There once was a story about a horse who moved the moon.
"She was a beautiful dark winged unicorn, with a mane like the night," his mother would read as Quiet Boy fidgeted under the covers, "and she galloped across the sky with the sound of distant crickets," and she would pause and put down the book and crack open the window, and the sound of distant crickets would echo in from the darkened hills. Quiet Boy would stop his squirming and stare into the night, and "chirrup, chirrup," his mother would whisper, and he would imagine Moon Horse pulling her moon across the sky to light the distant hills, and the beating of her hooves would lull him to sleep.
Then one day his uncle moved in, and his bed was moved to the attic by the south-facing window. There were no more stories then, only the distant shouting from downstairs. Then, one night, shouts and thumping. Then, one night, screams and shattering. Afterward — when the only sounds left were muffled sobs — Quiet Boy got up from his bed, tiptoed over to the window, and cracked it open. The beating of Moon Horse's hooves echoed in from the hills, and he lay down and pulled the covers around him, and "chirrup, chirrup," he whispered to himself, and Moon Horse's light shone gently on his tears as she lulled him to sleep.
Soon afterward, Quiet Boy and his mother moved to an apartment in the city. They had to haul all their boxes up four flights of stairs next to the broken elevator, and the whole building had a lingering sickly-sweet scent that not even opening the windows could erase. But he had his own room again — even if it was just a thin-walled space between the bathroom and the pantry, so small he could only open the door halfway before it hit his bed. And there was no more shouting at night, only the sounds of his mother hurriedly eating and showering after getting home from her second job.
Gone, too were the hoofbeats that carried Moon Horse through the night. Quiet Boy would crack open the south-facing window — or throw it wide, if it wasn't too cold — to hear the honks of horns and the roar of engines echo up from the streets below, punctuated by the occasional squealing of train wheels along the elevated tracks two blocks away. One night, he sat in a chair by the window until well past midnight, watching her moon creep across the sky and straining his ears as hard as he could. The trains stopped running and the traffic dwindled until there were occasional periods of city-silence, but there was never a single chirrup.
That was okay, he decided. Moon Horse was on vacation, and her silent sister Sun Horse was taking over for her for a while. It was good that she got to take a break, because everybody deserved nice things like vacations.
He dreamed that night that he was with Moon Horse on a cruise ship. There was a giant banquet, and they offered her lots of really fancy cheeses, but she saw that Quiet Boy was eating bagel pizzas and decided to have those instead. Then, because she was famous, she got to steer, and she let Quiet Boy spin the wheel when they needed to turn the boat.
It was the best dream.
Quiet Boy grew up under the shadows of the city and the light of the horse-drawn moon, and did well in his classes at school, even if he got pushed around at recess and tended to hide out around the corner of the building with a book to read.
Then there was a graduation ceremony, and a new school — with lockers, and six different periods to keep straight, and groups of big kids that divided the lunchroom like fiefdoms in the feudal system in his history textbook. The old school's taunts became torments and the pushes became punches. Quiet Boy learned to hide in the library, but he also learned that he couldn't always hide. On the days when he came home with bruises and skinned knees and black eyes, after his mother was done silently bandaging the wounds, he would lie in bed and stare for a long time at the moon, wondering if he could run away to the place where Moon Horse was on vacation.
For months, he did his best to endure school. But one day, Quiet Boy's pants were pulled down after first period, and he was cornered and given a swirly at lunch, and when he got back from the principal's office, he couldn't find his backpack anywhere. He fled school when the bell rang for fourth period, tears streaming down his face, and used the spare key to let himself into the apartment. Then he balled up on his bed, sobbing brokenly.
A gentle, clear feminine voice called his name.
His heart stopped. He glanced around. The room was empty, the window was closed, and he knew he had slammed the front door shut behind him. It definitely didn't sound like his mother, and she was at work anyway. He fought to control his breathing and sit up.
The voice called his name again, as clear and strong as if someone were a few feet from his ear. The room was definitely empty.
It was impossible. It was insane. But there was only one particular sort of insane it could be.
Quiet Boy swallowed, drew in a shuddering breath, and whispered, "Moon Horse?"
He felt her smile, though he couldn't say how. But there was a presence there with him, around him, and though there was nothing visual about it, he knew she was smiling.
"It's going to be alright," Moon Horse said.
And it was. He went back to school and found his backpack (in a trash can, minus wallet and phone). The leader of the bullies got suspended, and then stopped showing up to school when his parents moved. Quiet Boy made friends with some other kids who hid in the library, and they took over a table in the corner of the lunchroom, which kept the other bullies from singling them out.
And the moon became a symbol of how, even in his darkest moments, Quiet Boy was never truly alone.
Quiet Boy wanted, more than anything else in his life, to talk to Moon Horse again.
He spent weeks searching the house for the story of Moon Horse, wondering if there was something magical about it, or if there were more clues in the story which he didn't remember from his younger days. He finally had to conclude the book had been lost in the move, and he wasn't able to find another copy anywhere.
He began whispering little prayers to the moon each night, asking Sun Horse to tell her sister that he wanted to talk to her. He learned in science class that the moon was a cold, dark ball of rock that circled the earth because of gravity, and the sun was a ball of fire that sat immobile and horseless in the center of the solar system, and that made him feel pretty foolish. He kept saying his little prayers regardless.
One day, he remembered his dream of the cruise ship, and he walked to the city library to check out books on dreaming. When he tried lucid dreaming, he spent a very long time lying still and staring at the ceiling, too excited for sleep, his nerves twitching at the slightest indication that something was happening.
One of his library friends noticed him reading the lucid dreaming book, and they got to talking about dreams, and the friend told Quiet Boy that he was overthinking it. "Just close your eyes," he said, "and put yourself where you want to be. A lucid dream isn't something that happens to you, it's something you make happen."
So, the next night, he tried again. He took a deep breath, calmed himself as best he could, and closed his eyes. He imagined himself in a cruise ship with a giant banquet table full of exotic cheeses, and took a closer look, and realized that they were all really moon rocks that looked like cheese slices. His heart began to beat a little faster.
Moon Horse wasn't in the banquet room, though. He walked to the bridge, with its giant ship's wheel, and neither was she steering the ship. The entire place was curiously deserted.
"Hello?" he called out in his dream. "Moon Horse? Are you here?"
"I'm not in your dreams," a familiar feminine voice said in his ear, "I'm here with you."
Quiet Boy's eyes shot open, and he bolted upright in his bed.
The room was empty.
"Hello?" he said aloud, but his heart was hammering in his throat and adrenaline was icing his limbs, and if there was a presence there to smile at him, he was in no state to feel it.
Over dinner the next day, Quiet Boy worked up the courage to ask his mother about Moon Horse, hoping that she might have some sort of mystical wisdom to pass on. She looked at him blankly, chewing a mouthful of chicken.
"From the book," he said. "The one you used to read me. But she's real. I've talked to her."
His mother leaned forward, silently sinking her face into her hands.
The next day, he was pulled from fifth period to talk to the school psychiatrist. She smiled a lot, and told him he wasn't in trouble, and invited him to tell her everything because she was just there to help. Quiet Boy told her about Moon Horse, kind of. He talked about how he had heard her say that things were going to be alright, and then they were, and he had made friends and wasn't being bullied quite so much any more. The psychiatrist asked him if he really thought Moon Horse was real, and it sounded like she wanted to hear him say no, so he said no. He listened through the door afterward as the psychiatrist told his mother that the schizophrenic episode seemed like a temporary coping mechanism for a resolved period of severe trauma, and under those circumstances medication wasn't clinically appropriate.
Quiet Boy didn't tell anyone about Moon Horse after that.
He tried, in fact, to ignore Moon Horse as best he could. When the moon shone on his face late at night, he tried to think of it as cold, dead rock. He kept horses out of the games of let's-pretend at his library friends' houses. He read a little bit about schizophrenia, and about crazy people, and told himself he didn't want to be one of them.
That lasted until graduation, and the newer, bigger school in the suburbs where the older kids hung out by their cars in the parking lot. It only took him one day there to realize that he was the fresh face at the bottom of the totem pole, and most of his friends were going to the other school across the city. No matter how much he tried to deny it, Quiet Boy was terrified that it was Moon Horse's power which had made everything work out alright, and that without her he was going to go back to his old misery.
So that night, as summer was drawing to a close, Quiet Boy lay down on his bed and closed his eyes, breathing slowly and deeply, feeling his heart pound. Instead of the cruise ship, Quiet Boy pictured his room, and the moonlight shining on a boy lying on his bed. He looked down on his sleeping body as his chest rose and fell, and promised himself that he wasn't going to panic no matter what happened. Then, while his body remained silent and unmoving, in his mind's eye he drew in a deep breath and said: "Moon Horse?"
An old, familiar presence surrounded him. "I'm here," Moon Horse said.
The voice wasn't as clear as the first times they had spoken — in truth, it felt like dream-speech rather than actual speech; an echo in the back of his head that was more evocation of sensation than sensation itself — but it was unmistakably her. Quiet Boy felt his jaw tremble, and fought down the urge to open his eyes.
"I'm glad you came back," she said. "I missed you."
He didn't quite know how to answer that.
So he reached out for the presence, his dream-arm fumbling in the dream-shadows. An odd tingle spread through the fingers of that hand. He pictured himself petting a horse with a dark pelt and a mane like the night, and felt the presence smile and wrap around him a little more tightly.
At that, he found words. "Thank you," he out-loud whispered, keeping his voice well below his mother's hearing. "For what you did. That was you, right?"
He felt Moon Horse nod.
"How? Why?"
The presence settled in alongside him. "Because you listened. Because you cared."
Quiet Boy opened his eyes then, turning his head toward the odd pressure prickling at his skin. The room was empty.
Moon Horse's presence immediately receded … but, this time, not completely. Quiet Boy felt her smile, then felt a tingle in his cheek, like a broad, flat nose had wetly nuzzled it.
He smiled back. Then he rolled over onto his side and backed up against the pillows along the wall, feeling her presence in the shadows. And when he drifted off to sleep, it was just like she was there at his back, the barrel of her equine torso rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing, sharing with him reflected body heat.
He felt watched over. And he felt loved.
The next night, Quiet Boy sat at his window and stared at the stars until the bathroom noises from his mother had died away and she'd closed her bedroom door. He thought about his room again, and thought about the presence in the shadows, and felt Moon Horse stir to life at his attention, and felt the equine form lying alongside him where the pillows rested against his arm.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, feeling the thoughts that had been roiling in his head all day finally sharpen to a point. "But I have to ask. Are you real?" The question felt silly even as it left his mouth — he knew how clear her voice had been, and the way she had turned his life around. But he also remembered the psychiatrist's visit, and knew that the warmth and weight he was feeling against his arm were the pillows by the wall.
Moon Horse's only response was to smile, as if at a joke. Quiet Boy found he had to laugh too. Here he was, worried that talking to a horse spirit from a children's book meant that he was going crazy, and his response was to ask his phantom if she was real or not. What did he think that would prove? Would anyone ever say no?
"It's just," he said, feeling awfully self-conscious, "how could I possibly be important enough for the attention of the horse who moves the moon?"
"Because you helped me steer a cruise ship once," she joked, in a gentle tone that spoke of far deeper reasons, but the important thing was that it was a joke — that she couldn't even conceive of taking his self-doubt seriously. It was marvelously affirming, and Quiet Boy realized suddenly that he no longer cared about his doubts either. If this was crazy, it was a kind of crazy which told him he was good and loved and worthwhile, and how crazy would he have to be to turn that down?
He joined in her laughter, then whispered "Thank you," and fell asleep against Moon Horse.
It became Quiet Boy's nightly routine: sit by the window — reading or doing homework — until his mother fell asleep or left for a night shift, and then sprawl out on his bed, staring at the stars and talking with Moon Horse. She told him of her job, and the special horseshoes she wore that gathered the hymns of crickets across the world for the power to draw the moon across the sky, and how the stress of the job had driven her to abandon her duties and wander through dreams, until she stumbled across his and had the most lovely time she'd had in centuries. She spoke of how she began to watch his dreams, and how she decided to stay when she realized the challenges he was facing in his life. About the silent solar sister who she'd left in control of her duties, and the distant herd who moved the planets, and the people she watched as their souls drifted from the stars down to the earth and then back to the stars again when their lives were over.
Quiet Boy told her about what he was learning in school, and about the friends he talked to in the library, and the video games he played when he was a good boy and got his homework done, and of the games of let's-pretend that had shifted over the years into role-playing games with dice and rulebooks and numbers to represent the swords and the serpents. She listened raptly to everything he said, and he never minded when he had to explain the way his world worked, as if he was talking to a space alien for whom he was the only window into Earth culture. In a way, he supposed, he kind of was.
And every time he spoke with her, the presence became easier to call forth, and the mental words they shared flowed more freely, until the words no longer began to matter. He would subvocalize at her, to set his own thoughts into verbal order, and back would come a burst of sensation that evoked rich and complex shades of emotion in response. And when speaking in that emotion-language began to feel too weird and abstract, they would retreat to words, and he would finish her sentences and she would finish his, and he'd cuddle a little closer in against the pillow that was the closest he could come to touching her, and her ghostly presence would nuzzle his neck and curl in against him with equal urgency.
"I love you," he said during one of those quiet together nights, and "I love you," Moon Horse said back, and the gulf of physical distance tore at his heart. But he had his pillows, and he would curl up against them at night, and share the feeling with her of that contact, and she would share with him the sensation of his warm arms around her shoulders and the longing she felt in return. In time, the sensations they shared took on more intimate dimensions, and they would share, too, the whimpers and moans and arched backs and clench of hips. He would touch himself, then, and even though it wasn't her touch, it was something real, and tangible, and wholly unique.
It was almost enough.
One night, she showed up with a smile whose meaning he couldn't quite piece together, even in their emotion-language, and gestured at the window. "I made you a present," Moon Horse said, and Quiet Boy stared at the sky for half a minute until it clicked.
There was a new star in the sky.
"I know you can look at the moon and think of me," she whispered as he cried and hugged her tightly, "but now you can look at that star and think of us."
"I love you," he whispered back. "I love you, and I can't believe how incredibly lucky I am that you're a part of my life, and I'll treasure it forever."
Quiet Boy went to the bookstore the next day to buy an astronomy guide. When the sun set, he sat at his window with it, teaching himself all the constellations that connected the stars he loved to watch — at least the ones that were bright enough not to be washed out by the city lights. Then their star, the new star, rose above the horizon, and a shock passed through his body.
It was in the book.
The guide called it Tarazed, the third-brightest star of Aquilae. The book had been published ten years ago. But Quiet Boy knew, as sure as he knew his name, that it hadn't been there before Moon Horse's gift. The nearby Altair was one of the brightest stars in the sky — an unmistakeable landmark — and he remembered it being part of a pair of nearby stars, not a line of three.
When he asked Moon Horse about it, she seemed confused too. "That's the one," she agreed, but neither of them knew what to make of its place in the book. "Magic works in mysterious ways," she suggested, and that reluctantly settled that, and in time Quiet Boy even began to think that it was pretty cool that their star had a name.
He grew fond of pointing out stars and constellations to his role-playing friends when they were walking around after dark. "There's the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper," he would say, pointing, "and in between them —" he'd pick out an arc of stars almost bright enough to find amid the streetlights — "the dragon Draco coils around the North Pole, guarding his hoard of star-studded silverware against the heroes who would brave the sky to steal it." They would nod thoughtfully. "And if you check out that big triangle of super-bright stars," he would continue, "that right-hand one's Altair, in the constellation of The Eagle, and right next to it?" His voice would drop meaningfully. "That's Tarazed, and legend has it that it was placed in the sky by an enchantress who wanted to give her lover the world's most beautiful gift." His friends would smile approvingly, and he'd feel the little secret thrill in his heart that came from hiding the truth in plain sight.
Quiet Boy got a girlfriend more or less by accident.
She started coming to his friends' role-playing games when one of them brought her along, and even rolled up a druid character to join their party with, and in time she stopped being the friend's girlfriend and became one of the players. Then she and the boyfriend broke up, and Quiet Boy did his best to comfort her because he didn't like his friends feeling awkward, and they were having a long and intimate talk under the stars when she tapped him on the shoulder and then kissed him on the lips.
His heart fluttered, and he kissed her back, and things proceeded as they always will with teenagers until they reached the point at which being in a public park quashed the mood. Then they promised to see each other again, and Quiet Boy went home feeling quite light-headed. Then the guilt set in.
The worst part wasn't Moon Horse's awkward silence. It was that, after the shock passed, she perfectly understood. "I can't be there for you," she said, "not like she can. Be with her, love. I want you to be happy."
"But I can't just abandon you!" Quiet Boy said.
Moon Horse looked away, then smiled at him, and though she did her best to hide it he felt the undercurrent of sadness upon which it rode. "I'll be here when you need me," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Neither am I," he said, and meant it, and very nearly texted the girlfriend right there and then to call things off. But as he was typing, he began to think.
What if there was another way? Couldn't he split his time between them, setting aside evenings for Moon Horse and evenings for the girlfriend? But despite the fact that they would have very different types of relationships, that felt way too much like cheating. He didn't want to demean his love by making it into some sort of dirty secret.
Quiet Boy avoided the girlfriend's texts for the better part of a day while he thought about it, and kept coming over and over to the same conclusion: he wasn't going to try to love them both without being honest about it. But he couldn't imagine life without Moon Horse, and he didn't want to cut things off with the girlfriend, so he worked up his nerve and told her they needed to talk.
"This is going to sound weird," he said when they sat down on opposite corners of her bed, and fidgeted and took a deep breath. "But I want to be with you, and you're awesome and I think I love you, but I can't give my whole heart to you because I'm already in love with the horse that pulls the moon across the sky."
She was silent for a moment, and he almost bolted, but she bit her lip and nodded and looked him in the eyes. "That does sound weird," she said. "Tell me more."
He did — first in awkward dribbles, then longer stories of Moon Horse and the times they'd shared, and then, as the dam broke, everything. The girlfriend listened quietly, asking occasional questions, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder when he tensed up and thought he'd gone too far.
"Thank you for being honest," she finally said, "and I want to make it really clear that I don't think you're crazy. That's … actually really cool, and I wish I had a friend like Moon Horse, and it's really sweet that you care for her so much."
Quiet Boy braced himself. "But?"
The girlfriend sighed. "But I need to think about this," she said. "Do you think you'd ever actually love me?"
"You're wonderful, and I think I do, and I think I can, and I really want to try."
The girlfriend frowned, and looked away, and said the last thing she would ever say as his girlfriend: "But how could I ever compete with her? I mean … she's so perfect."
Quiet Boy didn't say anything for a long while after lying down with Moon Horse that night, not until she nosed him and said, "Love? Talk to me. I'm worried."
"She said you're too perfect," Quiet Boy said heavily. "And she's right, isn't she?"
Moon Horse cocked her head. "What do you mean?"
"You're fictional."
"Well, if I was as perfect as she thinks I am, I'd have a clever response to that." She stared at him with a jocular smile, but he didn't particularly feel like laughing along with the joke.
Her smile fell a notch, then stabilized and crept back upward. "Come on," she said. "We both put in an awful lot of work for a fictional relationship, don't you think?"
"That's because …" He flailed for words. "You're important. Fictional but important."
He felt a phantom pressure at his side as she settled in against him. "Am I now?"
"Of course you are. Look at all the ways you've changed my life."
Moon Horse smirked. "I meant, do you really think I'm fictional, but I think your last sentence answered that."
He felt his cheeks heat. "Well, you act fictional. If you were real, you should be trying to deny what I'm saying."
She sighed, seeming to deflate a bit, then nuzzled his cheek. "Would it make you happier if I did?"
Quiet Boy sighed back, and didn't look at her. "That's part of it. All you care about is me and my happiness. How many years has it been since you moved the moon?"
"Is it so hard to believe that you're that important to me?"
"Yes. … No. … That's not the point." He pressed his hand to his face. "The point is, that's not realistic. A real person has wants and needs more important than their lover."
"Just like you did when you were willing to risk everything to keep me in your life?" There was a dry edge to Moon Horse's voice. "Why won't you let me respond in kind?"
He had no answer to that, but neither did it satisfy him. He snuggled against her for a little while — or, at least, against her pillow — and she curled her neck over his and nuzzled his ear, and he could feel the rise and fall of her breathing against his side, and at the same time he was all too aware that he was lying alone in a silent room hugging a pillow.
His thoughts swirled around in his head for a long time, and then Moon Horse said, "You never answered my question. What would make you happy?"
"If you were real."
She was silent.
"Are you?"
She was silent.
He let out a breath, and turned his back on the pillow.
"You keep asking that," Moon Horse said softly. "How am I supposed to answer? Nothing I say will change whether or not I exist. This is about what you believe."
Quiet Boy thought.
"Create a star for me," he finally said.
Moon Horse went silent again, but this silence felt ominous.
"Can't you?" he asked. "You already did, once. … Didn't you?"
Moon Horse shifted, and her presence left his bed, and there wasn't quite the sound of crickets as she walked over to the window. Perhaps, if he imagined it just right, the chirrup of the wood floor squeaking.
"Yes," she finally said. "And if that's what it will take to make you happy, that's what I'll do."
He got up from his bed and pulled his astronomy guide from the shelf, glancing out his window at the visible constellations and down to the pages. "There's an empty area above Orion's Belt. Make an equilateral triangle with Alnilam and Mintaka."
"That's not how it works," Moon Horse said quietly.
"Then tell me where it'll be," Quiet Boy said. "So I know what to look for. So I know it was you."
Again, she was silent, and every pause ripped at his heart a little more viciously.
"There," Moon Horse said after some time, staring further upward in the sky.
"There?" he asked, but her gestures were vague. Through trial and error he narrowed it down to an area near the shoulder of Pegasus, and confirmed with her that that was her intention. He took out a red pen and drew a circle around Markab in his astronomy guide, and satisfied himself that the stars in the sky matched the stars in the book.
Moon Horse approached him, and drew him into a hug, and then her presence receded.
"I will return," she said, "when I am finished."
Quiet Boy never saw Moon Horse again.
In time, Quiet Boy moved on.
He graduated, moved away from home, and found a job, and quite without realizing he became a Quiet Man, diligent in his work and reserved in his manner. He met a woman and fell in love with her, and did not tell her about the love in his heart that had once been set aside for Moon Horse. He would occasionally step out onto their balcony late at night, watching the cold moon drift in its orbit through a dead sky, and feel an emptiness in his heart, and then he would shake his head and sigh and go back inside and fix himself a mug of hot cocoa.
He got married to the woman, and they lay together in his bed, and her belly swelled with their child, who turned out to be a beautiful girl who cried somewhat less than he had been expecting. Their apartment in the city began to feel cramped, so for several years they conscientiously saved up their money, then bought a house miles from the city at the base of some quiet, grassy hills.
Their first night there, the chirrup of crickets drifted in from the distance.
Quiet Man stopped what he was doing, walked out to their backyard, and fell to his knees. The emptiness in his heart twisted and wrenched and ripped, and his body shuddered, and he curled up sobbing.
"What's wrong?" Quiet Man's wife asked, gently hugging him from behind. "Love, are you alright?"
He had to take a minute to compose himself, sinking into the real warmth of her undeniably real embrace, letting his breathing slow as his emptiness receded like the tide into his depths.
"Are you alright?" she gently repeated.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's silly. But I grew up in the country like this, and … and suddenly being here just reminded me of something important I once lost."
She was silent for a moment. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"Someday."
"Alright," she said, and kissed him on the cheek. "Let's go inside."
They did.
A few months later, an international parcel arrived from a used book seller whose name he couldn't pronounce.
He waited until dark to open it, then riffled the frail old pages with a thumb, breathing in the dust and memories. For a moment, he closed his eyes, curling his fingers against the spine. Then he took the book upstairs to his daughter's bedroom.
"She was a beautiful dark winged unicorn, with a mane like the night," Quiet Man read as Quiet Girl fidgeted under the covers, "and she galloped across the sky with the sound of distant crickets," and he paused and put down the book and cracked open the window, and the sound of distant crickets echoed in from the darkened hills.
Quiet Girl stopped her squirming and stared into the night, and "chirrup, chirrup," he whispered, and Moon Horse pulled her moon across the sky to light the distant hills, and the beating of her hooves lulled Quiet Girl to sleep.
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