I bought this book some time ago and didn’t much like it when I first began reading it. I picked it up again and suddenly really began enjoying it. This was the story she tells about a friend in the opening paragraphs of the moon chapter.
Lunacy
“During the glory days of the Apollo project, a young astronomer who analyzed moon rocks at a university laboratory fell in love with my friend Carolyn, and he risked his job and national security to give her a quantum of moon dust.
“Where is it? Let me see!” I demanded at this news. But she answered quietly, “I ate it.” After a pause she added, “There was so little.” As though that explained everything.
I was furious. In an instant I had dropped from the giddy heights of discovering the Moon right there in Carolyn’s apartment to realizing she had eaten it all without leaving a crumb for me.
In a reverie I saw the Moon dust caress Carolyn’s lips like a lover’s kiss. As it entered her mouth, it ignited on contact with her saliva to shoot sparks that lodged in her every cell. Crystalline and alien, it illuminated her body’s dark recesses like pixie powder, thrumming the senseless tune of wind chime through her veins. By its sacred presence it changed her very nature: Carolyn, the moon goddess. She had mated herself to the moon somehow via the act of corporation, and that was what made me so jealous.
Of course I had heard old wives’ tales advising women to open their bedroom curtains and sleep in the moonlight for heightened fertility and more regular menstrual cycles, but no folklore described powers to be won from the moon by eating its dust…
I still envy Carolyn and her taste of the moon. She has long since lost all traces of the moon morsel…What could it have contained, anyway, to preoccupy me all these years? A few grains of titanium and aluminum? Some helium atoms borne from the sun on the solar wind? The shining essence of all that is unattainable?
All of the above, probably, all rendered the more extraordinary for having traveled to her across 240,000 miles of interplanetary space, in the belly of a rocket ship, and hand delivered as a love token of a handsome man. Lucky, lucky Carolyn.
