I’m getting ready for the block party: dark eyeliner, obligatory silver glitter (we’re on the moon, after all, we have our fashions), beard trimmed to perfection, hair carefully dishevelled. I do my best, yet the good mood won’t stay on, no matter what I try. Because the moon is cursed, isn’t it, and I feel like disappearing again. Neither of those things can be helped.
My skin itches, every mark of old pain calling me back to the place I have no wish of going back to, every scar a temptation, that scurvy of the heart making its demands: see me, remember me, open me up. You know you want it, you hunger for it and I do, I want to give in, take a knife and unstitch myself, let my old mouths gush. That is my own curse, I tell myself, lie to myself, this is my inheritance, my lifelong bequest: a full-mouthed body, a whole-bodied mouth. Who gave it to me, this malediction? Maybe an ex, maybe an ancestor—intergenerational trauma is a thing, after all, and the people who raised us were so rarely fit for the job. I stand in front of the mirror with my sadness, my penchant for self-destruction, and count my scar-mouths, place a fingertip on each one to make sure it remains shut, hush now, this is not the place or time. I glance at the gray crater-ridden skin outside, find us alike, both cursed, both marked. I feel at home here, especially since nothing here feels like a home, all cold, all reflective. Is there any other place for me but this cursed moon? We match so well, now, in our afflictions. I tell myself we’re lucky that way, the moon and I: if there’s no curse, there’s nothing to lift. And so what if I have to lie? A curse is hope; it can one day be broken.
At the party, the music drones, drags, slurs. It’s the curse, we tell each other. After those baby witches hexed the moon in 2020 (remember WitchTok?) everything on the base started misbehaving. It was little things at first, non-essential systems short-circuiting, coffee machines brewing mud, nothing life-threatening. It might escalate eventually, but what can you do. On the moon, life is always on the edge of extinction, always on the brim, every breath a breath in spite of the void, every step a step into nothing, every morning a headstrong thing, a fragile thing that exists in defiance of eternal night. It is an absurd way to live, and the only one we know.
We catalog the malfunctions, try to score each one on a scale from hex to incompetence, though we all know metaphysical causes don’t necessarily require metaphysical solutions, and it’s usually the mundane problems that make you bring out the big guns, the holy waters, the dry sage, to come up with your best incantations in languages you pretend you used to speak. Curses may loosen screws, but it’s mundanity that will destroy you. And is there anything more mundane, less supernatural than trauma, than cruelty, than a broken heart? Who doesn’t know this, among the queers? Disproportion has always been the bane of our existence.
Everyone is some flavor of queer here; I never figured out if it was random, or fateful, or a conscious choice on the part of the company. The pay is good enough, so I’m guessing we’re probably not being exploited more than expected? Which I know is a fucked-up thing to say, but, well. I rack my brain to remember if there was a relevant question during the interview and come up empty; was it so covert that I just didn’t notice? Perhaps I’m so obvious—is it the voice? The flowy dresses? The beard?—that they didn’t need to ask me, specifically, skipped over that question just for me. Or maybe there’s some kind of self-selection going on, queer kids just naturally flocking to the moon like moths to honey, bees to flame, etc. In the end, does it matter? Here we are, all queer, on the moon.
Block parties are not a huge leap for our kind of mankind, except, in our situation, absent any actual building blocks, a block party means getting together and going on social media blocking & reporting sprees. There’s no dancing, though we try to look our best; it’s the least we can do, and vanity has never been very high on our hierarchy of sin. Things are brutal out there, been like that for some time, the echo chamber is not a chamber at all but an enormous bucket of hate, our enshittified hellscape so facile and shallow there’s no point debating anyone anymore or trying to intuit if they’re being sincere (which might allow a glimmer of hope—perhaps you can change just this one person’s mind, and if you can do that then maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for us all) or if they’re just trolling, which is maybe better in the small scheme of things (hey, if they’re just taking the piss they’re unlikely to go out with their friends for some queer-bashing-as-bonding-experience on Friday night) but also so much worse in the grand scheme because it means mutual care and recognizing each other’s humanity rates so low now on every scale it makes one hope for that asteroid, just so we can all be put out of our misery and hit reboot, and then maybe, amoeba by amoeba, do it better the second time around. But one’s gotta stay optimistic! So, we resort to the tiniest possible action, blocking and reporting, cleaning up those timelines one fash at a time. It’s supposed to be healing (or even enjoyable, if you like punishment)—at least until that, too, like all else, becomes rote. Enshittification infects everything, sooner or later, and capitalism swallows activism on the regular, only to expel it again some time later, radicalized to a beautiful shine. We spring eternal.
All in all, it’s not a bad way to spend a Saturday night on the moon, and there’s literally nothing better to do. So why not. You know?
The party is crammed as usual, as many queers as you can fit in the modular common room that connects our individual capsules, temperature carefully controlled and oxygen adjusted for the influx of bodies, lights at the standard fluorescent blare but covered by sheer fabrics, blues and greens that give everything an underwater vibe. The host is Drew tonight, so the music is the kind of acid electro he likes, punctuated by a few pop songs that we’re meant to listen to grudgingly, in a sort of irony-filled stupor, but that most of us secretly enjoy (or maybe not so secretly; it’s only Drew that thinks we hate that kind of music, and some of us are here exclusively for the bubblegum pop, the easy beats and breezy lyrics a welcome respite from the grating noise and well-placed rage of our regular programming).
We all know each other and are mostly friendly, but there are three or four pretty distinct groups of three or four people each that tend to flock together in these things. My group is lacking tonight, just me and Marina, the other two having been hit with emergency shifts because of the latest malfunction (something with the satellite links hiccupping intermittently; perhaps things are already escalating and we just haven’t realized it yet, like those frogs in slowly boiling water, though I can’t decide if that’s better or worse. Would you like to see your demise coming, or would you rather it sneak up on you?). Marina and I talk about the moon being cursed as we scroll through lists of nazis and proud boys hastily, while the internet still works. We debate whether the earth has been cursed as well at some point—it would account for the rapid disintegration of everything, the implosion we all saw coming yet did so little about, but conclude that no, incriminating a curse would be the easy way out, and we don’t deserve that, to blame our failure as a species on a few inexperienced pagans who should have known better but didn’t (which, to be frank, is also a testament to our failures of caring for and nurturing those who come after). We brought this on ourselves, we agree, we all did this together, dug that hole lump of dirt by lump of dirt with our own hands. I think of my own curse, so easy to articulate it’s in the DSM—lifting it “merely” a matter of time and intention, so why don’t I?—but I say nothing because the music stumbles and I stumble along with it, because your face is looking back at me from the timeline, your beautiful face next to some transphobic poison that, in another life, I’d have found hard to believe came from your fingertips.
“Are you okay?” Marina asks, and what am I supposed to say? I’m still not over you—will never be over you, of course, because, really, who ever gets over anybody? I remember that day, back when I first came out to you, back on Earth, over the bathtub, counting possible names on our fingers. You were so quick to accept me, so quick to celebrate. Should that have given me pause? It felt intoxicating, as if all five liters of my blood had turned to wine, an instant, miraculous drunkenness worthy of the holiest of books. You picked out the name you liked best for me, the name I looked like the most to you. It wasn’t my favorite, but it was yours, and so was I. And then you dunked my head into the bathtub, your palm flat on the back of my neck, held me under for just a fraction of a moment longer than I had thought necessary, just long enough for that primal thing inside to wonder, to squirm, to consider the possibility of revolting in self-preservation. But then you pulled me out again and I can still see the hair plastered to my forehead and my face dripping and you called me by my new name and my heart swelled, my chest swelled, all of me swelled, that fraction of a moment forgotten in the utter elation of my baptism. What’s the mundanity of drowning compared to that?
And now, here I am, on the moon, where bathtubs are but a distant memory of a life we’ve left behind for good. Most of us eventually become convinced it never existed at all, that it was something we made up and kept repeating to each other, partying around a fake digital fire with its fake digital crackling, that we kept whispering into each other’s ears as we were falling asleep and did it with such conviction and fervor we came to believe our own lies. Things like: we were born here. We’ve never been to Earth. This has always been our world, or we moved here when we were three. Still, our fairy tales speak of wide, moving seas, of the bright face of the moon hanging in the deep end of warm summer nights, of birds streaking across cloud-studded blue, of trees, of rain showers, of flower-riddled grass. And when it’s time for our voidshifts, we step onto our barren land and squint, imagine through our half-closed eyelids those marvels that have never been: here, a sea, here, a lake, here, a mountain populated by nymphs. We may have run away, may have fled the planet that birthed us, but what have we claimed for ourselves? Our world is a scar, our bodies craters, shaped by things that were, that have been, that never will be again. Our curses are things we gave ourselves, that we can lift ourselves. All we have to do is choose.
I still can’t speak, so Marina grabs my phone. She recognizes you. The post is about your ex (that would be me): a confused lesbian who got brainwashed by trans ideologists into thinking she’s a boy. I look at your picture—your bright eyes, your lush curls, your dark spontaneous lip hair I was always so envious of—and I feel like drowning again. Maybe you held my head under for longer than I thought, after all. I don’t ask myself what calamity turned you into a raging bigot. Instead, I wonder out loud: “Was it me? Did I do this?”
Marina doesn’t dignify this with a response. She reports the post—not that this does anything anymore, moderation is an idea we use to lie to ourselves, to make the wild-westness of our reality bearable, breathable—and blocks you. Your face disappears from the timeline, your words too. Or almost.
Marina navigates away carefully, as if through a minefield. She visits a website with instructions for unhexing the moon. It directs us to set our intentions properly, as if we have any idea how to do that, easily distractible as we are, our attention spans barely long enough to go through an entire block list. The ritual demands a long catalog of things impossible to get here: black candles, rosemary, lemon (we only get the fake citrus extract in these parts), shungite soap, palo santo. We google each of these things and marvel at them, these itemized hopes of saving ourselves, until the router belches loudly, and my phone loses connectivity.
“Mine’s gone, too,” Marina says. Someone tries to reboot, but all the lights on the router flash at once, blue, green, orange, purple, even a pink we’ve never seen before. “What does pink mean?” I ask, and Drew says he has no idea, it’s not in the manual. The temperature control malfunctions next; the room becomes sweltering and fragrant in that too-many-bodies way. I can’t stand it. The flashing lights give me a headache, small and defined like a fist behind the eyes, and I feel glitter running down my face in the heat.
I flee to the bathroom. I stand in front of the mirror, top shed, and contemplate my own curses, inherited or not, chosen or not—and if they’re chosen, are they curses at all?
All my mouths open at once, then, as if in reply. I gush, cratered, not even a knife necessary, nothing to block this forthcoming past. Isn’t this better than the alternative, the mute, mundane pain, the humdrum wounds? I mop everything up as best I can, though paper towels are in short supply. I am like the moon, I think, I tell myself, exiting the bathroom, taking my leave from the party, top back on, streaked with red. Moon, we are alike.
I step outside, onto my home’s cold surface. Together, cursed, the moon and I travel around the Earth. I look at it, the little blue pebble shrouded in all that dark. You old thing, I tell the planet, you poor, unhexed thing.
(Editors’ Note: “Cursed Moon Queers” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 60A.)
© 2024 Natalia Theodoridou
Natalia Theodoridou has published over a hundred short stories, most of them dark and queer, in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare, and F&SF, among others. He won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and has been a finalist for the Nebula Award in the Novelette and Game Writing categories. Natalia holds a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from SOAS, University of London, and is a Clarion West graduate. He was born in Greece and has roots in Georgia, Russia, and Turkey. His debut novel, Sour Cherry, is coming in April 2025 from Tin House (North America) and Wildfire (UK & Commonwealth). Find out more at www.natalia-theodoridou.com.