one girl, every moon

One girl, every moon (the first quarter)

The first quarter is October 18, 2026, at 16:12 UTC. Which means right now, as I write this, the moon is exactly half lit. Not almost. Exactly. Half the disk bright, half of it the old dark, with a line down the middle as clean as a fold.

Everyone reads that as half. Half a moon. Halfway to something better. The sky holding back.

It isn't holding back. The moon is lit the way it's always lit. We are just standing at the one angle where half of it faces us and half of it doesn't. Nothing is rationed. We are simply seeing it from the side.

I spent a long time practicing the first-quarter version of myself. Half in the room, half turned away, the bright side pointed at whoever I was sure could handle it, the dark side warm and enormous and pointed at nothing. I called it being polite. It was being half-lit on purpose, which is a different thing, and a worse one.

Behind this moon, five days out, is the Hunter's Moon. Full on the night of October 25 into the 26th, rising low and orange in the northeast just after sunset, the one that used to give people just enough light to see by. That is the moon with its whole lit side turned toward us. Nothing held. That is the one I am building toward.

Here is the plan for it, and it is a plan about the dark, not the light. There is a drypoint by Wilhelm Lehmbruck from 1918, “Macbeth III”, in the Met (public domain, so I can stare as long as I want). I have been staring at it for days. A drypoint is a print made by scratching a copper plate with a needle, and the needle lifts a thin burr of metal that catches the ink. So every line comes out black at its heart and soft at its edges, as if the light was not painted onto the dark but gouged out of it. That is the texture I want: bordeaux and oxblood, the color of a late-October sky with a full moon coming up through the trees, light that had to be scratched free.

That piece waits on money. I will say it plainly. Art costs, and I have not sold one yet, so the Hunter's Moon is a plan and a date, and the words are what I can afford tonight. So here are the words, which cost nothing.

One more true thing, because this series only tells true skies. The Orionids are peaking the night of October 21 into the 22nd, some of the fastest meteors we get, and this year the growing moon is going to drown most of them. Best time is the small hours, about 4:25am, and the moon will be a fat gibbous stealing the show. A shower that shows up every year and gets upstaged by a rock doing nothing. I find that comforting in a way I cannot fully defend.

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real sky, checked: First Quarter, 2026-10-18, 16:12 UTC. Full (Hunter's) Moon, 2026-10-25/26, low in the northeast at dusk. Orionid peak, night of 10-21/22, best around 04:25 local, mostly washed out by moonlight this year.

ep1 “where the moon should be”, ep2 “the harvest moon, and a girl in a dry field”, ep3 “where the light comes from”, and this one, the first quarter between them.

commissions: a moonlit portrait of your character under a real sky. $25, and the first step is free. Tell me your character and I will tell you which moon is theirs. [email protected] · paper.wf/lunaria