Page 4 of In the Light of the Moon

I saw that her mug was empty and picked it up, walking over to the sink to rinse it out and place in the dishwasher I’d had to convince her to buy.

“Be that as it may,” Granna turned to look out the window, toward the yard and woods that were just a short ways beyond, “you’re not getting enough sun working evenings at that place. Sleeping all through the day.”

My eyes rolled when I was sure she couldn’t see, “Not everyone can spend their days gardening and reading by the creek, fancy lady.” Even in the dim light of the kitchen, I could see the darker brown shade her skin had adopted after many hours outside. How this woman didn’t have more wrinkles on her face aside from a handful of smile lines and an elegant set of crow’s feet was beyond me. She spent enough time in the sun to look twenty years older than she did now.

I looked down at my own hand, and, okay sure, she had a point. My own tawny coloring was a bit light for the summer weather. “Okay, how about we go explore tomorrow? You can keep teaching me your wise witchy ways, and I’ll get some vitamin D. Win-win.”

Granna chuckled absently with her eyes still somewhere beyond the large bay window, and after she didn’t make to turn around, I walked over to see if there was something out there. It was hard to see with the light from inside reflecting in the glass, but as I approached further, I couldn’t detect anything besides the small but full yard and the darkened silhouette of dense foliage.

I looked back down at my grandmother and saw that her eyes were tightened, as if confused or searching. Her slender chest was rising and falling much more quickly than it had been before, but her breaths were silent. Worry started making my hands twitch, and I placed one on her shoulder to try and get her attention, “Granna?”

But she just kept looking with that strange expression on her face, and I watched the empty yard, half expecting for some dark figure to appear.

After an increasingly agonizing amount of time, I gently nudged her. “The wolf will be here for you,” she said so quietly that I almost didn’t catch it, “and he’ll be waiting for me.”

Dread. That’s what her nonsensical words struck in me. She seemed to shake herself after that, pulling away from her watch of the night outside, and let me lead her out of the kitchen and upstairs to her room as if it hadn’t happened.

But these episodes were happening more and more. Her friend next door, Roz, had warned me about it after helping me get settled. She’d pulled me aside while Granna was in the restroom to let me know that while she was usually completely with it, she sometimes had these… slips. Where she seemed to go somewhere else and say things that didn’t make sense.

Over the three months that I’d been staying with her, it didn’t happen so often that I felt like I had to… call someone. She had regular appointments to her doctor, who was already aware ofthe occurrence and hadn’t found anything alarming. The woman was eighty years old and otherwise healthy.

But this was the second time in the past week. Were they getting worse? I tried to shake away the frantic train of thought my mind was spiraling into as I said goodnight to her and continued to my own room.

It was long ago cleared out after my mother moved out to live with my father and eventually have me, but I felt like I could still detect the faint scent of her.

The furniture in the room now was all that I brought from my old apartment, and I walked to the nightstand that I’d had since I was a teenager to plug in and set my phone down. It was nearly one in the morning now, and if I wanted to be up in time to meet my early rising grandmother, I needed to go to bed.

After scooping up my oversized t-shirt to change into, I made my way to the small bathroom down the hall that I’d claimed as my own. The steam from the shower quickly engulfed the room tiled in shades of green and pink.

I stood before the fogging mirror and began to strip off my jacket when a stinging pain made me hiss. The denim fabric dragged over a tender area on my forearm, and when I finally peeled the jacket off, my breath caught at the long gouge that ran between my elbow and wrist.

The blood was already clotted, but the area was surprisingly tender, especially since I hadn’t noticed it at all. My mind ran over what all I had done today, trying to remember how I’d scratched myself this badly. I was no stranger to finding unknown bruises from bumping into things and quickly moving on to whatever I was doing in that moment, but this was far from a stray bruise.

When the hot water of the shower hit my back, I carefully kept my arm out of the scalding spray and gently cleaned it bycarefully working in some of the unscented soap I kept in the shower shelf.

I fought pathetic whimpers as I cleaned the wound, and the memory of the man crouched over me, face vicious, made me gasp. How had I forgotten that? Granna’s words and his retreating form down the street had been in the forefront of my mind so boldly that I’d quickly forgotten how he reacted when I tried to check his wounds.

After running downstairs to the kitchen for the salve Granna helped me make last week, I continued my nighttime routine of braiding my hair and lotioning my skin. The homemade remedy eased some of the sting from the scratch, and when I laid my head down on my pillow, I couldn’t stop staring up at the ceiling, eyes wide open. My head slipped and slid on my silk pillowcase, body unable to settle and find a comfortable position, especially with the image of those bright, green eyes.

Would I ever see him again? Or, I gave a panicked swallow, what if what was happening to Granna… was happening to me? Could that even be possible? As far as I knew, her seeing and saying strange things was a newer occurrence, and I barely remembered my own mother to be able to know if she’d experienced anything like that. The guys at Vinny’s hadn’t seen him, right?

I turned on my side, keeping my freshly bandaged left arm outstretched so as to not rub it on my sheets. My finger trailed along the length of the cut, careful to only apply enough pressure to feel the existence of it. The answering twinge confirmed—assured—that the man was real. That I’d found him behind my part-time pizza gig and watched him limp down the street into the night like a phantom.

With who my grandmother was, I was certainly open to the possibility of something… otherworldly happening. But, with all that she did and taught me through the years, I’d never hadan experience like this one before. Surely at twenty-eight, I wouldn’t be seeing my first ghost now, right?

No,I thought to myself before sleep came up behind and swallowed me whole,I’m probably just losing it.

I sat on the boulder, feeling its solid, cool grounding. The air was warm, sticky. But the stream was burbling with cool, clear water, and the trees with their full canopies provided enough cover from the sun. Granna sat aways away, where she was enveloped by the rays of sunshine. Her gray hair shone white under the brightness, but the breeze through the forest coursed past us both. Sweat beaded on my temples, on my lower back, but it was easy to ignore here.

When I lived with my father, the city pressed in on my body and mind so closely that I grew accustomed to the claustrophobic sensation of being closed in and off from this. A wave of sadness threatened to beat against my legs, knock me down and drown me, but I inhaled through it just as another breeze cooled my heated skin. I let images of hospitals and his ashen brown skin and IV drips drift away on my exhale.

My childhood was filled with love from him and his side of my family, but a thread of anxiety always stayed within my grasp, always slipping and cutting through my fingers. Like holding onto it was the only commonality. What reminded me of me. The two weeks each summer, though, when I would visit with Granna, would smack upside my head and leave me drunk on stillness and connection.

As I grew older, where friends and self-image and sneaking out to make out with boys and girls felt more important thananything else, I drifted away from this peace once again. She never admonished me or made me feel selfish for exploring those parts of myself, for being swept up in the excitement of adolescence. And then my father’s illness completely swallowed the beginnings of my adulthood. It clouded all of that stage of my growth.

I was free of it now, as fucked up as that sounded.

I opened my eyes, blinking wetly and adjusting to the midmorning light. Granna sprawled on a blanket she’d brought from home, book abandoned and face-down beside her chest while she basked in the sunlight.

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