Short Stuff

The Moon

"You can't just wheel a recovering patient out of their room." I muttered miserably, myhands thumbing through the enormous 'Book of Planets' that engulfed my frail lap. Back pressed firmly into the seat of my wheelchair, and my head bowed down, I focused not on pictures of Saturn and Mars, but on blinking back tears that threaten tosmudge the printed colours. "I'll call the nurses on you."

"Relax," Blake grunted as he pushed me through a surprisingly empty, half-lit hallway in the normally busy hospital. "It's not like your life was on the line or anything, thesurgery just failed. That's all."

"Ha!" I sniffled, a noise of derisiveness, sadness and guilt all mixed in a confusing swirl of disappointment. "The surgery failed again, Blake. We can't go to the planetarium atthe end of the month after all."

"If I were you, I won't be too sure about that." With that mysterious comment, he ushered me into a room.

I've always thought of the hospital as packed, filled to the brim. Empty storage closetswere a rare right, let alone an entire patient's room! Yet here we are, in one of the emptiest—and the most curious— rooms, I have been in. There was barely any light, the hallway light behind us only showcasing a desolate table and chair in the middle of the room. The peripheral of the room was shrouded in a darkness so thick, that I had to ensure it wasn't my eyes malfunctioning.

"Ah." Blake was just as thrown off as I was, bashfulness creeping into his tone as hedirects me next to the chair. "I forgot to open the window."

His hand reaches into the dark, and with one tug, a window opened.

Moonlight blazed through the single windowpane, bars of silver bouncing off the walls.It was like witnessing a magic trick: one moment it was darkness, and another, an entiregalaxy.

The ceiling and walls were speckled with the night sky, patches of twilight that seemedto blend into the floor. The swaths of night had been speckled with bits of white andpink, sprinklings of stars that seemed to go on forever, accompanied with distorted versions of the Moon that seemed to extend forever. Whatever clouds that had peekedin through the window, had now transformed into a wispy grey painted around us— anintimation of the Milky Way.

It was as if we were afloat deep in space.

"It took me a while to get the mirrors' angling right." Blake mumbled from behind me. "Had to make sure you couldn't see yourself in the reflection too, or else the wholething would be spoilt."

Mirrors? Angling? Reflection? What?

Despite my confusion, it only took me a deeper look behind this beautiful delusion to see what he meant. If I ignored the stars and moons around me, I could see what he had done to the room: transparent tape on the edges of the room, and iron nails that blotted the almost perfect expanse of the night sky. If I moved a bit in the wrong direction, I could see myself in the mirrors he had fixed onto the walls.

"I had to sneak in the mirrors into the hospital, and it was a pain trying to justify why I had rolls of tape and iron nails in my bag." Blake grinned as soon as I realised his scheme. "When I told them though, some staff agreed to help. That's one upside of having stayed in this place for so long, huh?"

"It must've been harder to find an empty room to hang all these mirrors." I gasped. "Andknowing that today would be a full moon? And making sure all the mirrors reflect it, and not us? You didn't have to-"

"I wasn't going to let another failed surgery stop us from having fun." Blake grabbed the book from my lap, as he slid into the seat beside me. "Now, I heard the pink super-moon is coming up, what's that about?"