A Moonlight Reverie

The whirring noise coming from inside the dashboard of Roy’s truck was driving him insane. He’d had it checked out at three different garages. He’d watched as the technicians opened her up and fiddled around with the cords and fans in there. They all shook their hard heads and shrugged their useless shoulders when they couldn’t find the source of that godawful racket. As he pulled into his driveway, the noise screamed louder at him and he banged his fist on the dash. The whirring continued. Grumbling curses under his breath he switched off the vehicle and jumped out. A sharp pain shot up his back—his only relic from Baghdad. 

Roy winced. The grimace was an almost permanent feature of his face, he realised as he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the truck window. It was then, his countenance still contorted in ugly displeasure, that he first witnessed an impossibility—his absolute opposite. She was a grin to his grimace. The peace to his war. Silhouetted in sunshine, she was a golden spectre just across the lane. He squinted as he watched her walking up the worn grass path to the front door of No. 12. Her face was visible to him for the briefest three seconds of his life as she closed the door behind her. But it was enough to frame her dimpled smile like a photograph in his brain. 

The rest of the evening passses by Roy, also without a backward glance. He catches his reflection in mirrors, in the glass table, between the rust spots on the freezer door handle and feels too seen. His eyes stray over the TV to the living room window that looks out across the street. And the house across the street. Nothing stirs inside. There is a tumbling inside of him. The towering image of himself he’d constructed - a watchful, sturdy veteran - was falling apart from the inside. 

When the light outside faded and the white glare from the TV absorbed his vision, Roy’s heartbeat slowed to normal. He fell into a more familiar stupor, a ritual numbness in the face of cartoon antics and reheated pizza. He roused from half-awakeness around midnight. The air floated in chilly through the rafters. He loved the cold. The cold bite of frost made the hot blood-and-sweat stickiness of the desert feel like an alternate reality. 

On cold nights like this one he was compelled to take cold showers. The crisp wash over his skin would freeze his innards. Rattle his bones and tighten the mould around his brain. The voice inside him holding back its scream would shrink to nothing. He heaved himself up and walked up the stairs to his bedroom. After twenty minutes in the shower he exited the bathroom in his sweats, the chill still biting his skin underneath. It was only then, like the clearing of a fog Roy’s bedroom window revealed the woman across the street. She stood at the window on the ground level of her home, looking up. At him. The frost in Roy’s bones warmed in an instant, the heat sustained by his furiously beating heart. Again, there was a glow about her. It was cooler now, like the moon kissed her face. Again, he felt the ‘otherness’ about her. It was as if everything that was repelled from his person, had found it’s way to her - grace, hope, beauty, and something else indescribable. 

He watched her. And she watched him. He stood there immobile, a lamb before a lion. Time stopped and only started again—ticking slower than ever before—when she moved away into the darkness of the house. It was after midnight when Roy finally found himself in bed. He lay awake asking questions to the darkness. Who was this shining enigma? Why was she staying at this most ordinary duplex? On this most inelegant drive? Didn’t that unit belong to an elderly woman? How long would she be there, haunting his view?

The next morning Roy drove to DepotMax to pick up a new bit for his drill. Soon after arriving, under the glaring white lights of Aisle 6, he found himself struggling to pull air into his lungs. The thought that he might miss seeing her as she left the house, or worse that she might leave and never come back, was making his brain spin. He muttered curses to himself for going on this errand and his chest tightened around his heart as if in punishment. The vicegrip only loosened as he walked to the car, the route mapped to his bedroom window.

It was night before the woman came into his view again. The stars were out and her face was still caressed in moon-glow. Even from this distance he could see that her shoulders were strong, and raised a little as if shielding her from something invisible. Then, she looked up. Right at him. Just like she had the night before. This time, after a few charged moments, her shoulders slid into gentle repose. And the angel smiled. 

In his dreams, Roy visited an open field. He was a giant amidst the tiny, white moonflowers. His boots crushed them as he walked. Feeling godlike, he reached into the sky to touch the shining moon. His heart leapt when he felt it stony and cool on his fingertips. Power surged inside him and it filled up every dark chasm in his soul. Wanting more, he stretched his hand further and picked the moon out of the sky. He rolled it in his hands. And eyes wide in a terrible glee, he crushed the tender orb in his palm. He woke to the sound of cracking bones ringing in his ears.

Everyday that week Roy watched the woman from his window. In the coldest hours of the night she would step into view and smile right up at him. He learned nothing more about her. She scarcely left the house. But he made sure to be waiting every night to catch her enchanting gaze. His mind was constantly on her—during his day shifts at the factory, while he ate, showered, masturbated. His brain urged him to go over, to talk to her. But his legs wouldn’t take him. His body stilled at the idea. To imagine that perfect face contorted in disgust toward him was unbearable. To think of her shutting him down and drawing her curtain on him forever was excruciating. Three times that week he went ballistic on a co-worker that disrupted these anguished daymares. He’d also shattered his TV remote in a similar fit of rage. 

His temper eased after another week of her presence at the window. Her smile assuaged his boiling moods every night and Roy became more convinced of her desire to see him. He absentmindedly scratched a moon into a piece of lumber at the factory. “Everyone draws the quarter moon,” a new guy on the line remarked, and Roy’s cheeks burned. “There’s a full moon in three nights,” the guy continued. Roy grunted in reply, but the words struck a chord. It seemed like a signal—the right moment to finally meet a moon goddess. That night and the next, Roy practiced simple sentences in his head. In his most desired scenarios, he imagined no words would be needed. That they would collide like magnets and she would lead him silently into her bed. He gazed unfocused at her those nights, thinking only of the full moon. Maybe, if he had paid attention, he would have noticed some warning in her eyes. 

The following afternoon, as Roy cruised past No.12 on his way home hoping to catch a glimpse of her, he noticed a flash of red that brought his foot slamming to the brake. Every bit of blood in his body pulsed hard through his veins as he read the words “For Sale” on a gaudy lawn sign. He didn’t know how he managed to pull the truck into the driveway, didn’t know how he got inside his bedroom. He sat on the ground sweating, waiting for, dreading, the moonlight. By sunset his limbs were shaking. By twilight he lost all hope that she would appear. And when the cold descended upon the night and no beam of light appeared at that window, something in Roy’s brain broke. 

Minutes later he was walking briskly across the silent road, a screwdriver and a crowbar in his pocket. He’d pry open any door to find some clue, some trace of her. He walked around the perimeter of the house. No light, no sound came from within. It didn’t take him long to find a window slightly ajar near the back of the house. It creaked open under the pressure of the crowbar and he wedged himself through. It was noisier than he meant to be but there was only ghostly silence in response.

He walked through the house, brave in his solitude—he’d been alone all his life. Every sign of home and belonging had been moved out of the house. It was barren of even furniture. Walls and floors, not a trace of her, except… a scent. Of bluegrass and white flowers, he imagined. He breathed it in, walking across what would’ve been the living room floor. The window, her window was mere feet away. He stepped reverently across the hardwood toward it. And stood where she had. For the first time, he wondered what was in this woman’s thoughts as she looked through the glass and what past events brought her to this place. Instinctively, he looked up at his own window across the street. There, brilliantly reflected in the dark pane, shone the full moon. There was not a glimmer or shadow of what lay beyond the window. 

It was the moonlight that had kissed her lovely face. It was the moonlight that she watched and yearned for. It was the moonlight she had smiled for.