UNDER A VIOLENT MOON

 

Richard Blaine discovers that sometimes dying with love is far better than living without it.

UNDER A VIOLENT MOON

“Finding your way through the darkness is how you discover the light.”

– Richard Blaine

 

“Kindly death,” once wrote Emily Dickinson, “is lurking everywhere.”

Wasn’t it just.

Helen Mayfair snapped beside me. “That is not what she wrote.”

“You can hear my thoughts?”

“Thankfully, no. Your years of living sequestered from the others has you speaking low to yourself.”

“Well, it was close to what she wrote.”

“No,” she sighed like a disappointed Miss Myers.

“Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me— bears no resemblance whatsoever to what you said.”

Sister Ameal beside Helen curtly said, “Your inane sniping has had at least one benefit – it has temporarily stalled the advancing Amal.

”They’re real?!” I yelped.

You heard of Indigenous Tribes? Well, the Amal are what you might call America’s Indigenous Monsters.

When the first Chitimacha, with the Atakapa, Caddo, Choctaw, Houma, Natchez, and Tunica came to what became New Orleans,  

The Amal were already here waiting for them.

Happy predators they.

Being soul-eating creatures of black mist, the Amal were not exactly chatter-boxes. So, their human victims never learned from whence they came.

Perhaps, oozed out from some nether region under the primordial ancient sod of what became Louisiana.

Who knows?

All their victims knew was that the Amal were drawn to despair. 

Before the Indian tribes arrived, those misty creatures must have had to subsist on depressed alligators I guess.

But despair has been chief resident in these parts with the arrival of humans. 

Slavery, corruption, voodoo only added spice to the mix.

Sister Ameal whispered, “I must leave you. My despair will only lend them speed.”

I frowned, “You despair, sister?”

“Greatly before your birth. Now, not so much. But merely the echoes of that darkness are too much for the Amal to resist.”

And with that, she was suddenly gone.

I shook my head. I didn’t know what shocked me more: her disappearing act or the fact that my birth had meant something to her.

The shadows kept oozing along the wet stone of the alleyway. Right towards us.

I frowned, “Why are they still coming? I haven’t a smudge of despair. 

I’ve long since learned tomorrow is promised to no one. If I die today, I’ll die laughing that I made it this long.”

Helen knocked on top of my head as if it were a door. “Imbecile! I despair.”

“You? Why? You’re beautiful, intelligent … a force of Nature.”

“I love … “ The next word came out hushed, “… you.”

My chest emptying, I cocked my head. “I know I’m not the greatest catch in the ….”

“Oh, Richard! Our love is forbidden.”

“Y-You’re going to be a nun?”

She reared her head to the dark sky as if to bay at the moon. 

The Amal froze, quivering as if in ecstasy. This was going to be so bad.

“No! You and I are … I am even forbidden to tell you clearly. We are … of two different species!”

“Y-You look human to me.”

“Appearing and Being are two different things.”

Exasperated at how things were going, I snapped, “What were you and Sister Ameal doing out here anyway?”

“We were both worried. You have been gone hours!”

“What? It hasn’t even been an hour since I left.”

“For you perhaps. But out here in reality, it has been hours.”

Helen drew her dainty revolver from the small of her back. I didn’t know what good bullets would do against shadows.

I was going to show them the Hand Mirror of Enigmas myself, so I should talk.

She moved to my left, and I frowned.

Helen smiled sadly. “This is the side your heart is on. It is the side where I choose to die.”

I started to speak, but she put her fingertips on my lips. “To die with you will not be so bad a thing as living without you.”

At those words, a tremendous golden light blazed all around us as the Amal screamed in agony.

Helen rasped, “The Shekinah Glory!”

Having read every book in the orphanage’s library and most of the ones in Stearns’, I knew the term.

The Jewish rabbis coined this extra-biblical expression, a form of a Hebrew word that literally means 

“He caused to dwell.”

It signified that it was a divine visitation of the presence or dwelling of the Lord God on this earth.

The Shekinah was first evident when the Israelites set out from Succoth in their escape from Egypt. There the Lord appeared in a cloudy pillar in the day and a fiery pillar by night.

I blinked my eyes.

The Amal were nowhere to be seen. The alleyway floor was turned to gold. Real gold, burnished as if polished for years … or eternity.

It didn’t stay, of course.

The alleyway soon became as pitted as the surface of the moon … and about as far away from God as the moon, too.

Helen whispered, “I guess when … one of my species feels love, He appears.”

We never spoke of her admission after that.

I had many more chess games with Mr. Morton, each one nastier and trickier than the last.

Helen was distant for a time. But little by little, she began to laugh again.

We grew closer and closer, never speaking of how each of us knew how the other felt.

Then, the morning came when Helen came to me with what I knew was my draft notice in her trembling, too long to be human fingers.

She leaned up, her lips becoming ready for the kiss about which I had long dreamed.

I arched as if tiny daggers of ice pierced me.

Copper snowflakes swirled about me in a storm of fury and sound.

Then, nothing.

If Helen Mayfair had a theme, this would be it: