The Moon Sets in the West

Thea Kinyon


Hazel eyes, with something young in them, that fought with something so much older, glanced up at the moon for a moment one summer evening when the crickets were singing about love... or death, or something. The creek water in the ditch made gentle wet noises as it swept gently by the reeds and mud in front of Darryl’s feet. The moon was full but somehow still gave the feeling of a scythe tonight.
The light from a moon the color of his skin fell over gently over him. He had muscles like an eight-year old stretched out in four directions, but he could arm-wrestle his dad for twelve shots of whisky, till his dad passed out and Darryl sometimes took the last shot and finished it himself, but never went right to bed.
Tonight, he’d left early and gone to find Sherry who had red hair and bright eyes that made him want to lose himself in them, lose his past and the memories from that distant life that he shouldn’t remember. Her parents were polite, and nice enough, except when her father got angry every now and then or her mother got depressed and started taking all those pills.
There was a creek like the one he stood by now, only long ago, and wider, more like the Mississippi sometimes, and more like the ditch creek sometimes, but always yellow like the moon when it rises at twilight in the fall. And sometimes there were ducks and sometimes there were girls with long black hair wading, washing in the water, laughing. Sometimes the banks turned red and he couldn’t look up, couldn’t look up and couldn’t close his eyes.
But all that was the wanderings of his subconscious - stupid thoughts that never died and wouldn’t leave him alone even in his sleep. He shook off the thoughts of past lives that he didn’t want to remember and let his eyes fall over the ripples in the creek... and somehow in all of them was a reflection of a redhead girl with starry eyes... or it could've been the moon he supposed, in another time or place when his imagination didn’t change things into whatever it wanted. Darryl liked reality... some of it. Most of it. The reality was that there was this girl he wanted to marry, and there was a war somewhere that had nothing to do with the one he dreamt about on a yellow river and the reality was he had a drunk dad passed out on the kitchen floor even now and a mother who loved God more than her own welfare... and whether that was right or not didn’t matter, because that was the reality.
Darryl sprinted and jumped the creek in a single leap - landing in the muddy bank on the other side and almost slipping back into the reeds that quivered from his sudden motion. In this moonlight he jumped two fences and dodged some sleeping cows and came through the cornfield owned by Sherry’s father to her house - two stories, tall and proud and whitewashed like the man who was it’s king. Like the mother who was it’s unacknowledged queen. Not so much like their only daughter or three dead sons. The third might as well be dead, though maybe not in Sherry’s eyes. “Missing” meant there was still hope.
Darryl came up under the second-story window where a single candle burned and a figure was vaguely silhouetted in the yellow light. He threw a pebble gently at the glass and in a second the window was open and a pale smiling girl’s face peered out and down at him in the dark, strands of red hair falling from a loose ponytail to swing in front of her face. A strong face, or strong eyes, but a certain weakness in the full lips that gave away so many feelings. They parted and whispered in seductive innocence, “I’ll be right down, Darryl. I’m so glad you came.” And they smiled widely letting a flash of white teeth shine quickly in the moonlight.
He waited for her, leaning his back against the peeling white paint of the east wall of the farmhouse, and looking for a cigarette box in his back pocket that wasn’t there. She came up to him wearing just a jacket over her long silk, sheer nightgown and though he knew he was allowed, he took a selfish glace up and down her figure, savoring the accented curves in the moonlight. Right now she should have been his world, and she was, in everything except the unwanted flashes of a dark woman with black hair falling over her full breasts in a moonlight far away...
He took Sherry in his arms and swept her briefly off one foot for a long, passionate kiss, and his heart beat faster at the touch of her red lips pressing back against his, and her hand warm against his back, holding him tightly. They broke with three successive softer kisses, each consequently drawing his breath in with the effect of it. “Let’s go,” he whispered, and took her hand in his as they ran back toward the cornfield, laughing once out of the range of her father’s whitewashed castle.
Every leaf on the cornstalks shimmered in an enchanted silver-green blur, like silk under the night sky, rustling as they ran past. Sherry stopped him three times for another quick kiss on the way, and when they got to the first fence he held the barbed wire apart for her to slip through. She held up her nightgown so it didn’t get caught, showing Darryl her pearly legs, softened even more in the dark. They ventured though the wild fields between the two fences and toward the tall spreading oak tree who’s leaves rustled slightly and were, like everything else tonight, accented and silvery in the moonlight.
Sherry, laughing and catching her breath, threw her suede jacket off and let it disappear in the grass at the roots of the oak. Darryl came up to her, embracing her once again as her breasts rose and fell as they pressed gently against his chest, and she kissed him this time, bringing his head down to meet hers. Her hand fell gently on his cheek and ear, and slipped over his shoulder, then to his waist, drawing her arm around it and pulling him in even closer.
A gunshot rang out, loud but distant in both time and space, and a splash...
“Darryl? Something wrong?” He’d withdrawn from her kiss and as the night came back to Darryl’s now open eyes he sighed, not answering her. Their foreheads touched for a long moment and Darryl stood unmoving in her compassionate but puzzled arms, fighting with the visions and sounds in his head that wouldn’t go away. He felt a cold shiver run through her body. “Why didn’t you wear more?” he asked a rhetorical question. She half-laughed and half-sighed, and he hugged her, his chin falling to her shoulder for a moment before she pulled him down into the grass. On top of him with her thighs spread over his hips she ran her soft warm hand up under his shirt, feeling his chest, how it rose and fell quicker with each waxing moment. She kissed his neck and began to unbutton his shirt in a graceful hurry, leaning down to kiss him again on the lips as she undid the last white button of his shirt and moved down to the top one on his pants. He reached up and gently pulled her hair out of its ponytail, letting it fall softly and teasingly across his face and now bare, pale chest. Pausing in her undress of him, she pulled off the nightgown in one swift move and Darryl’s excitement swelled as he ran his hands up her uncovered thighs. She pulled his pants all the way off and came back up to him, kissed him again, and lowered herself over him so he entered her - hot, wet, wonderfully familiar.
Someone else familiar died in his mind, with a last wet gasp and a horrible fear in her dark eyes... long ago...
Sherry didn’t notice, or she took it as a sign of pleasure, how Darryl’s eyes squeezed shut to make the memory leave them before it could make him cry, like something in him wanted to so bad but couldn’t. He pulled her down and they rolled over together, him on top now. No more visions now, he begged, and began to make love to her. The moment finally enveloped him in it’s young moonlit sweetness.

Darryl woke up in another cold sweat just before dawn. The pictures of blood and yellow rivers and black-haired girls fluttered away like leaves on the autumn breeze and the gunshots’ echoes became fainter and fainter as he remembered who he was. He wanted to forget the dream, like all the other dreams; he wanted them to disappear like stars in the light of day, or like alcohol evaporating in the sun.
His blond mother stood in the kitchen staring out the window at the lightening sky and the wisps of pink clouds advancing over the horizon. Maybe she was thinking about how many times she would have to reach the horizon and discover a new one before she came in sight of the one where God was. The coffee percolator, it’s first job done for this morning, let a dragon of steam escape slowly from it, almost pearlescent as it rose to freedom in the gold-pink light of coming day.
“Good morning, mother,” Darryl said as he got a china teacup down from the cupboard above the light green linoleum counter. A moment later, as if suddenly caught doing something sinful, his mother jumped and turned around to see him. “Oh. Darryl.” A quick sigh of relief or exhaustion or both. “Why are you up so early, baby?”
“Couldn’t get back to sleep,” he said steadily, calmly, as he poured the steaming black coffee into a blue and white and pink pattern of pearls and phoenixes. His mother stared at the cup until he picked it up and set it on the table, looked up and saw she was staring at the same now-empty place on the green counter. “Would you like a cup?”
“Oh. I’ll get it myself, love, just sit down.” A second china teacup emerged from the cupboard and slipped from his mothers pale hands in slow motion, plummeting towards the still yellow water, her black hair whipped past her face in a frozen moment and her silk dress stained red above her heart, a stream of blood falling up her soft slender neck and she herself fell... fell...
Darryl caught the teacup in his right hand as it was midway to the kitchen floor, and handed it back to his mother, safe, unshattered. “Oh. Thank you, Son.”
“Let me pour that for you mom.” And then they were both sitting at the kitchen table drinking hot black coffee and listening to the silence God and dreams had left behind.

Darryl’s father owned a Studebaker that he’d “borrowed” from his brother, now in France or Poland or a trench someplace cold and unforgiving, where it rained and he either missed the sun that shined on the Mississippi riverbank, or couldn’t remember how it felt on his back, his face, his bare feet on the warm fertile earth, earth un-mined, un-bombed, earth not discolored from blood, by a river that was neither red nor yellow.
The Studebaker was now parked outside the general store, downtown. As Darryl’s parents walked toward the shade of the awning, and Darryl stepped out and shut the car door before crossing the street, Sherry’s mom drove slowly by in her white convertible. The top was down and her short, strawberry-blond hair moved slightly in the breeze, curled and hairsprayed until it had no more freedom to fall against her neck or flow back in the wind. Darryl watched her pull up to the curb and step out, her black heels touching the hot dusty road and her hosed legs moving her gracefully toward the door of the post-office. This was where Darryl was headed, and he nodded respectfully to her as he opened his mailbox.
“Good morning, Mrs. Carpenter.” She glanced up from her mail and smiled gently at him.
“Same to you... Darryl. Give my regards to your mother,” Then under her breath, “The poor dear.”
“Sure will, Mrs. Carpenter. Have a nice day.”
“Mm-hm.” And she walked out the door, her movement causing the pill-bottles in her purse to rattle faintly.
The mailbox Darryl opened then and peered inside of was bare and empty, so he shut it again and walked back into bright sunlight just as Sherry’s mother’s white convertible pulled away and down the road back towards her white-washed castled and white-washed husband, and beautiful, redhaired daughter, the only child she still knew she had living.
On the dusty pavement, not far from where Mrs. Carpenter’s black heel had first touched a few minutes ago, there was a government-size envelope laying still against the black. Darryl bent to pick it up, glancing at the address, which was indeed Sherry’s. Mrs. Carpenter must have dropped it. He folded it and slipped it into his back pocket as he crossed the street back to the Studebaker. His father stepped into the sun from the dark interior of the general store, squinting his reddened eyes, and furrowing his wrinkled face, his gray stubbled cheeks washed and hollow, his expression otherwise hungover in every aspect. And following him, Darryl’s mother, carrying a paper bag in her arms. Darryl helped her, taking the bag and placing it in the back seat next to him as his father started the car.
Should he go to the Carpenter’s and give them the lost letter? Give it to Sherry that night when he saw her, if he saw her? Loose it? Keep it? It stayed in his back pocket almost forgotten until the sun was low and the kitchen was dim and dusty and his father got out the whiskey bottle he’d bought that morning as his mother started to make dinner. She had given up asking her husband not drink before dinner years before. Darryl set the table and paused before putting down the silverware at his father’s spot to watch him pour the first shot. The clearness of the liquor splashed into the clearness of the shot glass and filled it, swirling, the smell reaching Darryl’s nostrils and burning down his throat in his mind. His father put a hand around it and turned with two fingers back and forth, looking at it like an hawk watches a fish before the killing plunge. The whiskey did the plunging for him.
“What are you lookin at boy, finish the goddamn job already.” Darryl set the third place - his own - and went into his room. He’d had the intention to look at the letter, but it was barely out of his back pocket when a yell came from the kitchen, then a smack and a stifled cry. Darryl winced and turned to lean his forehead against the wall, his eyes squeezed shut and the burning inside him, deeper than alcohol, welled up, freezing him there. His fist clenched up but it only touched the wall, silently and in slow motion doing what the wall kept him from doing. A rectangle of floating golden dust warmed his back and arm that held the letter, unnoticed and forgotten. A knife twisted with a muffled crunching noise in the gut of a man who had slanted eyes and black hair, but the man never cried out and he died in the arms that may have once been Darryl’s or were once some other man’s in Darryl’s memory. The inner voice that usually told memory to “go away go away go away go away go away” was frozen, too, like Darryl’s fist and eyelids.
A soft knock on Darryl’s door and his mother’s quiet voice, “Dinner, Son.”
And silent, not looking at the his mothers one reddened cheek, he ate dinner as fast as he could and asked to be excused. “Sit your ass down, boy. Jenny, clean the table.” She looked up with a fork of mashed potatoes half way to her mouth. “NOW, whore!” Face stern, she took Darryl’s empty plate and her husband’s half-empty one and the rest of the things on the table, except for the whiskey bottle and shot glass, which still sat in the middle, two feet in front of Darryl’s father. Their owner and slave in one slowly dying body.
The washed out graying man across from Darryl poured another shot, his hand wavering only slightly. He pushed it across to his son. “Here, boy, take a drink. This’ll lighten ya up.” No words, the glass met Darryl’s lips barely and deserted its contents inside him, burning, but not burning away the coals that were already there. A clink as the glass hit the wooden table top.
Sherry. He should be with Sherry now, not this old filthy man in this old dingy house, not inside while the sun set over the fields and a beautiful redhead girl wasted away in house where her parents ignored her at best and prayed for Darryl to save her. She probably couldn’t see the sunset either, both her bedroom window and Darryl’s kitchen window facing east.
“C’mere, boy, and armwrestle yer old man. I’ll bet I can beat you still, yer just as scrawny as you were when you were eight.” He moved to the narrower side of the table and propped his elbow on its surface, waiting. Darryl moved to face across from his father and their hands clenched together for a moment as their eyes met, Darryl’s young, hazel, set, and the other two yellowed with age and liver problems, old, angry, and then suddenly afraid as Darryl’s arm muscles firmed and the back of the old man’s hand hit the table with a thud.
“Ow, fuck! You little bastard!” A gravelly, angry voice, not softened with the next shot, which spilled onto the table because of the shaking hand that poured it. The old man downed it, and his arm went up again, meeting Darryl’s again, and this time it resisted for a good thirty seconds until it hit the table. Another shot and a third round. The water from the sink was still running even though Darryl was sure that there were no more dishes left to wash by now. This time it was Darryl’s wrist that hit the table first, and a another shot went down his father’s throat, adding to the fire in the eyes that now had tasted victory for the first time tonight and expected more.
Darryl lost count of the matches and the shots but finally the water in the sink stopped running and his mother’s presence no longer filled the space in front of the darkened kitchen window.
“Turn on the light, woman!” the old man said between a lost round and shot of whisky. And he lost every next round in the dimly-lit dusty room until finally he passed out on the floor and Darryl picked up the half-full shot glass and let the clear liquor burn his insides again. He turned to see his mother through her bedroom doorway, sitting perfectly still on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing, her hands clasped together in her lap. Her nose was swollen. The space around her eye was turning yellow with an oncoming bruise. Darryl looked at the floor where he stood, his father’s hand limp next to his boot. He stepped over the unconscious body and stood by the counter. His elbows came to rest on the green linoleum and his head fell into his hands. Green linoleum. Nothing but green linoleum came over his mind.
“Darryl? Are you going to go to sleep tonight, Son?” His mother stood on the other side of the room, expression blank and defeated and beaten down...
“Soon, mom.”
Sherry. He should go save Sherry. She was so beautiful. His mother’s body disappeared like her life had done long ago, and he stepped toward the door, almost falling over at his own movement. The doorknob didn’t want to turn enough to open the door. How many shots had he had tonight? Dammit, why couldn’t the door open? There it went. The stars were out, but they kept moving around in blurred circles and Darryl barely made it down the steps. More shots than usual, is how many he’d had. Not that many... He stumbled into the front gate, which someone had closed - Why did people close their gates, what the hell was the point? Tried to open it, and somehow made his blurry way into the road. Maybe he’d had too much to drink. Sherry didn’t like it that he drank sometimes. What if she was mad? Sherry was so beautiful. He loved her. Maybe she would marry him and they could go far away, far away from all the fuckers like their fathers and sad dead idiots like their mothers and far away from all the stupid fucking yellow, from the black-haired girls who washed in the river...
Darryl sat in the middle of the dusty road and thought about nothing, then he was lying down, staring at the stars. Sometimes they were still, but if he moved his eyes they swirled and swam in a blurry dance, not unlike the past-life memories that haunted him.
A sound of a river nearby and reeds rustling softly in the breeze, and a hand felt his chest, a slender, slightly cold hand, and the long, slant-eyed face of a beautiful darker-skinned woman came into his vision, and she whispered something beautiful, her black hair falling in strands in front of her face. She kissed him lightly and he felt her uncovered leg move over his, and she came up and laughed a beautiful laugh, like wind and like water and like fire all at once, like a thousand bird-songs and bells. She whispered something else beautiful, and as she kissed him once again, her hand pulling around his waist, and her ankle on his shin, her hip against his in the tall grass, she faded away into the black night and the dancing stars.
Somehow Darryl made it back to his bed and fell asleep.

The next dusty afternoon, the wind blew harder and clouds flew across the sky, each shadow that passed over the fields getting bigger and bigger, electricity gathered slowly in the air as the day grew on. Darryl walked toward Sherry’s house, this time on the road, with the letter in hand. He stepped up on the faded steps to her white balcony, knocked three times on the door, looking at his feet.
“Darryl!” Sherry flung the door open and barely stopped herself before jumping into his arms. She whispered, “What are you doing here in the daylight??”
A voice from inside: “Who is it, Sherry?”
“Heh. You’re mom dropped this letter outside the post office yesterday,” He whispered back, holding the creased envelope out to her. She took it, only glancing briefly at it before her mother called again.
“I’ll be right back, mom.” She stepped all the way outside and closed the door gently behind her before taking Darryl’s hand. She took him and ran around to the east wall of the house, the wonderful wall away from the road and from her parent’s bedroom windows.
Her chest was rising and falling, and her red hair was in two loose braids that fell over her breasts, and strands of it were whisked around by the blowing wind. The huge sky, and gray billowing clouds around them, the electricity in the air, the promise of rainstorms and lightning and the promise of her full red lips there in front of him - Darryl’s heart beat quickened until he could feel it tighten his throat and Sherry’s lips parted, her blue eyes swimming and catching fire in his hazel ones. She flung her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately, desperately, her tongue and lips trying to take in every ounce of him in a single moment, in a single kiss. He, too, felt the desperate excitement of the moment, his arms around her, her body so close to him that she was almost a part of him, and it barely mattered where her lips ended and his began. They broke, breathing fast with the rush of being near each other.
“Sherry.” He took a quick breath. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. He kissed her hard, and took another breath.
“I love you Sherry.”
“Oh, God, I love you Darryl.” They kissed once more, briefly, and embraced for a too-short moment before Sherry drew away.
“Meet me tonight by the oak tree.” Sherry said it, but it didn't matter, because the words were in both their minds. One last quick kiss and she turned back the way they'd come, opening the letter. She disappeared around the corner, and Darryl went around the other side of the house.
Across the road, he turned back to see her still standing, frozen on the porch with the open letter in her hand. She looked in the opposite direction, then swung her head toward Darryl, saw him, and ran down the steps to him, across the road, holding her skirt up, and her braids bouncing against her breasts. She ran into his arms and started to cry.
“Oh my god John’s dead.” She cried into his shoulder. The letter was still crinkled up in her hand. He held her. There wasn’t much else he could do. He held close and tight as wisps of her red hair blew against his face and in his eyes. From the front door of the white house Mrs. Carpenter stepped onto the porch and looked around, then at them.
“Sherry!” She yelled, running towards them, Darryl let her go and she turned to her mother, who was glaring at him.
“Mom, John’s dead.” Her mother’s eyes fell away from Darryl and to the letter in Sherry’s hand. Her own hand, nails delicately manicured, long graceful fingers, silver ring that her husband had put there so many years ago - the hand came to her mouth to cover a gasp of dismay, and then went to her daughter and held her close as Darryl had done only a moment before.
John had died cold and lonely and far away. He had been a boy when he went to Europe, only a little older than Darryl, only a little bigger than Darryl.
“There’s someone coming.”
“Better go then,” that birdsong voice, the one from a different time, a different hemisphere. She kissed him once more and disappeared through the tall grass as he got up and brushed himself off. The men approaching were from his camp, from his own battalion, but they hadn’t spotted him yet. One of them yelled and pointed at something in the direction of the cliff over the river.
The rain started. Suddenly the three of them were drenched and rain turned the dust into mud at their feet, then standing water, and it ran down their faces in streams. Mrs. Carpenter’s hair fell flat against her head, the hairspray doing nothing now. Strands of red hair stuck to Sherry’s neck and forehead. The two women still embraced, their tears only visible to each other, camouflaged by the downpour. Darryl turned and walked back down the road.

It was still cloudy on and off that night, but the rain had stopped for the most part and Darryl could see patches of stars every now and then. The moon was hiding up there somewhere, waning behind a lighter patch of clouds. Darryl was looking through the kitchen window. A yell from his parent’s room, gravelly, old. A thump. The empty whisky bottle from last night stood alone on the green counter next to the sink, by Darryl’s right hand.
On the cliff above a yellow river, the wind blew faintly and a girl - the black-haired girl, the one he loved as much as the very life that was passing away in front of his closed eyes - she stood on the edge of the cliff and in front of her was a soldier, three soldiers, the men he knew and had traveled with all this way. The girl was no threat. Why didn’t they know? She’s not one of the enemy...
And a gun shot rang out. He ran to her, but he was frozen in place because the moment was too long and too fast for him to catch her as she fell.
The rain spattered lightly against the kitchen window. Thunder rolling in the distance and a door slammed. Darryl knew it was his father from the heavy steps and the old man walked toward the front door. Darryl turned to watch him just as he stumbled into a chair and, uttering a curse, fell into a pile of gray flesh and wood on the hard floor.
“Fucking, goddamn chair who the fuck doesn’t push in their fucking chair in this house,” came out in liquor-stained breath as he untangled himself and got up.
“You! Boy, did you leave this chair out for me to trip over? You little son of a bitch!”
Darryl only stood there as the wrinkled, thickly-veined, but still strong hand struck out across his face. It stung but he stood there, glaring at the stubbly, wrinkled, white-washed face in front him.
“Well, aren’t you gonna do anything, boy?!”
Darryl stepped back and turned, walking into the room where his mother lay against the wall, blood running down her forehead.
“Mom. Mom, are you ok?” He knelt by her and found her hand, squeezing it until her eyes looked dimly up and found him there.
“Son. I’m ok. It’s all ok. Everything will be fine.” She squeezed his hand, stronger than any move she’d made in years, perhaps her whole life. “He only hurts us because He loves us.”

“Where you goin, boy?! You can’t run away from your old man! Get your ass back here, its the middle of the goddamned night!” Darryl turned in the doorway to face his father and before he knew it his fist was buried in the side of the man’s gray head, anything but slow motion. When time stopped was when the blood spurted from his mouth and he fell to the floor for the second and last time that night. Darryl stared for one short moment at the still body now crumpled in the kitchen before him. Then he turned and ran into the night.
The oak tree. Would Sherry even be there? She’d just found out her last brother was finally dead, after being missing in action for months. The ditch creek was overflowing. Dammit, he’d have to take the road around.
A knife was in his hand before he knew it and he jumped onto the man who had just shot the woman he loved. The familiar face of a man from his own army, and shoved the knife deep into the man’s gut. The surprised look on the man’s face...
Darryl had mud up to his knees by the time he got to the bridge. He couldn’t see the oak tree, not from here, not at night, but three hundred yards and the field began and he slipped through the barbed wire fence.
The men of his army, surprised, watched in horror as he, one of their own men, turned against the other. The knife stayed in the dying man’s gut as he got up and turned to run down toward the river. He thought nothing, felt nothing, only took in the image of the ripples in the river disappearing and the yellow silt of the bank turning red as her body washed up a little ways away from him. Was she still breathing, was she still alive, could he save her -
The oak tree. A blessed, if wet, red-haired figure stood under the outspread branches waiting for him. As he approached, the rain got harder, blurring her figure until he got closer.
She died there. Her black hair was plastered to her face and as he moved it away from her eyes - open , still clear - blood swelled up out of her throat over her dress and onto his arm, on his shirt. She was choking on her own blood, and there was so much of it, turning the riverbank red. Her eyes searched his, afraid, so afraid, her hand somehow finding his and clenching it tightly until the eyes stopped looking at anything and her hand fell slowly from his grip.
The men caught up to him and a cold gun barrel was held to his head. A pause, one long eternal second and his eyes fell over the blood soaked face and the dead eyes, and the wet, black hair...
“Darryl will you run away with me?” She had one suitcase propped against the tree trunk. Her father hadn’t come home that night. Mrs. Carpenter had taken the convertible six hours ago after a phone call from the police and told Sherry to take care of herself - she was only going out for a drive, but take care of herself. Maybe call that nice young man from down the road, what was his name? Darryl? Take care of yourself, Sherry.
Darryl took her hand in his and together they found the dark house with the Studebaker in the driveway and the two bodies presumably still inside.
“No more visions, no more memories, the son of a bitch died long ago, I’m not him anymore. I’m not him anymore,” were the thoughts passing through his head as he stepped over the body in the doorway and found the car keys hanging on the wall above the green linoleum counter.
Sherry. He got in the driver’s seat next to the girl he loved, the only one left in the world who loved her. She was real. She was now. She was the only thing that mattered in his world and the only thing that occupied his mind, finally. They would go anywhere, it didn’t matter. West, East, it didn’t matter really...
The Studebaker pulled to a stop at the crossroad, its headlights shining into the rain. It was a T-fork; right was east, left was west. Tires slipping in the mud, the car seemed to want to go east at first. Then they found something solid and real underneath what had once been dust, and the car turned suddenly but surely toward the clear horizon where the setting moon could be seen through the passing clouds.

copyright Thea Kinyon 2001