Moth and the Jade Rabbit
This is a tale of a boy who loved the Moon. From the day he crawled out of his cradle, to the day he crawled into his grave. Even as he lay in his crib, before he had language and could name things and bring them into living, he would gaze out of his window looking for his beautiful moon.
His mother took nearly two weeks to name her baby boy. He was born while the moon was so new you could see it only in space. From Earth, it was lost to the sky and the black vista we know as night. On the morning of the first day, his mother looked down into her baby's face - there was no name there, calling from his eyes, calling from his soft breath.
On the evening of the first day, with the moon's crescent a silver bow new-bent in heaven, his mother looked down on her child light as pumice in her arms and wrapped his grandmother's crocheted shawl. There, in the time it took for her to brush the fringe from her own eyes, she fancied she saw, flickering on his long lashes, the start of a name. She blinked, and it was gone.
On the second day, she held her baby to her breast and watched a splinter of moonlight cutting through her curtain. Her baby boy giggled in her warmth. On the third day, as mist rose around the Sea of Crises, the baby turned in his sleep, restless. And so the days went on.
And the nights grew full of light. The baby slept in the day and played in the soft light of the small hours. On the thirteenth night (and he would come to love and despise the number thirteen: thirteen degrees of sunlight marking the moon's presence; thirteen features of the moon he would see from his bedroom window; the year he saw death) he fell asleep. He slept as if he was under a spell. He slept even though the moon was fullest. He slept so that the moon could deliver him his name. And it did.
Lying crooked in his mother's elbow (as she stoked up the fire, with the radio chattering in the back ground), fire-light played shadows over his beautiful face. And in the shadows and from the fire-light, the mother saw her baby's name land on his sleeping eyes.
In the morning, as his father dished up porridge for breakfast and his mother poured strong tea into two white mugs, he awoke and started to cry.
"Moth's awake", his mother said. His father said,
"Moth?"
The mother looked up from the tea, and put the pot carefully on the table.
"It's a good name, what d'you think?"
Moth's father cocked his head to one side and listened to the boy bawling in the crib.
"Be alrate", he said. "Aaahhhh. Moth? Aah. Moth."
Moth cut his teeth on the moon. No matter how many soothers he was bought, the only toys to pacify him were a soft, yellow moon, with a tinkling lullaby, and a white plastic moon bigger than his head. He sucked on the white moon's horns until they were rounded from his saliva, his lovely, warm tongue and from how he bit down with his chalk-white nubs of new enamel.
Moth learned a lot from the moon. By the names of the craters, rilles and seas, he learnt his letters. His numbers came to him by how many peaks he could see - adding one to another, this was the way he learned how sums worked.
As he grew much older, Moth would understand misery from the Sea of Crises, he would find the silence in his heart, the silence we all have, from the Sea of Tranquility; from the Marsh of Decay he would experience death and from the Marsh of Despair, learn how to grieve.
His father, who loved him with the heart of a father, thought he would be an astronaught. His mother, who loved him with the passion of a mother, thought an artist. He decided he would be both and become a lunar astronomer. For twelve years he read only books about the moon. He emptied the local library of books and magazines and papers about the moon. He emptied the School library too.
Moth read poems about the Moon Goddess and laughed because the moon had no goddess. He visited exhibitions - in front of sculptures and canvases filled with the moon, he would hold his head to one side and whisper to no one in particular "That's where you come from." Then he would smile. When he smiled, you couldn't help but believe what he said.
At night, beside his note-books and his large digital watch, he would hold up his eye to the small telescope his father had bought him for his ninth birthday and count the minutes under his breath as the moon climbed into the sky. Each night, his father would poke his head around the corner to make sure he was in bed. Three nights out of four, he would pick up his son and slide him, quietly, beneath the eiderdown.
Then on his thirteenth birthday, Moth fell sick. His mother cried for ten days, his father cried for ten days more and still Moth would not recover. They brought doctors from the North, physicians from the East, sawbones from the South, and medicine men from the West. Still Moth grew sicker. His breathing slowed. His eyes clouded. His head burned like the fire in the grate.
When the moon was high in its lunation, its bright, beautiful light shone through the window and illuminated the boy's fragile, aching body. Through crusted eyes, he saw, in the shadows of the moon's surface, the shape of a small rabbit hunched over an even smaller cauldron. The Jade Rabbit. The rabbit that made herbal potions and medicines. Moth called his mother and told her what he thought he saw.
"But it doesn't exist," he said, " it's not real."
No one would admit to how they did it, but strings were pulled, favours called in and an expedition was mounted to go to the moon. If the boy had known he would have begged, on his sick-bed, to be part of it. Money was taken, vast amounts of money that no one could afford. Carrots too. Fine grasses packed in cool trays. All gifts, bribes, payments to the Jade Rabbit.
No one would talk later of the details, of how the mother and father headed the team, of who carried what equipment, what treasures and for how long. None will talk even now of the despair when the Jade Rabbit rejected first the gold and silver.
"I have the sun for gold and the stars for silver," he quipped.
Then he rejected copper, iron, bronze.
"I make medicine, not sculptures"
He thought for forty seconds about the carrots, forty more about the cool, cool grasses but nothing was good enough.
"I should go home," he said. "You've nothing for me. I watch you from up here. You burn the copper, iron, bronze. You burn the beautiful grasses and the tasty carrots. You spy on us, all the planets, looking for our gold, our silver. You offer gold to me now, but one day you, your son maybe, will come hunting, stripping, ravishing. It's inevitable. It's your nature." And the Jade Rabbit turned his back to the party and chopped his mystical herbs.
He was a cold rabbit, but not so cold that the sobbing of a mother couldn't turn his head. Slowly, like the turning of the moon.
Never would anyone say there were three ingredients in the medicine they brought back. Or that one was herbs. One was moonstone. The other was a true secret (though some might have said a mother wiped her hand across her eyes with the back of her hand and what fell into the cauldron was a son's miracle).
They would say it was the moon saved Moth's life. The moon he loved, knew everything about, the moon he lived by. And Moth, on his fourteenth birthday looked up into the sky knowing he wasn't saved by the moon, but by medicine. Good, strong medicine. He liked that his friends and neighbours thought it was the moon saved him. He liked the stories they told. He laughed at the thought that a rock, as beautiful as it is, could bring him back from death and that his parents would know how to get to it when he, even in his fever had only dreamed of rabbits, and rockets and small bronze statues.
© Copyright Jacqueline Gabbitas 2008
first published in the New Fairy Tales magazine 2008, issue 1