Cut on the Bias

It starts with a harvest moon on a swipe-right, bend-over night. A moon that is too big for the sky, that has outgrown the solar system and wants more like you want more. You sketch the moon large at first. Across six poster boards taped together on a conference room table. You kneel over them, stretch to reach the outer edges. Ink stains on bare knees. Your co-workers say the finished design resembles a pregnant belly. You nod like this makes sense. Like pregnant belly is what you were after. But it isn’t. So you shrink your moon to a circumference of millimeters. You multiply it. Your boss is pleased when you print the moons onto silk strips, fold the ends into triangles. He is less discerning than your co-workers, who frown at the finished necktie. The shapes aren’t pregnant any more, they say. Just boulders now. Boulders that make them think of cavemen, of the dystopian movies their teenagers watch. You don’t want your moons to be boulders. You set your drawings aside. Stop dating. For Christmas, you design neckties with candy canes that look like candy canes. For St. Paddy’s Day, you make four-leaf clovers that are only four-leaf clovers. You draw sombreros and American flags and pumpkins. It gives you satisfaction to be a woman tying men down. When you see your work cinched under the Adam’s apples of men on the street, you open a button on your blouse. You let the wind have at your throat. At least this, you think. Avoiding the night sky, you hold your gaze below the horizon, carefully like one would carry an egg a great distance. But the moon keeps calling, calling. It will not let you forget all that you desire. You set to work again, stealing a sliver from the harvest moon, then another. Giving it eyes to harbor shadows. A mouth for knowing thirst. Your boss takes you out to celebrate. Steak extra rare and cheesecake extra runny. He pays you a bonus. The many moons are a wild success. Wives and girlfriends and lovers buy them for birthday gifts and anniversary gifts and gifts just because they feel so lucky to have a man. Printed with a smidge of reflective material, the moons bounce the lovers’ inner light back onto them, like the real moon reflects the sun. Your celestial work, smeared across all those necks, doesn’t make you happy like it does the people who buy them. You feel afraid. They seem dumb, these ties. All the ties. Lacking purpose. Soul. Humanity. You spend evenings on the roof of your building, eyes up, wishing, wanting. You watch the look on men’s faces change. The moons make them nervous too. Dissatisfied. You see it in a dream before it happens, but you are too late to stop them—the men who reach your tie up toward the heavens, who fasten it to the moon, and hang there, breathless.

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Maureen Langloss is a lawyer-turned-writer living in New York City. She serves as the Flash Fiction Editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her writing has been published in Gulf Coast, Little Fiction, The Journal, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Her work will appear in the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her online at maureenlangloss.com or on Twitter @maureenlangloss.