A Nighttime Walk in My Neighborhood

There’s a full moon out tonight. I’m walking in field. Tall grass? Wheat? What is it about narrators that they can always name everything. I can’t name anything. All I know is the pale moonlight making the tall-wheat-grass look like a still frame in a black-and-white movie. I don’t know what kind of grass this is or what kind of rock that is… I just know that I’m here, under the moonlight, and it’s cold and I tell myself I like it, but it’s still cold. So I keep walking.

My street snakes toward the edge of the island…in between are the tall wheat grass fields, ready to be plowed under and turned into more houses in this suburban seaside town. Till then, I can cut across the field, straight down the hill, believing, briefly, that I’m out in the wild, free. Alone.

I look up at the stars and I imagine myself flying, a winged adolescent angel framed by the night sky, flashing eyes and flaming hair. But alas, I’m ever earthbound.
I use my arm like a machete and hack at the grass. Doesn’t do much good.
I look up at the stars and envision vile red-eyed leather-winged, bloody fanged beasts swoop from the sky. I raise my shield to fend off one and flash my sword at another. They disappear in a puff of acrid smoke.

Alas.

And in my darkest visions she’s walking with me, in that pink sweater and that perfume and she’s holding my hand with both of hers entwined around my arm and my jaw is shaking in that way it does when I’m feeling…feeling…and we stop walking and we press our faces close and she feels warm and smells like her and I squeeze my eyes shut and see supernovas of green and orange and red…
And…and…now I’m home.

Alas.





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