Bodega | How the Moon Can Stop the World from Ending

I have four babies frozen in time. Their little snowball bodies are suspended
in petite vials surrounded by liquid nitrogen. I always think of Jurassic Park,

the false-bottom can of Barbasol. In this fantasy, Dennis Nedry,
absconds with my babies and I save them by being the dilophosaurus,

laying in wait, spreading black tar venom all over Dennis’s stupid yellow rain jacket.
It’s always easier to think about movies than reality, the shrinking tunnel of math

these babies must squeeze through. It’s easier to think about where the babies
are right now: climate-controlled storage units with just enough room.

In movies, climate control can turn the sandy loam of a planet like Dune
into the verdant paradise of Earth. Easier to think of that than a 50% chance of a live birth,

but when confronted with them, under the microscope, reality seems possible.

Each looks glorious! Like the moon in summer: a dusty slate spun perfectly round,
inspiring people to launch themselves into the unknown, and conspiring with the tides

to shape and reshape existence. This moon, my moon, is what they look like.
They are here, and when I am ready, someone will pluck a moon out of its frozen past,

and my husband will watch from a screen in my hand as the moon touches down
into a red velvet galaxy, and we will wait to see if this moon becomes something even more,

something else: a time traveler summoned here from the frost, surrounded now not by
the vacuous vials of cryospace, but by living tissue of the flesh and plunged into the future.

The tiniest time traveler tasked with terraforming to keep its world from ending.
Tasked with living to keep my world from ending, Or maybe just to keep it

from not changing. To keep it from staying frozen in time without the promise
of new life in this aging land. Without my little moon baby. My time traveler.

103 – April 2021

By Elise Tobin Samaha

How the Moon Can Stop the World from Ending