The Man on the Moon, Chapter One: Flower Picking is an Indispensable Profession

There was a saying amidst the people of the Moon Kingdom, a proverb usually uttered when a worker would kick up their feet, relax, and be lazy rather than tend to the tedious business assigned. “You’re turning into a Cosmo Bahram,” the moon people would say, and the victims of these harsh words would grunt and mutter an aggravated reply before going back to their daily labor, a little more conscious of their attitude towards their crucial jobs.
Now, Cosmo didn’t refer to some celestial body somewhere within the recesses of space, but rather a moon person who tended to the crystal fields of the Moon Kingdom. He was a normal farmer like hundreds of others, and he even wore their trade, gray tunics and hats woven out the corn stalks that grew on the moon. He carried about a hoe and a shovel as though they were more natural to maneuver than his own arms, his hands were forever calloused from the rough labor, and his face was forever caked with dust. He only stood out as exemplary to some of the young moon girls who giggled foolishly at his lithe, muscled, ash-colored body, long white hair, and, of course, his gorgeous ivory eyes that seemed to hold some secret of the stars and the world that they saw.
But, apart from the outward features he was blessed with, he was scoffed at by the people of the Moon Kingdom. There was something wrong with Cosmo, a good farmer that turned from his work and stared off into the black space as though searching and dreaming for an answer to some question never whispered. He was odd and different from the hard-working moon people, especially the farmers, but whatever caused his bizarre behavior was only guessed at. Maybe he had a bad run-in with a Titan. Maybe he had drunk too much immortality potion. Maybe he had accidentally bonked his head on his shovel. All of those were good guesses, but none of them were true.
Our story begins on a day where the moon was dark and only a few crystals shone from the crystal fields; the rest had been frantically and perfectly picked by the farmers to create the glow of a crescent moon, and the ones that remained were being prepared for the new moon, Nighttime, as the Moon Kingdom dubbed it.
Cosmo was rushing through the clean fields in a most haphazard fashion, pausing every now and then to peer behind a large boulder or inside a crater, all the while bumping into frazzled colleagues who were transporting and picking crystals. He gave them hasty apologies and darted away before they could scold him for being so careless and reprimand him for not working. Even the small, delicate crystalline insects, the sparkling white butterflies and drowsy, pallid bees dodged out of his careless way, for once a bit frightened of the normally peaceful moon people.
Cosmo ran to a large, gray rock that still held some of the crystal plants, flowers similar to the bluebells of Earth if they had a majestic, soft light and were made of the most radiant, white gemstone. He brushed a few of them aside, tearing them from the hard, gray ground, sending a few angry bees buzzing away to tell their queen of the insanity that had breached their fields.
“Where are you?” Cosmo asked, a little annoyed, but still with a laugh. “You win, okay? Just come on out; I’ve been trying to find you for hours.”
“What in the Milky Way are you doing?” called a man’s voice from behind him, a rather deep, infuriated voice.
However, Cosmo paid no heed and continued ripping out the flowers. “Okay, now you’re just rubbing it in. You win! And if you don’t come out in the next minute, I’ll turn you into a nice, fluffy hat. And when people ask me, ‘Oh, Cosmo, where did you get such a fine hat?’, I will say, ‘You know, it used to be my rabbit, but she was such a bothersome, aggravating, trying little thing that I thought she would look better on my head instead of running around, cheating at children’s games!’”
The man from behind Cosmo grabbed his shoulder with a fierce hand and wheeled him around. “Quit talking nonsense, boy! What on the moon are you going on about?”
Cosmo just flashed a radiant, white smile at the giant gripping his shoulder. He was a moon man, and he was quite tall and beefy even for farmers, who were quite large normally. He sported no hair on his black head; no, instead he exhibited a haggard, tangled gray beard that knotted down to his chest. His eyes, a dark gray, shot venom into Cosmo’s ivory ones.
“Mr. Capella sir, I think I lost my rabbit,” Cosmo said with a smile.
“What are you blabbering about?” Capella said, growing more aggravated by the minute.
“Well, it’s more like she’s hiding from me. We were playing hide-and-seek, you see, and she decided that it would be fun to be a condescending little monster and hide in a place where I can’t find her. Do you like rabbit stew, Mr. Capella?”
“Listen here boy, I don’t know what you’re doing playing children’s games, but you have work to do. Tonight is the night of the crescent moon, and you better get your stony butt into gear and help us to create it instead of causing havoc.”
Cosmo leaned back against the boulder and pouted out his lips, a rather comical sight. “But what about my rabbit?”
“I don’t care about your rabbit! I care about this job, and I care about the crystal fields, and I care that you are running around like an intoxicated Titan and ruining my flowers!” Capella was shaking Cosmo at this point, but the young man just smiled again, disarming and saccharine.
“You’re kind of funny when you get mad, Mr. Capella. You should hear yourself yell. You know, I – Oh, wait, here she is.”
Cosmo tore from Capella’s death grip and opened his arms out to a small, slender moon rabbit with fur like snow and eyes like stars shining in the shadow of space. She jumped into her friend’s arms and nuzzled her black nose into Cosmo’s chest, eyes glinting with humor and affection.
“I thought that you might’ve gotten stuck in a crater, Brightfur,” Cosmo said, and the rabbit looked at him with an expression that probably meant something along the lines of, “You’re just jealous of my superior skills at hide-and-seek.”
“Is this some kind of a joke to you?” Capella asked, crossing his arms with a frightening scowl.
Cosmo laughed, a sound that rang through the fields. “Oh goodness, definitely not! If it was, then I might actually be working.”
“Then why do you think that it’s okay for a grown man to play a silly child’s game with a rabbit? Is there something wrong with you? Are you ill? Or maybe those stories are true about your parents feeding you spoiled moon cheese when you were a baby.”
“We were just having some fun, right, Brightfur?” Cosmo said, and the rabbit nodded her head.
“These fields are not the place for fun, Cosmo Bahram! We have a job to do, and if you don’t get to it, then I might be forced to give you a real head injury.”
Cosmo let out a hefty sigh. “But do you know how bored I am, Mr. Capella? It’s the same old thing every single day. Pull out some flowers, plant some flowers, haul some flowers away, seed some new ones, and make sure that they’re perfect or else the humans are going to come up in a monstrous spaceship and slay us all because there was a slight bump in their crescent moon.”
Capella grabbed Cosmo’s chin and roughly forced his face closer. Cosmo could smell his breath: the aroma of cinnamon and barley boxed at his nose. “The Moon Kingdom is all about order and structure, boy. We tend to these fields and create the phases of the moon because we are the keepers of time. Time is measured by the moon, and if we don’t regulate it, then time ceases to exist. Does that make sense to you? The chariot-pullers that pull the moon around the Earth do the same thing. They keep order. They keep time. Even the tideologists have an important job; the Earth depends on the tides, on the ocean. Do you understand, Cosmo Bahram?”
“But the tideologists actually have a cool job,” Cosmo said, rivaling Capella’s scowl. “They can see the Earth, they can see the humans and the oceans through the pool maps that they control the tides on. They actually get to see Earth! And even the chariot pullers can, at least, get close to the Earth. At least they can shake hands with the stars they pass by. But this, this farming job of mine, literally melts all portions of my mind with its toxic monotony. I swear upon our Queen, if I have to continue doing this for much longer, my head will explode. Can you live with yourself if that happens, Mr. Capella sir?”
“I think I can,” Capella said, and he pushed Cosmo against the boulder and began to stroll away. “Now get back to work, boy, or there will be some heavy consequences.”
“Yeah yeah, I’ll bet it’s so much worse than being a farmer for the rest of my life,” Cosmo grumbled under his breath. He put Brightfur down and began to rearrange the flowers he had destroyed upon the boulder, frowning all the while.
When Brightfur continued to look at him with pity thick in her black eyes, Cosmo threw his hands up in the air. “What can I do, Brightfur? I can’t spend the rest of my life like this, destined to create the phases of the moon, the same ones, day after day after day. And if I try to have a bit of fun, people look at me like worms have crawled into my mind and taken residence there, or like I have sprouted wings and have turned blue! Sometimes, oh, sometimes, Brightfur, I wish that we weren’t immortal. Forever seems much too long.”
Cosmo picked up a shovel lying nearby and leaned on it, staring at the Earth so far away in front of him. It is a miraculous sight, as anyone can tell you, the perfect planet that enraptures the mind and imagination with its vivid colors, so unlike the gray we are used to, strange mountains, curious forests, and, of course, the queer, intelligent creatures that inhabit it.
“I’ve spied on the tideologists before, and I have looked inside their pool maps. I have seen the oceans of Earth and the dazzling fish that inhabit them. They sport so many different colors, so unlike the gray and white ones we have here! And I have seen their winged creatures that arch so gracefully in the blue sky and cry out into the wind (not that I know what wind is. I’ve only heard of it). And the humans . . . the humans! Now those are some creatures that I would like to meet. They are so interesting, so diverse, so . . . so free.”
Cosmo sighed, as did Brightfur as she leaned against his legs, imagining the salty oceans and the birds and the captivating humans. There they stood, staring out at the Earth, so far away. “One day, and I swear on it, Brightfur, we’ll go there. We’ll go to Earth and we’ll feel the wind in our hair and we’ll actually smell the seas instead of just seeing a projected image from outside a window. One day, we will meet a human, and we will have an actual conversation, stimulating, knowledgeable, and talk of the crystal fields will never pop up. Not even once.
“I swear, I swear on every minute of my immortal life, one day, my dear rabbit, one day we will go to the Earth. And then maybe I will be content with this boring existence. But, until then-“
And Cosmo, with a face as downcast and shadowy as the dark side of the moon, picked up his shovel, and went back to work.