“Moonwalk”

The thick rug warmed under my criss-crossed legs. Pins and needles descended down my legs to my feet, prickling them, though I dared not move. The room was as still as stars, crystalized in time, fragile. I heard my father breathing through his mouth as he always did. A low, yet consistent huff sound like air leaving a tire. He was still dressed in his work clothes; suit, tie, tan button-up shirt with short sleeves, and black pants with black shoes to match. He was a particular man about his clothes, but he never could escape the California heat, and the specters of sweat under his arms which followed him home each day. My mother, poised beside my father on the couch behind me, was pencil-straight, like a body in rigor mortis. Her hands clasped together in her lap, her pale, nervous fingers like a clam clutching a pearl in its mouth. We were illuminated only by the light of the television. Bathing in its glow we looked to be a family of ghosts, carrying on our lives in a home which was no longer ours. Even my younger sister, littler by seven years, had stopped moving, and the noises known often to be associated with five-year-olds had slowed, nearly quieted entirely.

A reporter came on screen, and as he spoke his voice seemed to fill the room, maybe our whole house, too, and I even picked my head up, slowly, to look out the window at the trees and the bushes, wondering if they could hear it too. If maybe they were listening. As the voice trailed on, the scent of my mother’s cigarette, left unattended in the tray beside her grew and grew, until it seemed that the room itself was a dream, completely hazed in smog. Her pink dress and my sister’s pink pajamas seemed to have all the color drained from them as I glanced back at them through the smoke.

On the television, the machine was landing, and the sound of voices crackled back and forth with each other, introducing us to the Moon. I leaned my head forward, closer to the screen, scanning it with wild eyes. I saw craters, dirt, dark, and light. It was no different from home when I really thought about it. I had only to look out the front door and there it was. And yet my mother cried, her soft sniffling tears falling slowly, dripping down off the edge of her perfect jaw. My father was too stunned to put an arm around her. His face carried with it the wonder I felt I should have been experiencing myself. Instead, I felt almost nothing. No, that wasn’t right, there was a feeling there: it was fear. How could I not understand it, this feeling everyone had seemingly made a pact to feel together? I grew angry with the Moon for making me feel this way. I grew angry, too, at the men up there. Angry and confused. I shifted my gaze once more to the window, the television a blur at the corners of my eyes as I watched warm winds blow in between branches and across the sandy desert expanse of my backyard, my whole world. It was much more beautiful than the Moon. Besides, the Moon glowed brighter down here than it ever would up there. I stood up slowly, then, and walked down the hall to my bedroom. I had been wearing my pajamas, but I felt restless, and sleep was a faraway thought. As I slipped into my jeans, dirtied from a days-ago fall in the mud, hours after the first rainfall of the season, my little sister came to the door. I could not hear my parents, and knew they were still unmoving on the couch.

“Where are you going?” my sister asked.

“I’m going for a walk,” I replied. “Can I come?”
“No. It’s too late.”
“Please?”

“No,” I said again, “I’ll be back later.” I wriggled out of my pajama shirt and into a white t-shirt instead. I was ready. I walked with a strange feeling of solemnity, a word I didn’t know at the time, down the hall. I slipped my shoes on, and walked out the front door.

The night wind was warm but would grow cooler and cooler, I knew. Little specks of dust and dirt kicked up behind me as I began to walk, unaware of a plan, my feet dragging across the ground. I followed my heart but could not see it. The dust and dirt tumbled over itself in the wind and miniscule specks found their way into my eyes. I rubbed them slowly, thoroughly, like a small, small child might after waking up from a nap. I took my time with this process, because it meant having something to focus on, though truth be told even without my sight, I knew that place like the back of my hand. I couldn’t get lost out there.

I swam through the deep blue of the night sky, bathing in the shimmer of the stars, for what felt like a lifetime, though thinking back now it must have been mere moments, a short glance above me. My mind wandered this way and that as I watched the busy night life of the desert go by. I was an intruder, ironically, trying to fit in with this place which both was and was not meant for me. A snake snapped to attention as I walked by and I smiled at it. Further still I walked: past a scampering mouse, stray needles from a tree I couldn’t see, and one lone patch of ground still damp from the rainfall, shaded beneath a bush which swayed slowly in the wind.

Finally, I came upon a rivulet. From where I stood I couldn’t make out where it began, nor where it ended, but the discovery of the trickling water was enough to make me stop for a moment. I didn’t remember ever having seen anything like it, and I turned around, looking for my house in the distance. It had disappeared. I turned back to the rivulet, fascinated and thrilled with it, and knelt down beside it. Yes! This is what I had come out here for! I smiled like I had at the snake and watched the water rush, in its own small way, through the canal it had carved out for itself in the ground. As I was kneeling, I listened to the almost imperceptible slipping sound the water made, weaving back and forth, and marveled at the near-crystalline nature of it, despite the muck surrounding it. It was like looking through a window, and just on the other side was the whole world. Water was like that, I knew, and it comforted me to know it would always be like that. I lowered myself a bit further still, and let my fingers slip into the water. It was like the flow barely even noticed. It just kept on going, moving with the knowledge that it had much more important places to be than there with me. I dragged my fingers up and down the stream, feeling the water first rush against my fingertips, and then letting it carry them back down with the current. My mouth felt dry, then; I was thirsty. I thought I might go home, but that lasted only a

moment when I thought better and remembered the sight of my family on the couch, tucked away in the dark. I stood up, brushed the dust from my pants, and resigned to keep walking.

I walked on and on, wondering all sorts of things: did they have The Beatles on the Moon? Or Elvis, chocolate ice cream, race cars? Most importantly though, was that I wondered about the trees, and about the warm evening breezes, and the comfort of seeing a bird flying high above me, reminding me I was not alone. It was hard to see these things in my mind. Or rather, it was hard to imagine not seeing them. Once I had walked some more, I was met with a cactus: one of the largest I had ever seen. In the night, as its height rose up into the dark of the sky, I could barely see where it ended, craning my neck to look up at it. I imagined the rain falling on the cactus, hard and fast, and despite its sharp, deadly exterior it would secretly thank the clouds for the water and soak it up as fast as it could. Inside the cactus, the spiked, unfriendly-looking plant, was water and green. And the water made the green glisten and shine in the sun, and what amazed me most of all was that the cactus seemed to know the importance of safeguarding this beauty, of holding onto it no matter what. I reached out then and ran my fingertips across the spines of the cactus, careful not to nick myself, pressing just hard enough to feel that pricking sensation. As I drew my hand away, I realized one finger had caught and begun to bleed. I licked the blood off and wiped my finger on my jeans for good measure, before stepping back from the cactus, letting it alone for the night.

I let myself walk just a bit further, growing wary of the late hour, and how the warm winds had begun to cool. It seemed that I had found myself straight in the middle of the desert. There was nothing around me but the trees, each contorting themselves in new ways, and the sight of the flat plains of earth which reached far beyond where my own eyes could. I rubbed my arms for warmth, faster, faster, and walked without knowing it. My feet, it seemed, barely touched the ground at all. It was as if in the blink of an eye I had traveled lightyears. I was carried further and further, until suddenly my foot brushed against an object on the ground. It writhed in the sand at my feet, and I jumped back gasping, startled. I thought, then, of the match box I had left sitting in the junk drawer in the kitchen, beside the rubber bands, pencils, miscellaneous keys, and an old, broken mouse trap my father had vowed to fix someday. I always brought it with me on nights like these when I ventured out after dark. Often, I spent those nights playing catch with my sister, close enough to the house that the lights from inside still protected us. The matches were often merely a prop, necessary for nothing more than the usual macho posturing of a young boy and an older brother. Now, when I needed them most, I had forgotten them. After having stepped back, the ground in front of me slowly came into focus, and I saw the small body of a lizard with three legs. The fourth, I noted, was wedged under a rock a few feet behind it. The lizard was bleeding from the stump where its appendage should have been. I bent over slowly, trying to assess whether it would fight me if I picked it up. I turned myself and, scooping it from underneath, held the animal up with both hands. I raised it high above my head and examined its underside, cool and pale and scaly, then turned it again and examined its wound. It was fresh, had perhaps happened just minutes before I had found the lizard myself, and would, of course, heal eventually. I had learned about that in school. Its arms

paddled in the air, reaching for something to hold onto, though its slow-blinking eyes betrayed no sense of panic. It was amazing to be holding such a creature. Just to have it in my hands, to know for that brief moment in time our lives were one. Slowly, I lowered it back down to the ground and let it work its way in between two rocks, hiding from me. I pretended not to look, playing its game, and turned myself back in the direction of home now. It was time to go back.

The house was dark when I finally returned, besides the small glow of the lamp in my bedroom, calling me. I reached out for the back door which creaked quietly, then dropped my hand again and let the door shut. I looked up at the sky, and fixed my eyes on the Moon. I squinted, and could almost make out the shapes of two figures up there, throwing shadows across the light.