In her dream, the moon exploded.

Something hit it from behind — some dark shadow, some cosmic force she couldn’t name. The moon, pale and pearlescent and strangely much closer than it’s supposed to be, blossomed into fiery magma. A wave of wind pushed out from it, nearly knocking her to her feet.
“So this is it,” she thought, a familiar fear swelling in her chest. 

For a moment, she was transfixed by the moon’s fracturing rocks, how they fell like the asteroids she was taught killed the dinosaurs. She felt connected to prehistory, somehow. Like this was always meant to happen. Like she was the special one to experience it.

Then one of the rocks hit a building on the horizon. It sent forward a rush of rumbling energy that made her vision shake. She ran to the left, down a road, over a steaming car. From the shops she passed, the road must’ve been Forbes Avenue, but it was tilted downhill, like the quaking changed its shape.

Vaguely, she sensed people running around her. Screams. Bodies falling and breaking against the ever-shifting ground. 

The pavement cracked and moved in a curling line like a snake. She could almost hear it hiss through the plumes of steam rising from the wreckage: “Thissss … thisss is the priccce … “

The Cathedral of Learning stood between the trembling buildings like Moses parting the red sea. She looked to it for hope, for the promise of shelter in its basement, and ran, sprinted towards it. But just as she dodged another splitting fissure, a flaming rock dove to the Cathedral as an eagle would its prey. The building didn’t even break its fall. The rock crashed through the steel and limestone like it was paper. 

The impact, somewhere near Soldiers and Sailors, made the rows of shops sway and fall inward, the red sea folding back into place. The sound of the snake’s hissing had risen to a hellish harmony of human screams, crumbling concrete, and the thunderous drumming of the moon’s many falling pieces. 

As the skywalk over Forbes fell on her, as its weight snapped her bones and smothered her chest, she imagined this must be what God sounds like. 

She woke up and went about her day. 

In the afternoon, she walked to Schenley Park. She crossed the bridge, passed the many locks clinging to the fence, and wondered how long they’d been out there, victim to the elements. 

Today the elements were kind. There was a soft spring breeze that washed in from the east, and the sun’s rays fell in delicate amber tones. Panther Hollow Trail was a treasure trove of sensory experiences; the grit of grinding gravel, the gentle pats of her tennis shoes on the dirt, the faint accelerations of car engines, the birds chirping and the bugs buzzing.

Although, she didn’t hear any of this because she was listening to music.

She walked further, then around the path again. She lost herself in listening to “Little Oblivions” and forgot the time. She saw the shadows, and knew the danger, but stayed with the trees anyway. 

The moon’s face emerged in the dimming indigo sky. It was clear and untouched, save for gray craters, the scars from asteroids it survived, but even those seemed right in its shape.

She watched it. It was especially luminous tonight, like how lightbulbs shine brightly just before they die. 

The cool wind gathered around her ankles, sirens in the distance called with the coming night. A cricket, somewhere, tuned its wings.

She imagined that mysterious cosmic power again, a darkness deeper than space. It loomed behind the moon, then pierced it, and the moon broke, and fell, and burned the world in its suffering.

She didn’t need an oracle to tell her what these dreams and images meant, but she also didn’t have the words to describe it — it was a tightness in her throat, a low pain in her belly, the feel of thin fingers pulling on her temples. It was the world, and what the world wasn’t, and yelling men, and selfish people, and bright screens. It was a dream, light and glittering, and like the moon, always breaking.

Later, once she was safely in bed, she’d look out her window and see the moon tinted with shades of sunset — or, to a more sensational viewer, shades of bloody doom — but for now, all she saw was its brightness.

It didn’t care for snakes or Moses or God. It didn’t care for cracking buildings and steaming pavement. It didn’t care for her cosmic threat. It was bold. Natural. Comfortable in its glow. 

A bird, some type of eagle, flew past it for a moment, but it was a small, shadowy blemish in the vastness of the light.