The Night the Moon Was Late

The fountain was talking to itself again. It said plish, then it said plosh, then it thought about it for a while and said plish again. Arlo the hedgehog listened from the path with his nose twitching. He was small and round and covered in spines that went every which way, and he had the best job in the whole night garden: he was the keeper of the moonflowers.

Moonflowers were shy things. They stayed rolled up tight all day, like little green umbrellas nobody had opened, and they only yawned wide when the moon came down the gap in the hedge and touched them with its long silver fingers. Arlo counted them every evening, out loud, the way Nana Bramble had taught him. "Nineteen little ones," he said, "and the Moon's Own makes twenty."

Nana Bramble was old, and her spines had gone silver at the tips, and she had given Arlo the job in the spring. "You've got steady paws," she had said. But Arlo wasn't so sure. Some nights the watering can felt enormous. Some nights he worried he was still too small for a whole garden. Tonight she was three beds down, humming to the parsley, close enough to hear him if he called.

Tonight, Theo the snail was there too. Theo lived under the parsley and took most of the evening to arrive, and when he finally did, he settled onto the warm stone edge of the fountain with a small, satisfied sigh. "I counted the stars," said Theo. "All of them?" asked Arlo. "Every single one," said Theo. "Twice, in case I missed one."

Arlo knew this wasn't true, and Theo knew that Arlo knew, and it was their oldest and best joke, so neither of them ever said anything about it.

Then Arlo went to work. He watered the little ones first, tipping the can carefully, and then he climbed up on the flat stone to reach the Moon's Own, which grew on the tallest stem in the garden. It was enormous, a pale bud curled as tight as a fist. Arlo leaned up on his tiptoes, and then a little further. Then he turned, quick, because Theo had said something funny about the stars, and his spines swung around with him. Snick.

A sound like a tiny door closing. The stem of the Moon's Own bent right over, and its great pale bud hung down near the soil, and there was a crack in the stem, thin and clean as a hair.

Arlo froze. All his spines prickled at once, which is what a hedgehog's worry feels like from the inside. The Moon's Own was older than Nana Bramble. It was older than the fountain, probably. It was the first flower of the whole garden, the one all the others waited for, and Arlo had swung his spines into it because Theo had made a joke.

He tried everything he could think of. He propped the stem up with a twig, and the bud drooped. He tied it with a long blade of grass, in a neat knot the way Nana had taught him, and the bud drooped lower. He stood with his paws braced and held the whole thing up himself, and after a while his paws went numb and he had to admit that this was not a job for paws.

Then Nana Bramble's lantern bobbed up the path, between the jasmine. Arlo did the thing he would think about later, in the quiet part of the night. He pulled the broken stem behind himself, tucked it in among his spines, and stood across the gap in the hedge with his back to the flowerbed and his face to the path, as if nothing at all had happened.

"There you are," said Nana Bramble, coming up the path with the lantern held low. "The fountain's in fine voice tonight." She looked up at the sky. "Though I don't know where the moon has got to. It ought to be through the gap by now."

Arlo said, "Mmm." It was the smallest sound he had ever made. His tummy felt like a pocket full of pebbles. Behind him he could feel the bud drooping against his back, soft and cold, and he kept absolutely still, because still was the only thing he could think of to do.

Theo, who noticed everything even if he never hurried about it, slid down off the warm stone. "Arlo," he said. "You're standing very strangely. You look like a hedgehog who is hiding a hedge."

Nana Bramble lifted her lantern higher. She looked at Arlo, then at the gap in the hedge where the moonlight should have been falling in a long silver bar across the flowerbed, and she said, quiet and kind, "The moon isn't late, love. Something is standing in the way of it."

Arlo looked down at his own paws. He looked at the long dark bar of the flowerbed, unlit and empty, with every little bud still folded up tight. He had been standing in that gap for an hour. He had been so busy hiding what he had broken that he had been keeping the moon off the whole garden.

He stepped aside, and his paws felt wobbly, but his voice came out steady, which surprised him. "It was me," he said. "I broke the Moon's Own. I turned too fast, and my spines swung into it, and the stem cracked. I'm sorry, Nana. I've been standing there so you wouldn't see."

Nana Bramble didn't gasp, and she didn't scold. She set the lantern down and came and put her paw on Arlo's back, careful of the spines. "Thank you for telling me," she said. "That's the heavy part done." Then she smiled, and the smile had a secret in it. "Do you know how many times the Moon's Own has been broken?"

Arlo shook his head. "Four times," said Nana. "My brother sat on it. A slug nibbled it in the wet summer. Twice the wind got it." She knelt down and laid the cracked stem gently on the soil, where it leaned against the earth like a sleepy head against a pillow.

"Moonflowers don't mind starting again," she said. "It'll root where it lies. And it'll open tonight, cracked stem and all, because it always opens. It's only the light it needs."

And just then the moon came clear of the hedge and poured down the gap in a long silver bar that landed right across the flowerbed. Nineteen buds uncurled at once, one after another after another, like a row of small white lamps being lit. Last of all, the Moon's Own opened where it lay, tilted sideways on its cracked stem, and glowed.

Arlo sat down hard on the warm stone. He felt enormous and light, as if he had put down a bag he hadn't known he was carrying. "You were standing in the light," said Theo, climbing back up beside him. "For a whole hour. Imagine that." "I know," said Arlo. "I was there." And they both laughed, quietly, the way you laugh when the evening has gone soft.

The fountain went plish, then plosh. The jasmine smelled of honey and rain, and the wet earth smelled of the garden, and the twenty open flowers breathed their pale light onto the path. Nana Bramble turned her lantern down low and sat with them, and Theo's shell caught a little of the glow.

Arlo watched the Moon's Own leaning on the soil, glowing anyway, glowing sideways. He thought about how heavy that hour in the gap had been, and how light this was. His spines settled down. His paws went still. The fountain said plish, and then it said nothing for a long, long while.