As It Washes Away
art by Mariam Seshan, words by Mia Tan
Footprints on the Moon
Bee would eventually reach an impressive height, but at the time she was small and needed leverage—on a hazy afternoon in our backyard, she leaned forward, adjusted her purple hair clip, and told me about her and the moon.
“The moon knows me,” she said, crossing her thin, grass-flecked legs. “I’ve been there before.”
She claimed that whenever she walked, her footprints would appear on the moon. Each step, a crater. Each footprint, a rocky pit carved out by Bee herself. She told me other versions of the story—how she could control the tide, teleport between stars, and turn her eyes into silver beams watching over Earth. Her retellings became more and more mythical, to the point that I would look at her and, instead of seeing an older sister, imagine someone straight out of a book—a god who could summon fire, or a titan who could hold up a house.
But the moon was just a sloppy inkblot in the sky. Some nights it was only a sliver, and that’s when I hated it the most. Because every night it refused to come out, Bee would lie in bed and cough, barely strong enough to sip juice from a straw.
Something must have gotten loose in my head because one night I talked to the moon. I told it the truth about her bones. How the growth hormones had missed her and hit me. It’s why she walked slowly and rarely left a trail behind. It’s why I could race to the middle seat faster than her and punt soccer balls farther than she ever could—right over her head, right over the fence.
And I kept talking to the moon, right up until our last summer together. By then, her body had thinned into something like a shriveled tree. Her nails stuck out like weeds from yellow dirt. We sat on the shore, shaking grapefruit juice in crackling ice and licking vestiges of sugar from the glass. Boats blared their horns as they docked, tucking in for the night. I watched a moth bump foolishly into a nearby lamppost. Bee curled herself into a ball, as she always did, turning her body into its own small planet.
Yesterday I walked down to the sandbar in dim light and thought of Bee. No one in the house had spoken about her in years, but I swear some part of her dog-eared story came true that night. I imagined her in our backyard, young and cross-legged—an oval imprint in the grass. I thought of her craters stamped all over the moon.
