“What, you think you’re my first rescue of the day? Hop on.”
Luna lowered herself onto Benny’s back, and sure enough, the webs sank a little farther into the muck, but not too far. With a grunt and a few carefully placed steps, Benny turned around and slurped back toward the village.
“Benny, have you seen Willow? Is she any better?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been to your hut yet, there were so many people stranded.” He shook his head gently, so even that small movement wouldn’t throw them both off balance. “Some Perigee this turned out to be, eh?”
She patted his shoulder. “I’m sure they’ll still make time for the firecrackers tonight, don’t you worry.”
“Luna,” Benny said in a voice that was pitched just a little too carefully. “What were you doing out there?”
Luna sighed. She didn’t know if what had happened was a thing she could find words for. All her life she’d heard stories of the terrible creature below, but now she found herself wishing she could hold on to that look on its face just before it disappeared, that look of hope and love and promise.
“I met the creature, only it’s not—she’s not what you’d think. I watched the sickness—the curse—whatever you want to call it, I watched it roll in black tears out of her. She was . . . I don’t know. It’s a long story, Benny. A long, long story.”
“You know you’re going to tell me everything.”
“Yeah, Benny. I know.”
Luna laid her chin on Benny’s shoulder and held on tight as he brought them steadily closer to the village. The huts seemed out of place, like too-tall waterbirds airing their bare ankles. Everything looked different. The place she had spent her whole life was a place she was going to have to get to know all over again.
“Benny, you little water skipper, you!” Granny Tu called, waving an arm over her head. “You bring that girl up here where I can give her a proper hug.”
Luna laughed, but the noise caught in her throat. Mama ran out of the house and gripped the railing as she watched her daughter draw near.
Granny Tu nudged Mama with her elbow.
“You did this?” Mama asked, her eyes full of something buoyant and bright. “You drained the swamp and got rid of the creature?”
“Something like that,” Luna said, her wince softening into a grin. “I did it for Willow. Was it—Is she—”
Mama got down on her knees and reached for Luna. The rushing water had left even the ladder high and dry, and Luna had to stand on Benny’s shoulders to reach the bottom rung and climb. Mama pulled her up the last bit, and held her close for several heartbeats. Granny Tu wrapped her arms around the both of them. Luna couldn’t see their faces, but she could feel the ragged pull of their breath, the heavy sighs that set their worry free.
After a time, Mama backed away and placed her hands on either side of her daughter’s face. “Luna,” she said, “I can’t believe how brave you were. I can’t believe I let myself get so wrapped up in sadness that I couldn’t see it—I couldn’t see you.”
A pair of pelicans leaped from their perches and flapped, ungainly, steadily rising along the path of the newborn river.
With a gentle push between Luna’s shoulder blades, Mama said, “Go on inside.”
Luna walked into the hut and around the paneled screen at the back, her heart swelling until there wasn’t room for anything else, not breath, not speech, not fear or worry. Willow sat up in bed, her arms outstretched, starbursts of pink on her cheeks and a wide smile breaking on her lips. The sheets all around her were speckled with black sludge where the curse had finally sweated out of her.
Like the river that had been hemmed and penned in and suddenly set free, Luna ran to throw her arms around her sister.
“Happy Perigee, Luna!” Willow beamed. “Isn’t this just the best day ever?”
Epilogue
The river flows.
It begins as a trickle deep in the heart of the jungle, in the thick, secret heart of the jungle. It surges and swirls, gorging on the breath of a thousand streams.
The river, it bells, and it swells, and it flows, and a reed-thin girl in a skinny boat spins in slow circles. Her sister perches at the bow, calling directions and captaining the little craft. The pair of them hold paddles flat as porpoise tails, and the boat skims along an eddy where a swamp once covered everything in sight. The sound of their laughter winds like chimes through tree roots reacquainting themselves with the air. It bounces off dirt drying in the midday sun and skips over the cool, clear ripples of water rushing past.
In another world separated from this one by a veil of whirling clouds, a second pair of sisters ride the currents of a different river just as silken, just as sweet. Arms outstretched, their fingers interlace, as if they cannot bear to be separated even for a breath. They are rocked in the wavelets while the fish below buoy them up on a pillow of bubbles. A thousand droplets leap away from the steady flow to kiss their tiny brows.
Mornings are born, evenings fade, and still the river slides by.
Acknowledgments
I am so grateful for my editor, Reka Simonsen, who is loyal and kind and so very wise! Many thanks to the wonderful team at Atheneum Books for Young Readers for welcoming me, and for turning this story into such a lovely book: Justin Chanda, Emma Ledbetter, Sonia Chaghatzbanian, Jeannie Ng, and Chava Wolin.
To my brilliant agent, writing partners, and early readers, thank you for your encouragement and faithful critique: Ammi-Joan Paquette, Meg Wiviott, Anna Jordan, Kristin Derwich, and Tiffany Crowder.
Finally, to my friends and family, thank you for understanding and embracing my near-constant state of daydreaming and plotting, and for making life in this real world so fantastic! I love you all.
Melanie Crowder lives on the Colorado Front Range, where she is a writer and educator. She teaches English to nonnative English–speaking students and holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of the young adult novel Audacity and the middle-grade novel Parched. Visit her at melaniecrowder.net.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by Melanie Crowder
Jacket illustration copyright © 2015 by Zdenko Basic
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crowder, Melanie, author.
A nearer moon / Melanie Crowder. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Long ago the dam formed, the lively river turned into a swamp, and the wasting illness came to Luna’s village, and now that her little sister is sick, Luna will do anything to save her, even offer herself to the creature that lives in the swamp on the day of the nearer moon.
ISBN 978-1-4814-4148-3
ISBN 978-1-4814-4150-6 (eBook)
1. Water spirits—Juvenile fiction. 2. Magic—Juvenile fiction. 3. Sisters—Juvenile fiction. 4. Families—Juvenile fiction. [1. Water spirits—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Sisters—Fiction. 4. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C885382Ne 2015
813.6—dc23
[Fic] 2014043590
A Nearer Moon Page 9