The bar was crowded, even for a Friday night. This was not the type of town that wasted its time drowning in beer bottles and shot glasses- the population clung to their puritanical roots too much to indulge like that, especially in times like these. But President Roosevelt had announced the draft earlier that day, and panic led the stolid, less patriotic male population to a night of binge drinking.
After a few minutes of waiting, Conor finally managed to catch the bartender’s eye and motioned for another round. Even the bartender was looking nervous. Conor wanted to laugh at the whole bunch- he had no doubt that the war would touch this town no more now than before. He turned back to the girl next to him with her drink. “Did I ever tell you about how my parents met?” he asked, leaning on his elbow with a practiced ease and taking a sip.
The girl’s giggle was audible even over the drunken sounds of the panicking patriots. “I’d say no, since I just met you today,” she said in mock reproof. He smiled and leaned in closer.
“Oh, right. It’s strange, but somehow I feel like I’ve known you my whole life. Maybe we’re just kindred spirits or something.”
She giggled again. It seemed the giggle was her favorite form of punctuation. It might have been annoying, except that she was really very pretty, and Conor knew he wouldn’t see her again after tonight. Even in a small town that was relatively easy. “Alright, kindred spirit,” she said, sipping her drink. “Tell me how your parents met.”
“Well,” he said in confidential voice. “My father, Abraham Matthews, saw the young Miss Walton across a crowded room at a neighborhood party, and time just... stood still. He went up to talk to her, but she of course hated him from the instant she set eyes on him.”
“Of course she did,” the pretty girl murmured.
“My dad was persistent though. He wrote her every day to tell her how he felt, just hoping that maybe just one of his letters wouldn’t end up in the garbage. Even when the first World War broke out, and he went to France to help beat up the Germans, he kept writing letters to her. And the day he came back, all worn out and unkempt, my mother was waiting for him at the train station.” The pretty girl smiled. “They got married a week later, and nine months later...” Conor touched his chest and leaned in just a little bit more. Their knees were almost touching now. “You know,” he added, looking deep into her eyes, just inches away from his own, “My father always told me that I might as well chase the moon as look for a love as pure as the one he shares with my mom. But I’ve always thought that love is just out there for anyone to find, and long as they look hard enough...” The pretty girl gasped a little when his lips touched hers, but it didn’t take her very long to wrap her arms around his neck. She didn’t even protest as Conor’s hand wandered over the cool skin of her hip underneath her delicate cotton dress.
Later, after walking the pretty girl home and giving her one last kiss goodnight, Conor wandered around town, thinking about the story he gotten from a movie poster. He wondered what it would be like to fall in love, just like the characters in the movie. A spark when you look into a girl’s eyes, a jolt, a fire, a lightning bolt, and then you’re hooked. But he had looked into hundreds of girls’ eyes, felt hundreds of sparks of anticipation, and he would never say that he had fallen in love with any of them. Maybe it was true, that looking for love was like chasing the moon, looking for a dream that could never be real.
He kicked a rock into the gutter. It didn’t matter in any case. If love was real, he had years, decades to find it. And if it didn’t exist, well, he still had years before he had to worry about that. He had plenty of time.
The next day, the draft letter came in the mail.
...
“Tell us the story again, Mr. War Hero,” the girl said, sidling in closer and fingering his uniform. He hadn’t wanted to wear it, but everyone had insisted that in order to welcome him home properly, they had to see him show off his patriotic colors to the whole bar.
He took a sip of his beer and traced the wood grain on the table. “We were escorting several trucks of supplies to the front,” he said for the third time that night. “And we were passing by all this deserted countryside. A couple of days into it, we had stopped for the night and everyone was getting the camp ready. I was a little restless, so I got my buddy Jeff to come exploring with me instead of sitting around the campfire. We found an old farmhouse, that we thought was abandoned.” He made his fingers stop fidgeting. “We were about to go inside when I got a strange feeling, like something bad was going to happen, so I told Jeff to wait until I brought the rest of the squad- just in case. It took a couple of minutes to get everyone up and ready, but we were almost back to the farmhouse when a shot rang out and Jeff went down.” Conor paused and took another sip of beer. “Everybody started panicking, because even though the moon was pretty bright we couldn’t see where the shot had come from. But then I saw somebody moving near a window in the house, so we opened fire on the windows while the corporal kicked in the door and started shooting. When we got inside, we found five german soldiers who had stayed behind enemy lines because of their wounds.” He looked down at his fingers, still moving listlessly along the table, and wished the girl would stop leaning into him like that. It made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.
“Is Jeff okay?” someone said in an awed whisper. “Did he pull through?”
“Jeff? He’s fine. Shattered his shin, but it healed eventually. The guy who hit him didn’t have that great a shot through the window.” Conor shook his head. “Jeff got a good deal. Just a little nick in the leg, but he couldn’t walk for another couple months, so they sent him home. He wasn’t much use as a cripple, the corporal said.”
“But he didn’t get all these medals though, did he?” the girl asked with a smile, looking into Conor’s eyes. He closed them.
“I guess not,” he said, taking another swig and finishing the bottle.
Later that night, Conor slid out of bed as gently as he could, to avoid waking the girl asleep on his pillow. He looked down at her for a while, guilt weighing down his limbs- he hadn’t meant things to go so far. Even before France he’d rarely let things get so far. He hadn’t even wanted to kiss this girl, whose name he’d forgotten if he’d ever known it. She lay curled loosely on the bed, the sheets covering her naked body with more modesty than she had shown. He closed his eyes against the unwelcome sight; silently he slipped outside onto the balcony and looked up at the bright crescent moon.
He hadn’t wanted to kiss her, but it was the only way he could halt the flow of questions and requests for him to repeat the story. There had been no moment of anticipation, no jolt, not even a flutter, but she had clung to him when most girls would have pulled back, as persistent as he had once claimed his father was. She, like the girls before her, hadn’t realized the truth of his story, had allowed herself to be distracted by his kiss, and had distracted him in turn with the warmth of her reception.
But here, bathed in the sharp shadows of night, there was nothing to keep the memories from swamping him- the apparently empty farmhouse, the full moon lighting everything as if was day, the flicker of movement in the window, the sound of the gunshot that shattered Jeff’s bone, the crash of bullets through glass, the thud of the door hitting the floor, the absolute silence that followed. The sight of the five dead german soldiers with bandages tied around their heads, their arms, their legs.
The sight of the French woman lying gasping on the floor next to her german captor. The sight of her blood pooling beneath her as she reached to him, Conor, the man who had inadvertently killed her. The feel of the wet floorboards under his knees as he knelt next to her, though he knew there was nothing he could do, and the feel of her cheek beneath his fingertips. The sight of the moon reflecting in her eyes as her life drained onto the floor with her blood.
“You did your duty,” Jeff told him bracingly when Conor visited him in the hospital on his way home. “Sure, if you hadn’t decided to go exploring or called the squad over, she might have lived and I might not be sitting in this God-damned chair right now. But then again, they might have snuck up on us in the night and killed us all in our sleep. You went with your gut, and saved all of our lives.” Conor continued to stare broodingly at a nearby lamp. Jeff sighed and slugged Conor’s arm lightly. “C’mon, lighten up. She’s probably better off anyway, in heaven or wherever. She’s up in the sky now, wearing all white and floating around on fucking silver wings instead of in this hellhole. Or maybe she turned into a star, like my momma used to tell me when my dad died, and she’s looking down on you with all her celestial goodness.” Conor let out a reluctant laugh at this, and tried to appear more cheerful for the sake of his friend.
But as he stood on his balcony and looked at the waxing moon, he couldn’t help thinking about her, imagining her surviving and living into the old age he had deprived her of. She had probably been graceful and patient, cheerful and witty, hard working but fun-loving. He imagined her brushing her short black hair, writing a letter, working around the farm, staying in the country for the sake of her elderly father, her brother and sister-in-law, her love of nature. She was intelligent despite her humble origins, and would stay up nights reading philosophy and history and scientific journals and existential novels after singing her nieces and nephews to sleep. Someday she dreamed of moving to Paris, or even across the Atlantic to New York, where she would study at university and soak up the culture of a big city. And eventually she would get married, have kids, and live happily with whatever man was lucky enough to have captured her heart.
He sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. He glanced back inside, reluctantly considering going to sleep, but froze, startled and unnerved. For a brief, disconcerting moment, he could have sworn he saw someone standing next to the girl in the bed, looking right at him. The image was fleeting: he blinked and she was gone, just the product of shell-shock and an over-active imagination. He squeezed his eyes shut then opened them again. Nothing was there. He turned back to his examination of the night sky and the morbid thoughts it called to mind.
The frenchwoman lying in a pool of her own blood. It wasn’t fair- she had been so beautiful, just entering the best part of her life. He thought of what her smile might have looked like; as he watched her smiling like the round face of the moon, he imagined his unnamed wishes floating through the atmosphere, weightless shrapnel expelled from his heart to be absolved by her watchful ghost.
...
The nights and days blurred together. By night, he stared at the moon and forgot about whatever pretty girl had distracted him that day, and who lay asleep in his bed. By day, he worked at Mr. Jacobson’s furniture store and wandered around the once-familiar streets of the town that was changing before his eyes. With the end of the war, all of the mobilized citizens of the surrounding country were making the town their permanent homes, ready for a new project to be thrust into their hands. New residential developments appeared like mirages in the desert, reflecting the houses around them and ready to disappear at the first change in the weather. Where once only a few passersby would wander the streets, now they were overrun with crowds hurrying off to shops so new the paint was still wet. Conor let himself be carried by the current, unable to fight the terrifying press of bodies swirling around him.
He stopped in front of one of the new shops, closed his eyes, and thought of the moon. She was always peaceful, always changing yet always the same, cool and white and distantly sympathetic. Slowly, the overwhelming noise and claustrophobic wave of the crowd faded away to an unpleasant throbbing behind his eyes- a headache that would never fully go away, or maybe a panic as a gunshot rang out and windows shattered. He opened his eyes again and looked at the reflection of the crowd in the shop window like a coward unable to face his fear.
A stillness in the never-ceasing flow of movement caught his eye for a moment, another unremarkable person stopping to look at the display. But as ordinary as this occurrence this may have been, Conor felt the air vanish from his lungs, and he nearly passed out before he remembered how to get it back. The girl reflected in the glass, superimposed over the utterly ordinary items no household could do without, was so heartbreakingly familiar that Conor felt like he should call out her name and see her smile at him. But he had never seen her before in his life, and he did not know her name.
She was slightly taller than average, her body slender but not without curves that dispelled the illusion of childishness that her simple pearl-grey dress created. Exercise had brought two faint spots of color onto her pale cheeks, the only color in her ivory countenance. Her hair was a silvery-blonde that cascaded down her back like a waterfall of light, only tempered by a few grey ribbons the same shade as her eyes. Her snowy colorlessness did not take away from her beauty but rather gave her a silvery glow, as if the afternoon sun sought her out specially and shone just a bit brighter where it touched her. She looked like she was a few years younger than Conor, but the expression in her smoky eyes seemed older than the earth itself.
“Hey, boy, are you all right?” A hand waved in front of Conor’s face. His attention snapped back to the present as he turned his head to look at the old man who had spoken.
“Sorry?” he said dazedly.
“You’ve been staring at that window for a good ten minutes,” the old man said, peering at him like he had some infectious disease.
Conor looked around. The girl had vanished, into the crowd or around the corner. “Did you see that girl that was looking into the window?”
The old man snorted. “Boy, I don’t see anything anymore.” He hesitated. “What did she look like?”
Conor described her as best as he could without descending into the corny metaphors that were swirling around his head. The old man shook his head. “Nope. My eyesight must be worse than I thought, to miss a girl like that.” He started to shuffle back into the shop.
“But do you know her? Do you know her name or where she lives or-”
“You think I know everybody in this town, boy? There are so many newcomers here I can barely keep my own family straight, let alone strange girls that disappear into thin air.” The old man turned away again, leaving Conor to his long awaited thunderbolt.
For the next few days he looked around the streets he wandered far more eagerly than he had before, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ivory beauty. Several times, he thought he saw her turning a corner, or running in the park, or exiting a shop, but every time he came near he saw that the flash of white glow had been the reflection off a wristwatch, a sunbeam shining through the clouds, the flash of a camera.
Three days after he first saw her in the reflection, he sat on a bench near town hall as the sun began to sink behind the skyline, watching a young boy throwing coins in the fountain for wishes when ray of sunshine caught his eyes. Blinking, he looked around and saw with an odd shuddering in his core that it hadn’t been a ray of sunshine after all: it was the silvery ghost of the woman he seen in the window. She was walking hurriedly, her shoes clicking on the pavement as she fumbled through a purse and finally pulled out a coin like the ones the boy was throwing. He stood up, hardly knowing what he should do or how he could approach her; he started after her anyway. Her hair rippled in the soft sunlight, and she traveled across the town like particle of dust lit up in a sunbeam. As he followed her, trying to marshall his thoughts, he imagined that she might float away into the ether if even a tiny breeze disturbed her progress.
Even as the thought occurred to him, she paused, then made her way into a particularly thick part of the crowd. Irrational panic hardened in his gut, and he made his way quickly through the crowd, occasionally catching sight of a pearly ribbon, an ivory wrist. But when he came out of the mass of unfamiliar faces, her perplexingly familiar one was nowhere in sight.
The next day he awoke feeling odd, jittery and groggy at the same time. He was unfocused during work, forgetting what he was supposed to do with sandpaper in one instant, then working with a feverish intensity in the next. He felt like this was a day when something extraordinary would happen, though he couldn’t focus enough to perceive what that would be.
He worked later than he usually did, absorbed in the near-parallel patterns left by the brush as he painted varnish onto a table. When Mr. Jacobson finally took the brush away from him and gently shoved him out of the door, the sun had already vanished beyond the horizon, and its last death throes of light had almost dissolved into the oncoming darkness.
He wasn’t surprised to see the silver and white girl standing nearby, her arm around a lamppost and her face to the sky.
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye as his fingers clumsily buttoned up his jacket. Her pearly radiance had not disappeared with the sun- in fact, it seemed like she was using the temporary absence of her rival to spill even more light into her surroundings. The dirty, orange glow of the streetlight did nothing to temper her pearl-white colors.
Abruptly, she looked at him, grey eyes meeting hazel. She studied him for a long moment, locking him in her eyes so that he couldn’t look away; she smiled at him. He couldn’t imagine a more beautiful smile.
He had to say something, or else she would disappear again. He cleared his throat. “Hi,” he said awkwardly.
She looked at him for a while before answering. “Hello,” she said softly. He thrilled at the sound of her voice, cool and distant like the stars. She paused, then continued in the same gentle voice, “Are you just getting out of work?”
He had to clear his throat again. “Yeah, work.” He looked behind him at the furniture store behind him, but his gaze swiveled back to the girl. “Listen,” he began, then fumbled for words. All the confidence and pick-up lines that had made him the ultimate expert on flirting had deserted him, and he wondered if others ever felt this fuddled when talking to a beautiful woman. “Listen,” he said again, trying to pull himself together. “I’ve seen you around town a few times, and every time I see you I wonder who that beautiful woman is.” Not his best, but he couldn’t take back words that had already been said.
She gave him that breathtaking smile again. Again there was a pause before she spoke. “Thank you.”
“My name is Conor,” he said, extending his hand. “What’s yours?”
Pause. “Luna,” she murmured, taking his hand lightly before dropping it. Sharp shivers shot up his arm from where she’d touched him.
“Luna,” he repeated. “It’s nice to meet you, Luna.”
She nodded in a silent likewise and continued to look at him searchingly. Abruptly, she said in her soft voice, “There’s a place I know, not far from here. Would you like to go with me?”
He felt caught in her gaze once again. “Sure,” he managed.
He followed half a pace behind her and they walked through the deepening darkness and dim orange streetlights. Luna walked with such a graceful stride that he felt lulled into a dream, the lullaby of her footsteps drawing him further and further into another world filled with silver and black shadows dancing on a waterfall of light. She turned down a dark alley with a serene confidence and all he could do was follow her. “So where are we going?” he asked, a faint unease stirring in the back of his mind. He looked behind him and saw that the alley had taken a turn and he could no longer see the lights of town.
She laughed a little and touched his shadowed hand with her faintly white one. “Trust me, Conor.”
Shivers flew down his spine. “That’s not-” he began, but then stopped as they turned another corner into bright moonlight.
Opening before them was the scene of a dream, a fairy tale. A garden nestled between low walls that shut out the surrounding bleak countryside and preserved this tiny piece of paradise. Flowers and trees bloomed around a small stream that pooled and flowed with poetic beauty before disappearing beneath the far wall. The full moon hung over it all and lit the scene with its silver glow. But the most beautiful thing in the garden was Luna, sitting on a stone bench underneath a willow near the stream. Her own personal glow had grown brighter under the celestial lights, and she sat with her face to the sky as if welcoming it into her soul.
Luna noticed him looking at her. Smiling softly, she indicated the spot on the bench next to her. He sat, feeling small and confused next to her. “I come here every full moon,” she whispered, leaning into him. His side was warm where she touched it, and her skin was cool. She tilted her head back to gaze into his face, and for the third time he was caught in her grey eyes. “I’ve seen you too, Conor,” she murmured so quietly that he almost couldn’t hear her. “I’ve seen you staring up at the moon, searching...”
“You have?” he breathed, his thoughts deliriously incoherent as her cool breath caressed his cheek.
“What am I searching for?” He wondered if he should feel frightened or concerned, but all he could think about was the soft glow of moonlight reflecting off her skin and onto him. In this dream anything and everything could happen.
Her hand wandered through the air to touch his face; she looked at it with childlike wonder, though some ancient wisdom still seemed to lie in her eyes. “Love,” she whispered. “The past. Life lost. Some people might say you’ve been chasing the moon...”
“How do you-” he began, but her face closed the small gap to his and kissed him. In a rush his mind went blank with delicious relief.
She pulled back after an infinite moment, and he struggled to make his thoughts lucid. There had been a question, but his jumbled words and heart couldn’t frame it; all he could manage was a hoarse, “Who are you?”
She smiled that lovely, glowing smile and leaned in to whisper into his ear. “Sometimes,” she breathed, her voice taking on a singsong quality, as if she were reciting the words of a poem. The lullaby gently pulled him deeper and deeper into her dream world. “Sometimes the sympathetic moon creates the best mysterious, lovely figments of your imagination, born physically through breathtaking wishes,” she murmured, and kissed him again.
Conor awoke the next morning in the field behind the town, the sun hitting his eyes with harsh beams. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. Nothing; reality had finally struggled its way into his dream. The garden had evaporated into the night, and Luna had vanished over the horizon, leaving him with nothing but memories and a small, odd peace in his soul.
