Not In Time - Audio

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Stars twirled, clouds moved across the moon, and then bored, drifted off again, revealing her favorite crescent moon. It reminded her of a Girl Scout song from camp she had learned a billion years before.

She tried singing it to herself, the melody faint and faraway, a lullaby meant for someone smaller and more trusting than she had ever allowed herself to become.

“Baby’s fishing for a dream, fishing near and far.”

The line played on repeat in her head, tangling with the sound of the crickets and the low hum of the refrigerator through the screen door behind her.

That’s what she was doing. Fishing for a dream. Because nothing real could help her now.

It didn’t help that her mother and father had named her Moon. They had been beautiful, impossible, infuriating hippies who believed the universe was a benevolent place that would provide for its children if only they opened their arms wide enough.

Her mother, June, who painted watercolors of chakras and kept crystals on every windowsill. Her father, Ash, who played folk guitar on the porch and talked to trees as if they might answer.

They’d named her brother Solstice. Sol, he went by now, living in San Diego with a sensible wife and two sensible children and a career in software engineering that was about as far from chakra paintings as a person could get.

Sol had escaped. Moon had not.

Not that she hadn’t tried. She’d built herself a life that was the opposite of everything her parents had been—ordered, evidence-based, rooted in data and logic.

She worked as an environmental data analyst for the Harmon County planning office, a job that required spreadsheets and zoning maps, and soil composition reports. Numbers. Facts. Things you could verify.

She’d chosen it on purpose. A life where nothing shimmered at the edges. A life where the ground stayed solid under your feet.

Except it didn’t. Not for her.

Moon pulled the old wool blanket tighter around her shoulders and stared at the crescent moon hanging above the ridge.

She was sitting on the back porch of the small house she rented at the edge of town, where the last street dead-ended into woods that ran all the way up to Willow Creek Lake.

It didn’t occur to her that her parents might have rented a home just like this for the exact same reasons she had.

It was late October, and the air had that particular autumn sharpness that felt like the world was pulling itself taut, getting ready for something.

She was out on the porch watching the moon because it had happened again today.

The meeting had been routine—a zoning review for a proposed housing development, the kind of meeting Moon could navigate in her sleep.

Cal Brecker, the developer, had been presenting his site plans on the big screen, all glossy renderings of cul-de-sacs and community pools. Moon had been reviewing the topographical overlay on her laptop when the room shifted.

Not dramatically. Not like a movie. It never was. It was always subtle.

The fluorescent lights were still humming overhead. Cal was still talking about lot sizes and price points.

But layered over the conference room—transparent as gauze, yet vivid as a photograph—Moon saw an open meadow. Tall grass bending in a wind she couldn’t feel, only see.

And water. Not the thin trickle that the county maps showed running up to the Willow Creek Dam, but a wide, muscular creek cutting through the land with the confidence of something that had been running that course for thousands of years.

She could hear it. The rush and tumble of water over stone. She could smell wet rock and mud and something green and alive.

She’d gripped the edge of the conference table, pressing her fingernails into the wood until the present reasserted itself. The meadow dissolved. The water sound faded. Cal Brecker was looking at her.

“You okay, Moon?” her coworker, Beth, asked. “You look pale.”

“Migraine,” Moon had said. The word came automatically now. She’d been using it for twenty years, the way other people used “fine” when someone asked how they were.

Migraine covered everything—the sudden stillness, the distant stare, the way she sometimes flinched at things no one else could see. People understood migraines. People would not understand what actually happened to Moon Castillo when the world decided to show her its other faces.

Because that’s what it was. That’s what it had always been, since she was a little girl sitting in the back seat of her parents’ ancient, rusted green Volkswagen van, driving through the hills of upstate New York.

She’d look out the window at a gas station and see, layered beneath it, a blacksmith’s forge. She’d watch a strip mall parking lot shimmer and become a muddy crossroads with a horse and wagon waiting.

Once, she’d seen a group of people—not ghosts, not transparent, but solid and real and utterly alive—walking along a river that wasn’t there anymore.

She’d told her parents, of course. She was six. She didn’t know yet that some things should be kept to yourself.

Her mother had been delighted. “She’s seeing through the veil!” June had exclaimed, clasping her hands together as if Moon had just won a prize. “Oh, Ash, I told you. I told you she was special.”

Her father had been gentler about it, but no less certain. “The land remembers, Moonie,” he’d said, crouching down to her level, his kind blue eyes serious. “It holds everything that ever happened on it. Most people can’t see that. You can.”

At six, this had felt like magic. At twelve, when she’d blurted it out at a sleepover and the other girls had stared at her and then laughed, it had felt like a curse.

By sixteen, she’d stopped telling anyone. She’d even stopped telling herself. She’d decided that whatever she was seeing was a neurological quirk, a misfiring of the temporal lobe, perhaps, some mild form of epilepsy that the doctors had never managed to catch because she’d never been brave enough to describe the symptoms honestly.

As an adult, she’d subjected herself to MRIs, EEGs, and blood panels, certain they’d finally prove something physical was wrong with her. Everything came back normal. Perfectly, infuriatingly normal.

So Moon had done what any rational person would do. She’d built a fortress of normalcy around herself. She didn’t drink. Alcohol made the visions worse.

She didn’t take recreational drugs, not even the mild ones her college roommate had offered. She kept a rigid routine: alarm at six, coffee at six-fifteen, desk by seven-thirty.

She ate the same breakfast every morning and went to bed at the same time every night. Structure, she had learned, was the best defense. If she kept the present nailed down tightly enough, the past couldn’t bleed through.

Except lately, it was bleeding through anyway.

The visions—she hated that word, with its connotations of prophets and mystics, but she had no better one—had been intensifying for weeks.

They came more frequently now, lasted longer, and carried more detail. And they seemed to be circling around the same piece of land: the Willow Creek corridor, the low-lying area south of town where Cal Brecker wanted to build his two hundred houses.

Moon didn’t know why. She didn’t want to know why. She wanted them to stop.

She closed her eyes against the stars and the moon and tried to will herself toward sleep. But behind her eyelids, the water was still there—rushing, insistent, alive. A creek that hadn’t existed for seventy years, demanding to be seen.

And then, without warning, the porch was gone.

Moon’s eyes flew open, but what she saw wasn’t her backyard. The house was gone. The town was gone. She was standing on the same hillside; she could feel that in her bones, the particular slope and angle of the earth beneath her was the same, but everything built by human hands had vanished.

There was only forest and moonlight, ancient oaks so massive that their branches interlocked overhead like the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral.

And below her, the sound of water. Not a trickle. A river. Running fast and free through a channel so wide she could hear it echoing off both banks.

And she saw people.

Not the flickering impressions she usually caught—a silhouette here, a shadow there. These were vivid. A group of figures moved along the water’s edge, carrying something.

Baskets, maybe, or bundles of some kind. Their movements were unhurried and purposeful. They knew this land. They belonged to it.

A woman at the edge of the group stopped walking. She turned her head slowly, as if she’d heard something, and looked directly up the hillside.

Directly at Moon.

Their eyes met across centuries.

The woman’s face was calm, unsurprised. As if she’d been expecting this. As if she’d been waiting.

Then the vision broke like a wave against rock, and Moon was on her porch, gripping the railing with both hands, her heart slamming against her ribs. The wool blanket had fallen to the floor. Her coffee mug had tipped over, and cold coffee was pooling around her bare feet.

She stood there, shaking, for a long time.

The crescent moon hung above the ridge, unchanged. The crickets sang their indifferent songs. Inside the house, the refrigerator hummed its same mechanical note.

Everything was exactly as it had been.

Everything was completely different.

Moon looked down at her trembling hands and whispered to herself the only honest thing she knew: No one can help me. No one even knows what this is.

The moon said nothing. The moon never did. It just hung there, reflecting what was already true, the way it had done for every person who had ever looked up at it in fear or wonder or despair.

Moon picked up the fallen blanket, mopped the coffee with it, and went inside. She locked the door behind her, as if locks could keep out what was coming.

They couldn’t, of course. Whatever was happening was going to happen whether she wanted it to or not. And that’s what scared her.