Francois Bereaud is a husband, dad, full time math professor, mentor in the San Diego Congolese refugee community, and mediocre hockey player. His stories and essays have been published online and in print and have earned Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. He serves as an editor at Roi Fainéant Press and Porcupine Literary. The Counter Pharma-Terrorist& The Rebound Queen is his published chapbook. In 2024, Cowboy Jamboree Press will publish his first full manuscript, San Diego Stories, which is the realization of a dream. X: @FBereaud francoisbereaud.com
Gibbous Girl Non-fiction by Angela Townsend
Many strange little girls love the moon. Some rhapsodize about how she is shy, winking boneless in the night. But our friendship was born of her boldness. There she was, in the hot blue sky, disregarding all the storybooks that wrote her out of the day.
“It’s the moon!” I announced.
“Sometimes you can see it even in the day,” my mother confirmed. This was no simple atmospheric phenomenon, and no one knew that better than the woman who kept books with names like The Moon is Always Female.
I spent enough days searching the sky for my pearl that my mother found me an icon, a rubbery wall moon that formed a triptych with pink roses. I said prayers for all the aunts and uncles in her glow-worm light. She supervised the poster of the baby polar bear promising, “Nothin’ can happen today that God and me can’t handle together.”
But puberty makes us terrible and new. My overlong legs dangled off the crescent in ill-fitting jeans that earned me the nickname “The S.S. Highwater” from the boys I liked. A child valiant against chronic illness is everyone’s mascot and cherub, but a fourteen-year-old diabetic is just a downer. My effortless A-plus years vanished into the cloud of Earth Science.
I asked for grit. I experimented with encouraging people in all directions. I purchased a yellow notebook and passed it around class, asking everyone to file reports of what made them glad.
“The Happy Book” filled with secrets from hoodlums, tenth-graders, and the odd substitute teacher. There were paeans to the X-Files and doxologies for Doritos. There were unsolicited arguments – “cookies and cream,” “Strawberry, you fool!” – and bold propositions – “I love Rachel!” “Who wrote this????” There was flamboyant self-pity – “the days that are not total trash” – and latent Buddhism – “when I just feel like I’m all here.”
Mostly there were meditations on the small salvations breaking dawn across each day. “Soccer.” “My dog going silly for spray cheese.” “Ladybugs.” “Coffeeeeeee cake.” “Peace signs.” “Getting my little cousin to laugh.” “EVERYTHING PURPLE!” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles forever.”
The powerful volume came back to me every night. I had become the Happy Book girl. I was auditioning for the role of sun, and directors were everywhere. I colored myself into the top corner of the page, praying my rays would warm the whole picture. It worked. Eleventh-graders I didn’t know sought me out to confess their awful mothers and nascent novels. The substitute teacher threw comets of sadness while clearing the board. I listened.
The Earth Science teacher, a nasal reed in cargo pants, was my cloud of unknowing. “You and that Happy Book,” he would chuckle, going on to lecture about condensation I could not comprehend. Then the day came when he brought messages from my home satellite.
The moon was always full, but she told tales with light. Made of integrity, she did not mind that we misunderstood her most of the time. She had her own course to follow, needing no permission to become new. She gathered light and gave it with prodigal pleasure. She gathered herself and gave herself the grace of secrets.
This was not how Mr. Jursak explained it, but I orbited above his text. Only one of his words pierced my dreamscape: “gibbous.”
“New,” I knew. “Full,” everyone wanted. “Crescent” had its magic. But I had never known the term for the plump moon, the clown who scrapes the icing off the cake. “Gibbous.” The word delighted me absurdly. Gibbous. Now I had the answer for the nights we would squint and ask, “is it full, or just close?” Gibbous. Her imperfect circle claimed the name, playful as a monkey. Gibbous. She would take what the sun gave her and make her own meaning. Gibbous. Doughy and divine. Short of expectations and full of process.
I looked for the fat moon, calling her by her name. Gibbous. We laughed. I wrote “gibbous” in tiny script on the bottom of every page of the Happy Book, and everyone wondered who had done that. Gibbous invited me to spend the summer gathering light, but I had already colored my corner, yellow as hay fever. There were torches to carry to the timid and tortured. There was love to lavish. There were eleventh-graders and uncles and the odd postman to warm like mice between my hands. There was so much in my hands.
If I could not be the full girl, I would be the loving girl, no one’s beauty but everyone’s old familiar. I rose with prayers like helium, “love through me, love through me, make me a light today.” I discovered the power of my vocabulary to reupholster egos. I did battle with darkness on the landscapes of lives.
I graduated with the superlative, “Sweetest Girl in Rose-Colored Glasses.” I was terrified most of the time. I became molten comfort by day and complete collapse by night.
The moon always protects, and she remembered what I forgot. My crowd-pleasing exuberance fell flat in college, where no one seemed to need constant reminders of their splendor. I snuffled lonely across the quad, leaking lazy prayers that I might become better. I received no answer.
I received a red fox, feral starlight with no cover letter. She offered no explanation, a comet complete in herself. She was gone before I could gasp, and my gaze shot up. I had only seen the fire-tailed spirit because of the gibbous moon. I felt new. I imagined running.
It was a moment. I rose the next morning redoubling my efforts. I befriended the woman who cleaned the dorm bathroom. I got to know the dining hall director’s sorrows. I wrote letters to every elderly member of my childhood church. “Love on legs,” one weepy professor called me at graduation.
I loved enough to be loved. I squinted at the sun. I went from seminary to nonprofit, fullness to fullness, scribbling the storybook with waxy frenzy. I met flotillas of suitors who loved their reflection in my eyes. I felt powerful. I spilled light.
The moon is always full, but little girls learn to empty themselves. I met a hungry man and offered him my icing. He was every page of my Happy Book, the place where the universe could stop expanding. My process was complete, my fullness secure. I declared myself “incandescently happy” and proclaimed his glory at every turn.
He asked me to stop wearing bright orange and to start eating differently. He told me I was abnormal and recklessly naïve. He photographed my craters and gave lectures on my veiled selfishness. He crumpled my prayers in his pockets and cautioned against belief in a fairytale God.
He did not know what to make of my manic accolades, and in that regard he was the healthier of the two of us. “You call me golden,” he quivered with contempt. “You describe something that does not exist.”
Still, he grew green and gigantic, haughty in the hothouse of my striving. If I stayed full, he never needed to hunger for my affection. If night never came, he could always see his ornamental bird. I slimmed to a crescent and gave up my colored pens. I stopped writing and allowed him to proofread my greeting cards.
“Love him through me,” I prayed on my back in the night. “Love him. There’s nothing you and me can’t handle together.”
The moon is always holy, and she makes no effort at earning. When my prayers pierced a black hole I'd assumed would kill me, I woke to find that the sun had risen without my word. Riddles of light streaked my hours, but I was powerless to compel them. I watched them laugh across my fingers, and all I could do was wiggle.
If divorce had turned me into a black hazelnut in the sky, my constellations did not notice. No one ceased to love me. Neonatal and bewildered, I had no gush left to give. I kept my job. People sent peonies and hand-felted hummingbirds and superb vulgar cards and jellybeans. Friends conspired to gift me a telescope. Words hurtled out my fingers like primeval fire.
I felt new and feral, process on two legs. I lurched from darkness to swollen hope within an hour, phases and phrases crashing in and out of order. It was dangerous to be anything other than the light, my own happy heresy. I saw myself out of place at midday, then secure under fog of night.
I conducted experiments, gluing rocks into cairns and sketching satellites on my ankles. I wore violent orange and exhumed weekends for my own designs. I rested when I felt sick. I hogtied adverbs to keep from telling acquaintances they were godlike. I was astonished that they liked me anyway.
I noticed the sun and its distance. We did not overlap in any Venn diagram of power. He had things under control. I had a face that was a container for light. There was nothing that could happen tonight that we couldn’t handle together.
Angela Townsendis the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, and Terrain.org among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately. X: @TheWakingTulip& Instagram: @fullyalivebythegrace