The smoker will run out of cigarettes today. She first appeared on the news on my sixteenth birthday, about a week ago—her and her pile of ashes. They show the same establishing shot of her every morning: she’s in front of a busted-looking convenience store across town, the ashes on her right, a gradually dwindling supply of cigarettes in a paper bag on her left. She’s spoken to the journalists just once: “I’ll keep smoking,” she told them on the first day, “for as long as we’re on the moon doing our killing.” Every morning, I mark the ash pile’s height on my TV screen with a Sharpie.
Today, the screen can no longer contain the ashes.
I only know a little about the moon: people live there, and they are being slaughtered. My parents don’t like me asking about this; I’ve learned to mute the TV anytime the news runs the clip of the smoker’s statement. I’ve tried to learn more. I borrowed books from the library: Emery and the Petrified Forest, a picture book about fruit that grows in the moon’s coral-forests; Sisters’ Story, about the moon’s poetry; and Lockpicking, about Lunar music and technology. I sometimes steal glances at the newspaper over dad’s shoulder. They report on the slaughter most days, and there are photographs of the Earth from the moon’s surface; our blue planet roars in that other sky. I feel heavy when I turn it over in my head. When I press him on it, all dad says is, “She thinks we’re responsible for what’s happening up there.” He has started reading the paper alone in his study.
In today’s broadcast, people bring loose cigarettes to the smoker. Not long after it finishes, I steal a cigar from dad’s study and wrap it in a plastic bag. I lie to my parents about where I’m going.
I don’t know why, but I want to help her.
I walk all day to reach the smoker, and my lungs, about as pristine as a kid’s can be, sing and burn in my chest. The moon seethes with blood and fire overhead. Over the last week, I have filled my notebook with sketches of the moon—the sickly color of its cheeks, its razed forests, the ashes drifting down on me and my neighbors’ heads. I hate war, I think. Is this war? I don’t really know. What I hate is my neighbors, maybe. But my gut twists around when I try to figure it out. I’m so scared I feel dangerous. I think about the cigar in my pocket. Smoking it. A fire in my chest burning forever. All I want is to be free.
I turn a corner and there is the convenience store. A crowd roils in the parking lot. The other day at school, I sketched the store, the crowd, the cameras. I added a ladder: a figure—the smoker, maybe—was trying to climb it to the moon. Oscar, a boy I barely know, saw the sketch. He yelled and ripped it from my notebook. He cried, I don’t know why.
As I cross the street, I wonder what my arrival looks like on my TV, with its static and Sharpie lines marking the ashes.
In the years to come, I will sometimes search for the clip of my arrival. I will wonder what brought me to the convenience store that day. I never will find a recording. The thought of it will gnaw on me. To drown it out, I will dance in the fields on the edge of town, in basements and warehouses, hot and engulfed in firelight. I will yearn for the world’s end, accept any invitation that lets me dream I am not a coward. Nothing will work. After years of this, I will leave home to study the body. And while I study, we will kill the moon’s people every day and make their land ours. We will bring our favorite pieces of the moon home with us, loaded on ships with body bags and weary journalists. Lockpicking will fill clubs across Earth. Art galleries will be lined with canvases made from the wings of lunar bats. Petrified fruit trees will fill our parks, the sharp, colorful coral removed from the bark. Sometimes I will check on the smoker. Easy to do: a bored engineering student will maintain a simple livestream in her spare time. A ticker will run at the bottom of the screen, tracking the height of the ash pile, the types of cigarettes, how many she has smoked, lighthearted trivia about the years she’s been smoking. Eventually, the convenience store will close. Activists and ironic counterrevolutionaries will keep the smoker supplied with cigarettes. When I finish my studies and return home, I will know people from across the moon’s cleaved culture—immigrants and refugees, programmers and dishwashers, farmers and executives. One day, I will meet a man for a date. He will be Lunar. He will be waiting outside an abandoned warehouse downtown. I will allow him to lead me inside, first across a quiet Astroturf field and then through a yellow-green coral-forest, eroded stone fruit hanging on the branches. Firelight will not quite fill the space. As we leave the forest, we will spill into an old cavern. A cave stolen from my home, my date will whisper in my ear. Flesh will be burning somewhere. The floor will shake. Dust and grit and smoke, older than anything I have ever breathed, will stifle the air. And I will hear them before I see them, the actors in their day clothes, already sweating, already hollering. In the cacophony will be Oscar, the boy from school. The boy who wept over my sketch. I will recognize him right away: his burning eyes. With his comrades, Oscar will rush around the cavern, climb on furniture, smash TV screens, burn printouts of ceasefires and declarations, kiss some of the audience. He will dance, and he will bleed, and he will brim with joy and mischief and purpose. My date will join him. So will everyone else. So will I, no longer alone. My throat will burn with a shame I can’t voice. When my date asks later, I will lie that I understand. I will go back a few times, trying to. The morning after one of these secret visits, there will be a body waiting in the coroner’s office, my office. I will get to work. I will think about Oscar’s body, the greasy firelight glistening on his skin, as I study the deceased. I will remember how I sketched the burning forests as a kid. I will know, as I work on the body, that the sick look of the moon’s surface is a sign of environmental collapse—our animus for the moon threatens the delicate relationship between land and people, maybe forever. I will think there is no turning back. The deceased will be emaciated and strange: a dozen bats’ wings growing from her neck, a pair of scraggly birds’ nests in the crook of her collarbone, her hair yellow, mossy, fruiting. She will be an ecology—cracked snakes’ eggs in her ankles, hips stabilized with blasted concrete and tree roots, bones made of bark, an esophagus loud and blue and screaming, like the Earth in the moon’s sky. I will only understand who is on my table when I open the chest cavity: the smoker’s lungs will be a chunk of obsidian, pitch black, shimmering, nested in calcified wood and paper. For the first time, I will breathe the moon’s air. It will be sweet, then acrid. I will weep, cradling her lungs against my own.
But today, I shoulder my way into the cluster of people—reporters, protesters, witnesses—gathered around the smoker. I push through until I’m only a few people away from her. At her feet, I see half-empty packs of menthols, joints, clove cigarettes. My breath catches in my throat: the ashes are higher than she is tall. Awful and beautiful. My TV could not capture it—the plastic and plants and fabric mingling with the ashes. I doubt the smoker will last more than a few days. My fist closes around the cigar.
I want to believe this is a kind of mercy.
When it is my turn, I approach the smoker. The people and their cameras shuffle closer. A queasy feeling courses through me. Of course there will be a record. I wonder if Oscar is watching.
I drop the cigar in the paper bag on her left.
“I’ll miss the moon,” I say. I try to look her in the face, but all I see is the black of her lungs. The war is not in the sky.
The smoker smiles tightly. “Tell them, not me,” she says.
I pivot. To the cameras, I cry: “I killed her, same as you.”