The Moon Papers

An excerpt from the novel by Emmalea Russo

Summer is not yet here, but the days have been humid nonetheless. And the air’s manic energy at the cusp of seasons can be felt in almost everything. My son was born between double moons—the Flower Moon of May 1st and the Blue Moon of May 31st—an immense event that acts almost as a bridge between the spring and the summer, leading, ultimately, to June, and, more specifically, to June 30th, the publication of The Moon Papers by Emmalea Russo.

The Moon Papers, though a continuation from Russo’s debut novel Vivienne, can be read as a standalone. The premise: A controversial arts collective is rolling out their most audacious project to date—a second moon, set to launch from the Mojave Desert and into the Earth’s atmosphere at the summer’s end. The problem? No one seems to understand how “Moon2” actually works, or how it may alter the mind of every creature on the planet. It is sci fi, but not really. It is all at once too familiar for science fiction and too strange for reality, and more enjoyable because of it.

Read below for an excerpt, and see here for details for the launch event, July 1st at P&T Knitwear in NYC.

“Emmalea Russo is an inspiring breaker of barriers. With shock, wit and invention, The Moon Papers launches narrative into erratic orbits. No one else in fiction writes about the art-world with the side-eye its shenanigans demand.”

—Jack Skelley, author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker

*

“A suprising science fiction novel . . . beguiling.”

—Foreword Reviews

What Velour Bellmer thought of most that spring were dead things. A string of creatures, freshly deceased or almost gone, formed a line in her mind—a decrepit and gleaming path leading into a new sort of summer.

A roadkill bullfrog she’d watched slow-fry day after day, no one coming to scoop up the body. Only two days after dying, it was not even a body, just a flat crisp merged with the unkempt road.

A vole she nearly tripped over in her backyard, gashed red with some terrible neck wound, whose spiritless mass, when prodded with a twig, felt gelatinous and gummy, its guts boiling under the first of many waves of heat.

A young duck mauled by a creature she first took for a wolf, but which revealed itself as a bald eagle as it rose from the grass, huge wings beating, carrying off the body as the rest of the ducklings huddled together watching.

A baby bird glowing pink under the high sun. She’d scooped it up with a shovel then hurled it over the fence before the gardener arrived.

A deer at the mouth of the strip mall parking lot, its bloated bulk framed by thriving lilacs.

Velour felt she was really seeing the country that June, in all its pretty gore. Before moving to the small rural village, she’d romanticized it. Then, for three decades, she resented its smallness. Finally, she had resolved to live there forever.

Her phone lit up with a message, bringing the screen to life. It was Lars, her son-in-law. He was worried about Vesta—his wife, her daughter. Has she seemed different to you lately? Distant? Velour ignored this. There was always something going on with Lars and Vesta. She clicked off her phone and the screen once again returned to its black mirror form. Lying face up on her lap, it reflected the sky: winged, soaring things, miniscule from their height. Pulling back her hat, she looked up, squinting against the sun, to see the real thing. Birds darted across the sky. Starlings. She wanted to photograph their manic gracefulness, the way they moved alone and then together, diving down and shooting up in synchronization. Starlings were typically active at dusk and dawn, periods of altering light, so why were they zipping around now?

Earlier in the spring, a family of starlings made their home inside a hole above her front door, a hole originally bored by a squirrel. She’d seen the gap, but by the time she told her slate roof guy about it, the birds had already established residence. He’d refused to destroy the nest and they’d had a standoff about it. Picturing the look of obstinate refusal on his squishy face still made her angry. Now the feathered family dive-bombed her every time she walked out the front door. They’d covered her white house with hooks of white shit.

Time felt as slippery, blurred, and hard to grasp as those frenzied starlings reflected in her phone. In which direction were things moving? Were they getting better or worse? She certainly couldn’t tell, didn’t know. As her phone lit up again, the birds disappeared into digital blue. Beside her, twelve cigarettes floated in dingy water, her yellow glass ashtray overflowing with rain from the night before.

The oppressive languor of noon. She didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to go back inside her home. And even if she did, it would be hard, with her house filled to the brim with so much stuff. She didn’t want to wander around the unincorporated village in which she’d lived for the better part of her life. So, she opted to do nothing. This nothing, Velour felt, was part of aging and dying. Technically, she was sixty-eight, but she thought of herself as seventy. It was better that way, she reasoned. A form of preparation. She’ll have been seventy for two whole years before actually turning seventy, which she hoped would soften the blow.

“Hi! Hi there! Velour!”

Mindy Rogers’s shrieking voice made Velour wince. She was a stout woman who affected what Velour took to be a faux southern accent. She had recently moved to the development up the hill from Velour’s house, the Residenz, with her sons and husband and was now shoving her big face between two of Velour’s seventeen-foot-high privacy trees. Velour had installed the trees precisely when the Residenz was finished and new people began poking around her place as though it was a pit stop on a loopy bucolic tour. Mindy’s fat, intrusive head undermined the majesty of the trees, and Velour hoped that if she ignored her, Mindy would recede into the foliage and continue on her silly journey.

Mindy, of course, only pushed her face farther into the yard, unavoidable as a full moon.

“Just thought I’d say hello. I love your house. Have I told you that? It’s so real. I saved a copy of the magazine. I loved the pictures. Gosh. I’d like to see. Does it still look like that in there?”

The structure was built in the early nineteenth century, and Velour had spent many years designing and perfecting its interior, filling it with artwork by her father and her mother, her daughter and her late husband, while also staying true to that earlier era. She’d uncovered a walled-in fireplace and restored it to its former glory and added new appliances to the kitchen, among other updates, melding everything together to produce an effect that was low-key magisterial. The crowning achievement had come about last year, when House Wisdom Magazine profiled it: “An Artist’s Quirky Country Chic.” Velour sighed, rising out of her chair to address Mindy.

“Yes,” she said, “of course it does.”

“You’ve had so many delivery trucks come by lately,” Mindy said. “It doesn’t hardly seem like there could be enough room for all that stuff.”

“Do you keep tabs on everyone’s deliveries?” Velour asked, finishing the question off with a wicked smile.

“Well, um, no . . .” Mindy stuttered as she retracted her head into the leaves. “I’m gonna keep on my walk,” she said, “have a nice day.” Velour waved, then lit a victory cigarette. She couldn’t really enjoy her triumph, though, as she felt the disease of embarrassment in her chest. She hadn’t realized people had been clocking all the deliveries. Goddamn snoops.

After the House Wisdom profile spread, and after her home had reached maximum perfection, something snapped inside—Velour had become obsessed with accumulating. Trinkets, objects, furniture, anything. Every purchase gave her an electric hit, and for that instant she felt immortal, indestructible: like death wasn’t possible. She’d filled the first floor of her home to the brim, letting her obsession run wild.

Some afternoons, she’d drive around for hours looking for items left on the side of the road or sit in a dark room and compulsively type strings of words (“Antique Victorian era table, marble top, good condition”) into a search bar, clicking around for pieces that made her feel hopeful, alive, free. The feeling was what mattered. Practicality be damned.

For example, last winter, back when she could still fit large items downstairs, she’d found a gorgeous floral couch with ornate peg legs from the 1950s. At nine hundred bucks, it was a steal. The piece lived, however, in Palm Beach, Florida, and thus cost over $1,000 to ship to her doorstep in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Velour imagined her items—unique, beautiful, and strange, with origins spanning centuries—spilling out onto the street and rising up over the slick and soulless homes of the Residenz, demolishing its gaudy structures and crushing its residents, squashing Mindy and her McMansion.

Vesta and Lars begged her to stop, trying to tempt her into reversing course by emphasizing how much money she’d get if she sold everything she’d accumulated, not only because the items were valuable, but because they had been owned and touched by her. Collectors were crazy for Velour Bellmer, Lars insisted. They wanted her artistic legacy, family history, taste—hell, even her junk. Lars had gone so far as to suggest featuring her collection at his art space in Manhattan, Gallery X, but the thought of buyers walking around her things, nodding and whispering and raising their eyebrows, made her sick. She couldn’t understand why her daughter and son-in-law were so clueless on this front, especially when they benefited from her hobby.

Recently, she gifted Vesta and Lars two bright red, space-age-style swivel chairs from the late 1960s. When she first saw them, she was struck by the thought that in their afterlives, Lars and Vesta might become those chairs: vinyl and steel and spinning in the ether. She found the chairs to be so incendiary and weird that she craved them for herself. So, she experienced the gift as a loss, and wasn’t that precisely what true giving meant? But Vesta and Lars had never even brought the chairs inside! They were still in their front yard.

She stared at the California poppies in her own yard. The aerospace orange flowers were trance-inducing, evocative of the drugs and possibilities of yore: quaaludes and opium and cigarettes on airplanes. The combination of staring hard into that hue, afternoon coffee, nicotine, and so successfully dissing Mindy had an effect on her mood that was rousing yet smooth. She was out of cigarettes, but there was a fresh pack in her bed- room. She took a moment to let her eyes wander over the tiger lilies dotting her yard as she steeled herself to face the interior of her home.

She squeezed between two Louis XV parlor chairs with floral upholstery and an old card table with a painted eagle and folding wings, then four Windsor chairs, a bright green glass lamp, and a rolled-up art nouveau rug. After shoving past the rug, she drifted up the stairs to the second floor, which was utterly clean as compared to the first. Upstairs, all was calm. The walls were all white, and the ceilings light blue, a color that was thought to keep ghosts and unwanted visitors away. With each step up, she felt lighter and lighter—ascending into restful, protective cyan.

Approaching her bedroom, she paused. There was something lying in the hallway a few inches from the closed attic door. A gleaming lump, brown like shit on the two-hundred-year-old hardwood. She froze, then winced. To her disgust and astonishment, the lump began to move and moan at a high and distressed pitch. Her heart pounding, she rushed into her bedroom, grabbed the green glass vase from atop her dresser and returned to place the vase firmly over the lump. Holding the vase down tight with her hand, she examined the thing more closely. Its squealing had increased, but the antique glass muffled the sound.

It was somehow extremely pathetic, even more so now that it was trapped and tinted green, and she grew hot with the urge to bash it with something heavy. She shook her head. It was out of the question. There were absolutely no messes allowed on the second floor.

A screeching sound pierced the walls, startling her. It seemed to come from above, mimicking the sound from inside the vase. Was she hearing things, hallucinating? Breathing deep to steady her heart, she regarded the blob. It had a delicate spine, visible through damp fuzz. It was the tiniest spine Velour had ever seen. She said the words out loud—“tiny spine”—as the cries from upstairs grew louder. Frightened, Velour sat on the floor and texted Mac.

VELOUR: can you come over here

MAC: what’s up?

VELOUR: i trapped something

MAC: what??

VELOUR: in a vase i’m looking at it

MAC: but what did you trap?

VELOUR: don’t know

MAC: what do you want me to do?

VELOUR: HELP

MAC: bad timing
Lisa’s having a bad day

not good

VELOUR: it won’t take long

MAC: she’s real bad

VELOUR: PLEASE!

MAC: i will c what i can do

VELOUR: back door is unlocked

Mac Wallace lived at the very top of the Residenz. Factoring in the time it would take him to disentangle from his wife, Velour guessed his travel time would be at least twenty minutes. She resigned herself to waiting. She got up. At first, she circled the vase. Then, she began to trace a creaky piece of hardwood like a tightrope walker, making a familiar noise in order to drive out the foreign one coming from up above, which began, after a while, to remind her of her dead mother. When her late mother was living in the house, she was constantly calling to Velour, sometimes with a purpose, but often only to confirm Velour’s presence, wanting to know that her only child was still there, alive and capable of replying.

The thing inside the vase moved, gently rolling, babyish. Then, it let out a squeak. The air changed. A chill moved up Velour’s neck. She walked into her bedroom, trying to shake it off, and looked into her mirror, which was over one hundred years old with beveling around its edges and an original silver chain. Velour squinted, the floral designs engraved across the glass squiggling over her forehead. Her reflection enlarged as she leaned far into herself, examining the lines on her face and tossing her hat onto the clean, bone-white bed behind her. Two of the screenless windows in her bedroom were open, and her long gray hair blew in the warm wind.

Finally: Mac’s heavy steps clomping up the back set of stairs. She could tell by his pace and force that his hands were in his pockets, and that he both did and did not want to be there. She was still looking in the mirror, examining her wrinkles, when he appeared behind her in the glass, their eyes making contact. They both looked so tense and drawn that they burst into peals of laughter.

When Mac knelt down before the captured creature, Velour thought he might start praying, and when the thing made its awful sound, Velour recoiled but Mac remained still and attentive, as though listening for the Lord’s good word. Velour crouched on the other side of the vase and they looked at one other through the viridescent glass, the thing writhing between them.

Mac raised his eyebrows.

“Do you know what you got going on?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“That’s a pup,” said Mac, pointing.

“What?”

“A pup,” he repeated.

“That’s no puppy!”

“No. A bat. A bat pup. A newborn bat.”

At the word bat, Velour went cold. “That’s impossible. I’ve never had bats here. In thirty-five years, not one.”

“There’s a first time for everything. We’ve got a male satellite colony living in a barn across from the Residenz. That means there’s a maternity colony nearby.”

She moaned. “What is a maternity colony?”

He pointed at the vase, “raise the pups.”

“I hate you,” Velour blurted out.

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” he protested, following her as she walked into her bedroom.

“What are you doing?” he asked. But she didn’t reply.

She tore a page out of a magazine on her nightstand, slid it under the vase, and carried the impromptu apparatus—pup, vase, paper—to the open window. She felt collected and empowered. The solution was so simple. She should have done it right away. She cupped the pup in her hand, the page between them, and felt its lightness. Its pure potential pulsed in her palm like a seed. Its head rested on the intricate art deco ring around her middle finger.

“Vel. Don’t,” Mac cried, grabbing at her, but she’d already let go.

She whirled around to face him. “What?”

Outside, there was a small splat.

“Pups can’t fly,” he said.

They looked down. The bat had hit the windshield of a parked car and was lying there, crumpled and motionless.

“Oh God,” she cried, burying her head in Mac’s chest.

“It’s okay,” he said, enveloping her in a tight embrace.

She breathed in his musky smell—hay, plastic, detergent. She squeezed him tighter, her nails digging into his back, then felt her body relax. They stood there, near the open window, the metallic chirps of starlings filling the air.

Mac dropped to his knees and began tugging at Velour’s long dark skirt. He shoved it up over her hip bones until she stood half-naked next to the open window, two stories above the pup. He grabbed her, nuzzling his face into her thighs. She closed her eyes. She saw the pup on the windshield and the orange poppies swaying in the breeze. She gripped his hair, pulling him closer. Years ago, they’d agreed that these transgressions didn’t really count. Doesn’t count, doesn’t count, thought Velour. They were off the map, unrecorded. And so maybe the pup was too.

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Emmalea Russo is the author of Vivienne, Confetti, Wave Archive, and G. She lives in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.