Bo and the Biscuit Moon

Bo the mouse looked up at the moon and gasped.

Somebody had taken a bite out of it.

Last night it had been round. Round as a plate. Round as a biscuit, in fact, which was what Bo had been thinking about at the time, being a mouse. And now, tonight, there was a curve missing from one side, a neat, clean curve, exactly the shape a mouth makes.

"Who did that?" said Bo.

Nobody answered, because the only other creature awake was Bo's friend, the child who lived in the house, who was sitting on the back step in pyjamas eating, as it happened, a biscuit.

Bo looked at the biscuit. Bo looked at the moon. Bo looked at the biscuit.

"Was it you?"

The child laughed, with crumbs. "I can't reach the moon."

"Then who?"

They thought about it together. The owl could reach, but owls eat mice, not moons, and Bo preferred not to dwell on that. The clouds went up there sometimes, but clouds have no teeth. The wind could reach anything, but the wind was more of a pusher than a biter.

"Maybe," said the child slowly, "it's hungry. The moon. Maybe it's been up there all night with nothing to eat, and it got so hungry it took a bite out of itself."

Bo thought this was the saddest thing he had ever heard. He was a mouse. He knew about being hungry at night.

"We should feed it," he said.

So they did. The child broke off a crumb from the biscuit, a good one with a bit of chocolate on, and Bo took it in his paws and held it up as high as a mouse can hold anything, which is not very high, and said, "Here you are, moon."

The crumb did not go up. Crumbs rarely do.

"One more," said the child, and gave him another. Bo held it up. Nothing. "One more crumb." Nothing. "One more."

By now there was a small pile of crumbs on the step and the biscuit was mostly gone and the moon, Bo noticed, looked exactly the same.

"It isn't working," said Bo.

"Maybe it's not hungry," said the child. "Maybe it's just... that shape tonight."

"Can a moon be a shape?"

"I think it can be lots of shapes. I think it goes round, bit by bit. A bite, then a bigger bite, then a curl, then nothing, and then it starts coming back."

Bo sat down on the step. That was a lot of shapes for one moon. But it was better than hungry.

"So the bite grows back?"

"In a few weeks. Round again. Then it starts over."

Bo looked up. The moon, with its bite, did not look sad any more. It looked like something halfway through, which is a comfortable thing to be, when you know the rest is coming.

He ate one of the crumbs. Then, because they were there, another.

"One more crumb," said Bo.

"One more," agreed the child, and ate one too.

They sat on the step and finished the pile between them, slowly, with the biscuit moon over the garden and the night getting cooler and the child's mum, inside, starting to say the word "bed" in the voice that means it.

"Goodnight, moon," said Bo, with his mouth full. "Grow back soon."

And the moon, which was in no hurry, being only halfway, said nothing at all, and shone.