A Curious Moon

By Elsie Steane

You sit next to me on the bench. It is so much easier to have these conversations when one doesn’t have to look at the other. I imagine that is why confession booths are like that. And why the worst conversations all happen in the car. Tonight we have our confession booth.

I winced when I first sat down, because the wood was moist on my thighs. I wish I had worn trousers. But by now I have warmed the bench and it’s not so bad. You are wearing the jeans I said I liked, with the stains. We both dressed up to split apart. It’s funny.

I am taking the lead at last. I have taken it miles too late. I’ve been looking backwards ever since we started; wondering, should I have gotten on? But the rattlesome wheels rolled on.

“I still want to be your friend, though.”

I look up at the sky when I say it, and the moon is sharp and wicked. A curling scythe. Harvest. I have harvested just what I liked from you.

I don’t know it, but you will cry when you get home. I didn’t know that you could do that. I didn’t know I meant so much to you.

That’s a lie.

I watch your fingers play on your guitar. You’ve just polished the strings, and when in a moment we come back into your room after eating a tin of peaches, we’ll realise how it bad it smells. But at the moment we don’t notice. We are both thinking how we can still taste each other’s mouths. We are drunken on cutesy relationship things that you said you wanted to try. And I know that you are in danger.

There are spots on your shoulders, red lumps and brown with pale rings around like moons. They look like they hurt. I think you have been picking them. I would like to reach out and pick them, too. Leave craters on your skin; fill my nails with your scabs.

I rest my chin on my knees as I watch you. I don’t know the song; our tastes are so very different; but I will learn the songs you like. I’ll learn every one. But I won’t tell you.

When you turn your head to look at me I have looked away. I am afraid that you will kiss me.

I knew you were going to kiss me when you asked if I would like to go Lochend Park after the ceilidh. I knew it when I smiled and said yes, I’d love to go. I knew it when you ran to the petrol station and came back with two Cokes and Jack Daniels in black cans. I knew it when you put your arm around me on the bench and kept telling me which bird I would be, which dessert I would be, which cat I would be, if I were a bird, a dessert, a cat. I knew it when you came to the ceilidh with a haircut, and suddenly I was sure about you (I thought), and suddenly I would not mind if you kissed me. It was that haircut I blame.

I hid my face afterward. I felt ashamed. Impure. I had lied to you, too. “I have never done that before.” I said it because it would please you. It did.

“The Cokes were a good idea. You taste so yummy.”

But every kiss after that tasted just like shame. I never turned you down. I was always a wretched people-pleaser. And always you were teasing me, that I was the one who leaned in first. I hated that. Again you said it, again and again and again. Like I was capable of taking the lead.

Big black droplets ripple the swampy pond. Rain rivulets down my neck. I hear the nuck-nuck-nucking of a squirrel in the tree. The air smells pondlike, metallic and green. There is absolutely no moon at all.

It’s easy to pretend love happens to you, like rain. Rather than admitting you walked into it on purpose. Even though you knew that coat was no longer waterproof.

I hear your distant cry, my name, from across the dripping field. I pretend I don’t hear you. It is so peaceful alone by the pond. The rain sinks through my coat and touches my moistened skin.

“Hey, this is my friend Eddie from Perth. He comes here now.”

“Hi, Eddie.”

“Hey.”

I didn’t pay much attention to you. You were just some kid my friend knew from home. A ‘cool’ guy. Not my type certainly. It was a bring-and-share picnic for returners, and you just tagged along. You were the guy who dived for the frisbee and got grass stains all down his jeans. I remember. Not my type, for sure. I was still thinking about Sam anyway. Sam, who strung me along. After all that pain, I never thought I would do the stringing. But I just say yes too easily. “Yes,” and suddenly I’m going to Prague. “Yes,” and suddenly I’ve learnt the flute. “Yes,” and suddenly I’m someone’s girlfriend. Yes and yes and yes.

“Yo. Do you have any time this week? Do you wanna meet up and do something?”

“Yes.”

And yes. And yes.

Elsie Steane is in her second year studying English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She loves exploring character in her fiction and is currently writing her fourth novel, a lighthearted fantasy under the working title ‘Wren, Pectus and Spike’.