As the Moon Climbs

“Fuck you, asshole!” Sheila screamed.

“You already did, whore,” Jack retorted. “Sorry, I mean ‘slut.’ A whore charges. You give it away like free samples at Costco.”

“Cut, cut!” yelled Greg. “I need more venom from you, Jack, and Sheila, if you could tone it down a bit that would be great.”

The two actors stared at the director in disbelief.

“Fuck you, Greg,” Sheila growled. “Stay out of this.”

“It’s none of your business,” Jack added.

“Really?” Greg asked. “My two principals are fighting in the smallest green room known to man and it’s none of my business? None of my business?”

They both started to speak and Greg silenced them with a gesture.

“I don’t give a shit who fucked who,” Greg said quietly. “I give a shit about the play that is opening tonight, starring you two horny fucks. You are both stellar actors, so fucking act like professionals or we’ll see how much your understudies have been paying attention.”

He turned and stalked out of the room, silence like a thunderclap echoing behind him.

Shots rang out above the heads of two soldiers leaning against a makeshift barricade in the center of the road.

“Cease-fire’s over, I guess,” said Private Abrams.

“Not until we get orders,” said Private Michaels. “Call it in. See what the brass says.”

“So we sit here until we get shot?”

“Or until we get orders, yeah.”

Abrams tilted up his helmet to scratch his forehead. “Sounds stupid to me.”

“You don’t get paid to think.”

“You don’t get paid to be a dick.”

Michaels shrugged. Abrams radioed the base. They sat in silence, bullets striking the wooden slats and sandbags behind them.

Abrams finally spoke. “Isn’t there a self-defense clause? I mean, they already broke the cease-fire by firing at us.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Michaels said. “What’s a promise worth if you’ll break it, good reason or bad?”

“I’d say it’s worth my life, for one thing. Wasn’t my promise anyway.”

Michaels opened his mouth to reply, but the hand grenade tossed into their laps brought the argument to an abrupt end.

Marie was always happiest in gaps. Empty spaces. As a child, she hid in the center of the clothing racks at department stores, or in the corner of the living room between sofa and loveseat. When it rained she tried to dart between drops to stay dry.

Her parents thought she needed a creative outlet and some discipline, so they enrolled her in violin lessons with an old man who was wiry and taut as a string, hair white as the horsehair he rosined.

His name was Mr. Rose and Marie was initially an apt pupil. She learned to read music readily, and could find the notes on the fretboard with ease. But she played her scales too slowly, waiting an eternity between each note. At last, in frustration, he brought out his metronome.

“Keep time with this,” he said, moving the weight to set it ticking, back and forth. Her mouth fell open. Her eyes unfocused. “Go on,” he urged.

She played every melody he set her perfectly, without hesitation. But what he couldn’t know was that she was really playing the spaces between.

Xanthes wiped the sweat from his forehead, leaning against the plow as Dicaeopolis swallowed water from his flagon.

“Do you think he’ll do it?” Xanthes asked.

Dicaeopolis squinted at him. “Best not to get hopes up,” he said finally. “Their land or our land, we’ll still plow and harvest it.”

“But if it’s ours, we can sell some of our crop, maybe buy another ox—”

“If it happens, we plan. Dreaming about Solon’s sweet words will not put bread on our table.”

Dicaeopolis goaded the ox forward and Xanthes guided the plow, the July sun lashing their backs like Helios’ whip on the steeds pulling his chariot. Stalks of wheat fell under the blade and were trampled beneath them, to be collected by the children trailing behind.

“It’s unfair,” Xanthes said later, using a piece of bread to shovel mashed beans into his mouth. “We do the work, they get the pleasure, by the luck of their birth.”

“Let no man count himself lucky until he is dead,” Dicaeopolis said quietly. “Eat. Sleep. We have work to do in the morning.”

It was an uneasy moral ground that Marik inhabited. She had been taught that each person was born in his rightful place as ordained by the gods, and that no man should seek to exceed his caste lest the gods strike him down for doubting their wisdom. Worth was granted, not earned.

And then she had killed a man who had tried to kill her. She had done it instinctively, gracefully, with the man’s own sword. He had been an assassin by trade, and such people were not meant to die easily. When his fellows found her, she assumed they were the hand of Tosh coming to exact vengeance.

She remembered the questions, the sleep deprivation, the torture. She remembered the pale face of the guild master, Lady Clarissa, deep blue eyes searching her own black ones. Finally, she remembered the Lady’s words to her just before she began her training.

“These are flagitious times,” the Lady had said. “We must make ourselves worthy of them.”

Perhaps, Marik had thought, the gods granted worth to those bold enough to seek it?