White moon red moon

every day you must eat a little full moon to keep the blood moon away. that is what the nurse says. they give you a small foil packet that looks like a calendar and you are told to follow the arrows. after seven days, you will be safe. if you miss a day, you must take the next one as per normal, and then after another seven days, you will be safe. if you accidentally take more than one a day, you will be okay. you may feel a bit nauseous. you may bleed a little. if you vomit within 3-4 hours of swallowing the little moon, you must take another one, because the moon may have come up from your stomach with everything else.

every day you must eat a little full moon to keep the blood moon away. for the first few months, you bleed irregularly. there is no straight answer to what irregularly means. some days, you have trouble finding the southern cross in the sky, and then you see blood on your fingers and it all makes sense. there is something bigger than yourself going on. the moon will keep tugging the silver fish back and forth, and you will keep watching the moon slice being punched out of the sky and into the ocean, big at first, and then smaller, and then bigger again.

every day you must eat a little full moon to keep the blood moon away. one day, the bleeding stops completely. the irregular bleeding becomes regular because it is no longer there. it carries on like this for years. your best friend gets married and has a baby girl. you have never held a baby before. your friend passes you the baby and it instantly starts crying, and you figure the baby is fresh enough that its intuition can feel your fear. you get a sense that you will now no longer be able to do the things you used to do together—drive without intention, wake up early to watch the lights. you look at the baby’s fresh face. you tell the baby that she is in a good place.

every day you must eat a little full moon to keep the blood moon away until one day, you decide to stop. your bleed comes back on the night of a full moon and this is no lie, you want to cry. it is much less painful then the last time you had your real bleed, so many years ago, before all the little full moons, before all the crying at the ngaio trees, before all the digging, before all the long stories in the long night, a reminder of what you chose to lose for a long time, a reminder that you remember, i remember, when i was young, in the morning, my mother would put the heater in the bathroom for me, one week every month, and she would get the shower warm for me before i got out of bed, and i would wash all the blood away, and she would be there with a warm towel for me. and it would be all right.