The Smiling Moon

This story is about a man who died. He died on the night that he sat atop building that overlooked Dogtown, a city he hated. He hated the lights that illuminated nothing. He hated the lanes that guided no one. He hated the pier, the city's ever-erect phallus. Its people were liars and its God was child with a stick. He hated his mother who hated him and his father who couldn't bother to. What he hated most was that this was all a lie.

The truth was something he feared more than death itself. The truth was something he tried to chase away with a bottle of sour wine. He screamed at it from the back alley of bars and the storefront of gas stations. When it didn't leave, he ran. It never chased him, but was always there. It stood quietly, waiting like a patient father. He was a child, however, who only turned toward it to spit and scream, but never had the courage to look it in the eye. Because the truth was something he could not understand, and this terrified him.

He could not understand why he saw, from the moment of memory, the apprehension in his father's eyes when he said “I love you,” or the fear in his mother's voice when she told him “No”. He did not understand why his siblings loved them without reserve, never questioning them like he did. He could not understand why his parents smiled when he walked, but frowned when he wandered.

At school, books kept their words from him, but gave freely to his peers. He instead, saw words in the sky. These were words of rain and words of wind. They told him why the sun set and the moon rose. They told him why trees grow and flowers wilt. When he tried to tell his teachers of what he learned, however, they only scolded him. They said he was distracted, that he was rude. They told him that the only truth lied in the books that never spoke to him. So he tried to leave, but his parents sent him back. They told him that his future was in those books, so he decided that he had no future.

Life became easier after that. When a teacher scolded him, he screamed at them until they left. When someone pushed him, he punched them until they bled. Before long, nobody spoke to him. He did not care. He instead spoke to the glistening steel of the playground swing set and the concrete below. They told him how metal was bent and kept in place. This made him happy. Then, one day, twelve years after his birth, nothing spoke to him anymore.

Instead, his dreams began to scream. They screamed painful yellows and blistering greens. They screamed burning blues and freezing pinks. They trapped him, sometimes until noon, but gave him no rest. He tried to tell his parents, but they said he was a liar. Their eyes, however, showed the truth. They were afraid. They could not understand why he didn't want to read and why he fought with everyone. They didn't understand why he spoke to trees and the sky above. They could offer him no foundation, no support, and so he continued to fall. By the age of fifteen, he left school. His mother was too scared to stop him, and his father could not bring himself to care anymore. From dusk to dawn, he wandered the city streets. Sometimes he begged it, begged for it to again speak to him. It never did. Sometimes he sat atop his house, staring up at the moonlit sky in tears. He felt that he had wronged it, and that its silence was his punishment.

On the day of his eighteenth birthday, he destroyed his home. His father had caught him drinking on the roof again, and without thinking the boy threw the empty bottle at his head. Tables were left overturned, chairs in pieces. Cutting words that, once spoken, could never be taken back were thrown between the two. The mother could only take his siblings and hide, quietly weeping as she watched her family be destroyed before her. By the end of the night the house that had raised him spat him out onto the cold, quiet concrete and slammed its door behind him.

For three years after he wandered as a pitiful vagrant that allowed no pity. He bit every hand that fed him. He could not hold a job for more than a month before something: a sharp word or a false smile, caused him to lash out at everyone around him. Every night, he wept angry tears into a bottle of sour wine and cursed the sky that continued to shun him. Then, on a burning day in May, this changed.

His screaming dreams began to sing. They sang feverish songs of life abundant and free. Days passed by in a blur. He did not care. He continued to chase his sleep and the wonderful dreams that awaited him. They soon began to sing to him tales of a land long forgotten and of the wolves that ruled it absolutely. The largest and most powerful of these wolves held the face of his father. Unlike the father he knew, his eyes were alive with a proud fire that could not be extinguished. He gave true guidance to his children, and always lead them down the right path. His anger was pure, and his destruction paved the way for new life.

He dreamed of his mother who smiled without fear and the courtship between her and Father Wolf. Without a word he knew her name, Luna. She loved her husband without reserve, and children she bore for him even more so. When the night rose above the primordial land, she would dance with reckless abandon and sing with a shameless fervor. She taught her children how to truly be free.

Then he awoke, sitting on the roof of an old, long abandoned warehouse that rested atop a mountain that overlooked the city beneath him. His gaze was pulled to the large waning moon above him. In that instant, his heart erupted. It tore itself to pieces and it was, on that night, that the man died. His flesh was ripped, his bones and tendons twisted into impossible shapes. He screamed as every nerve in his body burned hotter than the surface of the sun. His mind was flooded with molten thoughts of such intensity that his very sense of self melted away. Beneath it all, his soul was being pressed. Pressure built, his soul becoming a searing, blinding core. Finally, it burst and ripped through him. In a single moment, bones realigned and his muscles tripled in size. Uncontrollable life sprung from his very pores as a thick coat of black fur covered his body. From within the tattered remains of his human heart emerged a larger, prouder heart. From beneath the molten lake within his mind arose an unshakable sense of purpose. Knowledge that was kept from him his entire life was laid bare as bounty for him to feast on without reserve.

As potent, powerful blood pumped from his new heart, he smelled the midnight air. It was sweeter than he remembered and stuffed with life. As he took it into his lungs, a tremor began to bubble from his throat. As it poured into his mouth, he snapped his head back and from his lips burst a declaration of who he was. After the last of his breath left him, he again saw the moon that had set him free, and she was smiling.