The old people said the moon had always watched. Not with judgment. Not with interest in the way a person is interested in something. Just: with attendance. It had been there since before the first thing that noticed it was there, and it had continued to be there, and this was the whole of what it had done.
One night it looked away. The old people disagreed about what had drawn its attention. Some said it was something in the sky. Some said it was something in itself, some internal reckoning it had been approaching for a long time. The disagreement was not accidental. The old people had decided not to settle it. They felt the unsettled answer was more accurate than any settled one.
The looking-away lasted longer than a moment. The moon, being what it is, did not hurry. Time for it was a different kind of thing. A moment in the moon's experience was not the same length as a moment in the experience of the creatures looking up at where it had been.
What the old people said about the aftermath: the tides remembered. The plants remembered. The animals that had always timed themselves by the moon did not know yet how to time themselves by anything else. They stood in fields and at water's edge and looked at the place in the sky where it had been. Some of them stood there for a long time.
The ones who could not wait learned to count differently. The ones who could wait found, in time, that waiting had changed them.