The Night the Moon Went Missing

On the night the moon went missing, nobody in Willow Hollow noticed at first. The streetlamps still hummed. The cats still prowled the fences. It was only when old Mrs. Abernathy went out to water her nightshade garden that she looked up, squinted, and said, out loud, to no one in particular, "Well, that's odd."

The sky above her was not dark exactly. It was simply incomplete, the way a sentence is incomplete when you forget the last word.

By morning, three children had already decided to go looking for it. They did not ask permission, because the moon going missing did not feel like the kind of thing you were supposed to ask permission about.

It felt like the kind of thing you were supposed to fix.