I’ll be good - by Chloe Cheng

Friday Night, Friday Night, Spring 2021 Spring 2021 by Sara Kessel by Sara Kessel

One shot of tequila left. “A Trip to the Moon” by George Méliès. The trombone pulled low, descending. Trumpets colored all the wizards, their beautiful, airy trousers and starry hats pointed up to the sky. The head magician put the moon on the chalkboard. She heard voices coming down the dorm hall. A weaker magician doesn’t believe— they can’t just draw a dotted line, fly to the moon. A group of women brought them a change of clothes that calmed them down. The wizards were industrialists now; they raised their canes and stormed off. Phoebe and Julia had said they would watch it, too. She doesn’t want to ask again, she doesn’t want to hold their words as a promise. She doesn’t want to shut herself in, pull down the cell bars. Workers formed the base of the spaceship, a large metal bullet reflecting the moonlight. The head magician led a group to watch the smoke as it billowed out of the factory. Soot bubbled at the top like a giant silver balloon. She is drunk now. Drank the rest of the month-old hard apple cider flattened in the minifridge earlier. It’s a Friday night, but she’s on medication and not supposed to be drinking. There’s not that much to do in the middle of February, in the wasteland of frozen muck. There were only quiet, infected nights, not like they used to be. After the sun became small. After everything cold and dark showed themselves to her. Now there was nothing better to do than to sit in your dorm with your friends: she was stuck with them anyway. It was time to go to the moon. The conductor ushered in the trumpets again, the bullet fired impossibly out of a cartoonishly long musket. The clouds faded the observers out. They were closer now, Phoebe and Julia and the rest of them. She can hear them right beside her door, drunk, more than she was, flowing in and out of the other rooms, stomping down the hall, a full brass band. The moon’s lips were full and red. He smiled like the devil, he fooled all of them, all of the earthlings, until the bullet entered his eye and the clay melted right off. They were on the moon. The idiots crawl into the first crater they see, she can still hear them, together, shaking the gates with the occasional brush of a manicured hand, they run around the dorm floor, around their playground, the men were in the cavern now, lush with bright yellow mushrooms and jagged fields, and grew surprised when one of the mushrooms rises above the ground and sprouts an alien, are you really surprised, they sneer through the gates, that you’re alone, that we struck you with the magical sword, you put your legs over your head and circled around us so many times that the fate of your world was always meant to end in a boiling heap.