Ducking the Moon
By Whitt Castle


We graced dance astral, then; limping wrists over my shoulders your fingers dipped caress at the hairs of my neck.



—The cat is hungry, you say, now, in chaised recumbence beneath the filtered sun slit patient through the blind venetian's rayed gaze of our gray these days static in repose.



Spin and dip, waltz and fly, our means were negotiable, within grasp, needing only will.



—And the children. They need food, too, you continue, a glance askance shouldered to the echoed madness never less than a step behind.

—Children?



Persistent atop silence's insistence, we would dance beyond the song, feet in adamant defiance refusing the absent presence then about us, submitting only to the dreaming still seeming to sing to our silent sway and spin, the song ceaseless in our soft embrace.



—Mary, Thomas, Phillip, Courtney, and Alex.



You used to say that as long as we danced, earth our feet would never know, would never need. And I would remark every time that truer words knew no birth as those through such fleshéd and sanguine lips. And you would repeat "sanguine," and I would laugh and bite your lower, your tears churning silver smiles to cheek when I wiped the blood across my face.



—Mine? I ask and you back your hand to violent heights and descent despite the distance that spreads me reading reclined across the room, but the volatile volition in your eyes is diffused as Debussey’s La Mer comes on the stereo and ushers our day to noon from dawn.



I hear no children playing, nor cats mewing. Only the sea, which we live none too near.



You would sing, back then, should the music be lacking, absent as ascendant and gliding steps soared our heads to the moon.



There is a television in the room, a layer of dust beneath a layer of post-its beneath a layer of scribbled reminders to clean it. It never laughs anymore. It never danced.



—Whose if not yours? you ask, though I’d forgotten what.

—I’m sorry, dear, as I was lost in the journey of the mad doctor's elliptical ramblings into nocturnal finality, —What was that again?



Your abrupt rises to tip the drink at your feet, a drink we’d both forgotten. I sip from mine tabled aside me, and you stomp towards a refill. I come erect, steps cautious though without intent to the window beneath which the chaise resides. And pull up the blinds.



A glorious day of gloriole-locked near noon light, and for years it seems that we’ve known no sun other. There is a sea, in the yonder-lust, and it cackles immortal with Time lapping the shore in the ebb and flow of Life. Behind me, above the recliner, there are pictures, five, facsimiles of each other blank grinning stares tight-lipped into the day awaiting account behind me.



You drink slow steps back, sipping clear, and neither of us can regard the waves now playing. Our moment is tired, appropriates the silence between us. It will not be long, though, before the wind and sea wax discursive, bantering our minds awake. Debussy plays us, is deft on the whim or wan of any given day: the desire and doubt our aging flesh can no longer act upon.



On casual evenings quiet, I would catch you unawares, dim lights casting dark your high cheekbones with the moon again managing to glare its peek through the bare glass of the pulled blinds, remove to the table your sinking drink from your thinking hands, and take you in my arms, a cooing delicacy of swoop and grace, dancing therein the night to forever.



—The dog has died, you say, as if it just occurred to you, and you startle briefly when then I take the barrel from your hand, a slight sip afore setting it to ring wet the dust of the sill's neglect, and step into your gait. Your eyes glint yesterday’s splendor, hue blue and deceiving. I allow the lie to live, release its throat to breathe. We are young again, ducking the moon in dance.

—We don’t have a dog.

—We did . . . dip, turn and glide. . . .

—Seventeen years ago.

—The children, though? Tell me our children are in the next room . . . glide to turn, to pause. . . .

—They are, poisoned to sleep with arsenic. . . .

—And the cat? It’s been fed? spin from glide, step to turn. . . .

—You’ve yet to feed it.



Spin to dip, kiss.


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I am a writing instructor for an online college as well as the local community college here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I have been or will be published in the West Wind Review and Negative Suck, respectively.