At the end of the path she sometimes saw a semicircle of softly coloured light, shaped like the moon’s top half, lit in a pale pink – a Van Gogh-washed pink, a Giacometti rock-pink. It lowly glowed salmon, like the Goodmews pavement or the deeply streaked piece of polished celestobarite she’d seen for sale in the Happy Goblet.

Soft piano music – Moonlight Sonata, familiar to Francine – was mixed in with the chatter. Even as background, it was melancholy. But it was soothing – the slow, simple notes rising and falling predictably, sounding like the graceful fingerings of some long-fingered primate.

‘... it’s been calculated that when man finally lands on the moon, the simple action of opening the lander door will double the moon’s tiny amount of atmosphere.’

Those small blocks of wood above doors, with orderly dots on them, were addresses. They had looked like dominoes, or dice.

Since coming to Goodmews, she had read about moonflowers and that they blossomed at dusk, softly glowing and exuding their sweet scent.

Moondials tell time using the light of the moon, in the same way sundials work by the light of the sun.
Sundials, however, are far more precise. Moondials are only accurate once a month.

In the library’s glass case, there is one of the few surviving ‘moon sticks’ used by the local Sioux to measure time. According to (Miss or Mrs.) B. Lawon, with the rising of each new moon the Sioux would make a notch in their sticks. They would note the changing of the seasons, and learned they would come again.

She smiled at the thought that the street maps, always with Goodmews’s landmark, the church,
were still dotted around town on the orangewood notice boards stuck into patches of grass.

At Goodmews Post Office, Sam scanned the envelope he’d slid out of his private box.
In the left corner was a recognizable logo – a blue sphere, with a futuristic red wing slicing through it, and NASA in white letters across the middle.

         ‘There’s your cottage.’ Banno walked over and peered out, towards the back. ‘A classic old Fireman’s Cottage – second from the left. Number 2.’ A white, wooden bungalow

Colour could be beautiful anywhere – an azalea-flowered golf course, a blue-surfaced tennis court, the blue water of a swimming pool, the smooth black of a newly tarred road.

He’d strolled slowly across roads, taking advantage of the town’s extended pedestrian-crossing times…