What Did They See on the Dark Side

By Peter Bowden


 They said there was nothing there but rock and silence. Dust. Craters. A dead world turning its hidden face away from men. But that was what they said after they came back, when the microphones were on, and the flags were folded neat behind them and the world needed the moon to stay explainable. Still, one of them woke screaming for years after, and another never again looked up for very long. There are some kinds of seeing a man can survive only by refusing to name.

It was not monsters, not cities, not little green men standing in the gray. It was worse because it was older and lonelier. They saw tracks in the powder that were not their own, pressed deep and patient into the untouched dark, leading toward a ridge where no sun had ever warmed the stone. And beyond it, they said, there was something built, not built like men build, with pride and angles and steel, but raised as if the moon itself had remembered a shape and slowly pushed it outward through a million years of sleep. Black arches. Tall as cathedrals. Smooth as bone. Waiting without hurry.

One of them turned and looked back at Earth, blue and small and bright as a porch light left on for someone late, and understood all at once how young we are, how loud, how certain for creatures standing at the edge of a universe that has kept its own counsel since the beginning. They did not tell us because there are truths that would empty churches and fill them at the same time. So they came home and spoke of samples and modules and trajectories, while above them the moon kept its oldest secret, holding it in the cold like a hand over its mouth.

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