The Moon and Venus

The Moon and Venus
11/14/2014

He slowed his gait. Perhaps not so much for the children playing in the street just before them, but also because of the street signs indicating the intersection of roads he knew so well in his youth.

It was Sunday. The morning sun was slowly biting away at the night’s chill. To the right runs the stream in which he caught fish as a boy. Just ahead, the bridge that leads across to the chapel. It would be the first time he walked across the bridge with his infant son.

She stood there in the warm quiet, looking through the opening in the translucent shades. She drew nearer the window like a ghost. The floor creaked under the slow, clumsy placement of her steps. Her dim reflection in the ICY pane floated into view, and became the reproaching stare of her long dead mother. She wiped her foggy breath from the window with the edge of her hand, rested her head gently against the crown glass, and let her fingers trail down to her side creating fresh streaks in the frost.

It was him. He was again walking through the small town setting just outside her once COZY home. He strolled along happily with his wife as she held their infant child close to her breast under the WRAP of her woolen coat. They strode through her own reflection in the window. It was like the coming of age of a recurring dream she had had for years. The CHEESE cloth in her hand fell to the floor at her feet.

"I should never have walked away from you," she whispered into the window with a mouth full of pity meant only partially for him. The rest she reserved for herself and the life she once envisioned.

Strolling just off the comfort of her front porch was the man who once told her that her beauty was only matched by the subtle promenade between the Moon and Venus across the crisp night air of the Autumn sky. Each Fall, it seemed, even now, she couldn’t help but anticipate, and then gaze at the night sky hoping to witness the unfailing celestial event that brought her back to him.

In the extent of his view, he thought he saw a figure in the window. He shot a second glance as he bent down to pick up a stone in the road. “PAIN,” he thought to himself, “is born of the splicing of past and future visions, then matures, and finally comes of age in the timeless world of the heart. After a while, it may simply become the twinge in a knowing smile. But not always,” he thought. “Sometimes it’s more than that.” He found only darkness in the window.

He turned his back on the home across the street, and tossed the stone into the swirling water. Thin layers of Ice formed at the waters edge. The splash was too distant to be heard, and at once hidden by the dark current and carried away.

The young man, his wife and child, then turned together and walked up and over the bridge and out of view of the neatly kept home that looked out upon the gentle scene.

The woman in the house wiped her cheek with the tips of her fingers and turned away.