Erotophobia

My neighbor first told me what it was; I was seven and she was eight. Her brother and his friends were outside assaulting each other with 15-yard jets from their Super Soaker 2000s; she said it was something like that. Something like Hiroshima. A nuclear warhead rips your insides apart and the floodgates gush strawberry syrup. If something congeals it expands into a spongy mass like one of those quarter-machine magic dinosaurs you would leave in a glass of water next to the bathroom sink overnight. And then you became the moon.
The voluptuous moon materialized in every shadow and crevice from the mailbox to the heater vents to the TV antenna. I smelled it in the laundry detergent. It leapt through my mirror and bounced across the walls after dark. One morning I could have sworn I’d swallowed it overnight until I realized I could still see my feet in the shower. By Halloween the neighbor woman had ballooned into two moons. She was confined to a donut sofa full of daytime soaps and consigned to pants with elastic waistbands. For exercise she swam in takeout boxes. Rumor had it her husband tried to carve her into a jack-o-lantern when she ripened enough. When I spied her through the forsythia bushes dividing our yards, the reflection of the man in the moon flashed me a paralyzing grin.
And then I forgot about it.
Three years later I was sitting in health class when I saw the moon rising from the radiator across the room. It was then that I realized there was no escape. I further realized it when the ancient nurse who helmed the class, with the jowls of a Saint Bernard and round glasses whose paperweight lenses morphed her into a giant housefly, rasped it through her crepey lips. Before we could accost her with questions she buzzed out the window.
From then on I walked the halls with my legs glued, because I knew that in their jeans pockets the boys concealed missiles that fired at will. It was Hiroshima all over again. With every measured step to the cafeteria or the computer lab I was dodging missiles and radiation. And then I saw that all of us girls were radioactive and that the lemons and oranges and tangerines we tirelessly compared in the locker room before gym class were ticking atom bombs. It was a grand celestial design; we were being trained to reflect sunlight from the other side of the earth. Pamphlets claimed it was the Venus de Milo phenomenon but I knew better. We were being primed to be transfigured into the moon.
Outside a lunar eclipse was threatening.