Short Story: Prophecy of the New Moon (Gen)

Posted on | September 8, 2007 | No Comments

Author: Chark
Rating: PG
Word Count: Approx. 3000
Summary: A young girl learns that she is linked with a prophecy, one that has been ten years in the making.
Excerpt: “…thought my birth and the tenth anniversary of it would be a heralding of… the apocalypse, maybe? I’m certainly no devil spawn or harbinger of doom.”
Warnings: None really, unless you want to know this was a writing exercise in using first person past tense. I think I slaughtered this story. I still hope everyone enjoys it.

Prophecy of the New Moon
by Chark

My life was different. At least I thought so and as my mother always said, “Your own opinions should count for something. You have to believe in yourself, because you can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you.”

So what made me think things were different compared to everyone else’s life? Well, to start off, Mom and I weren’t living in the best part of town, but we got by with her working full time at the diner below our apartment and with help from the county welfare office for food stamps. It wasn’t the life some of my friends from school lead, with their nice designer jeans, new name-brand runners and fancy portable music players, but it was better than being out on the street and starving, or living a life of crime. I saw it each day in the girls — hardly a few years older than I was — standing on the street corners and the teenage boys standing in the shadow-filled alleys looking out at the world with hunger in their eyes.
Mom made it okay for me the best way she knew how. She let me be creative and independent. She let me be her friend. She let me be me — just CJ. Whatever I thought CJ wanted or needed to be. And that’s mostly what has made my life truly different, especially since I was only ten years old, or at least I would be tomorrow. Not many ten year old could claim as much independence as I had, and for that I was thankful. Plus, if you haven’t figured it out, I’m a child prodigy. I’m well ahead of the learning curve, but Mom said that as smart as I am and as intelligent as I can converse with adults, I needed a childhood. So we compromised. I go to elementary school for health and physical education, arts, and basic social sciences, then I go to the neighboring middle school in the afternoon for the more advanced stuff. I’m already up to 8th grade mathematics and English, along with the natural sciences.

So what brought all this introspection on? Well, my birthday for one thing, and the arrival of a letter from an old friend of my mother’s for the other. A gypsy soul, my mother said Elena had. A wanderer and a believer in the freedom of the spirit. Mom told me that Elena was present for my birth, which apparently occurred on the new moon. Elena said it was a sign and a portent that this birthday would once again fall on a new moon, according to the latest letter. I had to go look portent up in the dictionary. Once I figured out what she meant, I had to wonder what she thought my birth and the tenth anniversary of it would be a heralding of… the apocalypse, maybe? I’m certainly no devil spawn or harbinger of doom. But what really freaked me out is that in her letter she wrote about my having some kind of birthmark that looked like a crescent moon and that she had an appointment to see a mystic to see what prophecy had to say about my birthday. I asked Mom what birthmark she was referring to and she looked at me kind of strange, and had asked me why I hadn’t noticed the mark before.

“Mom, I honestly don’t know what mark you and Elena are talking about. I haven’t seen anything like it.” I shook my head in frustration.

“The one on the bottom of your left foot. CJ, you mean after all this time, you haven’t noticed the mark on your foot? It’s almost impossible to miss,” she said from her side of the couch.

I looked at her in confusion. I’d seen the bottom of my own feet a lot of times, but I’d never seen any moon shaped crescent mark before. I reached down and pulled off the sock covering my left foot and held it up so that i could see the bottom almost squarely. And I looked back at her and shook my head. “No mark, Mom. You sure you didn’t get me mixed up with some other child in the hospital when I was born?”

The expression on her face was almost comical. She reached out and took my foot into her hands, and pointed with her finger right into the center. “It’s right here. I saw it the minute you took your sock off. Really, you can’t miss it; it’s bright red, like a strawberry.”

I started to freak out big time. “Mom, I really and truly don’t see a mark on my foot.”

“You honestly don’t see the red moon shaped birthmark?” she asked.

I nodded my head in agreement. “All I see is unblemished skin, Mom. Maybe if you took a picture of the bottom of my feet, the camera might capture it?”

Mom’s face lit up at the idea and she let go of my foot and ran back to her bedroom, and returned seconds later with the Polaroid instant camera. She turned on an extra light to make sure everything was well lit, and then I propped my foot just so for her to take a snapshot. We waited and watched as the film was exposed, and it was just as I thought. My foot was clear of any birthmark, and Mom huffed in disappointment. Then when we both thought the film was completely exposed and I was going to tell my mother, I told you so, we saw the moon birthmark appear slowly as if by magic in the center of my foot. I gasped in surprise, and Mom did the same.

“Uh, Mom. I’m officially wigged out here. This is like voodoo or some kind of mystical crap.” I brought my legs up and wrapped my arms around them, hugging them tight. I buried my feet into the crack where the couch cushions joined. Here I had been looking forward to tomorrow and now I never wanted the day to come, not if something terrible was going to happen.

I felt comforted when Mom reached out and put her arms around me, and I leaned into her and let her carry some of my weight. I don’t think we’d hugged like this in a long time and it felt wonderful to slip back into the roles of mother and offspring. “Don’t worry, CJ. I’ll call Elena right away, find out if she’s already been to see someone about this prophecy she spoke of in her letter. Honestly, sweetie. It’s probably just a trick of the light or something. Just stay calm and we’ll find out everything we need to know.”

The arms around me slipped away and I wanted to cling to the warmth and security they provided me. I was honestly scared. The question of why I had a birthmark I couldn’t see and yet my own mother could kept circling in my head. Would Elena have the answers I wanted?
I listened quietly as Mom dialed Elena’s phone number. I hadn’t even heard her pick up the phone in the kitchen, so lost was I in my own thoughts. Was there anyway to stave off time, I asked myself. It was just hours away from midnight, and according to my mom I was born literally on the hour. The ‘witching hour’ according to old wives tales and probably just one more thing to compound the idea that something mysterious and supernatural surrounded the time of my birth. I wanted to believe it was all nonsense, but with this new evidence of a birthmark that wasn’t visible to my own eye, but was visible to those around me certainly said otherwise.

The hum of Mom’s voice echoed through my head, indistinct and fuzzy. I felt like I was swimming through a container of pancake syrup and getting nowhere fast. My limbs felt heavy and sluggish. The panic I was feeling was spreading through my body faster than lightening would strike a iron rod perched on the top of a three story home. Part of my brain was making fervent pleas with some unknown deity that it would trade in whatever set me apart from someone hum drum and normal. I had been proud of the fact that I was more advanced that most of the other students and kids my age, but maybe what they say about pride going before a fall was true. Maybe it was my downfall and something truly bad would happen. “Please let there be no prophecy. Let the woman Elena went to see be a hack and a wizened old woman who couldn’t fortune tell her way out of a paper bag,” I whispered aloud.

The silence was loud after the humming background noise of the conversation Mom had been carrying on over the phone. I felt the weight of an arm surround me once more and the hug and warmth of my mother’s body soothed away some of the worry that had been smothering me. I turned my head and laid it against her breast. “What did she have to say?”

I felt more than heard the exhale of a sigh as it left my mother’s body. Then a hand started carding through my hair. Oh, dear. That was not a good sign. She was comforting me too much, so whatever had been said must really have been bad. I waited for her to say something, anything. No words were worse than something being spoken. It just made the fear and panic rise up all that much faster.

I lifted my head away from her shoulder and looked her in the eyes. Part of me was glad that whatever it was, it didn’t strike fear in her heart to look at me or to not touch me with love. So I wasn’t the devil’s spawn after all. But then again, some of the best mothers probably had devils-in-disguise for sons or daughters and they still loved their children.

“Mom, tell me the truth. What did Elena say? Or what I should say is what did this mystic of hers tell her about me?”

The eyes that looked back at me blinked repeatedly as if to hold back tears. Okay, the fear ratcheted up a notch. I slipped from her grasp and reached out and squeezed one of her hands, otherwise my own would have picked up something and smashed it. I hoped that in squeezing her hands, the words would be squeezed out of her.

“The moment Elena walked through the door, the mystic went in to some kind of trance and what came spilling out was bizarre beyond words. It was as if they’d been waiting for Elena so they could share your story. Elena was stunned and had almost missed the beginning of what was said, but they repeated the…um…prophecy three times. By the third time, Elena had it all written down. She was even in the act of calling when my call came through. She says it actually scared a few years of life out of her to have the phone ring as she’d placed her hand on it.”

I wanted to scream to tell her to get on with it. The anticipation was killing me. Couldn’t she see that? Instead I gritted my teeth and stopped my eyes from rolling at the melodrama of the moment. This was serious and I had to not be the nine year old I was.

“And?” I squeezed her hands again to spur her on once more.

“The prophecy goes something like this, ‘The sign of the crescent moon marks her in her innocence and when the new moon on the anniversary of her birth rises, she will be the conduit to the future. She will foresee the future of the world.’”

I sat there blinking and swallowing down the lump that had formed in my throat. I tried to make a joke, “So has the new moon appeared yet?”

There was a physical jerk to my mom as if she was waking from a trance. “Elena checked the moment she got home from seeing this woman. It’s supposed to appear in the sky around midnight. Well appear is inaccurate I guess, since it will not actually be visible from here and is literally on the other side of the earth. Noon there, midnight here. It will be pitch black, except for the stars.”

With a slight turn of my head, I saw the clock on the wall. It was just after eight now. I had four hours in which to brace myself for seeing the entire future of the world. I hoped the prophecy wasn’t being literal. I don’t think my brain could handle the entire existence of the world to come and everyone on it.

The smile on my face was strained as I looked back at my mother. I tried to joke again when I said, “You think I could sleep through it then? Maybe knock me out with some Tylenol PM or nighttime cold medicine?” The desperation in my voice most have been heard, because once more mom took me into her arms and held on to me as if the weight of the future wasn’t already pulling me down and away from her and everything I thought I knew. I wanted to cry, so I did.

I cried off and on for what felt like hours, slow and steady. I couldn’t run away from time and I wasn’t about to put a stop to my future just to avoid the future of everything else. I didn’t know what would happen to me, but I would not take the cowards way out. I was smart and brave, and I heard my mother tell me so. But the tears wouldn’t stop coming. I could be brave, but I could still be weak at the same time. It was allowed. After all I was still only nine years old, soon to be ten.

The sounds of my mother shushing me and comforting me was almost washing out the roar of sound inside my own head. Almost. But I could still hear it coming, the moon slowly itching its way into place somewhere on the other side of the world. It was like a tide washing along the shore. Getting stronger and coming in faster intervals. I looked again at the clock and saw the minute hand inch its way upwards to the twelve, where the hour hand was also almost at. Tick, tick, tick was the sound now. It was loud and replaced the ocean like roar.

I closed my eyes against the sight. I took a breath to steady myself.

It was like drowning. I’d tell my mother that the moment I surfaced from the deluge of images. If a person could suffocate from the oppressive weight in knowing what was to come for the world, I surely would have when the moment the new moon came and went. It lasted for about half an hour, near as I could tell. When the future images stopped coming, I had long since passed out.

When I came to, I found myself tucked into some blankets on the couch. Mom had pulled the other sock I’d been wearing off, and I wiggled my toes against the knitted blanket. It was dark in the living room, and I could barely make out the shape of my mother sitting in the chair opposite me. Just enough light spilled in through the windows from the lamps on the street below our apartment. The moment was almost anti-climatic. Here inside my head was everything that would come to pass on the planet known as Earth, and yet it all meant nothing to me. I had no time references for many of the images that played through my mind. It wasn’t pretty to be sure. Would the disease that ravaged the many plants that currently thrived come within my lifetime? Would the war that came afterwards occur immediately or years later? A lifetime or three? Why share this possible future with a ten year old? What could I hope to accomplish to set things to right? If I could set them to right at all.

I knew that no one would believe the word of a ten year old. Maybe I was a modern day Nostredamous, and one day I would go to the most popular rag on the news stands and tell my story, tell the world what I had seen. Then step back and watch as I’d be declared a delusional person and then have them lock me away in some institute for the insane. I snorted out loud. Yeah right! As if. I was no dummy. Maybe instead, I should write down in a diary my vision. The future of the world wasn’t grand by my standards, and was destined to die. But it would be a glorious death, with many moments of triumph and defeat along the way.

But I think I’ll keep the prophecy to myself. No sense worrying Mom or anyone else I end up close to. Let everyone else play out their lives as they should and I’ll go along for the ride and watch it unfold. Besides, most of what I’d seen in my visions had literally already been predicted by scientists and if the people of today weren’t listening now and it all still happened anyway, what did it matter what I knew. However, I didn’t know what my own future would bring, since that wasn’t shown to me. I could only thank whoever blessed me with this burden that they left something hidden and mysterious for me to learn. The future wasn’t all bad, and I looked forward to tomorrow… well today and celebrating my birth. I was still special, just now… only more so. At least in my own opinion. And like I’d mentioned before, that’s really the only opinion that should count.

Finis

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