I imagined the men, hungry, gaunt, shadows deepening in the craters of their eyes, getting thinner, getting weaker, and one night lying down together, maybe holding hands in their big moon suit gloves, their lives leaving them. And I imagined the abrasive moondust chewing through their big moon suits, then the flesh of them, so they were bones on the surface of the moon, and I imagined the moon swallowing the bones into itself, as the desert sand absorbs a snakeskin. Their helmets left as headstones. Their bones absorbed into the bone of the moon, until they were made moon themselves.
The Hunger Moon has come and gone, but “The Moon in Full” series continues at the Paris Review.