moon child

A Story by Micah

tears dissolve in black coffee, the lights blend the contours of your back into the dark colors of the wooden table. the cafe is empty, it's three a.m., and the owner glares at you from behind a cell-phone screen.

you pick up the coffee cup- it's been cold for hours now. you've cried so much into the poor mug that it should not be considered black coffee anymore, but instead some sort of water-coffee mix, complete with the smell of saltwater.

they'd probably sell something like that here, actually.

you sit and count the eyes on the table and the number of hearts carved into it (6, 18) and you stare at the note written about 'love', dated 1984. you stare at the cinnamon-roll icing that has been smeared into one of the carvings of someone's initials. you stare. you stare and the tears keep dripping from your chin. your neck is sticky with the ones too weak to jump, your eyelashes full of the ones too smart to unclump.

"uh," the owner says, she's next to you now, tall and looming and her apron is stuck too tight to her waist. "here. it's on the house." she places a soft piece of apple pie in front of you.

you look up at her. she continues to flap her tongue at you; "here's a glass of milk, too. let me know if you need anything else, alright sir?"

you thank her in a voice rife with misuse. she smiles. she walks away. she looks at her phone again, and she reads a novel in it, a nice novel, a long one.

you eat the food she gave you faster than you've ever eaten anything before, but you only drink a bit of the milk (milk is your favorite beverage but the cup seemed to be begging you not to drink too much of it, 'i have a family', the milk wept, 'please, spare me!')

after you've pulled four out of six buttons off of your shirt, a tall, slender figure enters the shoppe and the bell on the door sings brighter than it ever has before.

the clerk does not look up before saying "hello, siel."

you turn to stare at siel, and he seems to glide across the floor to the counter. "hello, maria. pancakes, please."

"it's not fair that i cook for you, you know."

he tilts his head at that statement. "but nothing i could ever conjure up could compare to your works of art."

as owner-turned-maria heads back into the kitchen, siel turns to you, and he stares as if decoding a foreign language. his dark brows- deeper and darker than any night sky he's ever seen before, with more depth than depression personified- are cinched and his lips are separated with a breadth's width. "hello." he says, in a voice not unlike fog.

you, self-conscious of your creaking voice, do not say anything. you nod to acknowledge him before turning back to the fork you were engraving with a seam-ripper. he is forty paces from you but his eyes feel like they are hovering above your shoulder.

"one order of pancakes," maria says, emerging from the beaded curtain that lead to the kitchen (or perhaps a boiler room, or a bedroom, you do not need a kitchen to make food).

siel thanks her and eats them so slowly that you feel agitated. halfway through, he turns and looks at you with eyes that reflect supernovas, and you no longer feel angry, or, as a matter of fact, anything at all.

"the engraving work you do," he drawled, "is very lovely. do you do such as a living?"

"uh, ah, no." your voice is smooth and the words felt as if they were being pulled from your mouth. "thanks."

"aracel." he says. how does he know your name? "may i tell you something?"

your shoulders straighten of someone else's jurisdiction and the voice that leaves your mouth is not your own; it is one you have heard in dreams and nightmares alike. "yes?"

siel nearly looks shy, but he smiles sadly and his eyelashes are whiter than snow. "i have been looking everywhere for you."

after a long silence, shooting stars fall from his eyes onto his cheeks and his hair loses shape, depth, everything, but gains galaxies within its locks. he trembles. he quakes, he

he hunches over and now the counter is being stained with ink from the heavens. you look down at your mug, and your heart catches in your throat. what used to be a deep brown is now a deep fuchsia, with oil film dancing on top, and the spots on the table that you cleaned with your sadness are faintly pink, too. your fingertips are pink. your elbows. you focus on your nose and yes- it too is pink. quickly rising, you decide to flee, but the door stops you- he stops you, suddenly he is in front of you, with his pale cheeks showing the tracks his sobs tore.

"do you remember me?" he asks.

"no." you're too calm right now, you think. who are these people? why is your skin pink? why isn't your heart racing, exploding?! you try so hard to feel anything yet --

he kisses you quickly on the lips and suddenly, you feel the universe expand in your ribcage. the stars that are born to die do exactly that inside your bones and your eyelids flash movie scenes at you, your ears replay dreams that you had pushed out of your mind. your mouth wilts but blooms again as everything comes back to you, as you remember him, siel, as you remember maria, as you remember everything about yourself that had sealed itself away in the depths of your brain. your cells die and come back to life as you are born again, born again as a son of the Universe, the son of an accident, the son of a collision.

you are aracel, and you are the moon's son.