Strawberry Moon

By Justin Collmann

Illustration by Olivia Fournier

June 1863

Pennsylvania

Julia walked out to the dock, sat down in her mother’s chair, and looked at the moon. It sat just above the horizon and had a soft shade of pink, a strawberry moon. It calmed her to look at it and listen to the frogs chirp. She had just helped her older sister, Tess, to bed, but the experience had agitated Julia. She felt all jumpy inside as if she had swallowed a handful of grasshoppers.

When the great war between the states had begun, Tess volunteered as a nurse. Julia had also wanted to go, but she was only ten years old. Tess was nineteen. Julia and their mother had sent her off at the train station with many hugs and huzzahs. Tess had stood in the door of the car as the train pulled away. She waved and smiled. Tess was a hero, and Julia had never felt so full of pride in all her life.

But, when Tess came back the following year, she looked different. She was so thin you could see her collar bone pressing against her skin. She spoke in a quiet mumble and often broke into tears. At night, she would thrash and yell. Their mother would become so upset that she would have to leave the room. Only little Julia could calm her. She would crawl into bed behind her sister and wrap herself around her. 

Tess would gradually become peaceful and lucid and say, “I think a raccoon got in my bed and climbed onto my back.”

And Julia would say, “Yes but a friendly one.”

Tess would fall asleep after a while. Sometimes, holding Tess felt like touching a boiling kettle, and other times it felt like laying against a wet, rotting log. Always, some poisonous shadow would pass from Tess into Julia, and Julia would have terrible visions. In one, she was wiping down the wasted body of a boy who was so white he was almost translucent. She could hear his shallow breathing and smell the dried pooh on his legs. Other times, she and another woman would be carrying a man on a sheet. He had two bandaged stumps instead of legs, and blood was staining the sheet. Then, the woman would stop, look at her and say, “I think he’s dead.”

The only way for Julia to purge herself of these awful visitations was to sit on the dock and look at the sky, listen to the frogs, and let the shadows pass from her. The different faces of nature helped to move the dark thoughts along. A breeze could clean her out but standing in the rain worked even better. Tonight, Julia felt the strawberry moon pulling the shadows out of her with great force. She remembered from school that the moon engaged the oceans in a similar way and thus made the tides. It made sense then that moon should pull on her as well and take from her all the bad things, and she hoped that someday all the shadows might be extracted and leave them in peace.