Burning Moon

by Jo Watson

  The moonlight was illuminating his face, and I took the opportunity to study him through this new lens. Strands of dark wet hair fell into his face. His features definitely didn’t belong to that of a pretty boy, but they worked. He had a certain intensity to him; it was present in the way he spoke, the way he moved around with such confidence, and the way his smile lit up his dark eyes.

  “How do you know so much about this stuff? Space?” I asked.

  “I studied physics at university,” he said, without the slightest hint of playfulness in his voice. He sounded serious.

  “No! You’re kidding, right?” He had to be joking—only mathematical geniuses like Einstein studied physics.

  “Nope, I’m a big old nerd,” he said casually. “My main area of interest is Hawking radiation. ”

  “Wow! Sounds impressive, although I have no idea what the hell that even means.” I looked at the tattoos running up and down his arms, the old sneakers, the T-shirt with a biohazard symbol on it, and the very wrinkled button-down shirt that was hanging open in the front. Damian was definitely a complicated puzzle that I was nowhere near solving. And if I ever did solve it, there would probably be a missing piece, anyway.

  “So, genius physicist, with really rich parents, backpacking the world with no bank card. How did that happen?”

  He shrugged. “I decided I couldn’t work in a career studying what lies beyond our planet when I knew so little about it.”

  “That’s so deep!” I said in my best stoned-hippie accent.

  He smiled his sideways smile at me. “I can be deep from time to time.”

  A silence settled in; only the sounds of the tiny waves gently lapping around us could be heard.

  “And you? What’s Lilly’s big story?”

  Oh God, I hate questions like this. They’re so open-ended that I never know where to start.

  “Ask me something. What do you want to know?” I said, secretly hoping he wouldn’t.

  “Okeydokey…” Damian said, folding his legs and turning to face me.

  The movement caught me off guard, and apart from that taxi ride, this was the closest we’d ever been. I felt very awkward and quickly busied myself by running my hand through the warm waters, picking up the sand and letting it gently fall through my fingers. Suddenly, Damian took off his button-down shirt, attempted to squeeze out the water, and passed it to me.

  “Here,” he said, averting his eyes.

  “What’s this for?”

  “It’s to cover…well, your dress is a bit see-through.”

  “Oh God.” I gasped and looked down. To say it was see-through was an understatement. I put the shirt on and buttoned it up quickly. “Thanks.”

  “Pleasure.”

  Another strange, awkward silence moved between us again until Damian finally broke it.

  “So I know your sister-in-law is a lawyer.” He stifled a small chuckle. “I think everyone in the airport knows that. What do you do?”

  I was relieved he’d spoken and even more relieved he’d chosen an easy question and not something existential and profound about the meaning of life or something.

  “Well it’s nothing as fancy as physics, but I love it! I’m an auditor. I work at my dad’s auditing firm.”

  “You love it?” Damian echoed, sounding surprised. People were often surprised that I could enjoy a job like that.

  “Yes. I like the way it all works out perfectly in the end. You reconcile the value of the assets. You check all the costs, see if they match the values in the books, and make sure everything balances out perfectly. It’s simple. I like that about it. It’s either right or wrong. Black or white. Like life.”

  Damian looked at me curiously. “You really believe that? That life has no gray areas? Don’t you think the world is a little more complex than that, Lilly?” he said in a voice that seemed to challenge me.

  “No, I think that everything can be boiled down to one or the other. Black or white. Right or wrong. Left or right,” I replied, confident that I was right.

  Damian turned away. His eyes glazed over and he suddenly looked very distant.

  “My sister died when she was five,” he said in a hushed tone that was almost inaudible. “She was beautiful. She had this pitch-black hair, with pale skin and the bluest eyes you ever saw. We all called her Snow White. She was so curious and full of energy; she never stopped, like a little Energizer Bunny. One day, ten years ago, she was riding her bike on the street. We lived on a quiet suburban road at the time, so it wasn’t dangerous; we used to do it all the time. This guy, Brian, was driving down the street, driving under the speed limit, even, when his car hit a jagged rock and his tire burst. He lost control momentarily and hit her. And even though he was going slowly, she died instantly. The doctors said that had she been older, she would’ve survived. But she was so tiny.” Damian’s voice quivered, and I could feel his pain.

  “Brian jumped out of the car and tried to resuscitate her. Eventually he picked her up in his arms and started running to the hospital. He must have run a mile before someone helped him. He took her to the emergency room but…like I said, she was already dead.” He paused and looked down at the heart-shaped tattoo on his wrist. “It was a freak accident. The wrong place at the wrong time. There’s no one to blame, no right or wrong, no justice. And I’ve wanted to blame someone so badly, but the fact is, I feel sorry for Brian. I feel sorry for the guy who killed my sister. We’ve even become friends over the years, if you can believe that. Talk about a gray area. He still calls and sends us a card and flowers every year on the anniversary. He’s a good guy, and it was a terrible thing that happened, for him, too. He struggled with the guilt, he still does, and eventually fell into a deep depression and his girlfriend left him. So you tell me…Right? Wrong? Simple? Life is far, far from simple and sometimes things are very gray.”

  I was stunned. At a loss for words. It felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of my sails. What could I say in response to that? He’d been so honest and open with me that I couldn’t imagine any reply in the world would do it justice. And in that moment, I felt so close to this stranger.

  We sat in silence for a few moments before I finally spoke. “My parents got divorced when I was very young and I lived with my mother. She’s a theater actress.” I rolled my eyes and saw Damian give a faint smile. “She’s an alcoholic and an addict, too, and we moved around constantly. I think we lived in about twenty different places in the span of four years. She didn’t even care if I went to school or not, all she cared about was getting drunk or high and being adored on stage. She once disappeared for seven days when I was eight. My dad fought for custody for years, and every time it looked like he was going to win, she swore blindly she’d clean up, and the courts would give her another chance. She would be fine for a couple of months, but then something would happen and she’d drink or use again. But when I was twelve, she had a car accident with me in the car. I broke my arm and my wrist. She was obviously drunk and that was the last straw, my dad got custody. But…”

  I felt sad just thinking about it. “Those first twelve years of my life were really tough and I was pretty messed up when I finally moved in with my dad. I guess that’s why my family is so protective over me.” I could feel the tears building, but I took a deep breath and fought them back down.

  And then I flinched as a tiny fish swam to my foot and past me. Soon, another fish went by and another and another until a small school of brightly colored fish swam between us. Damian put his hand into the water, and we both watched as the tiny fish darted through his open fingers.

  “Try it!” But without waiting for a reply he took my hand and plunged it into the water next to his. I watched in wonder as the silver-and-blue fish weaved their way through our fingers. They tickled, and we both laughed out loud.

  “So, I guess we’re both damaged souls then, Lilly.” Damian looked at me and I could see that his mood had lifted, and so had mine.

  “I guess we are,” I
said, as I watched the last of the fish disappear. I heard a loud swishing sound and turned to see that Damian was standing up.

  “How ’bout we find out where those hamburgers are?” he said, trying to shake some of the water off.

  “Sounds like a plan. I’m actually starved.”

  I’d just started getting up onto my knees when a hand reached down to help me up, and without thinking, I took it. In one swift movement Damian pulled me up out of the water and we came face-to-face. The two of us stood dead still, inches away from each other, holding hands, and for some bizarre reason I don’t understand, neither of us let go.

  We just stood there.

  Staring.

  Holding.

  I could hear him breathing.

  I could hear my heart beating in my ears.

  He smiled at me.

  I smiled at him.

  And then he reached up and touched my cheek. It was so gentle and soft, my whole body responded with a shiver. I felt his finger trace the surface of my cheek and then he held up a single eyelash in front of my face.

  He took a small step toward me. “Make a wish, Lilly.”

  Chapter Seven

  And so I blew.

  And blew.

  And blew.

  And blew.

  But the lash clung on for dear life.

  And so I blew some more.

  Harder.

  Maybe a bit too hard.

  I winced as I caught the glimmer of a tiny fleck of spittle tumbling through the air with a trajectory that put it on a collision course with his finger.

  But no matter how hard…

  Or how much…

  That lash wasn’t going anywhere.

  So much for my much-needed wish.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe this!” I jumped up and flung my arms in the air.

  “What?” Damian was clearly taken aback by my sudden and rather dramatic outburst.

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream or shoot myself.”

  He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing is going right in my life at the bloody moment and I keep making a complete idiot of myself. I mean, I set myself on fire—fire, for heaven’s sake—and now I can’t even blow an eyelash off a finger, and, and, and…”

  Damian’s eyes followed me as I started to pace up and down the embankment waving my arms in the air like a rag doll in a tumble dryer.

  “This has got to be some kind of elaborate plot against me! My life cannot be going this badly, surely?”

  “Lilly…” His tone was soft and soothing, which made me want to slap him. “That stuff could have happened to anyone.”

  “Name one person that it’s happened to. One person.”

  Damian rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. “This girl at university once wore mismatching shoes to class,” he offered pleadingly.

  I swung around and looked him directly in the eye. “That’s hardly the same. Besides, did her fiancé leave her at the altar the day before and did she embarrassingly throw up on everyone in class? No!”

  I kicked some sand into the water, hoping it would serve as a good exclamation point for the end of that sentence. “You know what these past few days have felt like? They’ve felt like someone, or something, has been conspiring against me, turning my whole life into some kind of sick joke. I’m almost expecting Ashton Kutcher to rise up out of the water disguised as a merman and shout, ‘Surprise. You’ve been Punk’d.’”

  I kicked some more sand into the water, trying to make the mother of all exclamation marks. It was all very dramatic. But I didn’t care, because that eyelash was the straw that broke this camel’s back. It wasn’t about the lash. This was about the fact that I felt victimized by the world. That I felt like somewhere, out there, was a cinema full of people with popcorn and Coke laughing at me.

  “He-he-he-he. Look, she’s gonna get sick, she’s gonna get sick.” *Hides behind a tub of popcorn*

  “Ha-ha, look she’s wearing pajamas on the plane.” *Laughs so hard, Coke shoots out of nose*

  “Wa-ha-ha, she’s on fire! She’s on fire!” *Slaps knee and sprays popcorn everywhere*

  I was angry, and kicking the sand into the water wasn’t generating the kind of punctuation marks that could even remotely emphasize my current state of distress; in fact, my toe was sore. I think I hit a shell or, knowing my luck, a giant, rusty metal anchor, and now I was bound to get tetanus.

  “I guess I’m just tired of crappy stuff happening to me.” I walked over to the table, sat down, and hoped that we were close enough to the Bermuda Triangle for it to magically suck me in.

  “Guess what my wish was?” I said.

  “What?”

  “That bad shit would stop happening to me.”

  Damian walked over to the table and sat down. He looked genuinely concerned.

  “I’ve been trying so hard not to think about it, but do you know what it felt like when he didn’t show up, in front of five hundred guests?”

  “I can’t even imagine, Lilly.” Damian reached across the table, and for a moment I thought he was going to hold my hand, but at the last second he picked up the bottle of water and poured us both a glass.

  I mentally sighed; my life was a complete disaster zone.

  We sat there in silence, sipping our sparkling water and listening to the bubbles pop and fizz. For some reason I thought about my wedding invitations—I’d put so much effort into them.

  I’d spent hours at the paper shop choosing just the right color, texture, and thickness. Hours spent with the designer finding the right layout and design elements to make it perfect. The invites were an off-white color—Romantic Eggshell Dream was the name of the paper. They were embossed in the corners with a delicate flower design and all handwritten in calligraphy—some old lady sat there for days doing them all—and then folded them in half and tied them together with pale lavender ribbons. What a waste!

  And then another thought hit me. This scandal was going to be spoken about by my family for the next millennium, at least. In fact, it would probably be passed down from generation to generation in the great African tradition of oral storytelling. Some great-great-great-niece of mine living in the year 2104, where robots feed you breakfast and everyone lives in hydroponic bubble suits, would still be hearing the legendary story of poor Aunt Lilly who was left at the altar in front of all her friends and family. So for the rest of my life, at every family function I would probably hear…

  “Shame, shame poor Lilly. You must be heartbroken.”

  “Oh shame. You must be so embarrassed. I don’t know how you cope.”

  “Poor, poor Lilly, maybe you should just go live out the rest of your sad, pathetic, lonely life under a rock in the middle of the desert with only lizards to keep you company.”

  I was grateful when a loud voice suddenly broke through my terribly unhappy thoughts.

  “Your hamburgers,” said the man in the black suit, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He started moving things around the table to make space for our food. He glanced at me with a displeased look as he bent down and picked up all the candles and flowers that had fallen over. I mentally kicked him in the groin and smiled politely.

  I looked at my plate. My burger might as well have been hanging from the roof of the Sistine Chapel. It was a work of art and I almost felt bad for eating it…almost. But at this point, I was famished. I grabbed the burger, took an enormous bite, and started wolfing it down. It dawned on me that I didn’t care that I probably looked like a hungry scavenger, frantically gnawing on the last remains of a carcass. Because the one good thing about having your life declared as a disaster zone is that things that bothered you before seemed so insignificant now.

  Take eating in front of a guy, for example. Why is it that when a waiter arrives, whilst in the company of a male we’re trying to impress, we become panic-stricken and in anxious trembling little voices say, “I’ll have the salad, please. No dressing, n
o croutons, no feta, just leaves.”

  We have these strict woman rules about what to eat and what not to eat on a date—no spinach or any other kind of green that clings to your teeth, no ribs or spaghetti, and definitely no soup. So we order a bunch of leaves and spend the night moving a lonely piece of lettuce around our plate, as if eating something with the calorific equivalent of air would impress him. And you know the hotter the guy, the less you’re gonna eat!

  But since I didn’t like Damian in that way, and this wasn’t a date, I didn’t care if he looked at me like I was a yeti that had just emerged from hibernation and was eating the arse end off a low-flying crow.

  I continued to ravage the burger, and I got so lost in the process that at some stage I caught myself making loud mmm sounds. I don’t think I looked up once, either. I was just so focused on the task of consuming as much fat as possible. I swallowed the last mouthful and finally looked up and straight into the face of a smiling Damian.

  “What?” I snapped at him, a fleck of something flying onto the table.

  “Have you ever considered a career as a professional eater?” he said, putting a chip into his mouth.

  Although I’d just claimed not to care, I was terribly offended by this suggestion, and he could see that.

  “I mean that in the nicest way possible,” he said, pointing to the corner of his mouth in a You’ve got something on your face kind of gesture.

  I grabbed my napkin and rubbed my mouth, then looked at him for confirmation that it was gone. He shook his head and pointed to the other side, and I repeated the process again, looking up for confirmation once more. But Damian shook his head again, got his phone out, and then took a photo of me. He turned it around so I could see.

  How I’d managed to get tomato ketchup on my forehead was beyond me.

  “Oops” was all I could manage. But before I could do anything about the splotches of wayward sauce, Damian leaned across the table and wiped my face with his napkin. He had such a look of concentration on his face as he poured a little bit of water onto it and went to work on my forehead. Then my cheek, and then the corner of my mouth. My lips tingled as the cool fabric touched them. Suddenly all I could feel were my lips and all I could see was him.