May Microfiction Contest: Bronze Winner: “Under the Moonglade” by Jacob Young

On the beach, we dreamed of our remains. In a millennium, would they find them? Would they find the ash moon in the sand where a fire once singed the peach fuzz on our cheeks, when we made believe we were troglodytes, our beer bottles wedged in dunes? They could trace our steps along the shore, to the mound we lighthoused from, where we looked to the ocean and wondered where it ended and the sky began. They could scan the shadows and cigarette ash to find us marvelling at the stars, guessing which were real and which were reflections. City lights mirrored the Milky Way.

They would look at flight paths and satellite orbits—how, as we lay on our backs, a space station passed above, and we said to ourselves, “there weren’t enough stars, so we made more”. Under the moonglade, we wondered whether any of this would last a thousand years, and figured not. But that didn’t matter, because it did then.

Jacob Young is an Aussie-Brit living in the Cotswolds, England. He writes in a Hemingway-themed café, where he drinks his coffee black while writing of lives that aren’t his own to learn about the one that is. Jacob’s work has featured in Half and One.