By the light of the moon

the maddening
routine, year after year, always the same clothes, the narrow
little list of crap you'll eat, always washing your hands twice,
always nine minutes under the shower, never eight, never ten,
always precisely nine, and all your life with your head bowed,
staring at your shoes, always the same stupid fears, the same
maddening tics and twitches, deedle-doodle-deedle, always the
endless repetition, the endless stupid repetition!'
    '—filbert, coconut, peanut—'
    With the index finger of his right hand, Dylan attempted to lift
the lid of his brother's left eye, tried to pry it open. 'Look at
me, Shep, look at me, look, look.'
    '—chestnut, hickory nut—'
    Although standing with his arms slack at his sides and offering
no other resistance, Shep squeezed his eyes shut, foiling Dylan's
insistent finger.
    '—butternut, Brazil nut—'
    'Look at me, you little shit!'
    '—kola nut, pistachio—'
    'LOOK AT ME!'
    Shep stopped resisting, and his left eye flew open, with the lid
pressed almost to his eyebrow under the tip of Dylan's finger.
Shep's one-eyed stare, as direct a moment of contact as ever he'd
made with his brother, was an image suitable for any horror-movie
poster: the essence of terror, the look of the victim just before
the alien from another world rips his throat open, just before the
zombie tears his heart out, just before the lunatic psychiatrist
trepans his skull and devours his brain with a good Cabernet.
    LOOK AT ME... LOOK AT ME... Look at me...
    Dylan heard those three words echoing back from the surrounding
hills, decreasing in volume with each repetition, and though he
knew that he was listening to his own furious shout, the voice
sounded like that of a stranger, hard and sharp with a steely anger
of which Dylan would have thought himself incapable, but also
cracking with a fear that he recognized too well.
    One eye tight shut, the other popped to the max, Shepherd said,
'Shep is scared.'
    They were looking at each other now, just like Dylan had wanted,
eye to eye, a direct and uncompromising connection. He felt pierced
by his brother's panicked stare, as breathless as if his lungs had
been punctured, and his heart clenched in pain as though skewered
by a needle.
    'Shep is s-s-scared.'
    The kid was scared, sure enough, flat-out terrified, no denying
that, perhaps more frightened than he'd ever been in twenty years
of frequent bouts of fright. And while but a moment ago he might
have been afraid of the radiant tunnel by which he had traveled in
a blink from the eastern Arizona desert to the California coast,
his alarm now arose from another cause: his brother, who in an
instant had become a stranger to him, a shouting and abusive
stranger, as though the sun had played a moon trick, transforming
Dylan from a man into a vicious wolf.
    'Sh-shep is scared.'
    Horrified by the expression of dread with which his brother
regarded him, Dylan withdrew his pinning finger from Shep's arched
eyelid, let go of the kid's head, and stepped back, shaking with
self-disgust, remorse.
    'Shep is scared,' the kid said, both eyes open wide.
    'I'm sorry, Shep.'
    'Shep is scared.'
    'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to scare you, buddy. I didn't mean
what I said, not any of it, forget all that.'
    Shepherd's shocked-wide eyelids lowered. He let his shoulders
slump, too, and bowed his head and cocked it to one side, assuming
the meek demeanor and the awkward posture with which he announced
to the world that he was harmless, the humble pose that he hoped
would allow him to shuffle through life without calling attention
to himself, without inviting any notice from dangerous people.
    The kid hadn't forgotten the confrontation this quickly. He was
still plenty scared. He hadn't gotten over his hurt feelings,
either, not in a wink; he might never get over them. Shepherd's
sole defense in every situation, however, was to mimic a turtle:
quickly pull all the vulnerable parts under the shell, hunker down,
hide in the armor of indifference.
    'I'm sorry, bro. I don't know what got into me. No. No, that
isn't true. I know exactly what got into me. The old jimjams, the
whimwhams, the old boogeyman bitin' on my bones. I got scared,
Shep. Hell, I am scared, so scared I can't think straight.
And I don't like being scared, don't like it one bit. It's not
something I'm used to, and so I took my frustration out on you, and
I never should've done that.'
    Shepherd shifted his weight from left foot to right, right foot
to left. The expression