This is a new story idea I just wrote tonight. No idea where I'm going or if I'm going anywhere with it. Much of that decision will depend upon your reviews. Feel free to suggest directions this could go in, as I am pretty much fumbling around in the dark recesses of my own imagination at this point.
One – Sour Grapes
I like watching the moons when everyone else in the junkyard is asleep . . . Yes, there are two moons. Many people go their whole lives without seeing the Twin Moon, glowing like a mirror reflection in still starry water right under its sister. You might be one of those people – poor being – and so I forgive you for your raised eyebrows and your doubt. I realize you are only experiencing half of what I can, and that denial is the worst kind of sour grapes. But I am not telling this story to rub my privileges in your face; the Moons know they aren’t all privileges anyway, and you may find yourself thanking your lucky stars that you are not like me, when I am finished with my tale.
I digress.
I like watching the moons when everyone else in the junkyard is asleep. If one moon in its entirety can cast blue light strong enough to send shadows stretching across the dark cityscape, two moons can do twice that and completely obliterate the shadows. It is a second daytime, but only for those people like me, who see the Twin Moon and so can see its light. As for those of you that must live by the light of a single moon, you would say I have the ability to see very well in the dark. Len is one of you; he calls me Cat Eyes.
“Cat Eyes, why’re you still up?” he demands now, clambering up the mountain of trash to fling himself beside me on the stained and tattered mattress I’m slouched on. “You’re always up here. Like one of the gargoyles on East Water Street cathedral. Just lookin’ down on everyone, watching them pass under you without even knowing you’re there. I think I’d like to be a gargoyle. What do you think, Cat Eyes? Would I be a good gargoyle, you guess?” He throws himself into a crouched pose, his knees drawn up and his arms hanging like hooks over them. His round, pointed face is blindingly white in the light of the moons, their reflections glowing in his huge owlish spectacles. Len looks nothing like a gargoyle.
“Scary,” I tell him, and his puckish face dimples.
“Anyway, you didn’t answer my question,” Len tells me, spreading onto his side to look hard at me. When I don’t answer, he asks solemnly, “Is it the nightmares again?”
I shrug, then nod slowly, knowing that Len will know if I’m lying or not. Despite his glasses, sometimes I think he’s more of a Cat Eyes than I am, at least in matters of reading other people. “The moons help me.” They sing, kind of, did I tell you that one? They do, and I think it’s them talking to each other. Siblings sharing secrets about the stars, maybe. Man, I’ll bet your eyebrows are cranked up way over your head just about now. Grapes sourer by the second.
“Oh.” Len closes his eyes, tired from the midnight trek from his bed under a lean-to made of a slab of concrete propped against an oil drum. “Xav says you watch the girls in the windows of the buildings around the junkyard, but I knew it was the moon.”
I snort derisively. “Xavier would climb this junk heap to stare into some girl’s window.” But not me. I find no interest in girls, not even though I was one or two rungs up the ladder to manhood than Xavier.
“Girls are stupid, don’t you guess? I don’t think any of them would last out here in the junkyard like us guys, right, Cat Eyes? They’d be all whiny and everything, and want to take baths all the time. I hate baths. I could go my whole life without a single one . . .” Len’s words become more and more slurred as he lets his eyes droop closed and his face goes slack. His glasses are tilted on his face, pushed down on one side by the mattress under his cheek.
I look over at him, cocking my head and listening to the moons singing. I wish Len could hear them – he doesn’t believe me when I tell him about them. Just cranks his eyebrows up like you probably did. But he’d enjoy them, I think.
Len’s dark eyes creep open again, and I watch as they roam around aimlessly, wandering from my face to the sky to the small stretch of tattered upholstery between us. Then he grins. “The world’s crooked,” he declares, peering through his tilted glasses. “What were we talkin’ about again?”
“We weren’t,” I tell him. Then, “You should go back down before you crash here. I don’t want to have to drag you all the way to the bottom.”
He laughs at that, and is still laughing, giggling as he makes his way groggily down the mountain of trash. I crane my neck to look over my shoulder and watch his descent. When I’m sure he’s steady on his feet and not going to topple and break his neck, I look back up at the moons. Humming along with them, I stretch out on the mattress, spread-eagled on my back, and stare up and imagine that there’s nothing beneath me – I’m floating.
And then I’m asleep.