The day after my birthday was a Monday. After the experience of wearing the magic glasses on my birthday the previous day, I dared not put them on all day—and not just because they made me look like an old lady and I didn’t care to hear what the kids at school had to say about my looks.

It was because of what the king of the sun had said: that these glasses and their power were not for my human like. That only a dispensation from on high allowed me to wear them at all—that otherwise I must never put them on again, and hand them over to an appropriate authority to destroy them.

But that night was a full moon. When I was alone in my bedroom I couldn’t resist the temptation. I put on the magic glasses.

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At first I wanted to take them off immediately: I was getting motion sickness!

All that changed was what I saw—but with the glasses on that night I was aware of the whole earth hurtling through space, and the moon and all the stars as well!

I don’t know how I didn’t barf.

I never quite got used to this, but I tried to focus less on the motion and more on what was moving.

First I saw silver tongues of light moving fast, with no wind behind them. Did they know where they wanted to go? Did they see me?

I looked at the full moon.

Forget the “man in the moon”—I saw what looked like a woman.

In the moon? On the moon? Behind the moon? Who knew?

She was young—she couldn’t have been older than me!—yet her hair was silvery-white, like an old lady, and flowed down to her waist. She moved—at first I thought she was drunk and might have laughed, but she wore a queenly crown of pure silver, and a beautiful silver gown. She carried a whip in her hand, and her whip seemed to cause the moon to move in its orbit.

Ideas entered my mind, and I didn’t know how: ideas of water, the sea and the sky; of sadness and tears; of alcohol and drunkenness; of seizures and insanity; of elementary school and grammar lessons; of inconstancy.

Of my period.

It almost knocked me down.

And in being knocked down, I knew it was a punishment for what I had seen. For while I had a dispensation from on high, that was the only reason I was allowed to wear these glasses.

Before I took them off, I heard the queen of the moon speak. Her voice cackled, but was firm and strict, even in its beauty.

She warned me not to make a marketplace of the palace: not her palace, for it was not her own, but her King’s.

And her King was not the lord of the sun I had met on my birthday.

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Somehow—don’t ask me how, I don’t know—I knew I was meant to wear these glasses and see the sights of the nighttime sky every night that week.