Blue Moon

J.K. Stephens

The stuff looked disgusting. The violent blue color also seemed out of place. I shouldn’t really use it, should I?

My dim little kitchen was crowded with all the equipment and provisions required to do battle with the toxins someone was trying to feed into my environment: a gleaming water filter to make the city tapwater potable, racks of pots of hanging herbs to help clean the heavy metals from the air, wicker and wooden shelves carrying jar upon jar of creamy or brightly colored fermented sour or salty stuff in each of which there was more life than the average shopping cart full of groceries.

I ran my hand over the nearest tier of jars just to feel the weight of the cool metal and glass stuffed with real food.

In here it smelled alive, of fruit and vinegar and spicy eucalyptus. Here you could ignore the traffic noises outside my windows, and the grayness of the fetid air that hung over the city.

However, the flowering vinca on my sunporch paled out there in the summer heat, looking undernourished. It should get minerals from the soil. But who knew what was (or wasn’t) in the potting soil I had bought to plant it in?

As a remedy, a friend gave me plant food in a little plastic container with a snug plastic lid. Guaranteed to work.

But the plant food was lurid, eyesmacking blue. Who could guess what revolting chemical cocktail it contained? It rudely contradicted everything else in the healthful sanctum of my kitchen.

I mixed a little blue in a lot of water and walked it carefully to the porch. I poured it at the roots of the plant, gingerly. I washed the blue residue off my fingers.

Two days later the plant was lush and green.

The trouble was that I felt I had given it a drug: “My friend was feeling tired and listless, and I gave him some heroin. Now he is like a bolt of electricity — impossible to slow the guy down.”

Just for science, in a week I gave the vinca another micro-dose of the blue stuff. Two days later it had fattened further. It sat before me and thrived greenly, seeming to be full of joy.

So from that, I thought, I should derive that all plants on earth are just lacking some of this blue stuff? And maybe we humans just need a little more of some drug with a black-box warning in order to be happy?

Well, speaking of happy, that was the night of the full moon. I went out dancing and forgot all about the plants on the porch.

A couple of weeks later I noticed that the vinca was looking shabby again: dropping petals and all. It couldn’t be for lack of the blue stuff, I decided, so I just gave it a drink of water.

One dance partner from two weeks ago asked me to go dancing again, and then again, and I forgot about the vinca’s life in the delirium of dance bands around town. I didn’t even water the poor plant, a level of neglect to which my succulents were accustomed, but the vinca was not. With me, succulents survive well. My watering habits make me like a freakish Mother Nature of the Desert, and they are genetically prepared for that. But other plants aren’t.

And yet, when the full moon shone again into my sunporch, the unwatered vinca bloomed fatly, radiant and lush.

Suspicious, I began to watch the vinca covertly, even out of the corner of my eye while I worked. I watered it now and then and nothing else. It waxed and waned, fattened and thinned, anyway.

With bouts of dance and no-dance, phone calls and long silences, my dance partner gradually drifted off, probably drawn to someone else.

In the meantime I plotted the vinca’s cycles against the moon, just for science, and found that they matched: the vinca swelled as the moon did, and thinned as the moon thinned to a crescent and disappeared. This shouldn’t be a surprise, I realized: the moon affected all things on Earth. Centuries of farmers have known that. Sailors and fishermen, too. And I was just finding this out?

When I looked back, even my dance-man’s bouts of dance and no-dance seemed to follow the waxing and waning moon.

But to be really honest, nothing had fattened the vinca faster than that magic blue snake-oil elixir. The plant fattened and waned with or without it, but more with it. What was in the blue stuff?

I read the label, a list of chemicals. No enlightenment there.

It had been months since I put any blue stuff on the vinca, because who needed to? The moon seemed to bring the cheery thing back to life anyway. But a wintry day came when its pink blossoms faded and its leaves had grown pale and thin-looking. I guessed that this must be the time to give it a shot of the suspicious blue stuff again, in the interest of science. I mixed a little in a lot of water, as before, and walked it carefully to the porch. I poured it at the roots of the plant, gingerly. I washed the blue residue off my fingers.

Two days later the plant was lush and green again.

Two days later it was the full moon, too. What was I thinking? I feared that ignoring the lunar cycle had made my nerdy experiment worthless. The moon might have made the plant happy, with or without help.

However, because it was the holidays, again I forgot the vinca entirely in a month of dancing, candles and music. When I remembered, the moon was full again. The rather-dry vinca bloomed madly, fatly in its moonlit pot. It gratefully absorbed a pitcher of water, seeming to be none the worse for neglect.

In fact it thrived anyway in the coming days, as one and another of my holiday partners demanded another evening of dancing.

One morning when I should have been working, I thought of something strange to try. I took two hand-sized clear rectangles of window glass from my hall closet, leftovers from some forgotten renovation, and smeared a wet fingerful of the blue plant elixir onto each. I set one up on the porch where the monthly moonlight would shine through it onto a patio-table, and where I thought the light would strike I put a bedraggled pot of herbs. The little pot of herbs was a gift that, like other live gifts I had received in the past, was suffering from neglect.

I didn’t really know what to do with the second piece of glass. But my practical ancestors always seem to hover around me at such times, and thus inspiration struck: I placed the glass at my bedside window, held between windowpane and blinds, and I opened the blinds. The moonlight would shine through it on me, and that would be an experiment. Maybe something interesting would happen.

Although I did have to train myself to undress at bedtime in the bathroom to avoid giving a show for the neighbors, characteristically I forgot about the blue-smeared glass, between daytime work and evenings dancing, until April. At that time my favorite dance partner, who had disappeared months ago, called out of the blue to invite me to dance, and when one thing led to another, asked me to be his partner permanently.

It was much later that night, when I was sitting alone and astonished on my sun-porch wearing the ring, that I realized I hadn’t watered the vinca in two months. The plant was straggly. Yet it still bloomed bravely there in the light cast by the pre-dawn full moon.

I was aghast, penitent. I ran to fill a pitcher of water to pour onto the thirsty roots. And I did the other porch-dwelling plants too.

As I poured water into the small pot that sat on the inner side of a square of bluish glass, bathing in a blue shower of moonlight, the experiment came back to me. So changed, the herb stems in this little pot were no longer stringy waifs; the plant was thick and dressed with flowers that I’d never seen on it, ever, even on the best of days. And how they flourished! It may even have been the wrong season to bloom, but that made no difference.

I walked to the bathroom to rinse my hands, and before I could turn on the lights my eyes were drawn to the mirror. My face glowed in the dark, a sort of pale phosphor-glow. I was beautiful.

It came to me then, the obvious answer: That blue stuff did something to moonlight.

So I made up a pitcher of it, very diluted, and I drank a shot of it experimentally. I drank a shot a couple of days before the wedding. I put it in a jar and refrigerated it, and drank some on the full moon every month until our tenth anniversary.

I still do, every now and then, if I feel like I’m losing my glow. My secret, and you’re the first to know.

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© Copyright 2026   J K Stephens   Daybreak Publications