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Sep. 10th, 2014 12:08 amThe party on the condemned floor of the parking garage was so dark the lit portions didn't interrupt it so much as float through it like boats. It was an unmoored sort of dark. Walls seemed one-sided.
Like at every party of its size there were either two or three people with shiny clothes. By two or three I mean you can never tell whether it's two or it's three, because the astonishment of seeing one set of shiny clothes makes hazy the memory of having done so before. But you can at least recall that there were more than one. And there will never be four.
But only their clothes glittered. There in the dark, though, there floated a glow. A person. Her eyes, I think, or skin. After I bumped into her a second time and our drinks spilled into one another we got to talking and I asked could I be mistaken about her glow. She said no and was flattered I'd noticed. She said she was part of the moon.
There were others she said and looked around. She craned her head a bit as though one had just rounded a corner, but soon gave up and shrugged and shook her head. All of these motions took place on a glow, the one glow in that neck of dark. She was close enough to the wall that the wall glowed faintly around her. Looking down to drink my drink did too.
The moon people were everywhere, she promised. There were at least ten. You couldn't tell who they were in daylight and at night would tend to assume a moonbeam had hit them, but they were the moonbeams. If you saw one, she said, you should know that a person-shaped slip of the moon had come free. Their effects, while unnoticed, were profound. The presence of one in Denver in the '30s is why we think of Denver that way. When a technology company has a non-evil year thank a moonman. Or woman? I forgot to ask if all of them were women. I forgot to ask a lot of things because I was smitten and shy.
I'm sad to say I didn't believe the moon talk. I didn't even particularly listen, but when attracted I get a sort of phone call the next day that repeats what was actually said by both parties. At the time I just heard sidlings in a shine. I remember no features, the glow drank them all, but her eyelashes. She must have been amazed the whole time she spoke, they were so far apart. Each blink of an eye was a clap fading into a smile. When we walked out together they scrunched close to closed and she turned her head out of the lamplight and found some excuse to go.
But maybe that's not how it happened. Perhaps like the moon she didn't go anywhere at all. I remember the second or third of the people in shiny clothes going by about then - a Russian-ish man in a silver suit. Her having left seemed so certain, so how things just have to be in the dark, that I might have forgotten to look.
Like at every party of its size there were either two or three people with shiny clothes. By two or three I mean you can never tell whether it's two or it's three, because the astonishment of seeing one set of shiny clothes makes hazy the memory of having done so before. But you can at least recall that there were more than one. And there will never be four.
But only their clothes glittered. There in the dark, though, there floated a glow. A person. Her eyes, I think, or skin. After I bumped into her a second time and our drinks spilled into one another we got to talking and I asked could I be mistaken about her glow. She said no and was flattered I'd noticed. She said she was part of the moon.
There were others she said and looked around. She craned her head a bit as though one had just rounded a corner, but soon gave up and shrugged and shook her head. All of these motions took place on a glow, the one glow in that neck of dark. She was close enough to the wall that the wall glowed faintly around her. Looking down to drink my drink did too.
The moon people were everywhere, she promised. There were at least ten. You couldn't tell who they were in daylight and at night would tend to assume a moonbeam had hit them, but they were the moonbeams. If you saw one, she said, you should know that a person-shaped slip of the moon had come free. Their effects, while unnoticed, were profound. The presence of one in Denver in the '30s is why we think of Denver that way. When a technology company has a non-evil year thank a moonman. Or woman? I forgot to ask if all of them were women. I forgot to ask a lot of things because I was smitten and shy.
I'm sad to say I didn't believe the moon talk. I didn't even particularly listen, but when attracted I get a sort of phone call the next day that repeats what was actually said by both parties. At the time I just heard sidlings in a shine. I remember no features, the glow drank them all, but her eyelashes. She must have been amazed the whole time she spoke, they were so far apart. Each blink of an eye was a clap fading into a smile. When we walked out together they scrunched close to closed and she turned her head out of the lamplight and found some excuse to go.
But maybe that's not how it happened. Perhaps like the moon she didn't go anywhere at all. I remember the second or third of the people in shiny clothes going by about then - a Russian-ish man in a silver suit. Her having left seemed so certain, so how things just have to be in the dark, that I might have forgotten to look.
