The Moon Sneezed

Jack hadn't thought about it recently, but in a few months he would be only ten years old. Lost in a line of thought stemming from that, he missed his name on the roll call.

Leela poked his back, "That's you."

Jack looked up and heard the fifth grade teacher repeat his name. He said that he was here and started to remember where he was. He would have to stop daydreaming in class like that, one of these days the teacher would notice. Leela had said once that she didn't think that the teacher could perceive anything past the too-weak spectacles that perched on the end of her nose, but nonetheless Jack didn't like taking the chance.

An hour later, the board was covered with figures and the class was restless. A monotone shriek pierced the halls. The bell had good timing. The girls on the other side of the room started chattering loudly, some of the boys gathered around the fish tank in the back of the room, a few went outside, some gathered around the boy who had been playing his Gameboy upside down for the last half hour under his desk. The teacher had her head turned down to her desk, shuffling through papers and scratching a red pen at them occasionally. The boy sitting next to Jack, whom everyone called Stubby looked around cautiously and stood. They said that he had swallowed two balloons when he was little. One had gone to his stomach, the other to his head and as a result, he looked like a giant peanut. He waddled carefully over to the blackboard by Jack and picked up an eraser. He took a step back, ran toward the board full-force and slammed the eraser into the milky green surface as hard as he could. Jack did admit to himself that 'full-force' for Stubby wasn't too threatening. However, he did manage to create a full cloud of chalk dust that settled eventually on Jack's dark, scraggly hair. What on earth was he thinking? Jack watched motionlessly with one eyebrow raised as Stubby looked around the room nonchalantly and repeated his act twice.

Leela had gone to get a carton of milk at the break and walked through the door just before Stubby's last outburst. She returned to her seat behind Jack and coughed, "Stubby! What are you doing?"

He smiled sheepishly at them, "Trying to surprise the blackboard."

Jack blinked.

Leela's mind worked quickly, "With an eraser? How could an eraser be a surprise to a chalkboard?" She pushed her long, shiny brown hair behind her small shoulders.

Stubby was harmless, why not play his games with him? "Try a bowling ball," Jack added.

Stubby's face sank, then brightened. He fumbled to the front of the class and started drawing bowling balls on the front chalkboard. The teacher looked up from her work at him, seemed to decide that he wasn't doing anything wrong, and then returned to her papers.

Leela tousled Jack's hair to remove the chalk dust, "Jack?"

Jack turned sideways in his chair and faced Leela. His usually crumpled visage smoothed out a little bit as he saw his friend’s familiar face.

"Do you get this stuff?" She clunked her hand down on the math homework.

"Long division? Sure. You need help with it?"

"You read my mind," she replied with a smile. Jack picked up the carton of milk and held it up as if to ask permission. She nodded. He closed one eye and stared hard at the cow on the front before taking a sip.

"Come by my place this afternoon and I'll show you. It's not really that hard once you get the pattern." Leela lived in the same apartment building that Jack had moved into at the beginning of the summer. The girl he had found waiting in his new building was open and outgoing. It was a good thing she was, otherwise they never would have become friends, for Jack was anything but. She'd cracked Jack's hard exterior and earned herself the distinction of being the only person allowed to call him by his nickname. Of course, no one else even knew he had a nickname. Leela had been kind enough not to use it in front of anyone.

"Hi Jackie," Leela walked into his room. Jack sat at his desk with a well-worn blue dictionary open in front of him. "Got a new vocabulary word for me?" She sat on the stool next to him. It seemed Leela had grown fond of Jack's love of words. Half the time when they were together, he'd use words that she'd never heard before, that she shouldn't possibly be able to understand, but she almost always got the message.

Jack remembered one time when Leela had told him that he talked real sophisticated like her dad. When he wasn't drunk, that is, Jack had added silently. He knew she meant a compliment, but frowned all the same at the association.

"Today's word is ambitious," he took a big breath and sighed. "I like this one. It means you really want to do well and succeed in life." The word penetrated him. He had uttered it a dozen times before Leela had arrived, each time feeling his lungs fill with the charged air.

"Hmm... sounds like you." Leela looked up at the wall above his desk. He followed her gaze, passing over his John Wayne movie posters. "That's what I thought too," he replied and closed the dictionary. "Now, about that homework."

The bench had been covered in settled mist when they sat down to lunch and fog encapsulated the school even though the morning was well over. A noise from the classroom drew Jack and Leela away from tuna sandwiches in their shrouded cafe. When Jack tried the door the knob remained still, but the door moved towards him a few inches. Some of the boys were in the habit of trying to see how often they could sneak into the classroom at lunch without being caught. He glanced at the door frame and saw that masking tape covered the latch and kept the door from locking shut as he pulled the door open and stepped inside with Leela.

Inside, the same boys that had crowded around the fish tank the previous day were tearing down the watercolor scenes that a few of the girls had put on the outside of Winifred's tank. Winifred swam about innocently as her world brochure disappeared. The Russian winter and the moon over Italy made way for a few of the boys' faces pressed up against the glass. The rest surrounded Stubby, pushing him occasionally.

"I... uh, I don't think..." Stubby stuttered.

The tall boy interrupted him, "Yeah, I know you don't think. So I'm telling you: I dare you to swallow Winifred."

Another boy egged him on, "You've gotta do it."

"No, he doesn't," Leela retorted loudly.

Stubby's shaking subsided slightly as he stepped behind his two rescuers. "Get out of here Leela," the tall boy sighed, "and take your cowardly boyfriend with you."

"Hey," Jack snapped in a quiet voice, "Stubby doesn't have to listen to you and neither do we."

"Yeah," Stubby gained courage and his face flushed, "and I'm not gonna swallow Winifred."

Jack had moved in front of Leela and Stubby. Oh God, he hoped he didn't have to fight him. Though scenes with John Wayne flashed through his mind, the thinness of Jack's frame didn't allow him much weight to throw into a punch. Besides, he thought, this wasn't the reason he was at school. The other boys fought in the school yard occasionally, but Jack always felt somehow afraid of the violence, as if he would be infected by coming too close.

The tall boy made one quick motion and Jack flinched. But instead of moving to hit him, he plunged his fist into the fish tank, caught the fish by the tail, and pulled it out of the water. Jack watched, his eyes glued to the motion, as the tall boy's hand took small, wavering detours on its path towards his open mouth. In a moment, Winifred was gone and the boy dropped his wet hand to his side. He gulped, "See? Nothing to it." No one replied; they were too absorbed in the changing color of his face. Winifred must have wiggled all the way down to his stomach. The tall boy's eyes widened. He opened his mouth as if to say something and shut it. His face turned the color of the plastic plants inside the empty tank. And within a few seconds, Winifred came back up along with his lunch. Too late it had occurred to Jack that perhaps standing right in front of the boy wasn't the best place to be. His chest was warm. Before looking at himself, he glanced at the others. Leela looked nauseous. The last time he had seen someone throw up, he had looked as green as she did. But when he beheld for himself his no-longer-white shirt, he realized that he didn't feel as sick as he anticipated. He watched as the orange lump dripped lifelessly down his front to the floor.

He had woken the next morning when the sky first began to change from black, dressed quickly, and slipped out his window quietly, so as to not wake his mother. Jack moved through the clean streets in a sleepy stupor, without a single thought on his mind. These mornings out allowed him time to think about anything or nothing, as he desired. Reaching the park, he stepped into the dimly lit brush and reached into a pile of leaves. His thin hand closed around the makeshift fishing rod he had constructed over the summer in anticipation of the Christmas present his mother had promised.

When he got that new rod, he'd be ready. The long oak stick bore loops made from paper clips and a length of nylon line wound around an offspringing twig near the end. Jack had fashioned a hook from a paper clip and attached it to the end of his line. As a finishing touch, Leela had pilfered two bottles of clear nail polish from her sister's boudoir to coat the thing. It reflected the early morning light as Jack arrived at the edge of the lake. Leela was there already, lying back in the grass and gazing at the cool, deep blue sky. Far across the water, a tiny grocer opened his miniature doors to the empty sidewalks. Occasionally, a car moved along one of the four streets surrounding the park. The city buildings stood tall and silent around them. Soon they would begin to hum; the sun would begin to scorch the sky; and Jack and Leela would return home to their beds just in time to be woken for breakfasts, baths, and school.

"Hey Leela," Jack sat next to her and started untangling his line.

"Can you see the man in the moon?"

Jack turned his eyes up to her from the mass at his clumsy fingertips, "How can you see him if he's in the moon?"

"It's not a real man, Jackie," she protested, "the dark parts just look like a face."

"I don't see it." He squinted his already scrunched up eyes even more toward the full moon.

"It doesn't look like in storybooks. Mama was reading to the baby last night and the moon was smiling real big, like this." Leela turned her face to Jack and pulled it tight in a giant grimacing grin. "And the cow was jumping over it."

Jack's eyes smiled at Leela's dramatic interpretation as he finished with the line. "That's an ambitious cow," he commented.

"I was thinking, what if the moon wasn't smiling... what if it was sneezing?"

Jack laughed, "I think that would blow the cow off-course."

"What a picture!" Leela flailed her arms wildly.

"And no one there to say 'bless you.'" He pulled a curled up leaf off of where it had gotten stuck on his pole. "Bait," he presented it for Leela's eyes. Jack attached the leaf to his hook, pulled half the line off its reel and cast into the water. Leela pulled her hands behind her head and settled back into her sky-gazing. Jack tugged the pole upward twice and reeled in the slack with his free hand. There were fish here, he knew, he watched them snap at the surface nearly every day, but he had never caught any. He supposed real bait would help, but then, he was cautious of his rod and he was sure it would snap if he ever had to reel anything in. Besides, Leela had suggested getting bait once but she repealed the suggestion when she started picturing the act of spearing a creature onto Jack's bent paperclip.

He guessed leaves would do.

After they parted outside the apartment building, Jack climbed the fire escape to the cracked window of his room. He changed back into his pajamas quietly, but he didn't feel like going back to bed. He had been restless lately. He smelled frightening things growling and waiting inside him, as if the monsters under the bed had migrated. These things at once frightened him and calmed him; he felt strangely that he could relate with them. Jack padded softly to the television in the other room and pushed a video into the VCR. John Wayne came onto the screen in full Technicolor glory as Jack sat transfixed.

Wayne stood outside a hotel rolling a cigarette with his Winchester on the other side of the porch. Soon, the Marshall would come for the villain John Wayne had caught. Jack watched in awe as three bad guys suddenly attacked him. Unable to reach his rifle, he surrendered. They ordered him to drop his gunbelt and march down to the jail to release the prisoner. Jack loved this scene, he'd watched it over and over again. It would end with John Wayne offering his sidekick, Colorado, a position as his deputy. At the moment, though, Colorado distracted the bad guys, threw the Winchester to the unarmed Wayne, and drew his pair of six-shooters. His eyes never once left the fight scene that followed. People had asked Jack what he wanted to be when he grew up. When everyone else said they had aspirations of being astronauts and firefighters, he always said something normal like the others. But inside, his biggest drive was to be his hero, with that legendary bravery and honor.

A door across the room squeaked open and Jack's mother stepped out in a faded purple bathrobe. She stood for a moment taking in the scene before she began ranting about all the violence in the media today. She wouldn't have her son watching that shit. She walked over and pressed the power button on the gray television. The image flickered from the screen but the video, untouched in the black VCR, continued to play. Jack remained seated and listened to the tape's still hum until his mother ordered him to get ready for school. He left the VCR running as he went to his room and changed back into his clothes.

In the past, they had limited their outings to once every few days, but Jack had snuck out every morning with Leela since the incident with Winifred last week. Jack had been feeling something welling up inside him that was different from the cowardice he was used to. He couldn't put his finger on it, but it gave him the strangest feelings. Or rather, normal feelings at what seemed like the wrong times. So he sat and fished with Leela. At least being with Leela felt right.

He was on his way to the park in the early morning, listening to the city's still hum, when he noticed something he hadn't before. Along the sidewalk, a ratted shoe was sticking out from beneath a pile of newspaper. He stopped, puzzled, and looked at it closer. There was a dirty foot in the shoe, and a leg attached quite normally to the foot, which disappeared under the review of a Western movie. Before he could read the headline, the pile of paper twitched and Jack leapt backwards. A cold eye peered from beneath the papers. He paused for half a second and then ran till he had rounded the next corner.

Why hadn't he ever noticed the homeless man before? He walked past there every morning and, thinking back on it, the pile of newspapers had been there nearly every time. The morning air felt crisp on his teeth as he inhaled. Adrenaline coursed his veins like spiders sprinting over his skin.

Jack wondered what else he hadn't seen and took a shortcut through the next alley. His mind cried danger, but his guts didn't listen. His limbs took over.

He moved through the alleyway stealthily, not really expecting to find anything but spurred onwards by his adrenaline high. A muffled scream pierced the moonlit air and dove back down to silence. Jack froze in his tracks. Though the morning was quiet, a thousand trains of thought sped through his head, rattling furiously. First came the call to run. He ignored it, he had heard it too many times. An image of John Wayne flickered onto the back of his eye, but his new-found consciousness dismissed his desire to be the hero as foolish -- a dead-end road. This thought startled Jack in its blatant disregard for what he had thought in the past. It was as if someone else was inside of him making the decisions for him. In the end, curiosity won out; he wanted to know both what was happening and how he would feel about it. Jack ducked behind a dumpster, crept to the edge and looked around the corner.

A woman was lying on the ground near the far brick wall of the alley. She wore running shorts, a t-shirt and tennis shoes. Jack strained his eyes in the early morning light to see if he could recognize her, but her brown hair covered her face. In the shadow of the wall, a tall figure stood over her. He kicked her side. She groaned and rolled over. Jack tried to turn his eyes away, but he was mesmerized. The figure knelt next to her and tore her shirt. Muffled voices called frantically for help inside Jack's head, but an intense calmness came over him that reminded him of what he had dreamt the last few moments of drowning were like. The voices did not leave his head, but he felt no concern for them. Jack watched unflinchingly as the man probed her body and beat her. When the man stood and walked away, the woman lay still. Jack continued to watch her in horror-stricken fascination. A few minutes later, she moved and began to crawl toward the street. Jack waited until she was gone before he stepped from his hiding place.

He looked at his shaking hands. Blood rushed to his head, but then again, it almost felt as if his heart was spouting a different liquid than blood. It seemed that if he were to cut his hand right then, it would not be red that spurted out, but blue or brown or black. Jack realized that he should be home soon. He had the energy, so he ran the whole way.

It began to rain later that day. The drops pounded on the windows of the classroom at lunch as the students ate and chatted inside.

"Missed ya this morning," Leela commented.

Jack hadn't been very talkative at school with Leela that day. He had fallen asleep when he got home that morning and the scene had replayed itself in his dreams, only this time the woman was Leela and he had felt the exact same excited calm as he heard her cries. Now he felt uncomfortable being near Leela. The new consciousness had completely overtaken him, he thought. He both revelled and brooded in the idea.

"I slept in. Guess I was really tired," he replied.

"Are you going fishing tomorrow?" she questioned him. "The rain is supposed to stop this afternoon."

"No," he lied.

She met him there anyway. Half of Jack was glad that Leela knew him so well that she could even see through his lies. He was glad to have company he could trust. Yet, he was afraid of trusting himself; he'd visited the same scene again in his dreams last night. It had morphed again to where the woman was still Leela, but the strange man was the one hiding behind the dumpster, and Jack was in the alley kicking her side and harassing his best friend. What frightened him was that all of the strange feelings he had experienced were the same, only more natural. He had questioned less his deeds and the way his mind muted out the cries for help.

Leela lay on her stomach in the grass, ignoring the mud that spattered her shirt. She stared at the still damp ground. "Look at all the worms." She began to sing to herself, "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me. I’m gonna go eat worms. Big fat..." Her eyes fixed on one worm that slithered along with both ends appearing thicker than the center. "Oh look! This one looks like Stubby!" she laughed.

Jack looked down at it as he prepared his rod. Quickly, he snatched it up and affixed it to his hook, pulled half the line off its reel, and cast out.

Leela stared at him with her mouth open and eyebrows knitted together in disbelief. Oh, what strange bliss how her gaze seemed to burn into the side of his head, Jack thought. Suddenly, for the first time, something tugged on his line. That had been almost instantaneous! Just think how many fish he could have caught by now using bait. He reeled in as best he could, his thin hands winding quickly. Within a minute, he held the slimy thing in his hands. She flipped and flopped frantically at first, then it slowed and became motionless. A week and a half ago, he would have been horrified at this, but Jack felt the drowning feeling come over him again. He smiled as he put the dead fish back in the water. He took a deep breath, smelling salt and black blood.