Two Moons
Pages from some unreadable book.
We sit beside the stream and watch. Watch and listen. The orange sun is low to the ground and the moon is high.
Tree sap freezes, crackling, giving the dead landscape a mindless sort of life.
Our little fire has faded to embers.
We dare each other to wade into the water, but it’s too cold for such games.
The woods are darkly beautiful, and still.
You keep looking at my watch.
Things float by, bouncing over slick, black rocks. Something matted and dead. We talk of cooking it, of solving our hunger, but we just stare as it slips along and disappears around the bend.
Muffled concussions echo from upstream. A chrome Coke can bobs and spins in the current.
Pages from some unreadable book.
A little shoe.
We watch them as they fade and miss them all terribly, like buried friends, the second they are out of sight.
You turn my wrist and check the time.
The sun is just a pink line behind the trees now.
Everything is blue-white and black under the moon.
A silver flash below the water.
We blow breath on the dying fire, but it resists resurrection.
Lumpy things without names pass by us.
Burned things.
Bloody.
Pulled apart by the current.
I want so badly to know you, to understand you, but I can’t seem to look at your face. The unknown and unknowable business upstream distracts, the offerings that swirl among the eddies demand our fear and scorn, we mourn the lost flotsam—dead, alive, and otherwise—until our toes burn from the cold and the sun is gone and the glowing embers have all become gossamer ash.
Finally, we stand together. I slip the watch from my wrist and toss it into the water where it becomes later, and then yesterday.
And then ago.
Walking up the bank and over the crystalline field, a single shadow stretches before us, rippling its way out across the fallow rows of stalk and you say there must be two moons at our back.
How else could it be this way?
Convinced by your logic I look over my shoulder, but of course, there’s only just the one.
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