Midnight Moonlight

by Chambers, V. J.

  And then, seemingly frustrated, he drove his fist into the wall beside her head.

  Calla started, letting out a little cry.

  The man-thing growled. He backed away from her, clenching his hands into fists. He threw his head back and let out a shrill howl of frustration. Then he retreated back into the darkness, leaving Calla to sag against the wall, struggling to catch her breath.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Earlier that day, Calla went to the carnival on a whim. She had been spending the day lying on her couch watching Netflix, which was how she spent most of her days. It was summer, and she wasn’t teaching. She’d been on vacation for about two weeks, and it was nearly July.

  Calla usually felt her summer vacations went by faster than she ever imagined they would. Each one seemed to be over before she knew it. People made a lot of noise about the idea that teachers got three months off, but it wasn’t really three months. It was about eight weeks, two weeks in June, the whole of July, and then two weeks in August. It was still quite a long vacation, of course, and Calla was grateful of it. Well, generally speaking, she was. This summer, however, it was interminable. The last two weeks had quite possibly been the longest of Calla’s life.

  She hadn’t been sure how she’d handle it. This would be her first summer without Chad, and it had been nearly seven years since she’d had a summer alone. That was so long ago that she barely remembered what it was like to be alone. Furthermore, she’d been a completely different person seven years ago. She’d been twenty-five, and there had been enormous opportunities for a twenty-five-year-old to get into in the summer. Especially a twenty-five-year-old who’d been thin.

  Occasionally, Calla considered going out for a few drinks. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. For one thing, the only bars she knew of were places that she’d frequented when she was twenty-five. She didn’t know what kind of bars thirty-somethings went to. Really, bars should advertise these sorts of things. She wished there were signs that said things like, “Finnegan’s: We welcome newly-divorced singles!” But maybe that was a depressing thing to put on a sign. God knew, everyone on earth wanted to pretend as if marriage was forever, when it was obvious that most marriages didn’t make it.

  Still, Calla had never wanted to be a statistic. She’d been sure that her bond with Chad was strong.

  She’d been wrong.

  There were other reasons she didn’t go to bars, of course. One of the big ones was her body. She wasn’t attractive anymore, and she knew it. She rarely even bothered trying to look attractive. It hadn’t seemed important with Chad, who never seemed to care if she was wearing makeup or what her hair looked like or what she was wearing. She’d settled into a comfortable habit of wearing flowered blouses with drawstring linen pants. It was dressy enough to wear to work and comfortable enough for lounging at home. At this point, it was pretty much all she owned. But she couldn’t wear it to a bar. It was frumpy and English-teacher looking. She was an English teacher, but she didn’t want to advertise that at a bar.

  Calla had tried on a few of her old pairs of jeans, but all of them had been too tight, and she couldn’t stand wearing them. They were far too uncomfortable. Not to mention that even the baggiest of shirts over top didn’t quite camouflage the fact that her gut was hanging out over her pants.

  Very well, then, she thought. She’d just go buy new clothes. That would be a nice change of pace for her. She could pamper herself a bit. She deserved it after the year she’d had. So she took herself off to the stores to go shopping. She was gone for a long time.

  Shopping was no longer fun. Not at her age, at her size. She bought all of her linen things online from a boutique store that specialized in such things. Those kinds of clothes were meant to be flowing, so the size wasn’t very important. She didn’t need to try them on before she purchased. So, she hadn’t really been shopping in quite a while. She hadn’t known what to expect.

  She remembered shopping when she was younger. It was an exciting experience, flipping through racks and racks of clothes, selecting her size, and then going to try it all on. Everything fit back then, but she would decide which things looked better on her, and which things were cheaper, and which things she wanted the most.

  Now, the first problem was that she wasn’t quite sure of her size. The first trip to the changing room resulted in nothing usable, because all the clothes she’d picked out were too small. She had to face the fact that she was that size now.

  But that size wasn’t in the regular store. No, it was only in the plus-sized section.

  And there was less selection in the plus-sized section. Not to mention the fact that the clothes were just uglier.

  Anyway, those clothes didn’t fit either. Not really. Apparently, being plus sized meant that you had a very thick waist, according to the manufacturers of these clothes.

  It wasn’t as if Calla’s waist wasn’t ample, because it was. But the ratio of her hips to her waist was different than what the manufacturers seemed to have in mind. Which meant that the regular-sized pants would have fit her waist—that is, if she could have got them over her hips. And the plus-sized clothes fit her hips but gaped at her waist.

  Calla compromised. Leggings. There was no way that she could go wrong with leggings, right?

  She found herself a short summer dress, put it on over the leggings, bought the outfit, and left the store.

  But when she got home, and she tried it on, she wasn’t sure what she’d been thinking. She couldn’t go out in public like this. The leggings clung to her legs far too tightly, and she could see the dimples of cellulite. Her legs looked horrific.

  No. This was not an acceptable outfit.

  But she wasn’t going shopping ever again, she’d decided. That was far too depressing and futile of an exercise to be repeated.

  So, Calla had yet to go out for drinks. She’d yet to leave her house for any reason other than to go to the grocery store, as a matter of fact. She remembered that once, when she was in college, she’d been so depressed after a break up that she had pretty much stopped eating. She’d lost a lot of weight, which had been the only silver-lining to the break up.

  But not this time. No, she was ravenous in the wake of losing Chad. She ate and ate and ate. Calla didn’t really have much of a sweet tooth, but she had a weakness for salt, fat, and carbs. French fries, potato chips, pasta… Those were a few of her favorite things. She would buy those big bags of frozen French fries at the grocery store. Then she’d bake them in her oven. In the last five minutes, she’d cover them with cheddar cheese and bacon. (They sold little bags of already cooked and crumbled bacon. Calla thought it was basically the best thing in the world. She could eat bacon on pretty much anything.)

  She ate bacon cheese fries basically every day. She figured they were an appropriate breakfast food, containing both potatoes and bacon—which were certainly breakfasty—and she also ate them for lunch and dinner and for snacks.

  She was probably getting even fatter with every passing second.

  But she didn’t honestly know. A few years ago, she’d gotten rid of her scale. Weighing herself had only made her depressed, and she figured she was better off not knowing. At the time, she’d reasoned it didn’t matter as long as Chad still loved her, as long as he didn’t seem bothered by her weight gain.

  And he hadn’t seemed bothered. Nothing had ever seemed to bother Chad. It was one of the things she’d most admired about him. Calla herself was prone to worry. She got worked up over all kinds of possibilities, even ones that weren’t likely to come to pass. But Chad… he took everything in stride. And he was good at reassuring her. He’d sling an arm over her shoulders and say, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  And she’d babble something to him, breathlessly enumerating all the worst-case scenarios she could possibly think of.

  He’d rub her shoulder. “Even if all that happens, Calla, we’ll still have each other, won’t we? So, it won’t be that bad.”

>   But he’d lied, the asshole. Because he wasn’t here for her anymore, and they didn’t still have each other. He had Irene, and she had no one. Nothing.

  All she had was Netflix and cheese fries and a brand new outfit she didn’t dare wear out of the house.

  It was the thought of Chad that made her decide to go somewhere. She was starting to cry, thinking of how pathetic and lonely she was, missing him so much and wishing there was some way to get him back, when she shook herself and forced herself to stop it.

  You don’t need Chad, she told herself. You survived for twenty-five years before you met that man, and you can make it without him.

  It sounded nice in her head, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence to back up her assertion. After all, here she was falling apart in front of the Chromecast, stuffing her face with bacon cheese fries and crying. She didn’t seem like much of a survivor.

  “Well,” she said out loud, “I’ll just do something, then.” She got up off the couch, as if to punctuate her pronouncement.

  But what could she do?

  It was three in the afternoon, and she wasn’t going to go to a bar. No way. Far too early. She was trying to convince herself that she wasn’t pathetic. Getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon wasn’t going to do that.

  She picked up the newspaper, which had been delivered that morning. She kept meaning to cancel her subscription, because she never read the thing. It was a waste of money. But it wasn’t that much money, and she felt guilty, because she had watched that guy who wrote The Wire talk about how newspapers were struggling, and she wanted to support newspapers, so she never actually did cancel her subscription.

  Anyway, she flipped to the local section, because she knew there was a list of things to do in the area there, and she was determined to go somewhere.

  The first thing that jumped out at her was an article about the carnival. It was in town. There were rides and games and even some attractions. Calla hadn’t been to a carnival since she was a teenager. She thought she’d probably gone to the county fair her senior year of high school, rode some rides, eaten popcorn. She remembered having fun. She wasn’t sure why she’d never been to a carnival since.

  She’d always thought that she and Chad would do that sort of thing once they had children together.

  But of course, that was never going to happen.

  That settled it. She wasn’t going to let a lack of children get in the way of her enjoying life. If she wanted to go to a carnival, then she would go. No one could stop her.

  However, she was still wearing her pajamas, and she couldn’t wear those.

  She went back to her bedroom—the room she used to share with Chad. He’d been gone for months, and she’d gotten rid of anything here that reminded her of him, but she couldn’t get rid of the room itself. And she couldn’t afford to live elsewhere. According to her agreement with Chad, she’d gotten the house in the divorce, but she’d also taken over the mortgage. So, she had the whole of that to pay on her own.

  Maybe she could sell the place, but with the market the way it was, it might take years. Meanwhile, she’d still be on the hook for the freaking mortgage.

  No, she was stuck. She had to live here, but that didn’t mean she had to stay here right now. She was going to escape this place and go to a carnival and have fun.

  She felt a surge of triumph at the thought, and she suddenly felt happier than she’d felt in months. Her face broke out into a big smile.

  Now, she just needed to get dressed. She peered over at her closet, at the rows of baggy shirts and linen pants.

  And then she looked at her new outfit, lying over a chair by the dresser, the tags still on the clothes. She was pretty sure she was going to return it.

  But, on impulse, she tugged the new clothes on. The leggings—which were half leggings, baring her calves—and the summery dress that went down about mid-thigh.

  She took a deep breath and looked at herself in the mirror.

  She didn’t actually look that bad, she realized. The dress covered the worst of the cellulite. And her legs actually didn’t look enormous in the tight leggings. She could see their actual shape, which was kind of nice. The summer dress was flowing enough that it skimmed over her belly and hips.

  She smiled again. Maybe she’d been too hard on herself. Sure, she wasn’t anyone’s idea of a perfect beauty, but maybe she looked okay… even a little bit pretty.

  She cocked her head to one side.

  And then she noticed how fat her upper arms looked. She lifted one and pinched the flab that fell down. Ugh.

  Stop it, she scolded. Get out of here before you lose your nerve.

  And so, she did. She hurried out of the house before she had the chance to talk herself out of her excursion. She got in her car and drove to the carnival.

  The carnival was held outside of town on some farmland cleared for the purpose. She speculated that a farmer had decided to rent the land out to the carnival to help make ends meet. The rides sprawled over the area, surrounded by rows of corn on either side.

  As Calla got out of her car, she mused that it almost looked as if the carnival had grown out of the corn field—a very strange set of crops.

  She paid the price to get inside and began wandering around.

  She rode the Ferris wheel alone, then got on the Whip. She found it jerky and uncomfortable, not thrilling in the least. She wondered if perhaps she was too old for carnival rides. She remembered that they used to feel slightly risky and exciting. It was especially exciting to ride them if there were other people around who were afraid to do so. That made doing it seem more brave. It had made young Calla feel good about herself.

  But there was no one here with her.

  And all around, she noticed that the only other people her age were parents there with their children.

  Calla sighed. If she’d had her way, she would have a child by now. But some things simply weren’t meant to be. She knew that now. Even if she wanted something so badly that she thought that she’d die without it, it didn’t mean she would get it. No matter how she tried. No matter what she did. Some things simply weren’t meant to be. Calla was not meant to have children. That was that. The end.

  She felt like she might cry, even though this was something she’d come to terms with long before her marriage to Chad had broken up. So, she left the rides, hoping for a better distraction playing games. Maybe she could win the ring toss and get herself a stuffed animal.

  But she was surprised to see a tent set up in between the games and the rides. It had a sign on it, proclaiming, Come see the Beast Man! There was a drawing of a beast, hairy from the waist up, sporting a grizzled muzzle. But on the bottom of his body, he was wearing pants and had human legs. Half man! Half beast! Witness the freak of nature!

  Calla didn’t think that carnivals had attractions like this anymore. She thought all these freak tents had died out generations ago.

  But there was one here, a throwback to carnivals from the early twentieth century, and she couldn’t help but be intrigued. She was convinced the attraction would be something silly. She knew there couldn’t actually be a beast man. The idea of that being true was laughable.

  Sure, there were werewolves, but this wasn’t the same thing. And besides, the werewolves didn’t have wolf feet and a man’s torso. Calla knew.

  She flashed on a thought of the bright red balloon, bobbing away up into the sky, getting smaller with every second. Her balloon, when she’d been a small girl, only four years old. It had escaped, even though she had tried so hard not to let go of it—

  But that was the past, a very long time ago. Calla didn’t like to think about that. And she was adamant never to let that get in the way of her life. It didn’t bother her, because it was all over, and it was such a very long time ago, anyway. She hardly remembered it. She’d been so young. This Beast Man was just a carnival attraction. It wasn’t anything to get excited over. Calla could handle it. She wouldn’t even let herself thin
k about the balloon. She never thought about it, anyway. Not for years. There wasn’t any point in dredging it up.

  So, she went to the opening of the tent.

  A man stood there, grimy t-shirt stained. He had a scraggly beard and thick eyebrows, which he wiggled at her. “Two tickets to see the Beast Man, ma’am.”

  She’d purchased her tickets already, and she certainly hadn’t used them up on her two rides, so she handed over the admission.

  The man tucked the tickets into a wooden box and gestured. “Go on in.”

  The tent had a partition hung up, making an aisle leading from the opening of the tent and further inside.

  It looked dark in there.

  Calla licked her lips, looking over her shoulder.

  The ticket taker man laughed. It was a jeering noise. “You ain’t scared, are you, ma’am?”

  She might have been. There might have been part of her that was a little frightened. Part of her was thinking about that red balloon, getting smaller and smaller as it disappeared into the night, until it was only a tiny red dot in the sky.

  We don’t think about that, she thought furiously.

  She squared her shoulders and ignored the ticket taker. She began to walk down the makeshift hallway. It was dark, but she could see the grass under her feet. The walls of the tent and the hung blanket both moved a little bit with the breeze as she made her way deeper inside. She could hear the sounds of the carnival outside, children shrieking with laughter, the recorded music that played whenever someone won the Diamond Barrel Toss. She could smell fried food on the summer air.

  She swallowed. She was beginning to wonder if this was a good idea. Should she be in this tent, going to gape at a beast man? Wouldn’t it only upset her? Wouldn’t it only bring things to the surface that were better left buried?

  But she didn’t live her life that way. She wasn’t the kind of woman who hid from the things that frightened her. No, she faced them head on. She always had.