Moonlight

I wrote this story when I was a freshman in high school. I just had to put it up here, for memory's sake. It's always fascinating to read things I wrote a long time ago. It makes me see what time can do to a person. I think I've changed...a little anyways:)

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Driving...on and on. My mom was behind the wheel and I was in the passengers seat. We were out there on the plains of Texas, where cartoons of roadrunners, dust devils, rattlesnakes and tumbleweeds come to life on the edge of the road. We would sometimes pass an oilrig that had been pumping and working forever, grateful for anyone to recognize its hard work. And though mirages are never as convincing as you want them to be, anyone riding with us that day would have sworn they saw howling coyotes and Natives riding away on horseback.

The distance, a truly magnificent phenomena, seemed to sharpen to a point defined by land and sky. And the sky was somewhere between baby blue and gray, full of lazy clouds and warm air. The daze of the road numbed my mind…causing me to focus on the white blinking line in the middle of the lonely highway. There was a haze that sifted that forward void through our car, melted the moment over my 12-year-old body and then dumped it on the road behind us. My surroundings were never different, but always changing…a truly indefinable and shaky present. The static on the radio was an obvious sign of isolation and surrender to the road. We were at its mercy, impatiently waiting for it to take us somewhere exciting.

Sometime between minutes the gray turned grayer; the light disappeared and created dark silhouettes of plateaus in strange mystic shapes against the night sky. There was a time when I could not tell what was silhouetted against what, as if the earth and sky competed in deep blacks and blues. This competition had an audience of stars, cheering and waving in the night. The scene was lovely, but after a while, I could not force my eyes to work any longer, and my lids began to set upon my cheeks.

Suddenly, an intruding brightness peeked through the seam in the distance. At first I was confused.

“Mom, turn off the light please.”

But I got no answer. I reluctantly opened my eyes…rubbed them…blinked, and then rubbed again. Much to my amazement the brightness got brighter…and larger. Rising before my eyes was an astonishing dome of fire in the sky. It was like a swirl of burnt orange and red ink, and I knew it was larger and more powerful than me, the car I was in, and the world I was on. It was absolutely unreal.

“What is that?!” I asked startled.

“I have no idea,” answered my mom, completely speechless until this moment.

By now my eyes had totally forgotten about their weight, standing wide and awake, and I could feel the soft tickle of lashes under my eyebrows. I sat slumped and leaning on the edge of my seat, striving to decipher the image before me.

“Is it a water tower all lit up or something? Did an oilrig catch on fire? Is it Jupiter? Is the world ending??” No matter what I did to understand, I couldn’t. And then, just to make the situation more confusing, the fireball lifted off the horizon and completed its giant circle. Finally my mom dared to speak the last thought in my mind.

“Lindsey, I think that’s the moon.”

The moon?! There was absolutely no way that that enormous deadly creature in the sky could be the moon. I mean, had she ever seen the moon look like that before? Had anyone? I knew I sure hadn’t. But as the minutes passed we watched dumbfounded, as the fire rose higher and higher in the sky, gradually losing its color. Its brightness, however, lit up the night with an inevitable glow that invaded my vision even behind closed eyes.

Then I opened them. The moon now hung like an old friend, white and familiar in the sky above. Amazed, I knew I couldn’t forget what I’d witnessed.

“Wow, I can’t wait to tell my friends about how weird that was.”

My mom glanced over at me with a grin.

“The moon sure is gorgeous tonight isn’t it sleepy head?”

I nodded. Until then I was always sure of what was real. My life made sense, my days were always equal, and nothing ever changed. But something of a smile crossed my face that night as I realized the deep pillow crease in my cheek, the sudden loss of time, and the wavering image of a coyote howling in the distance.