Luna of the Eclipsed Moon

(Luna) The track burns gold under the late afternoon sun, and I love it. I love the way the heat rises off the rubber in shimmering waves, the way my lungs ache in that good way, the way Coach Pearson's whistle cuts through the thick Tennessee air like it's the only sound that matters. Out here, everything makes sense. The clock tells the truth every single time. "Set!" Coach Pearson barks, sharp and commanding. I drop into my stance. Fingers pressed to the line, heels lifted, every muscle in my legs coiled tight and ready. Behind me, the rest of the girls shift and breathe, but I don't look at them. I never look at them. This is between me and the clock. It's always been that way, ever since I was twelve years old and realized I could outrun every boy in my grade if I just refused to let my body quit before my mind did. The whistle shrieks, and I'm gone. Four hundred meters isn't a sprint and isn't a distance race. It's something meaner than both, a test of how much pain a body can hold without letting it slow down. My arms pump, my ponytail whips against my neck, and somewhere around the two hundred mark my lungs start screaming at me to stop, to just ease off. I tell them no. Not today. Not when I'm this close to something I can almost taste. I come around the last curve with my legs on fire and my vision narrowing to a tunnel, and I throw myself across the line like it owes me something. "Fifty point two!" Coach Pearson shouts, his voice cracking with disbelief. I bend over, hands on my knees, sucking in air that tastes like rubber and cut grass. A grin spreads across my face even though I probably look like I'm dying. My whole body trembles with the kind of exhaustion that feels like victory. "Three seconds, Willow." Coach Pearson jogs up to me, breathless with excitement, stopwatch still clutched in his fist like it's precious. "Three seconds. You know what that means? You're three seconds off Olympic qualifying times. Three. Keep this up and we're talking nationals. I mean it, Luna." "I heard you the first time, Coach," I say, my tone light with mock exasperation. I straighten up, still catching my breath, and swipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist. My heart is still hammering, but it isn't the good kind of exhaustion talking anymore. It's something closer to pride, warm and steady, spreading through my chest like sunlight through a window. This is mine. Nobody handed it to me. There's no mystery to it, no destiny, no invisible hand pushing me toward it. Just mornings before school when the sky is still bruised purple and I'm the only one crazy enough to be running loops around the football field. Just months of shin splints and burned lungs and the slow, stubborn shaving of seconds off my time until fifty point two became a number I could actually hit. Nobody believed me when I said I'd get here, not really, not even my own mother, who still thinks running is something you grow out of. I look up at the bleachers out of habit, and there he is. Jace Calloway, cap pushed back, notebook balanced on his knee, pencil moving fast like he's trying to catch me before I disappear. He's always there. I don't remember a single meet in the last three years where I didn't look up and find him waiting. "Take five, ladies," Coach Pearson calls out, and the rest of the team scatters toward the water fountain. I walk straight for the bleachers instead, my legs still loose and buzzing from the run. "You know staring is creepy, right?" I say, teasing, climbing up to sit beside him. "Not staring. Sketching," Jace corrects, his tone easy, unbothered, pencil still moving in short, sure strokes. "There's a difference." I lean over his shoulder to look. It's me, mid-stride, captured in that half second where my whole body leans into the run like gravity doesn't apply to me. He's gotten the tilt of my shoulders right, the blur of motion in my legs, even the fierce, furious concentration on my face that I didn't know I made until I saw it on paper enough times to recognize it. There's something strange about seeing myself through someone else's eyes, like catching a stranger wearing my own skin. "I look mad," I say, frowning at the sketch. "You look fast," Jace says, his voice softening as he finally glances up at me, blue eyes squinting against the sun. Something in my chest goes soft and warm the way it always does when he looks at me like that, like I'm the only thing worth looking at in a whole stadium of people. "Fifty point two, huh? Guess I better start running faster if I'm gonna keep up with you." "You'd have to actually run for that to be a problem," I fire back, smirking. "I run. Just not in circles for no reason," Jace says, laughing under his breath. He closes the notebook and hops down off the bleachers, offering me a hand I don't need but take anyway. His palm is warm, familiar, exactly the kind of steady I've come to expect from him. "C'mon, Willow. Mae's got the fryer going. I can smell it from here." "You cannot smell the diner from the track, Jace," I say, shaking my head. "I can smell it in my soul," Jace insists, deadpan. I laugh, and it feels easy, the kind of laugh that doesn't cost me anything. I don't know yet that this is the last day it gets to be this simple. By the time Jace drops me off at home, the sky has gone the color of a fresh bruise, purple bleeding into black. He leans across the seat before I climb out, tapping the sketchbook against his knee. "Fifty point two," he says again, quieter this time, almost reverent. "Told Mae myself. She near about dropped a milkshake on my head." "Proud of me?" I ask, my voice softer than I mean it to be. "Always," Jace says simply, like it costs him nothing. I climb out before my face can give away how much that word does to me. My legs are finally starting to ache from the run in that deep, satisfying way that means I'll sleep good tonight. I don't. The dream comes fast and it comes wrong, like my mind skipped past the part where things make sense and went straight to the part where they don't. I'm running again, except it isn't the track and it isn't Little River. It's a forest made of silver, trees that look like they've been carved out of moonlight, and I'm not on two legs anymore. I'm low to the ground, fast in a way my body has never been fast, four legs eating up distance my human legs could never cover. My breath comes out in a fog, and my heart pounds in a rhythm I don't recognize as my own. There's a wildness in it, something ancient and hungry, and instead of frightening me, it feels like coming home to a house I don't remember living in. Others run with me. I feel them more than see them, shapes moving through the trees on either side, and somewhere ahead of us a voice calls out, not in words, but in the shape of a name pulled up from somewhere old, somewhere I didn't know I remembered. It isn't my name. But it feels like it should be. I never get the chance to answer. I sit straight up in bed, gasping, my sheets tangled around my legs and soaked through with sweat. My heart slams against my ribs. For a second I don't know where I am. Then the shape of my dresser comes into focus, and my desk, and the glow of my phone on the nightstand. Just a dream. I press a hand to my chest and feel my own heartbeat slowing back down under my palm, but my legs still remember the wrong rhythm, four beats where there should be two, and I can't shake it no matter how hard I press my feet flat against the mattress. I let out a shaky laugh at myself anyway. Track practice must have wiped me out harder than I thought. That, or too many fries and not enough sleep. I reach for my phone and check the time out of habit, some old reflex that wants proof the world still runs on numbers I understand. 3:47 AM. I set it back down and swing my legs over the side of the bed, padding barefoot to the bathroom for water I don't really want, just to feel tile under my feet, just to feel like myself again. The cold from the glass doesn't quite chase away the taste still clinging to the back of my throat, something sharp and clean, like frost, like air that's never touched a city. I lie back down and pull the sheets up, telling myself it was nothing. Just a nightmare. Somewhere outside, an owl calls once, twice, then falls silent, and I curl deeper into my blankets, chasing sleep that feels thinner than it did before. I stare at the ceiling long after my heartbeat settles, waiting for the dream to loosen its grip the way dreams are supposed to. It doesn't. I can still feel the phantom weight of four legs instead of two, still hear the shape of that name hanging just behind my ears, and no amount of telling myself it was nothing makes the feeling let go. I believe it, too. For now.