BLAME IT ON THE MOON
Sharon M. White
The full moon held her gaze, held all of her really--still, quiet, unblinking-waiting--for what she didn’t know. The wind whipped up and blasted her trom every side, cold and unforgiving, scourging, searching and then died with a disorienting quickness. Hair flopped in disarray, clothes softly thumping back against her skin. Still she was riveted in place by the moon. Her connection to the moon had never been so strong, so real. In the stillness she could hear hounds across the hill, distant, foreboding. When she finally blinked her eyes stung and watered like mad. She suddenly felt surrounded, presences bearing down on her. Self-consciousness in the dark of her back yard was an alien feeling to her. Nevertheless here it was big as Life and twice as ugly, even though whatever or whoever was around her she couldn’t see. They were invisible and could be only her jazzed-up imagination. “And probably is,” she thought looking back up to the huge fairy-ringed full moon hanging in the velvet of the sky. Her long red-gold hair falling back trom an attractive face that she had lost all hope for over the last three years.
To get over the sudden bout of self-consciousness she smiled at the moon, closed her eyes and drew a deep breath of the damp air. She raised both hands to the sky and her beloved midnight moon and began to dance. At first it Was just a little weave and bob, hardly moving from her tracks. Then it was more abandoned as the self-consciousness faded away. ’Who cares ifsomeone is watching? Not the first time they’ve seen something weird here.’ She danced until everything melted away--swaying, stomping her feet in total abandon. She kicked off her shoes and relished the cool silken feel of the dew-kissed grass. She was mildly aware that she had never done anything like this out in the open, even if it was in the dark of her back yard but she had never felt better--or freer. That’s when it happened. That’s where it happened. And quite possibly that’s WHY it happened.
She laughed out loud until a sound made her stop in her tracks; arms still raised, sweat on her silvery brow, moon gleam in her eyes. “Yeeessss. We’re here.” Barely a whisper in the breeze. “Be still and you will be protected. We will help you child of Aradia.” The last vowel stretching out on and blowing away on the wind. Gooseflesh walked over her body as her arms dropped to her sides. The light from the faraway moon suddenly felt like a spotlight, she was nervous. No one was around; she could still hear the faint bass thump of her husband’s radio from the house.
There was a click and harsh maddening yellow light flared on the back porch. A rustle in the underbrush like retreating feet and then silence. She whirled first toward the door and then to the rustling behind her and back to the door. Her heart was thumped hard in her ears and throat.
’Damn him! Why in God’s name can’t I see one minute’s peace when he’s around? I think I hate him, I really do!’ (Did he see me dancing in the grass, oh gods. He was absorbed in that damned computer game trouble for sure wonder how I look he knows now he’s gonna start his mouth good thing kids are at mom’s) Strings of useless thoughts going through her head as he banged the back door open and bellowed out at her: “Woman! Get your ass in here! I have to ask you something!” He glared down at her; the set of his head and shoulders assured her there would indeed be trouble. She scurried like a frightened mouse in spite of herself and another thought bubbled up from her subconscious where it had been coiled, waiting for the right moment to strike out and hurt: ’I hate myself for acting this way more than I hate that big hulking bully in the house!’ Then she was up the back steps and in the kitchen. By then the radio was off, no distractions from his job, his Manly Duty as he called it.
As she stood on the rug inside the door looking at his back across the kitchen she remembered she had been barefoot. She had crammed her dirty feet into her shoes when he told her to come in, now she chanced a look at her feet-- wet grass stuck all over them. She kicked the shoes off again and tried to wipe the incriminating grass from her soles on the rug that proclaimed BACK DOOR GUESTS ARE CERT AINL Y THE BEST! And she thought how she would like to be going back out that door. Instead she crossed to the table and sat in the Hot Seat with a silent sigh. The kids had dubbed that chair with its fitting name because Daddy always wanted you to sit in that particular chair if you’d been ‘bad’ and he had to ‘ask you something’.
She raked her hair off her forehead and looked at his back, glared actually. ’One more time is all it’ll take and I’ll lose it. After three kids and ten long years I’m sick of being in this stupid Hot Seat of his, being bitched at like I’m a renegade teenager and he’s Big Mad Daddy, hope he chokes on that coffee.’
The clink-CLINK-clink of the coffee spoon was maddening. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of screaming at him to come on and get it over with. So she gritted her teeth and waited.
Finally, after about 300 years, he laid down the spoon, sipped the steaming cup of coffee that looked more like hot cocoa, a result of the two pounds of creamer he put in it, and still he didn’t look at her. Instead, he turned and looked out the window to the back yard--where she had been.
“What the hell were you doing out there? Trying to give the neighbors a free show? Advertise yourself? Just tell me what you were doing! I’ll be honest, I feel like knocking your two thousand dollar teeth right out of your stupid head. But I won’t,” he paused, for emphasis no doubt. Give the threat time to hit home. “It’s been a long time since I hit you, I think I’ve come past all that. And for your sake you better hope so. I don’t understand why you want to push me to hit you.” He was wearing his best I’m the Boss, Fear Me look on his face as he sat. “I’m waiting. Answer.” The muscles in his jaws worked as he glowered at her.
She knew she was pushing her luck, but then again how good had her luck been when she snagged this winner in the first place? She was most defensive and irritable when the kids weren’t around. She sneered, couldn’t help it, “Well, now, did it look like I was shittin in the weeds? Or maybe it looked like I was trying to turn on one of our well-equipped neighbors. You know the ones with all those schnazzy electronics that keep em running like robots. Hearing aids, pacemakers, electric wheel chairs. Whooo! Bunch of Geriatric Johns! Hold me back! Yeah, that is probably what I was doing.” Her look glazed from fire to ice. “Now, what do YOU think I was doing?” Her smile was lit with pure bone-jarring rage. “I’m waiting for an answer.” She was shocked, and more than a bit pleased, with the venom in her own voice. She felt strong; who cared where the sudden daring strength had come from? And she reveled in the horrified look on her husband’s face. She knew he was thinking that something was very wrong with her--and that made her happier; her grin widened.
He looked like a fish out of water--eyes bulging, mouth opening and closing ever so slightly. His coffee cup was poised in the air halfWay to his mouth-- mission failed--as he tried to absorb and understand just what had happened. After an explosively pregnant pause the coffee cup drifted down to the table like a leaf falling from its home high in a tree. When the cup was on the table his fingers were still loathe to let it go. His face had almost returned to normal, he tried to regain his composure and his control over the situation--and there was no way she would let that happen, not now, not ever again.
She placed both hands palm down on the table and stood up. Lowering her head she looked him straight in the eye. “No more. Do you understand me? No more.” She kicked back with her left foot--resembling a mule--and sent the Hot Seat scuttering and clattering from the kitchen table all the way to an abrupt halt against the living room door. The noise was huge in the silent house. She never blinked and he recoiled a few inches from her flaring face that also didn’t move through the whole ordeal. He wasn’t used to flinching; he was used to causing others to flinch.
“You,” he whispered, it was a hoarse, scratchy sound, “how dare you!” He slammed his boulder of a fist onto the table and caused everything on it to jump and rattle. Still she didn’t flinch. Instead she grinned again. She turned on her heel, grabbed her keys from the corny lip-shaped holder on the wall and started for the door. She heard his chair scoot away from the table as she reached the now tumbled Hot Seat. She reached down with her free hand, snatched the Hot Seat by the edge and slung it back toward the kitchen--and him--as she turned for one final look. He threw his arms up in a defensive reflex as the chair hurtled toward him. It didn’t hit his face, which he had covered, the back hit him square in the chest and caused the legs to shoot between his spread legs. When the leg made contact with the family jewels he moaned, unable to stop himself: and crumpled to his knees, eyes watering. She didn’t pause long enough to see the rest of the scene play out. By the time he hit the floor on his knees she was slamming the car door, leaving. This time she knew it was for good. On her behalf anyway.
She had done something that had been so unthinkable two days before that she was in shock for hours. She felt like she was dreaming and would wake up any moment. She was driving, just driving. There was a long stretch of potholed hardpan that started about a mile from her home and she drove it all the way to the state line at the top of the mountain where she now sat in the dark, motor oft: looking at the mountain with longing, wanting to be out there under the moon again. She had always felt as if she was different and tonight she knew she was. She wasn’t like any of her friends or her family. Only one aunt shared in her strangeness and the family had all but blackballed her long ago as a result.
The wind soughed through the trees, rustling them and to her it looked like a lover caressing the one he loved. She stepped out of the car and walked up to the top of the mountain peak that had been cleared and was named the Overlook. She thought, ‘Perfect name. It fits. You can look over the whole county ITom here.’ That’s when she remembered the voices in her backyard. Child of Aradia they had called her. Was she really a child of one of the old gods? The goddess sent to teach women the art of witchcraft? Surely not. The wind stopped suddenly and she could hear something moving about in the wooded area to her left. The moonlight shimmered on a glistening large feminine form moving toward her almost silently. This form was tall, at least eight feet. Fear tried to stab her heart but peaee took its plaee and a sense of coming home. As the figure stepped out into the clearing Sandra knew this was no other than Aradia herself, daughter of Diana. One of the Old Ones that people had lost faith in.
Aradia made her way across the clearing in long feminine strides that would put any pageant contestant to shame. Sandra knelt in ITont of her and lowered her eyes.
“Get up silly girl. I don’t ask for any such as this. You have done something that honors me more than being on your knees ever could. You danced with my familiars under the full moon. You stood up for yourself and your children. And you believed in my ways and me. That is one of the greatest honors any of us Old Gods can receive.” Sandra was standing stock-still; listening to all the things Aradia told her and not quite believing what was happening. Aradia stretched out one long slender and beautiful arm. Her hand wa.c; palm-up and seemed to be collecting moonlight from the very air. She held her hand over Sandra’s head and turned it palm-down, the moonlight poured out of her hand over Sandra’s whole body. Aradia wa.c; speaking in an unearthly language, beautiful and peaceful; musical. Sandra felt the moonlight wash down over her like warm water only it went all the way to her soul and she heard her own soul as it communed with Aradia in that same unearthly language of love and acceptance. “You are blessed from now until we meet in the Afterlife. I, Aradia, have blessed you and your children through you. Go home and have no more worries. Your children will need you.” Then she was gone. She faded away into nothingness as Sandra was starting to protest that she couldn’t go home to her abusive husband one more time.
The familiars were all around and with Aradia’s blessing on her Sandra could see the dim vibrating figures all around her. “Go, go, go, go... .go on.”
Sandra drove back home. She sat in the driveway a long time debating on whether to go in and face him again or not. She decided she would.
As soon as Sandra opened her front door she knew he was gone. Where? She didn’t care. Nothing was missing and his truck was still out front, keys on the corny little holder, coffee cup on the table with cold coffee in it, overturned Hot Seat where it had been when she left. They had taken him; he was completely gone from her life now.
Sandra searched the whole house and grounds--no sign of him. She was glad. She knew she would have to tile a missing persons report and she knew they would find nothing. She played by all the accepted rules of the land and went along with his family for the next year on all the theories and rumors but she alone knew the truth and was glad.
The last time Jared was seen was by one of the closer Geriatric Johns who had seen him in the back yard walking toward underbrush as if he were being beckoned by someone or something. He went into the underbrush and never came out. The police detectives followed all the leads and followed his footprints into the underbrush but could never find a trace of him from there. Sandra often smiled at the officers, a sad little smile that concealed very well how happy she was.
