Left with the Moon
Thanksgiving, grief, and the strange grace of queer friendship in a crumbling house full of ghosts. Not exactly a 4th of July story, but maybe the cost of surviving it--if your fireworks are internal.
Olé —an introduction to Left with the Moon
Left with the Moon showed up on my doorstep like Paul in his Volkswagen van--already speaking in full sentences, already offering to cook. I wrote the thing in the space of forty minutes. I brought it to my MFA workshop instead of the piece I’d actually planned and labored over, and the whole class was stunned. Honestly, I was stunned by the story as well.
American poet Ruth Stone said she heard the poem before it was written like a "thunderous train of air." You can hear more about how Stone chased ahead of poems in Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk "Your Elusive Creative Genius."
And not to compare myself to Robert Frost—I’m just your average Substack real estate whisperer with delusions of literary grandeur—but in 1915, Frost said he wrote The Road Not Taken in about five minutes. In contrast, he’d been wrestling with Christmas Trees, a cluster of pieces he labored over in England, shaped and reshaped through drafts and revisions, with colliding imagery, seasonal rhythms.
The Road not Taken was a swift, witty-spur-of-the-moment piece that spilled out with uncanny clarity.
That was Left with the Moon. I can’t think of another piece I’ve written that arrived so clearly, or felt so close to divine dictation.
One final note on the title: most people assume the moon is all Karen has left. That title signals absence. But that was never the intent. “Left,” here, is simply a direction.
STORY AFTER OPEN HOUSE ANNOUNCEMENT
25 Sims Avenue, Portsmouth, NH 03801
🛏️3 Beds, 🛁1 Baths, 📏1,336 sq ft, $799,000
OPEN HOUSE SATURDAY 7/5 AND SUNDAY 7/6 11:00AM-1:00PM
COME SEE ME!
This inviting 3-bedroom, 1.5-bath home offers the ease of single-level living in a peaceful neighborhood setting, just a 6-minute drive to vibrant downtown Portsmouth. Step inside to find a spacious living room filled with natural light, hardwood floors throughout most of the home, and a beautiful kitchen featuring stainless steel appliances. Enjoy relaxing or entertaining on the private back deck, perfect for summer gatherings. The attached one-car garage adds everyday convenience, while the dead-end location provides minimal traffic and enhanced privacy.
Left with the Moon
He is a playwright in New York and talks about his mother and likes to cook. I tell him over the phone I want to host Thanksgiving and ask if he can come. “Karen, you know I will cook the meal for you. The turkey the cranberry sauce the mashed potatoes and the cheesecake.”
Paul, he is melodramatic. I imagine his arms flaying as he describes the meal. He probably wears one of those yellow cable knit sweaters. And I love him. But he is gay. So, we decide he’ll come for the entire week. And when that late November arrives, with the geese overhead flying south and away in the gray sky, he pulls up in a Volkswagen van. He jumps out and embraces me. He says, “Darling, do you have a fag?” This is a joke. He knows I quit smoking years ago.
I have lived here a year now in my little house, cinderblock with deep red siding, a bit dilapidated, across from a butcher. I did not even know they had butcher shops anymore. My first Thanksgiving in three years, my first Thanksgiving here. I moved because my therapist said I needed the air to breathe. The ocean and beach is an hour drive, but I never go. There are too many bikinis. I have scars and can no longer bear to see my own body. In the summer, I can smell the salt on the breeze, heavy like too much perfume. And my neighbor raises chickens and told me I could have all the eggs I wanted if I didn’t report her to the city. She sets an unmanned table in her front lawn with the eggs, trusting people will just pay; I leave a few dollars for the ones I do take. Normally, on the days I have nothing in the fridge, and those days, lately, have been coming more frequently.
My friend opens the fridge. He sees the half-empty ketchup. The mustard with a dubious expiration date. A couple Samuel Adams turned on their side and shoved to the back. He frowns. I show him where I keep the coffee, an indulgence, a simple, local roast. “This is what you have been living on, fumes?”
I nod, show him his room. In the morning he wakes before me and listens to Tibetan singing bowls. I am in my bathrobe. The bathrobe is shabby and blue and hangs off my breasts lopsided. His dress is immaculate with skinny jeans and a cardigan. A shock of white hair slicked back on his head. He is starting to bald, but not so much anyone really notices. I pour my coffee and pretend I burn my hand.
He takes my hand into his. He turns my hand, inspects my fingernails. Looks at my palms. “This past summer I met a lady in the theatre who taught me how to read palms. Would you care if I read your palms?”
I am not into all that psychic jazz.
Paul takes me shopping. We buy off-brand wine and a turkey. Canned cranberries because, though I prefer fresh, the canned jelly is what I remember from my childhood. Robert, a high school mate from Michigan, arrives a few hours later. And although Robert and I had reconnected via Facebook, nothing more than the occasional like or sad face emoji, nothing more than a passing wave because I cannot bring myself to share online anything that is real. I am unsure what Robert is doing so far from Michigan. Why he is here in this bleak New England autumn with the sugar maples and paper chestnuts almost bare, the unswept olive and gold dead leaves at my doorstep. He is an unexpected, uninvited guest. I feel for him about the same way the Indians felt for the Puritans, seeing them struggle through the winters. He asks about the television. He wants to watch the Macy Thanksgiving Day Parade. I have not had a television for about as long as I have not smoked.
I also invite people I know from the college—shabby-haired professors, a few MFA graduate students because they think they are artsy. An actual artist, a painter of stilt-legged cranes and abstract cows, he travels down from the wiles of Maine. I invite the real estate broker who sold me the house. My neighbor who raises the chickens. I invite Johnny and his wife and their teenage daughter. Johnny brings an apple pie.
The artist from Maine tells me about his strange relationship to yellow. How he hated yellow and refused the color access to the canvas. How then for years after he forced himself to put somewhere anywhere on a painting the yellow, even if the color was a little dab. And now, yellow screams across his paintings. One of his pieces hangs above my mantel—cows tripping over windmills planted in yellow-tipped grass. I have surrounded myself with people I do not really know.
My last lover died in my arms. The MFA students tell me that is a cliché and want details. But I do not want to say how he died. I do not want to talk about the port, how even when we were not at the hospital that round disk in his chest was always a reminder. I had expected him to lose his hair. I watched how his hair fell out in large clumps, clogged the shower drain, and looked similar to what a cat would cough up on a living room floor. I do not want to discuss in detail how I bought him blue Bic razors and asked if he wanted shaved clean. He shook his head and allowed the stuff to fall out until no hair remained. I do not want to talk about the morning we woke in bed, making slow love, and I stopped because his eyebrows had disappeared. I do not know where his eyebrows went. No one prepared us for that. No TV shows, no support groups, and his face was being erased, falling out and sinking into the shower drain.
When I moved, I brought with me all the leftover orange pill bottles with his name printed along the sides. Some of them childproof, and I remember him not being able to open those, so he hacked away at the bottles with a steak knife and threw the caps into the garbage. The bottles, some of them empty, some of them still full, they are crammed beside the basket with the nail clippers and Q-tips and hairspray and I cannot throw them away.
Robert comes out of the bathroom excited and holds one of the bottles between his fingers. “What are these? What do they do? Can I have a few?”
I scream and beat him in the chest with my fists. Everyone stares. Paul, my friend, pulls Robert away, and takes him outside. The scene is too much for Johnny, and he smokes two packs a day. He slips out for a moment and returns with the cigarette smoked to the nub and field stripped. He asks where I keep the garbage. I pour him another glass of wine. I pour myself a glass of wine. It is maybe my third or fourth glass. I am not sure and I do not care. I tell Johnny not to bother with the garbage, just to put the butt in the sink.
I lean into Paul, press my head into his shoulder, and he strokes my hair. If I could purr like a cat, I would.
You can read the full story, originally published in Tinge Magazine (Issue 16, 2019), for free right here.
💥 Bonus Story for Paid Subscribers
Pahmomp
A surreal fish-myth of the borderlands, tequila sweat, and dreams too big for fences.