Cocoon Moon

Everything seemed to happen at once. Stella lived at two speeds simultaneously. In what felt like it should have taken only a second or two, the moon sprang upon her back and spread out like an effulgent tarpaulin, pressing her skin into the pricking fence wires and blocking her view. It seemed a violent act, but she experienced it as if it were a gentle, deliberate caress. It bothered her for a moment, and then her memory supplied an image. She wasn't sure if it was the right one: Stella, a girl at 26, taking her darling baby gently by the feet, lifting the bottom away to change a diaper, wiping carefully, drying, powdering, and re-wrapping.

As it turned out, it was not an unfitting image. The moon's substance, spread thin and flat and quite unlike a moon, covered Stella like a comforter, or like a flour tortilla, for that matter. At its edges the wires of the fence were snipped.

Stella rose into the air as slowly as whispering in the dark and under her the edges gathered together securely, under the stars.