Maybe the Moon

dignity.”
    “I suppose.”
    “It would work, Cady, I know. And with you singing it…it would rip their hearts out.”
    I felt a tiny alarm go off. “Is that what we wanna do?”
    He shrugged.
    “I’m not a poster child, Neil.”
    “I know that.”
    “If your friend wants that…”
    “She doesn’t. I told her all about you—what a great person you were, what a strong and beautiful spirit. She gets it, Cady, she really does.”
    Neil had never said anything like this to me directly, so I felt myself reddening on the spot.
    “Maybe I’m out of line,” he added.
    “No. I see what you’re after.”
    “You do?”
    I nodded.
    “You could sing something more upbeat, I guess.”
    “Fuck that. I want hearts ripped out.”
    He laughed; we both laughed.
    “We’d have a good time doing it,” he said. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”
    “I hear you.”
    “You’ll do it, then?”
    “Why the fuck not?”
    “Great.”
    “OK.”
    His gorgeous brown eyes settled on me for a moment, then seemed to turn nervous, darting away distractedly. “Think we’ve played hooky too long?”
    I smiled at him. “You’re the boss. Who’s gonna rap your knuckles?”
    “Yeah, but…”
    “What’s the matter? You leave Tread in charge?”
    “You got it.”
    “He can handle it,” I said.
    “Yeah, but we don’t know what happens to him during an eclipse.”
    We both thought this was hilarious. We were laughing our asses off, in fact, when the object of our amusement came loping around the corner, big red whiskers akimbo. “Oh, hi, guys. Been lookin’ for you.”
    We greeted him in unison, looking guilty as hell.
    “Mrs. Morris wants you. There’s a big toast or somethin’ coming up.”
    “Oh…well.” Neil gave me a wry, conspiratorial look, then hopped to his feet and brushed dead grass off his butt. A round of muted applause—more solar worship, no doubt—rolled toward us from the house. I rose and shook the wrinkles out of my Pierrette outfit, feeling somehow that an idyll had passed.
    Tread was predictably stoked about the eclipse—what a mystical, primal, humanizing thing it was—and proceeded to tell us about how he’d taken special care to align his crystals for this morning of mornings. Neil was sweet and kept a straight face throughout, though his smile seemed just on the verge of bolting for freedom like a herd of white horses. I didn’t dare catch his eye. Tread’s a real bran flake sometimes, but there’s no point in hurting his feelings. The fact that Neil understands this—and knows that I know he does—makes me like him even more.
    “Look at the ground,” Tread said, as the three of us headed back to the festivities. “The best show is down there.”
    I looked and saw nothing.
    “What do you mean?” asked Neil.
    “I think you have to smoke something,” I said.
    “Now wait a minute,” said Tread. “Just look.”
    “I’m looking.”
    “See all the little crescents?”
    I did see them. What I’d accepted as the usual variegation of light and shadow was, in fact, thousands of tiny half-moons—half-suns, if you prefer—scattered across the ground like the hairpins of an untidy goddess.
    “They’re photographs,” Tread explained. “Under the trees here the leaves filter the light, so it actually takes a picture of the eclipse.”
    “Amazing,” murmured Neil.
    “Yeah,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Good one.”
    Tread gave me a big, crooked, metaphysical grin—about as close as he ever comes to saying I told you so. “You should look down more often.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Sure. There’s good stuff everywhere.”
    “I’ll try to remember that,” I said.

    It’s dark now and I’m in my bedroom, looking out at the same moon that caused all that commotion this morning. Renee is in the living room, painting snowy peaks with her secret television lover. The world is back to normal again, they tell us, but I can’t help feeling expectant, on the brink of something truly significant. Neil says his video friend, whose name is Janet Glidden, will want to get started right away. That’s fine with me, though I’m not nearly as thin as I’d like to be. Oh, well. I’ll wrap myself in something dark and get the makeup right and do it all under a three-watt blue bulb. The voice is what counts, anyway.
    Jeff called earlier this evening to say he’d recognized my legs in that cellulite infomercial. We had a good laugh about it. I asked him, proceeding carefully,