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Fiction Short Story

by Jack Forge

Lunar Vigil

In mother's house, Jodi and I watched and waited. Our knees sank like stones into the sofa bed beneath the front room window. Our hands crawled along the windowsill, our noses pressed against the cold autumn glass. The October moon lighted Jodi's curls silvery in the night, but I couldn't see her eyes peering into the darkness around the street corner glow-lamp. I squatted behind her, my little hands trembling on her shoulders. I saw her head silhouetted against the moon and her pallid face reflected in the windowpane. We watched small shadow leaves outside float and plane like phosphorescent birds while we waited for Mother to come home from across the sea.

"Whoooo," said an owl in the avocado tree.

The jade leaves caressed our cottage cream walls and fondled moonbeams against the dewy glass. I wanted to pee but dared not leave Jodi and the window and the sheltering tree. Mother was gone to wander, while Jodi and I only watched, huddling in our curdled cottage built in a wood, beside the big house—the gabled house of many stories among the brambly hawthorns.

"That escaped prisoner from the Sanatorium," a television voice said, "is heading home, we believe, to an old house on Allen Street."

Jodi and I froze in the cold light of the cathode rays.

"...over six feet tall, three hundred pounds...thick, red hair and wild, dark eyes. We'll have more news at the last minute on KRZY. Now, stay tuned for Souls of the Damned—brought to you by Caliban Cleanser—pure as the driven snow."

Still Jodi and I huddled on the soft sofa and waited for Mother, but now the Red Hairy Man would come, too, home to the old story house beneath the round yellow moon. Jodi laved her lips with the pink tip of her tongue that flicked as quickly as the lids on my round eyes.

Creeeeek—

Jodi's face quartered, then halved, then fully brightened toward me as it shone in the amber light from a bare bulb glowing in the kitchen, where our back door was an uncertain barricade between us and the old story house. Our eyes flew to the brassy knob in the bulb light. Turning? We wondered in unison. The latch—locked?

Jodi and I looked together to see it locked. "Jodi," I said. "Is it—" She grabbed my leg and squeezed till I whimpered. We saw the knob floating in the cream color of the back door not yet turning.

“Be still!”

Its metal orb was dented and paint speckled with a spot of cream paint on the side of its golden sphere, a spot just below center and to the left—twenty minutes to the hour.

Creeeeek.

Jodi and I ran on a cloud in the tepid darkness, too black to find our way to the open closet, fathomless beneath the dim soft cloth shapes hanging in the dark. Too far across the dismal rug land of roses on the floor. Too far. But the kitchen door still cream, and the knob still at twenty till the hour.

We listened to hear no footsteps outside where Mother had walked away to the lighthouse across the asphalt sea ages ago. "I go to sweep the cobwebs out of the sky," she had said. "And I'll be with you by and by." But her footsteps were not yet sounding tap, tap on the pink flagstones interred beneath the giant avocado tree. No sound of Mother, but only lights from a car projecting a ghost dance across the walls. They waved and whirled around us, crept across the floor and ravished the rug roses. Jodi and I revolved in a spinning pool—walls turning around our heads, our eyes rolling around the kitchen doorknob as if a top spinning in a field of cream.

Jodi's face glowed eerily between the shadows. I gripped her hands and wished we were not alone, wished we had not searched for mysteries in the back of the closet. Together we prayed in fear of breathing.

Knock, knock.

We listened not to hear the soft solid tapping against our cottage wall.

"Whoooo—," said the owl.

A breeze shook the avocado tree into a giant witch dangling emerald pendants from the tips of her bony fingers. And the shadows of the silver leaves flashed across the foggy windowpane. I looked into Jodi's eyes and saw twin seas washing toward me. "Do you think—?" I asked and could've drowned in them to see the memories of our nakedness in her mind.

Forgive us our...

Tap, tap.

We listened not to hear a soft stepping not stopping on the flagstone blocks outside our cottage door. Red Hairyman? We looked and screamed in silence: "Noooo!" Looking into the kitchen, we thought we saw on the door, the knob turned towards the hour. Opening?

"Whoooo?" cried Jodi and I with the owl too soon too late.

Pray for us!

Coming at us from the unknown: a face in the window like a movie then gone. The front door opened. A shape against the gloaming entered the room. Outside, the avocado tree shuddered and shimmered in the lunar light, and the shape in the doorway became Mother in the radiance of the moon. She at last. Not yet gone forever from the cottage and the home where the owl at the door for sentinel stood.

© Copyright 2003 Jack Forge


About the Author

Surviving early life in Los Angeles, Jack Forge has been reading, writing, and making pictures since he was thirteen. After completing graduate study at the University of Iowa, he taught English for many years. So far, he has seen several of his poems, two of his short stories, a painting, and two of his novels e-published. This story germinated from memories of childhood with his single mother. Regardless of the storm and stress of the world, he lives for art, nature, and love. More about Jack can be found at his website: http://www.Dreamuse.com