And Sons. David Gilbert

      Sometimes Louis saw in his sons a mirror that reflected the best of who he was and he was in awe; other times he hoped to see nothing of himself and would insist on molding the opposite, by force if necessary. Fatherhood is the bending of that alpha and that omega, with the wobbly heat of our own fathers mixed in. We love and hate our boys for what they might see.

      —A. N. Dyer, The Spared Man

      ONCE UPON A TIME, the moon had a moon. This was a long time ago, long before there were sons who begged their fathers for good-night stories, long before there were fathers or sons or stories. The moon’s moon was a good deal smaller than the moon, a saucer as compared to a platter, but for the people of the moon this hardly mattered. They maintained a constant, almost mystic gaze on their moon. You might ask these people—not quite people, more like an intelligent kind of eggplant, their roots eternally clenched—What about the nearby earth, with its glorious blues and greens and ever-changing swirls of white? Surely that gathered up some of their attention? Actually, not at all. The earth to them seemed a looming presence, vaguely sinister, like something that belonged to a sorcerer. This brings up another question: how did the creatures of the earth feel about its two moons? Well, to be honest, life at that time was rather pea-brained, though recently scientists have discovered a direct evolutionary link between those moons and the development of binocular vision in the Cambrian slug.

      But one day—for this is a story and there must be a one day—the moon’s moon appeared bigger than normal in the sky, which the wise men of the moon chalked up to something they called intergravitational bloat. Regardless, it shone with even more brilliance, only to be outdone the next evening, when the circumference had quintupled. Nobody was yet frightened; they were too much in awe. But by the tenth day, when the moon’s moon resembled the barrel of a train bearing down on them, the people started to worry. This can’t be happening. What they loved more than anything suddenly seemed destined to kill them. Oh mercy. Oh dear. A resigned kind of panic set in, as they gripped their roots extra tight and prepared for the inevitable impact, which would have come on the twenty-first day except that the moon’s moon passed overhead like a ball slightly overthrown. Thank heavens it missed, the people sighed. Then they turned their heads and followed its course and soon realized its true path: the distant bull’s-eye of earth. It seemed they were not the players here, merely the spectators. On the twenty-fourth day, roughly sixty-five million years ago, the moon’s moon traveled its last mile and a great yet silent blast erupted from the lower hemisphere of earth. And that was it. Their moon was gone. In its place a cataract of gray gradually blinded all those