The Sky That Remembers You

The moon shouldn’t be that color.

 

Not orange, lit from within, like something is burning inside it.

 

You tell yourself it’s atmospheric distortion, wildfire smoke, refraction… anything human, anything explainable. But the longer you stare, the more you realize the light isn’t shining through the moon.

 

It’s shining out.

 

The silhouettes of the palms don’t sway. There’s no wind. No insects. No distant traffic. The world has gone perfectly, impossibly still, the kind of stillness that only happens when every living thing is holding its breath at the same time.

You try to look away, but something in the sky pulls at you. Not gravity. Not magnetism.

 

Recognition.

 

You’ve been seen.

 

The orange glow pulses once... slow, deliberate, like a heartbeat the size of a continent. And in that moment, you understand why the stars look wrong tonight. They’re not stars. They’re apertures. Openings. Watching holes in the fabric of the dark.

 

You are not alone.

You were never alone.

You were simply beneath notice.

Until now.

 

The moon brightens again, and the shadows of the trees stretch toward you, long and thin and reaching, as if the sky itself is trying to touch its newest discovery.

 

You.

 

And somewhere above the atmosphere, in the cold where sound cannot travel, something ancient and patient begins to move, not toward Earth, but toward you specifically, as if your gaze was a signal it had been waiting centuries to receive.

 

You wanted fear.

 

This is fear.

 

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