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Show Moon -129 the insects rattled the garbage bags and scurried across her as she tried to sleep. They crawled into the face of her clock radio, their corpses piling up until she could no longer see the time. On the coldest winter nights the boiler always broke down, and she'd sit in front of the open oven with a cup of hot chocolate, just as she'd done with her mother when they waited for James to come home from the war. She hugged herself, rubbed her shins, said over and over like a prayer, "Mom, Mommy." Never before that she remembered had she wanted so much the comfort of a mother. It's dusk. Windfall wheels and leaps in the pasture, weightless as a hawk working the spirals of air. The Three Sisters rise up like women in a bath, dripping purple light. The waxing moon is almost transparent in its early evening whiteness. Josh and I sit on the hanging porch swing he made for us. We're silent except for a squeak of chain against hook, the shuffle of a foot to keep us rocking. It feels like a sacrilege to penetrate this violet peace, but I force myself to speak. I pick up his lovely calloused hand and say, "I have to go away for a while." He twists to face me. "Oh?" "I want to go back to the places I used to live." "What for?" This is the hard part, for I'm not sure what for. I'm envisioning a kind of night voyage which will land me someplace I'll recognize when it gets light |