Two Stories - short fiction by Francine Witte

There we are in shadow on the beach. The sun behind like a secret that is following us. A secret you are keeping from me, but I know about anyway.

The sun is trying to burn the truth into my back. Wake up, the sun is saying.

In the shadow, we are stretched long and anonymous. We are longer than ourselves.

If you look at the top of our shadow, our heads appear to meet. It looks like we are sharing a thought, sharing a truth. Truth is, we never talk about the truth.

Now, the sun is going down. Heat backing off. The secret is cooling down. I won’t think about it anymore tonight, our shadows blackening into the blackness. The two of us shrinking down to size.

When she was little, she thought the moon was an egg. A round one. But an egg. Each month, when the moon was full, she would wait for it to crack open and drop its slimy oak into the sky.

Then, as she grew, she thought the moon was a colorless eye staring and watching her every move. Every month, she would hide in her room, but stripes of white moon eye would peep through her window.

Then she was grown and met Bill, a morning person. They quickly got married and moved into a house, two kids and a dog. They all went to sleep by seven, and she forgot all about the moon.

Till one night the phone rings, hangs up, and rings some more. She goes to the window and stares at her long-lost moon. It is full and looks like the golf ball her husband must be using these mornings away from her.

She looks again and it turns into a numberless clock or, perhaps, a dinner plate.

Finally, she sees that the moon is the other woman’s featureless face. No eyes or nose, just a hungry-kiss mouth on the white moonscape. She wants to wake her husband to show him, show him the proof so she can leave him once and for all.

But instead, she gets little again, goes back to thinking the moon is an egg and waits for the cracks to appear.

"Moon Story" originally appeared in Passages North, Winter/Spring 2009.