Padding through the Indiana State Capitol’s lawn, an orphan planned her parents’ funerals. It made no difference that they both were still alive, because they did not love her. She considered herself as good as orphaned, anyway. Through the clusters of maple and sycamore leaves, the night sky was coal smoke. The buildings wore dusty orange haloes. She so wished the city would shut off its lights so she could see the stars.

For her father, to whom she only spoke on Wednesdays, she picked out a black coffin. It would be left closed, per her orders, and even though he would not be seen, she would have his eyes and mouth hot-glued shut. He would be entombed in the family house that he had kept for himself.

For her mother, the coffin would be white, and open, and she would even allow them to apply a light coat of make-up. As if the divorce wasn’t enough, her mother hadn’t even come looking after the orphan ran off from the blue glass hotel. She savored the image of the white coffin lazily sinking into a sharp-cornered grave, but nearly tripped over a raised bronze plaque at her feet. It read Bicentennial Moon Tree. Deciding she had walked enough, the orphan tugged off her sweatshirt and folded it over the cold metal. When she laid down, it made a fine pillow.

From her makeshift bed, the orphan gazed upward. The Moon Tree’s branches were crooked like witches’ claws. On the tip of each sat a fat, green bud. She wondered why this tree was so underdeveloped, compared to its leafy neighbors. Perhaps, true to its namesake, it only grew in the moonlight? What she didn’t know was that this tree, along with five hundred of its baby sisters and brothers, had actually been to the moon.

She didn’t know that while one astronaut took a corned beef sandwich, and another, golf balls, a thoughtful astronaut brought the infant Moon Tree into space. That the five hundred seeds had circled the moon thirty-four times. That they had been unrelentingly pelted with cosmic radiation, infused with stardust and dark matter, cooked by a fiery re-entry, all before being planted in the soil just inches from her head. She didn’t know the White House received one, the Emperor of Japan received one, Valley Forge received one, that Moon Trees encircled the world.

But she did know that trees of any kind were not supposed to glow. Yet, as she gazed at the branches of the Moon Tree above, each individual swaying bud switched on like a diode. A muffled buzz simmered all around her, like an attic full of bees. The ground beneath her shook, gently at first, but as the Moon Tree’s glow intensified, so did the buzz. Dwarfing all other sounds, it occupied every last inch of her inner ears. The ground began to quaver as it does at a shuttle launch. In order to steady herself, the orphan grabbed large fistfuls of carefully manicured grass.

All around her, the city lights dimmed, then extinguished. The buildings, the ground, the sky, all receded to darkness, then to blackness, then to a nothingness through which the orphan fell, only to be caught in a tangle of roots. The Moon Tree was now the bright, glowing locus of the world, its buds a vortex of a thousand swirling lightning bugs, its expansive network of roots all that kept the orphan afloat in the void. Everything else had melted away. In that moment of falling the orphan called out to her parents, but couldn’t hear her own voice. Not that they could have come. She had buried them herself.

It seemed to her that she was stuck in a black without boundary, but by cosmic coincidence, call it a quantum fluctuation, or perhaps because the Moon Tree had heard her cries, two of its buds collided and bounced apart— now connected by a thin line, like a golden string of spiderweb, like a single strand of saliva between two pairs of lips. A second collision created more strands, more connections between the glowing nodes. And while she didn’t understand the process that was taking place before her, the orphan found herself transfixed by it, this source of progress in an otherwise dark and shapeless world. She knew that she wanted to help.

Steadying herself with the Moon Tree’s trunk, wrapping both arms around it, the orphan stood. Underneath its flaked, peeling bark, she felt a busy thrum, a warm pulse. With the Moon Tree firmly in her grasp, the orphan began to rock back and forth, bending its thin trunk, hoping the sway would force more buds to collide like dancers in a crowded ballroom.

And collide they did, each impact causing a dozen more, the orphan’s vision seized by an endless series of quick light bursts, each glowing point a vertex with countless rays, randomly arranged, until all the branches were cocooned in fine threads, like a communal nest of tent caterpillars that spun gold. As the Moon Tree’s light condensed further, as its branches, entangled in a luminous web, constricted, the quaking stopped. The overwhelming din hushed. In her periphery the orphan caught a glimpse of another source of light.

Several, in fact. There were more than the orphan could count, more that she could not see, but there were sixty-one in all: the surviving Moon Trees across the darkened world. Towering beacons, lit torches. She wondered if every distant light was a tree, and if under every tree was another person just like her, believing herself or himself alone. The orphan wanted so badly to go to one of these lights, to find someone, to connect the same way all the glowing buds had. She was suddenly jealous of these buds, snuggled up tight in their golden nests, crowded and cozy.

Her arms still tight around the Moon Tree’s trunk, she shook as hard as she could, hoping to somehow collide it with one of the distant lights, that it might work the same, that the collision of two trees might form one huge golden strand, a bridge to someone else.

But instead, across the dark expanse, casting lithe tendrils of light into the blackness, the other trees were reaching out to her.

Above the orphan’s head, in the very center of the Moon Tree, the sixty-one light tendrils met like a worldwide network of comet tails. As each beam connected with it, through her arms and chest the orphan could feel the Moon Tree grow warmer, its pulse hasten. She watched it glow a purer gold. And in this dark embrace, this warmth, this familiar pulse, she could only see her parents’ bed: dad on the left, her mother on the right, and nestled between them, under the covers and sheets, soaked in enveloping waves of body heat, her. A golden nightlight in the socket by the door.

All at once the Moon Tree began again to buzz, the ground beneath it to shake. The trunk’s warmth began to burn the orphan’s arms. She recoiled at the sudden pain, but forgot it quickly, forced to negotiate the quivering roots with nothing to steady herself. The golden buds of the Moon Tree popped like firecrackers, each burst flicking a light back on in the city which she had thought was swallowed up, restoring architecture in random pieces, restoring the carefully manicured grass, her sweatshirt and the plaque, beneath her feet. In place of each exploded bud was a loose ball of shimmering light that, upon colliding with others, congealed, doubled in size, then redoubled, first as a nebulous, wavering gob of blown glass, soon hardened, forged and reforged. The thousand freed fists of light consumed and were in turn consumed, until all that remained were two massive incandescent marbles, each orbiting the other above the spent, empty branches of the Moon Tree. The orphan knew what was to come next, but when the two marbles finally collided and issued a grand, heaven-rending clack, she was still knocked off her feet by the impact. And even though her sweatshirt absorbed most of the blow, her head still struck the bronze plaque when she landed. The last image the orphan saw through her flagging eyelids was an opaque white pillar of light issuing from the Moon Tree’s branches, which pierced the Earth’s atmosphere and climbed up past the moon, past the nearest orbiting planets, past tight clusters of white, infant stars, past their swollen, red forebears, to a dark corner of the galaxy, her location now marked from thousands of light-years away.

She stirred, opened her eyes. The sky was streaked purple and magenta, the morning sun still but a premonition, the air thick with police sirens. Above her, fresh green buds on the tips of the Moon Tree’s branches. Above them, an unmistakable, cylindrical husk, flecked with suspended, iridescent flakes. In the distance, the orphan heard her parents, both of them, calling her name.

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Zach Roth is a fictioneer in the Butler MFA program. You can read him in the Walleyed Press and Hobart. He has a passion for fonts, math rock, and watching Ukranian nerds play organized eSports.

Illustration by Weird_Tales_volume_36_number_01.djvu: Weird Tales, Inc. derivative work: AdamBMorgan (Weird_Tales_volume_36_number_01.djvu) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.