Bertrand Wasn't My Best Friend


Bertrand wasn't my best friend but they were my roundest.

@p And reliable. So when I knocked on their door that night around midnight, and I said, come, I have something to show you! they came.

@p I had spent considerable time planning it. The spot, I mean. The general geography of the area was obscured by houses and streets, like stalagmites or stalagtites on the cave floor or ceiling, inverted or upside-right, or not. But in between them, in and top of them, if you learned their lay, you'd find there was one round hill that was rounder than all, and on it was a park. I had planned a long time to find that park, and the rest of my experiment was up to celestial mechanics, not more machinations.

@p Bertrand took a moment to get ready, for they were in their P.J.'s, but they came. Their beautiful round and round, perfectly curly hair, round brown eyes and, just enough, a round body.

@p Me? Well, I was round in some places, but angular in others. Not round enough, is what I meant to say.

@p Bertrand followed me, we walked streets for some time, until we found the hill hidden in the houses. We climbed the perfectly round hill, which was on a larger, greater, yet rounder hill, and we stared side-by-side.

@p We layed there one year, but we did it in a moment, because this was the night of the magic moon. The supermoon phenomenon described in textbooks could be transmuted, if, when you looked at it, it looked back, and saw something it loved. And we were to be it. I held Bertrand's hand as the moon rose over us.

@p "We are going to trade places for a moment with it. It won't make sense, at first, but after, you will be changed."

@p As we lay, looking up, the stars observing us cooly with approval, the moon grew, grew well past super, until it encompassed the whole universe, and in a momment, dizzying vertigo of the space between planets, inverting vertigo which became impossibly more until it became less, and we looked up, and saw that it was us on the moon, and looking down up into the sky we could see our earth, our perfectly round earth, and the round hill, and the smaller round hill upon it and there, held in it's gaze, was Bertrand and I.

November 13, 2016, the night of the Super Moon


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