bed time story before adam

It's better to crazy than be false, the Bear Moon spoke, glowering fatly from his throne in the purple depths of the sky. The cooking was slow, and the people huddled around the fire and breathed the sweet smoke of roasting hart and hare. Little Buckle looked up into the mouth of the night and listened over the murmur of human voices and yip of the dogs playing in the campfire's half-shadow to the hollow, silent sound of the Moon's voice. He grit his teeth and shut his eyes against the force of Moon's luminous litany, as huge, weightless, bell shaped words dropped down, ringing his ears and causing his vision to blur around the edges and his skull to vibrate slightly. Aphorism after truism, simile and trope, paraphrase upon misquotation. Really, thought Little Buckle, the Bear Moon just likes to hear himself think. And furthermore, the Moon was saying, my favorite poem about me, which will be written by a fey, diminutive Iberian playwright during the blood-glutted first half of the European 20th century, reads, in part, as follows: nadie come naranjas bajo la luna llena. Which, I think, is, or should be true, though the reason why escapes me at the moment...

Little Buckle turned his eyes to the fire and unclenched his jaw and the Moon's voice was subsumed by the low din around him. Old Woman turned the spit, toothless maw slightly agape, crow-footed eyes twinkling with forgotten mischief, and Fat Head stood across the fire, displaying his muscley muscles to the sisters Warble High In The Tree and Mud Legs, who looked to their mother, Fallow Field, who in turn looked to her husband, Oak Ball, who only smiled and remembered when he was a young man who posed and postured in the firelight.

The people were short, slight, and black haired, every one. They were quick to laughter, and sparse and to the point with their words, and they lived before maps could identify continents and before clocks or calendars marked linear time. Abstract pontification had yet to find a role in social interaction. It did not prove useful to expound and elaborate when only the most laconic verbiage was needed to locate food sources and pinpoint immediate threats to survival. But despite this paradigm of oral simplicity, there were times when Little Buckle enjoyed the Moon's abstruse prattle.

He was the only one of his people who heard the ringing celestial intonations, which never seemed to stop, but waxed and waned in volume relative to the size and location of the moon. At midnight, when the Moon was at its fullest, Little Buckle would bury his head under a folded skin to escape the pulsing drone. Certain teas, known for their intoxicating qualities, proved to inhibit the lunar receptors in Little Buckle's head, so much that he took to drinking himself to sleep many nights. He found that the Bear Moon, the last moon of the hunt, spoke softest of all the Moons, and on topics so fantastical and impossible that he was able to listen longer than on other nights of the year. On nights when the Bear Moon spoke, Little Buckle would tell Old Woman to wait until the moon was three quarters into the sky to brew the tea made from fermented blackberries, honeysuckle and grapevine shavings.

On nights when the Bear Moon spoke, the other people knew not to disturb Little Buckle. Though they could hear nothing, they could tell to leave him alone when his eyes reflected the stars of distant, unfamiliar galaxies, and when he laughed and shook his head at nothing in particular.