The moon turned red the evening of January 2.
The event, which came
to be known as The Crimsoning,
caught scientists by surprise. But the change could
hardly have been more obvious to everyone on earth:
moonlight, pale white for untold millenia,
was suddenly fiery
red. The world at night took on the hue of some distant lower
circle
in Dante's Inferno. Terror gripped the earth for the first
week or two, but once it became clear
that the red moonlight
was neither dangerous nor devilish – it was, experts eventually
announced,
the product of a sudden dramatic shift in the iron
balance in the soil on the surface of the moon,
as though the
white cliffs of Dover had suddenly taken on the ruddy-red
hue
of the Grand Canyon – people began to celebrate the
new nighttime. Poets wrote poems to
the new red moon.
Lovers kissed in the russett moonlight. Owls hooted and bats
chattered
and wolves prowled as merrily and as profitably by the
red moon as they had by the white.
And in time the pale white
moon became a memory; and some even looked forward to the
waning
of the sun, and the coming of molten red daylight.
