how to prepare one,” she said. “Come.” She steered me to the kitchen. Step one to making a mate, she explained, don’t rush. Good things take time.
“Probably right,” I hear you say, “Still, I keep an open mind.”
Even now I can remember the next steps she taught me, the hum of the TV in the next room. Fill the gourd a thumb’s length from the lip. Tilt it in the palm of your hand so it makes a wall of yerba. Add lukewarm water to the empty side. Keep it at a slant, so the wall gets wet. Wait for it to become strong, well-fortified. Only then is it ready to drink.
In English, I’m told, they call this homesickness. I feel sick, yes, when I remember that when my mom wakes up, I’m not there to put on a kettle for mate. I get nauseous by my own excitement to be here, in a place of opposites—north instead of south, fall instead of spring. And my stomach churns just thinking that if I get run over by a car in America, my parents don’t have the money to ship my body home.
“Hm-mm,” I say, trying to block out these thoughts. “What do you study then?”
“I’m in business school,” you say. “I’m making a prototype right now. It’s for a shoe insert.”
“A shoe insert?”
“Yeah,” you say, “With a GPS tracker. For the elderly. So you can find them if they wander off?”
I think perhaps you’re just as desperate as I am. You remind me briefly of my father, the way he once spent 1,000 pesos to buy me a star in the southern skies and win my adoration. The Sofía, he called it, after me. This was obviously a scam and my mother said as much, slapping a towel at him in disbelief. “Nobody can own the stars,” she said, “not even our Sofía.”
Your words come out rushed, like you're reading a manual aloud. Even though the only thing we have in common is our desperation, we claw closer on the beach and I find myself wanting the collision. Your hand skates over the popsicle wrapper and then, in the rustle, we kiss.
First quarter
I figure I won’t see you again, but I’m wrong. A little over a month later, I’m studying event horizons for a quiz—learning how to calculate at what point objects fall into the mouth of a black hole—when I hear the key in the door. My roommate Celeste enters carrying an armful of costumes, which she stuffs in a suitcase. It’s nearly Thanksgiving and she’s off to her aunt’s house. Thankfully the International House stays open for the long weekend.
“Sure you don’t want to come?” she says as she tries to fold a mountain of tulle. Celeste is the dressmaker for the theater program and goes to her aunt’s house in the “boondocks” to catch up on her alterations. “You’re welcome to crash there on holidays,” she says.
I’m lucky, I know, that Celeste has even offered. The House has already sent a zillion reminders that it closes during winter break. Apparently, a student once locked herself in the dorm during those two weeks on purpose. She outfitted her bedroom with Y2K-tall towers of ramen, canned pineapple, peanut butter and rum, and waited for everybody to return behind frosted window panes. At least, it won't come to that for me. Worst case scenario, I’ll take the metro out to Celeste’s aunt’s house and spend December on a pull-out couch, profusely thanking a total stranger.
“I’ll let you know about Christmas,” I say and try to smile.
Once Celeste’s gone, the House feels empty. It’s too depressing to do schoolwork, so I decide to poke around the dorm. Not everybody's left for Thanksgiving and I hear students fooling around behind slate-colored doors. I keep winding through the floors, which is how I discover that the door at the top of the stairs leads out to a rooftop. Somebody has already decked it out with a plaid loveseat and a couple of mold-blotched pallets. I smell the armrest before sitting down, figuring that if I get lice at least my mind will be preoccupied with something other than how I’m going to pay for a flight home in December. When I got the full ride—room and board included, travel excluded—I was so enamored by my own success that I believed it would all work out. Stupid me.
I sit down on the loveseat and watch the crisscrossed lines of plane exhaust fading into the dark blue sky. If I close my eyes, I can almost switch hemispheres, find myself there instead. I try to see the view from my parents’ yard, the plots of land stitched on the horizon like quilt squares. A typical sight for canarios—those who live in the Canelones region—where soil is rich for figs, peaches, plums, wine grapes, mandarin oranges and melons. There’s a hammock in the back, under the avocado tree, and a brick-laid grill for asado. I’m nearly there, I can almost see my father’s flower beds lined with gray and white stones, but the noise of the city is too different. Honking horns, speakers blaring Nirvana, weighted doors slamming, college kids whooping as they toss a glow-in-the-dark frisbee, emergency sirens far off—none of these sounds fit in my parents’ backyard.
I open my eyes, thinking I need a better plan to transport myself there when I notice you passing by on the sidewalk below. I’m sure it’s you because of your baseball cap—the Chicago Cubs. You’re carrying a paper grocery bag crooked in one elbow.
“Hey, Teddy,” I shout as you search for the source. “Want to come up?”
You squint at me under the bill of your cap. “Yeah, ok.”
You’re sweating when you make it out onto the roof. You set the bag on the loveseat, resting your elbows on the rusted-out rail. Then you take out a bottle of red and open it with a Simpsons widget on your keychain.
“No family nearby?” I say.
“Nope,” you say and take a swig. “Let me guess, you’re here to stargaze.”
“Ha,” I say, “No visibility in the city. Look at that smog.”
You look up with me. Night is creeping in and an orange glow starts to rim the sky. The trails of plane exhaust have been erased like chalk, leaving a general haze of white. You hand me the bottle and sit down beside me. A street lamp turns on and our eyes adjust to the circle of light behind us. I can hear cicadas whirring, crescendoing their call with the friction of their bodies. I bring the bottle to my lips.
Once I wanted to become an astronaut. I imagined the universe was my mother’s black velvet dress, that my finger was a ship wading through it, the grain of the fabric mussed up by my path. Sometimes my mother would lend me her motorcycle helmet and I would put it on and imagine myself high above the earth—up, up, up—until it felt so real that I could see our planet from that mighty distance and it scared me. It sounded so far away, I told her, so lonely. I couldn’t bear the distance.
For some reason, I open my mouth to tell you this, but laughter erupts on the neighboring roof and my own seriousness seems out of place. I watch as two students appear, illuminated by the blue light of a phone in a palm. The light turns towards the ground, around one of the potted plants, as if they’ve lost something. A key? A hair tie? I squint, unsure.
“What do you think they lost?”
“Nothing, they’re checking the plant.”
“The plant?”
“It’s pot,” you say and now it’s obvious that they’re fondling the leaves.
“How can you tell from here?” I say.
“My grandpa smoked.”
“Hippie?” I ask.
“God, no. He had chronic pain.”
“Oh,” I say, “sorry.”
You shrug and we look back into the night sky, which has turned to the purple-black of a bruise. I decide suddenly that all I want tonight is to sink into the dark, polish off this bottle and have sex lasting longer than ten minutes. In that order.
“You going home for Christmas at least?” I ask.
“Home is a bit of a moving target,” you say.
“How so?”
“My grandpa raised me. He died. I sold his house. End of story.”
“Sorry,” I say, “I’m an idiot.”
“No you’re not,” he said.
The moon looks like a faded bar of soap, the smallest sliver as it begins its new phase. I realize I need the magic trick of intimacy. To focus on each other instead of everything else. Your hand slips around the back of my neck and I set the wine bottle against the couch leg. We fall back onto the cushions and the moon is swallowed behind the gutters of the roof.
“You’re not,” you repeat. By now you’ve scrambled the meaning, it could refer to anything. I’m not homesick, I’m not broke, I’m not falling for you.
“I’m not,” I say.
Full moon
Over the next few weeks, you and I meet up once, then twice, then almost every day. We become nocturnal, cramming for quizzes in the fluorescent light of the common room and then spending Saturdays under the sheets, napping and making love and only getting up to fry eggs in the shared kitchen. I learn that your parents were drug addicts, that you like watching home improvement shows, that you’re weird about taking off your shoes when you come in, that you like bringing me a coffee or a bagel in a paper bag and shrugging when I gush over it. And that you’re fragile, so fragile that even an off-hand criticism from your business professor can put you in a mood. Somehow, suddenly, our lives are wrapped up and I can sleep again, edging into slumber on those nights when your body pins down mine.
It’s early December, two weeks before exams, when I’m jolted back to reality. I’m stomping my boots on the front steps of the International House, trying to fling the slush off to avoid my roommate's wrath, when I see the package. I’ve been shut up in the library all day, my eyes watery from reading, and I almost don't see it. It’s there, snow-crusted like it’s been waiting outside for a while now. I pick it up—it’s for me—and I sprint up the stairs, grabbing a butter knife to slit it open.
Happy birthday, Sofía, the cake reads and I drop my coat on the arm of the common room couch, stunned that I’d forgotten my own birthday. It’s the accent that gets me, the squiggle of red icing on the i that makes me close the box and clear a shelf in the shared fridge. My parents must have ordered it and spent money they didn't have. Only they would give the right instructions for my name, with the accent and all.
The silence here makes me feel funny. A birthday is perhaps the loudest decimal, as far as family events go, and here I am, the world beyond the windowpane muted by snow. I can still remember my quinceañera, the way my eardrums rang all day afterwards. I pick up the phone to call my parents and the dial tone screeches, startling me from the quiet and cold of my new life. Since they don't pick up, I call you instead.
I think of what I’ll say—I forgot my own birthday, ha!—but instead when you pick up I start crying. “It’s my birthday,” I say and then, as some kind of explanation, I add “and it’s snowing.” “Wait there,” you say. Like any good child of capitalism, you arrive half an hour later with champagne, sparklers, and those chocolates with inspirational quotes on the wrappers.
You look pretty pleased with your shopping spree, and I’m amazed by how quickly you’re on the House doorstep. When I go to let you in, you pull items from the peak of your bag. Behind you, I notice the white face of the full moon that’s just starting to wane. I still can’t accept that my body is here, in the northern hemisphere. As if to press myself into this earth, I suddenly grab you in a hug.
“I knew you would like it,” you say, as if this has something to do with your purchases. Americans are weird, I think, as I lead you inside my room. You pop the cork and we polish off the bottle, quickly, too quickly. You’re yapping on about the shoe insert prototype again, which you brought over to demonstrate.
“Want to try it out?” you say.
“Sure.”
You show me the front and back of the insert like you’re doing a magic trick and then stick it in my shoe. I lace up my boots and walk the full pace of the common room. You show me my location on the app, but my bubble on the screen makes me feel queasy. I feel odd, can’t believe I’m there where the map indicates. I set down your phone and you take off my shoes and the special insert and then the rest comes off, too. My head’s feeling a bit hollow and everything is pleasantly pixelated. I need your gravity, need your weight to anchor me down. When you’re inside of me, I realize that somebody you loved must have wandered off for you to want to tether them to this world with your little app.
We’re in that halfway lull of sleep and wake, our blood still pounding through our veins, when you turn to me. I’m thinking you’re going to tell me the story of the shoe insert, of your grandpa, of whatever it is that haunts you—but you’ve changed the subject.
“I’m thinking of going on a cruise down south,” you say. “Spend Christmas on warm waters.”
“Nice,” I say, “You should visit Uruguay. Since you’re going down there anyways.”
It’s probably hot there by now, I’m thinking, the cobblestone street bumbling with vendors selling popsicles. Stoplight, that was always my favorite—the one with three flavors in red, yellow and green. My parents are probably sitting on the front patio in their lawn chairs, a thermos on the ground between them, spiraling up steam from the hot water. A bag of bizcochos forgotten, black ants crawling onto the plastic lip. They’ll be talking about the new bakery, which used to be a haircutter’s, before that a money lender—remember?—where their neighbor once worked, yes the one with the limp, whose wife died in a lightning strike a decade ago. Remember?
You pause. “Actually, I was inviting you to come with.”
I catch my breath. I’m nearly there, scuffing a chair towards my parents. I’ll have to put water on for my own mate first, then sit down. I’ll see a horse tied to a tree in the median, hear the clang of an open-bed truck where a young man unloads blue gas tanks. Somebody is clapping at the fence with a plastic tub of milhojas for sale and there’s the sound of shrieking kids, the umph of a soccer ball kicked against a wall, radios of all the neighbors babbling through open windows. I can almost hear the watermelon vendor’s voice far off, as though he’s turned the corner.
“Oh,” I say, “I mean, I can’t afford it.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What do you mean, you know?”
“Just that you haven’t gotten your ticket home yet.”
I feel uneasy as I consider it. I sigh. “I would feel weird goofing off on a cruise when my family hasn't seen me in ages.” Impossible, I think, to be there off the coast, enjoying myself, while my family stretches their salaries to buy me a cake.
“Right, right,” you say. I can imagine you on a beach chair somewhere, your baseball cap still on, trying to win over another girl's heart.
“You’re mad,” I say and this is a fact. I can tell. There’s always a moment where lovers do the math right in front of my eyes. You’re no longer sure whether this little fling is worth the intimacy already invested.
“No, I get it. You’d rather have a pity party than go with me.”
“It’s not a pity party,” I say. “My family comes first, even if I can’t see them.”
“Mine too.”
“But your grandpa’s dead.”
“So?” you huff.
“Being thousands of kilometers away isn’t the same as being dead.”
“Isn’t it? What about those astronauts that go into space for years and years and come back younger than their own children?”
“What?”
“I’m just saying, distance is a sort of death.”
“It’s not the same and you know it,” I say, though the thought horrifies me.
You turn away, facing the other side of the bed. “What are you going to do instead?”
“Stay with Celeste's aunt upstate,” I say, “Video call my family. Eat ramen. Repeat.”
“She probably doesn’t have good wifi,” you mutter.
I lie back and close my eyes. My brain feels too bright and I know I might be sick. I should eat some birthday cake, I think, get some food in me. Instead, I try to stay as still as possible so I don’t vomit. I imagine the two of us on a ship deck somewhere, but my stomach lurches, so I don’t move, not even a little bit. With my body so flat, I think, I could be your world.
Last quarter
After my birthday, we text a bit, but I feel us drifting apart. No matter, sex has always felt like its own expanding universe to me. When I learned the cosmos was in constant motion, filling up the void of space, I felt dizzy and strange—the same way I’ve always felt trying to love. Odds are, we won’t get together again. The universe expands; people move on.
Everybody is heading home for the holidays, but since I can’t afford the ticket, I’m still around Saturday night after finals, packing up to go to Celeste’s aunt’s house. This is vaguely embarrassing to me, but since I’ve got no other roof to stay under, I’m planning to show up with a tin of gingerbread cookies, do all the dishes and apologize profusely all break long.
I’m tossing my thickest sweaters into my duffel when you text me, inviting me to your presentation of the shoe insert. Since I have nothing to do until my 8:00 p.m. train, I decide to go. I don’t bother to dress up, just jeans and a black top. Even with my coat, I’ve never felt so cold on the walk over and I look up at the moon—just a fingernail in the sky—and wonder if it’s any warmer at Celeste’s aunt’s place.
When I arrive at the business school, I don’t unbutton my coat even though the audience looks like well-dressed mannequins in their suits and loafers. I get that peculiar, draining feeling of walking around a mall.
“I’m glad you came,” you say behind me. You’re looking a bit puffy, the shoulders of your suit a tad too wide. “Will you help demonstrate the insert? Like the other day?”
“Ok,” I say.
You’re up next. You go through the slides of your presentation with a booming voice, talking about the GPS, the price of caring for dementia, the ability to track loved ones and prevent disaster. As you’re talking, I’m wondering why the hell I came in the first place. For nights, I stayed up thinking about what you said—how people could be far enough away to feel dead—when I realized: what do you know? You’re the one who thinks the world could be flat.
The applause jolts me back and it dawns on me that the GPS technology you’re using is based on satellites spinning around our world. That’s proof enough that the earth is a sphere and yet, you still hedge your bets.
“Now let’s see the product in action,” you say. “Sofía?”
You hold out the shoe insert on stage and I’m reminded of that first night, the way you lifted your flip-flop to the horizon, evidence it might not be round. I let out a laugh and slip on the insert for you. My dot appears on the screen. You nod at me to go on now, take a few steps. I walk a pace or two and then, at once, I’m struck by the need to steal your shoe insert. This way, you’ll see the map of my footsteps over earth, the way the path curves when I go far enough, when I return to Uruguay.
I walk off the stage and hear your voice “Sofía?” but there’s no stopping me now. I want your app to show everywhere I go—each little stride—to form a half-moon when I take a plane back to my birthplace. My path will be your evidence, my footsteps your bane. And someday when my feet are planted in my homeland and I can breathe again, I’ll text you to say just this: the world is anything but flat.
I take another step.
Nadia Born writes peculiar fiction, both literary and speculative. She won New Letters’s 2022 Editor’s Choice Award and has stories featured in Gulf Coast, Water~Stone Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, MQR Mixtape, and elsewhere. She also has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Find her online at www.nadiaborn.com.