The last moon flight
Max knows he is going to die. Not immediately, not in the next hour, but soon. His wings are getting heavier, his eyes cloudier, and when he hides under the old linden tree after each flight, he feels how the cold remains in his limbs. The fresh smell of wood and damp moss that hangs here in the tannery garden between the stones and beds cannot drive away the cold. For an owlet moth, this is an unmistakable sign. He has lived for sixty days – longer than most of his kind. Longer than he had hoped. But not yet long enough for what he has planned.
“I’m flying to the moon,” Max says to Carmen. The Mile End Jumping Spider sits, as she does almost every evening, on the branch directly above his hiding place, cleaning her front legs. She is small, but her large eyes miss nothing. For two months she has been watching Max make his circles every night, always higher, always braver, as if he could actually reach the sky. They both live here, between the beds, in a place where hides were once turned into leather.
“The moon is over 384,000 kilometers away,” Carmen replies pedantically and somewhat dryly. “You can manage a few meters to the next tree crown at best.” Carmen is a jumping spider – precise, logical. Still, she likes the old moth. Perhaps precisely because of that.
Max spreads his wings. They shimmer gray-brown in the last twilight, shot through with fine lines and dots – a pattern that looks like hieroglyphs. As an owlet moth, he belongs to a huge family, a moth once told him – so many species that humans are still discovering new ones. Max finds this comforting. In such a large family, there’s room for crazy dreams.
“I know I won’t reach it,” he says. “But maybe I’ll get closer than ever before. Maybe… that’s enough.”
Carmen jumps closer with a tiny leap. For jumping spiders, movement is communication, every hop has meaning. This one means: I’m listening.
The owlet moth tells her about his first moon flight, back when he was young. How he had emerged from his pupa, completely disoriented in the darkness, and then had seen this light – silvery, round, unreachably beautiful.
Sometimes he saw shadows in it that looked like a face. Humans call it the man in the moon – a bat had once told him. Max found it comforting – someone looking down on everyone from up there. Since then, he had flown toward it every clear night. Not because he expected anything from it. But because it was the right thing to do. The only thing that felt right.
“We are creatures of the night,” he explains to Carmen, “we belong to the darkness. But the moon… the moon makes the darkness come alive.”
The spider is thoughtful. She knows the darkness too, hunts in it, lives from it. But she has never thought that moonlight could transform it.
This evening the moon is almost full. Max feels his muscles vibrating – an old memory of strength that has long since weakened. He takes off, cautiously at first, then with the elegance of sixty days of practice. Carmen jumps to a higher branch to follow him.
She watches as Max makes his circles, higher and higher. Over the elder bushes, over the linden tree, over the former tannery building with its empty windows. In the distance she hears the hum of cars, sees the orange lights of the city. But here, in this forgotten garden between overgrown stone troughs, there is only the moon. And Max, flying toward it.
“Wait,” Carmen suddenly calls. She jumps from branch to branch, following Max upward.
He hears her, but he keeps flying. His wings work harder, his airways are tight. Still: he has never been this high. The moon has never been this close.
Carmen reaches the tree crown and jumps off. For a moment she flies with Max – two tiny creatures in the dark void between earth and sky. Then she lands on his back.
“Carmen!” Max calls out in alarm. “You’re much too heavy for…”
“I’m light as a feather,” she interrupts. “You can do this.”
She’s right. Together they fly higher than Max could ever have managed alone. The wind carries them, the moon pulls them, and for a moment – just for one – it feels as if they could actually overcome gravity.
But then Max feels his strength fading. His wings tremble, his orientation wavers. He begins to sink, slowly at first, then faster.
“It’s alright,” Carmen whispers. “Let go.”
Max stops fighting. They glide down, gently as a withered leaf, and land on the soft elder bush. The moon shines in their faces.
“Do you think I touched it?” Max asks.
Carmen looks up. The moon is the same as always – distant, cool, untouchable. But in Max’s gaze she sees something else.
“Yes,” she says. “You touched it.”
He closes his eyes. He is tired, but it’s a good tiredness. The tiredness of someone who has arrived. “Thank you,” he whispers.
Carmen stays with him until dawn. When the first rays of sun warm the garden, Max has fallen asleep. Forever.