Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

Before she sat down, she held the jar under the faucet and filled it so that the bottom of the avocado seed sat in water. Then she placed the jar back on the windowsill and returned to the counter, where she started in on another bowl of stale cereal.

Eventually, she heard movement from the hallway. The woman must have come back in through another door. The shuffling footsteps came closer. The woman who emerged was not the same woman who had led her into the house. This woman was tall with short blond hair—nearly as pale as her white top, which was streaked with orange and yellow stains. When this new woman saw Lila, she stopped, her deep-set eyes narrowing on Lila’s forehead. “Baby, what is it that has happened there onto your head?” she said.

Lila’s hand went up to her wound, then to a gash on her left thigh. “What is what what?” the woman said, now very concerned.

She went to the sink and wet her hand, then rubbed at Lila’s head wound. The rubbing hurt. Lila pulled away. “No it’s not,” the woman said to herself.

She pulled off her top and wet it under the sink. The woman wasn’t wearing a bra and her small, freckled breasts were even whiter than the rest of her skin. She held Lila’s head against her chest as she scrubbed at the wound. It felt like her face was on fire.

When Lila squirmed, the woman said, “Hold so that.”

Then more firmly: “Hold so that I can.”

After she had cleaned the wounds on Lila’s head and thigh, she put the shirt back on, though backward. Lila could see her bloodstains on the shirt.

“Go you with them and find wood that burns,” the woman ordered cryptically.

She shooed Lila off the barstool and into the hallway. It was a white-walled corridor with four doors and a low ceiling. Family photos hung on the wall and Lila studied them for a moment. The pale woman was there, and children with her deep-set eyes and light skin. One girl was maybe the same age as Lila. There were pictures of her dressed as a cheerleader. A man, bald and lean, also appeared in the pictures—the father. There were older black-and-white pictures too, the family before the family. The people like you who came before you, Lila found herself thinking, hinting at who you’ll be. Clues to the answer that’s you.

They had pictures just like this, she and her parents—her own family. Though they hadn’t been taking pictures much the last couple of years, she realized. Probably, she considered, because her dad had moved out to the desert base to start his new job while she and her mother had stayed in San Jose. For a while, Lila wondered if her parents had separated. She was astonished when her mother casually told her that families weren’t necessarily permanent. It was only after Lila tearfully demanded that she be allowed to live with her dad that they made the move. The desert turned out to be all her mother said it would be, only crappier. But at least we’re together, they’d all say, to the point that it became a punch line in their wry attempt to transform any mishap or unsavory condition of the environment into a shared joke. When the air conditioner broke, when their neighbors shot automatic rifles into the air on the Fourth of July. Or once, while they were driving, when they spotted a dead fox on the shoulder of the road being torn at by coyotes.

“At least we’re all together,” her mother had said with fake cheer.

Lila thought she heard a cough coming from the end of the hallway. One of the doors was cracked open. She went to it and listened, hearing the quiet sounds of someone in the room—the occasional sniffle, the squeak of mattress. When she slowly pushed the door open, she saw the man from the pictures sitting naked on the corner of the bed. He was staring at the TV, which wasn’t on. Lila could see that he was wearing tennis shoes, no socks. He was remarkably thin, with his ribs exposed, his sinewy frame, the dark patch of hair and his penis like a bird in a nest. She had seen a lot of naked adults over the last few weeks, especially in the desert, and was surprised at how quickly she had gotten used to it.

The man caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye. He made no move to conceal himself. Without turning in her direction, he said, “Go away, Dad. You can see that there is a nasty business here. Fuck, your beard is such a ruiner.”

Lila backed out of the room. Off to the left, another door was partly open. She pushed through and found herself standing in a dimly lit bathroom. To her relief, there was water in the toilet. The whole neighborhood must still have water. They had lost their water in the desert a few weeks ago. One well on an abandoned property became the source for the whole community, requiring her father to walk out to it every morning with a five-gallon gas can and fill it up, sometimes fighting with others who tried to hoard the source. When that became too dangerous, they started taking water right out of the aqueduct and boiling it.

Lila used the toilet, savoring the whoosh of the flush but watching with skepticism. Maybe that was the last flush ever. Yet the bowl slowly refilled.

Just like hope, Lila thought. That was what her mother would have said.

Then she held her breath and turned, daring a look into the mirror. She could hardly recognize herself. One side of her face was swollen. A cut ran from her scalp to just below her cheekbone. It was red and raised, but probably from that woman scrubbing at it, she thought. Both eyes were purple with bruises, though one was worse—puffy, the skin stretched tight, shiny. Her lower lip was swollen and split. There was the painful gash on her thigh too. She knew she was supposed to feel lucky to be alive, but she didn’t feel much of anything. This must be what shock feels like, she thought.

She should never have allowed herself to fall asleep. The Marine driver wasn’t a sleeper. She thought she had sensed it when he first arrived at the house, but he did a good job of hiding it. He probably saw faking it as the only way off the base, arranging with her father to serve as courier in exchange for medical authorization and the car. Who knows where he was really going, and when he planned to ditch her. It was the car and the clearance he wanted. Probably just made up the safe haven.

The Marine didn’t say a word as her father threw her into the backseat. Her mother seemed to have forgotten their agreement, or her instincts took over. She started slapping and clawing at her father, screaming, “You let her go!” But he already had Lila in the car, door slammed. He slapped the trunk and the Marine floored it, throwing her back as the car lurched forward and ignoring her screamed demands to stop and let her out. Instead, they rushed headlong and she watched her mother draw back into the distance, swallowed by the desert darkness.

She tried to reason with the back of her driver’s head—a square block of meat, prickly with high-and-tight hair, rising from bulky shoulders. A faceless face with no connection to emotion. He sat stony and fixed, eyes squinting at the unlit road ahead. The engine whined as they shot up the on-ramp and onto the deserted freeway, the scarecrow forms of Joshua trees blurring by. She sobbed and screamed behind him, face glazed. His response was to stomp the pedal, throwing her back against the seat, her head banging against the door as he swerved to dodge something in the road. She sat upright and again he swerved hard, this time tossing her into the door to her left. Her head hit the window, rattling her brain.

“Better strap,” he said. These were the only words he spoke to her. It was his erratic driving that encouraged her to pull the seatbelt around herself.

The swerving continued, though she saw nothing in the road ahead of them. She should have known then that he was an insomniac, dodging imaginary obstacles. But instead she thought he was just trying to keep her off balance and out of sorts, or in such a state of worry about his driving that she would give up trying to get him to turn around. Still, she had no intention of falling asleep in the presence of this stranger.