"Empty Moon" (First Draft) Part 3 of 3

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       I awoke the next evening to the red glow of the setting sun through the horizontal blinds; I had slept through the entire day. Brandy was already awake. The rain had stopped sometime while we slept. Through the door of the bathroom I heard the water pouring down, cascading off her body to the floor of the small shower. I lay there in the fading light listening to the sounds of approaching evening outside, people heading home, rustling bags from wherever they had been shopping, cars idling at red lights, waiting in traffic. A horn blared, a high-pitched staccato note, and an engine revved, pulling a car through the intersection and away from my window.

       As the streetlights came on one by one, a cool wind blew, rustling out the last few remaining droplets of rain that had collected on the leaves of the tree outside my window. From the bathroom a loud, flat sound signaled to me that Brandy had dropped the soap. I checked the time, and realized that she had been in the shower for at least twenty minutes now. I got up, pulled a pair of shorts on and crept over to the bathroom door, listening carefully to the sounds from inside. Nothing but the steady pour of the shower. I knocked on the door.

       “Brandy?” I said. “Are you in there?” Nothing but the water.

       I opened the door slowly. A burst of steam evacuated over my head. I stepped into the humid bathroom. The orange and blue curtain was drawn. As I stepped towards it a small sound, a small moan, like the sad, dying gasp of a trumpet, reached my ears.

       “Brandy?” I said again. “What’s wrong?” Again, no answer, just another soft moan and a gasp.

       I walked up to the shower and pulled the curtain aside. Brandy was standing there facing me, her dark red hair, almost black from wetness, hung in slow waves down her back. The water poured down her face, down her trembling, naked body into the drain. Her hands covered most of her face; her eyes were red and irritated.

       I reached into the shower and turned the water off. Brandy didn’t move, just stood there, shaking and crying. I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her. I led her out to my bed and sat holding her quivering body. She stopped crying.

       “What’s wrong?” I asked her. She sniffled and turned her head to look me in the eyes. She blinked slowly and sniffled again.

       “I have to go,” she said.

       “To work?” I said.

       “No, I have to leave.”

       “Why?”

       “Just before my father died, he bought me a bike. The thing lasted for years. I rode it until I was too big for it. And then I took it with me wherever we moved. But the traveling was too much for it. It started to fall apart. I eventually had to throw…it…away.”

       “I’m sorry,” I said. “But what does that have to do with us?”

       “Because,” she paused to sniffle. “I can’t stand this.” She pulled herself into my shoulder. I held her, rubbed her back. “I was standing in the shower and just thinking to myself about all of the stuff that I’ve lost – toys and books and people and…things. It all disappears, no matter how hard I try to hold on, everything breaks, everything dies.”

       “That’s what happens,” I said.

       “I can’t take it.”

       “You kind of have to. It’s not very fair, but you have to.”

       She pushed away from me, tearing herself from my grip. “I can’t watch you die, I’m not going to.” The sun had set; my apartment had faded into darkness. “I’m not going to,” she said again.

       She stood up, dried herself off, and got dressed in the dark. I sat silent on the unmade bed, listening to her move around the room, finding her clothes. She put on her pants, her bra, her shows. She grabbed her jacket and bag and headed for the door. I cut her off.

       “I’m not going to let you leave,” I said. I grabbed her arms. I felt like I was in a Film Noire detective story.

       She shrugged out of my grip. “Dammit, I’m going to leave whether your let me or not.”
       “Please,” I said, “Just talk to me about this.”

       “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t explain it any better than I already have.”

       I stepped towards her. “What if I promised not to die before you?”

       She leaned forward and kissed me gently on the lips. “Goodbye,” she said into my ear. She slid around me, opened the door slowly and walked out into the hall. I spun around and caught the door before it closed.

       “Brandy,” I said. She stopped but didn’t turn. “No good story should end with one of the main characters just leaving, especially a love interest,” I said, quoting my college fiction professor. “You can’t just go,” I said softer.

       She turned her head to look at me. Her reddish curls bounced with the motion. “So maybe your life isn’t a good story,” she said, and walked out of the building.

       I slammed the door and began looking for my clothes. I found a shirt, but I couldn’t find my shoes. I turned on my desk lamp, filling the room with warm yellow light. Brandy’s wet towel was on the floor where she had dropped it as she got dressed, my shoes concealed beneath it. I put them on and ran out into the street.

       I caught a glimpse of her under a streetlight, about a block east. I wanted to call to her, to make her turn around, but there were people in the street, so I began to walk. In my haste to catch her, I had only thrown on a t-shirt. The people I walked past were clad in heavy coats, their hands either tucked deeply into their pockets or in gloves. From the looks I received, I assumed it was cold, but I didn’t feel it.

       Brandy walked the four blocks out of downtown without looking around, her head down, eyes focused on the ground. When she would pass under a streetlight, I would catch a flash of her red hair. She walked straight down Main Street to a small cemetery. From her bag she produced a flashlight and clicked it on, sending a column of light into the night sky. She redirected it into the graveyard.

       I followed the bouncing beam of light, dancing through the uneven rows of headstones. The sliver of the waning crescent moon that hung low in the sky was of little help. I found a path, but kept losing it. My thin shoes were soaked. Eventually the beam stopped, focused on one headstone. I made my way over to it. Creeping up behind Brandy, I read the carving on the gravestone. Singer, d. 1848.

       “This is my father’s grave,” Brandy said, from near the origin of the light.

       “It can’t be,” I said. “This guy died over 150 years ago.”

       “Perception versus misconception,” she said in a solemn voice. “Do you know why we didn’t put the year he was born? Because the engraver wouldn’t put 1037-1848 as a life span.”

       “You’re telling me your father was over 800 years old?”

       “Time isn’t constant. It moves slower for some people than others. Father was just over 81 when he died. My mother only lived to 72.”

       About 720 years, I thought as I stared at the gravestone, wondering if she was insane. She had told me some weird things before, and they had seemed believable. I found myself unwillingly believing her again.

       “So how old are you?” I said.

       “I’m 26,” she said. “I was born in 1740.”

       “So you’re really 260 years old.”

       “In your definition of years, yes.”

       “This just doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “What happened?”

       She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said.

       “Are you a vampire or something?”

       She turned to face me. “I already told you. I don’t know why. It just is. There’s no explaining it. One year to me is like ten to you. That’s all I know. I’ve lived through revolutions and war after war after war.”

       “And the whole time we’ve been seeing each other…”

       “Has been about a day and a half to me,” she said.

       “You’re insane,” I said. “You’re just gone, out there.” I turned to leave. I kicked a headstone and fell to the wet grass. Brandy helped me up, the flashlight’s beam playing over her father’s tombstone. As she let go of my arm, a drop of water splashed on my hand.

       “I’m sorry,” I said.

       She turned the light on me, reached out and grabbed my hand. Kissing my fingers softly, she clicked the light off and placed it in my hand. In the sudden darkness I was blind.

       “Keep it. I know my way through here by heart. Goodbye.” I heard her turn to leave.

       “I love you,” I said. She stopped.

       “No you don’t,” she said. “You think I’m insane. You…” she broke off. “I never should have told you. Maybe…maybe time moves faster for you, and you really do love me. But I can’t take that chance. I don’t want you to love me.”

       “Because you don’t want to love me,” I said.

       “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t finish my thoughts.”

       We stood facing each other, seeing more as our eyes adjusted to the near pitch-black night. The only sounds were the wind through a grove of trees in the distance, and the occasional car.

       “Where are you going?” I said finally.

       “Barcelona? I dunno. Away.”

       And with that she turned away from me and faded off into the night.

       I stood there as the silver sliver of moon rose into the night sky. I looked out toward the street. No sign of her. My eyes slowly adjusted more to the light. She was gone. I looked around, but she was nowhere to be seen among the low grey markers.

* * *

      
       Tonight I wait for her. Even though I know she won’t be coming back, I sit up here on this dark roof, my back pressing against this cold brick retaining wall, watching the stars meander through their dark path. That bright one there is the North Star. The far edge of the cup of The Big Dipper points to it. Those three in a row to the east are Orion’s Belt. I never could make out the rest of Orion, that great mythical hunter, especially when the sky is full of other stars.

       The light from those stars is millions of years old. It left the surface of those stars long before even small mammals roamed the earth. Some of those stars have already died, but we won’t know for thousands of years. It’s the illusion of time.

       The moon is gone; it has finished its cycle and is beginning a new one simultaneously. It’s time to start over.

 ___
(Read more about this short story here.)

"Empty Moon" (First Draft) Part 2 of 3

< Part 1 | Part 3 >

       We stood on the roof of my building looking out at the city. We didn’t talk much. The moon shone down on us, just over half full, amidst the constellations and man-made satellites.

       “She’s waning,” I said to Brandy. “Finishing the third quarter of her life.”

       “How do you know so much about the moon?” she said, looking out over the city.

       “Astronomy. Easy science credit in college.”

       Brandy leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I turned to look in her eyes. Her black eyebrows arched upwards, the outer corners of her eyes curved downwards. It was the look she gave me when she wanted something. Her breath was coming out in short bursts of steam.

       I leaned forward to place my lips on hers. She thrust her head upwards, forcing our lips to make contact. She wore no lipstick. My tongue danced across her lips, tasting the soft flesh. She opened her mouth, flicked her tongue against mine. Our tongues mingled, feeling the heat of our mouths. Her tongue pulled back as her lips closed. I pulled back and looked into her eyes. Red circles spread across her cheeks. I pulled her chin to me and kissed her again. My hand slid down the front of her long-sleeved shirt. I grabbed a breast, soft and plush, yet firm. She gasped as my thumb slid across the front of her breast, grazing her small, hard nipple.

       I could feel the blood rushing past my eardrums. My face grew warm and felt out of place in the cold night air. Her hands rubbed my shoulder blades, pulled me closer to her. I shifted my feet and put my other hand on her back. We stopped kissing occasionally to take breaths of our own air. We continued to kiss, to put our lips together, to probe each other with our tongues as the moon trolled across the night sky.

       Eventually, my hands changed position, one moving under her shirt, the other sliding down her back. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I felt her hand – right or left, I couldn’t tell in the moment – slide off my back and down to the front of my pants. I pulled my head back and looked at her. She was smiling broadly, her lids drooping, brown irises staring into mine. Her hands rubbed against my pants. I grabbed her arms and led her inside to my apartment.

* * *      

       Five days later, we went for a walk in the park in the late afternoon. The sky was grey, darkening by a shade every hour. The streetlights came on early, as the sun found itself unable to push through the cloud cover. The rain began to fall slowly as we made our way down the sidewalk back to my apartment. We walked faster as the rain dampened our hair, then began to run as the droplets got bigger and fell faster. We burst into the lobby of my building soaking wet and out of breath. I shook my hair as we walked down the hall to my apartment, a two-room, one-bathroom living space in the back of the building. It was the smallest unit in the building. It was cramped, but there were trees outside my bedroom window. We walked in; she toweled her hair lightly, then laid down on the green blanket covering the green sheets of my bed. I put a Miles Davis CD on and lay down next to her.

       I looked into her bone-china face, my hand in her hair, playing with her curls. They were still wet, but slowly drying on my pillow. She looked into my eyes as her hands played across the front of my shirt. The mournful sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet hung in the air over us. It was the sound of someone who’s seen a life I had only glimpsed. It was the sound of someone who knows things I have only thought about. I don’t cry when I think about my father, but that trumpet alone could break me down. Brandy closed her eyes.

       I leaned forward. Our lips met, tongues sliding over each other. I pulled her closer to me, held her tighter. I pressed my lips tighter to hers as Miles’s trumpet rose to the climax of the song. I shut my eyes as he pushed all of that pain through the brass of his horn. As the instrument faded I opened my eyes and pulled my mouth away from Brandy’s. Her eyes were brown slits, her mouth a red curve. She kissed me softly on the lips, then rested her head on my chest.

       We lay silent, letting song after song wash over us, humming along with the parts we knew. My nose rested in her perfect, clean hair. Her hair was always clean. Even when I spent all night with her, that hair would smell like she had just gotten out of the shower.

       The sound of rain coming in through my open window increased. The soft staccato splashes of the droplets gave a nice counterpoint to the fluidity of the jazz. And at the same time it is a soothing, almost melancholy addition to the music. Mother Nature improvising with the Miles Davis Quintet. I let out a deep breath.

       “Did you ever notice,” Brandy said, “That people who are about to die always seem to find God?”

       I tried to look down into her face to find out if she was serious, but all I saw was the top of her head. In my silence, she continued.

       “I mean, even the atheist will say, ‘Please God, no’ if you put a knife to his throat.” She turned slightly in my arms to look straight up. Her eyes were serious, as though she was concentrating on one of the various little peaks of the landscape of my ceiling. Her nose twitched slightly. “Even some people who are followers of some religion that doesn’t believe in God will beg to a Judeo-Christian God for their salvation.”

       “That’s from a movie, isn’t it?” I said.

       “Yeah, but it’s true.”

       “Well, ‘God’ has become another exclamation, like ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’.”

       “I think it goes deeper than that. I think that in the moment of death, people see the truth. I think Christianity might be the one true religion.”

       “Oh, dear God, I hope not,” I said. We laughed. Miles continued to cry through his trumpet, the rain continued to fall outside.

       “What do you do?” I asked her.

       “What, for a living?” she said, sliding back to shine her green concrete eyes into mine. I nodded. “I’m a phlebotomist.”

       “Really,” I said.

       “I suck people’s blood, and then run all kinds of tests on it. You’ve probably met lots of us in your time, you just never knew it.”

       “So basically you suck for a living.” She nodded. “Are you good at it?” I said.

       “Well, I haven’t received any complaints yet.”

       The trumpet trilled, the saxophone rose up, the drumbeat increased. Miles sounded angry, like he was lashing out at all of the misfortunes in his life. Or maybe at himself, as most of his troubles were self-imposed. He was addicted to drugs. That was his fault. He lost favor with the critics when he tried to write music that would be commercially successful rather than personally fulfilling. And he lost fans when he took five years off because he needed rest from too much performing and too many drugs. Those all resulted from choices he made. Of course, he made all of those choices about fifteen years after he wrote and recorded the album we were listening to that night.

       I looked at Brandy and wondered at the choices I had made in my life. Some were fairly intelligent, and some were fairly dumb. I was still alive, and for the first time I was happy, so I guessed I had made some good choices. I kissed Brandy on the lips. She had been a good choice. The saxophone died down, laying down a rhythm for the sad trumpet blowing two sad notes over and over.

       The next song started with a quiet, tinkling piano intro. We got under the sheets and shut the light off. The trumpet and alto sax picked up the piano intro, altered it, transformed it, and brought it back to the original.

 To be concluded...

(Read more about this short story here.) 

"Empty Moon" (First Draft) Part 1 of 3

       The roof is dark tonight. The light over the door is broken, and the light from the street below climbs the walls, but seems to fall away before cresting the wide slab of granite that tops the waist-high wall around the edge of the building. I stare at the stars scattered across the sky. In the absence of the moon, there are so many of them it is hard to tell them apart. They are like grains of sand. If I close my eyes, the sound of a car in the street below sounds almost like a wave. The moon is new tonight.

       The way the sky was the night I met Brandy, full moon shining amidst the clouds, making them look darker and more sinister, I thought Halloween was already here. It was the perfect sky for a night of evil. That’s what I thought the night I met her. That’s what I thought as I stood on the roof of my four-story apartment building, watching the people scurry along the sidewalk, bundled tight against the cold night air, rushing home to their space heaters or electric blankets, or whatever they used to shut out the cold world.

       I leaned on the granite ledge that surrounded the roof of the building and looked down on those people. My limp hair hung straight, framing my face. I felt like a gargoyle, watching over the building, protecting it from demons and other dangers of the Middle Ages. Except that I really didn’t care what happened to the building or its inhabitants.

       From behind me I heard the crash of several of the small stones that lined the roof. A footstep. I kept my attention on the thin but steady flow of people in front of my building. A footstep. This one was closer to me. A footstep. They are picking up speed. A footstep, another. I turned to see a young woman standing there in the moonlight, hands in the pockets of a long, black overcoat, reddish-black hair dropping down to her shoulders in thick, elongated springs. Her face was dark, shadowed by her hair. I couldn’t see her eyes, just her red lips. She was nearly as tall as I was. She stood there looking at me look at her, a half-smile gracing her lips.

       “Do you come up here a lot?” she said.

       For some reason, I thought about James Dean meeting Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, how calmly Dean handled everything. I nodded. She walked up to the granite edge and looked out at the surrounding city, then down at the people.

       “Interesting,” she said. She flashed me a smile, her brown eyes glittering.

       “Yeah,” I said. “I like it up here.”

       She looked up at the bright, full moon, the clouds scudding in front of it, then back at me. “My name’s Brandy,” she said. “Brandy Singer. Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”

       My mother never told me never to talk to strangers. She also told me not to major in English. I didn’t listen to her then, so why would I listen to her now? We went to a small, nearly empty diner a couple of blocks from my apartment. Neon lined the wall near the ceiling, bathing everything in a surreal green. The waitress forced a smile as she poured our coffee. I dumped a load of sugar into the black, steaming liquid and took a sip, all the while looking at the tall beauty sitting across from me, wondering what she could possibly want from me. I remembered hearing about women in New Orleans who would seduce men, drug them, and steal their kidneys. Or was it their liver? Either way, there was something about Brandy that didn’t seem dangerous. She took a sip of coffee.

       “Good coffee here,” she said.

       “Yeah.”

       “Did you know that George Washington was one of the first people to drink coffee in the US?” Somewhere in the back of the diner a glass broke with a muffled curse.

       “No, I didn’t know that. I always assumed he drank tea.”

       “He did before the Boston Tea Party, then they started boycotting it.” She took another sip of the coffee. “He needed something to drink, and since the coffee wasn’t taxed, he tried it. It’s been an American tradition ever since.”

       “Strange that he needed something to drink,” I said.

       “Well, we all have something. Some people drink coffee, some people down flagon after flagon of wine. Some people sit in front of the TV all day long.”

       “Flagon?” I said.

       “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Flagon. It’s an archaic word, but you know what I mean.”

       “Yeah,” I said.

       She looked at me over her mug, steam rising around her eyes. “So,” she said. “What’s yours?”

       I laughed and looked out the window at a car passing slowly through the narrow alley. Such a scenic place for a window. I turned back to Brandy. Her eyes hadn’t left, the mug hadn’t moved. I took a breath.

       “Jazz,” I said. “I love jazz.” I proceeded to describe my collection of music. “How about you?” I said.

       She looked at me for a few seconds. “I love people. I love to watch their patterns, what they do and why.”

       “An anthropologist,” I said. She smiled.

       “What do you do for a living that affords you so much time to stand on the roof of an apartment building and so much jazz?” she said as she put down her cup.

       “I write for a local paper,” I said.

       “Ah, a reporter out scouring the crime scenes for details?”

       I put down my cup. “No,” I said. “Food critic. I’m supposed to go to restaurants and survey the food.”

       “Supposed to?” She took a sip of coffee.

       “Yeah, I write reviews of places that have closed recently, usually because of some disaster, a fire or something.”

       The waitress came back to ask if we wanted anything else. We told her that we just wanted coffee. She breathed a sigh of relief. I watched her walk away and wondered just how long it would be until she snapped.

       “Did you write that review of The Black Beauty?”

       “The jazz club that burned down? Yeah, I wrote that. It ran right under the article of the place burning down.”

       “Sounded like a fun place.”

       I stirred my coffee. “That’s what I’d heard.”

       Brandy looked up at a picture depicting an old man feeding breadcrumbs to some ducks at the edge of a pond. “So you’ve never actually written a review?”

       I took a gulp of coffee, now thick from the amount of sugar I had poured into it and shook my head. “I don’t really need to. My father died when I was in college and left me all of his money – a tidy sum, good investments – so I could live off that if I ever get fired, but my pieces are more filler than anything else.”

       “What if you run out of places that have closed recently?”

       “It has happened. I just make them up. I see it as making good use of my English degree.”

       She took a couple of sips of coffee and stared at me. “Did you make up The Sunny Day Eatery? I can’t remember ever reading that it closed,” she said.

       “Yeah, that place never existed,” I said.

       “Damn, the chicken piccata sounded incredible.”

       “Well,” I said, “That’s actually my own recipe. Some night you could come over and try it.”

       Her face lightened, her red lips stretching across her face. There was something very child-like in the expression. It was the look of a child who gets the exact gift, the perfect surprise.

       “Nothing is ever as it seems, huh? I’d love to.”


To be continued...

(Read more about this short story here.)

I was writing crappy vampire love stories before crappy vampire love stories were cool!

Way back in the murky mists of the year 2000 I wrote a story called "Empty Moon" for a fiction writing class at UNH. I believe it was one of the first fiction classes I'd ever taken, and I remember feeling like the one big, fat flounder in the middle of a bowl of cherries. In short: horribly out of place. I was in a class bring taught by a professional writer (Professor Charlotte Bacon had published a novel and a book of short stories by that point), surrounded by writers, at least some of whom were sure to be future professional writers, and all of whom were sure to be more suited to a fiction writing class than me.

As it turns out, my fish out of water feeling was short-lived, and soon I was a big, fat flounder swimming in the ocean amongst the other fishes. I had taken prose writing, and essay writing, and had submitted some very well-written papers for other classes. The big difference here was that I got to make things up. I may not have been as well-read as my classmates. I may not have had the same background as my classmates (having spent the first couple years of my college career pursuing an engineering degree). What I discovered, though, was that I could write as well as any of them.

Fiction writing at UNH was taught from the "literary" perspective, meaning character-driven, non-genre fiction. We weren't to write science fiction. We weren't to write mysteries. We weren't to write horror stories featuring vampires. When I'm feeling even marginally confident of something, telling me I can't do something just makes me want to do it more. I was feeling somewhat confident about writing, so I felt confident I could write a genre story as a character-driven piece of "literary" fiction.

Which brings us to "Empty Moon". I decided that if I treated the vampire as just another character, I could write a story about two people meeting, falling in love, and then discovering the secret one of them was hiding. The word "vampire" never even needed to appear in the story (though it does once). I thought it could work, and I was determined not to listen to advice from my professor that it was better to write the stories as two humans, and plunged on ahead. Believe it or not, at one time, I was kind of cocky.

The other reason I chose to write about a vampire was that the first image that popped into my head, that sparked the story to life, was that of a person crying over a broken vase, and the idea that everything breaks eventually. No matter how careful we are with things, no matter how much we protect them, something will happen. The vase shatters. The car breaks down. The loved one dies. Who better to put voice to that idea than someone who has lived a long long time, and seen a lot of loss. An immortal. A vampire! Who can walk around in the daytime. Yeah, I beat Stephanie Meyer to that bit of...stupidity.

The actual execution of this story was a bit clunky. I resist the urge to cringe upon re-reading (and retyping, since I can't find a digital copy of it), because I know it was one of my early stories, and is a raw first draft. There are words and phrases that I can see immediately should have been axed, and I'm already reconstructing the entire story in my head. The reveal is...well, the reveal kind of craps on my whole initial concept. A family of (not quite) vampires?

What is interesting is that I revised this for my final portfolio for that class. I have the revised story, in which I removed the vampiric element, and changed the story a bit to make it more realistic, and, in my extremely humble opinion, ruined it. Maybe I'll rework that into something completely different.

So, while I don't think "Empty Moon" is anything great, I certainly think it's better than what it turned into. As such, I have decided that revising and rewriting "Empty Moon" will be my next project. I will post the results of said project here. First, though, I will post the original, raw, unedited first draft of "Empty Moon" in 3 parts.

Please feel free to comment on any or all of the parts.