I couldn’t decide where to move, so I moved to the moon. I found a nice craterfront property, a lonely promontory overlooking the Sea of Hope. I dug the foundation in white earth the consistency of cake batter, though I don’t know if lunar soil can be referred to as earth. I built the walls out of dinosaur bones — a spine for a banister, a jaw for a sconce, and for the entry hall, a lofty ribcage with plaster between the ribs.
I unrolled lush carpets down the corridors, streaking the gesso-smooth floors with bands of royal blue, royal red, royal purple. Everything royal. I carved scrolling molding into the walls of the throne room, punched holes through the wonderboard and filled them with stained glass pomegranate candy. Through them I can gaze upon the sea, a white-gold crater filled with shallow shadows.
I shaved strips of Milky Way from the sky and papered them to my ceilings with a bucket of glue and dewdrops. It’s always raining in my throne room, a fine, frothy gauze that gets nothing wet. It beads on the blooms of my crystal beds — spears of citrine and sapphire proliferating in loamy troughs sunk into the floor. It glistens on the floor-to-ceiling freshwater pearls encrusting the wall behind the throne itself.
The throne is solid sea glass, limpid turquoise, with a plum-colored cushion stuffed with puffin down. It stands alone on a raised dais made of salt bricks that do not dissolve in the lingering mist. It’s just for show, of course. I never actually sit in it. I spend most of my time in the library, a perfect cylinder drilled deep through the moon’s crust and into its frosty core. Here there are no mass-market paperbacks, no Dolphin Doubleday editions of anything, no inflexible spines or covers where the author’s name is as big as the title. There is one book I can only find when I’m not looking for it, a children’s book filled with illustrations of impossible sea creatures. Mostly I read literature infused with magical realism, and as I read I drink chamomile-valerian tea that lulls me lucid-dreamily inside the book as I fall asleep on its open pages. I don’t like chamomile and I’ve heard valerian tastes like cat urine, but that’s okay because the tea tastes like inch-thick buttercream melting into a warm cinnamon roll. There is always plenty of cinnamon in my house. The kitchen itself is buttressed with beams of cinnamon sticks, and the saltshakers are filled not with salt, but with cinnamon sugar.
I’d invite guests over for dinner if only they enjoyed caramelized onions as much as I do. But I prefer eating alone at a simple wooden table in a room with no distractions. I can be distracted elsewhere, and I can get elsewhere on the quaint little train whose rails run at Escheresque angles through my house. The engineer, I’m sure, is a charming animal in pinstriped overalls, but I’ve never seen his face. I just rely on him to transport me to the sandy-bottomed swimming pool where I can breathe underwater, the fantasy toyland where my stuffed animals have forgiven me for not playing with them since I was twelve, the anti-nausea anti-gravity room, the lighthouse, the ice garden, the gift shop, the wishing well, the unicorn stables, the zoo, the aquarium, and the bedroom that absorbs nightmares and spits them out as butterflies.
Some nights I climb the stairs to the observatory and train my telescope on earth. I feel an airless ache in my chest as I observe the steamy, blue-green marble rolling around its mindless orbit. How can something so small cast such a big shadow? As it blunders across the sun, it plunges the moon into darkness, slice by glittering slice. Once I felt a sense of betrayal. Now I feel almost-relief. What I can’t see, I can’t miss. Besides, I have a kingdom to look after now.
