Sea of Tranquility Read Online Free PDF

fisherman’s house, it was a dream come true for her. “When I first set foot in here,” she told Sylvie,“this place reeked of authenticity. I asked Ned where the toilet was, and he asked if I needed to pee or do the other. I said I just had to pee, and he pointed to a little piece of one-inch black plastic pipe in the wall. I looked at it, then through the window, and saw it went outside and emptied into a little stream that grew ferns and cress. Ned had never encountered the problem of a woman having to take a pee in his old house, owned up to it, said it’d been a lonely several years. Then he built a first-rate outhouse. I had to tell him it had to be away from any watercourse. He said women were funny creatures, but he built it where I wanted it all the same. Built it like he was building a dory. Only certain materials, certain types of spruce wood he cut himself. Enough timber in it to withstand a gale. Guess he didn’t want me to come to harm if I was inside one day and a hurricane happened. Men are funny creatures.”
    â€œMen are,” Sylvie said.“Men certainly are.”
    â€œSylvie?”
    â€œYes.” Sylvie had a dreamy look on her face. Talking about how funny men are as creatures.
    â€œSylvie, do you know there is something about this place.”
    â€œThe house?”
    â€œNo, not Ned’s house, although I think it is special too, but the island. Do you think there is
something
indefinable about this island. I felt it the first day I arrived.”
    Sylvie worried through the pockets in her loose skirt looking for a handkerchief. “Oh, my dear. Something, yes. Not everyone can feel it, but you can, can you?”
    â€œThere’s doubt in your voice, like you think I’m teasing. It’s because I’m from away, right?”
    â€œPeople from away don’t always understand. Lord, many people who grew up here don’t even understand.”
    â€œBut I do.”
    â€œI believe that.”
    â€œIt’s not just the land,” Kit said.“It’s the sky, too. Everything is much clearer. Clearer up in the sky and space above this island, too. Last night I had my telescope focussed on the moon, on a place on the moon called the Bay of Rainbows.”
    â€œYou’re lying to an old woman. There’s no place on the moon called the Bay of Rainbows.”
    â€œNo lies. There is.” Kit picked up, of all things, a teacher’s pointing stick and went over to the wall where hung a big, round, blue saucer of a map. The moon. She pointed to a place and read it off: “Bay of Rainbows, just north of the Sea of Rains.”
    Sylvie was hamstrung. Felt like a little girl in school again. “So there it is,” she said, as if the universe was a stranger place than she had ever thought, something like a fairy tale complete with astronomers sitting on mountaintops coming up with exotic names for places on the moon.
    â€œSylvie, I saw a bright light there as I was looking at the Bay of Rainbows. A flash.”
    â€œMoonmen?”
    â€œNo, I think not. Another asteroid on impact.”
    â€œThat’s what all the craters are about, I suppose. A wounded old thing, the moon is, isn’t it?” She felt a kind of kinship there. All her men dying, belligerent asteroids battering the face of the moon in the night.
    â€œWounded indeed. Look at that sorry old girl.” Perfectly natural that the moon must be feminine. Not a man in the moon at all. Wounded old girl. A couple of million years old. Up there hanging over the earth. No atmosphere to help ward off chunks of rock gamming about in space.
    â€œI’ve never felt closer to the moon than I do on this island. Back in Massachusetts, back when I taught in Boston, I sat onmy rooftop and the moon kept me sane when I felt like I was going crazy.”
    â€œSome people used to say the full moon
made
you crazy. Women especially, our blood all controlled by