Phantoms of the Moon

by Michael Ciardi

It was merely a matter of time before the harsh winds of winter consumed Belle Falls in a pocket of unpleasantness that mercilessly lasted nearly four months. This year’s coldest air arrived well before the shortest day, and promised to assault the town with an ample portion of snow. With a threat of pending snowfall, it never ceased to astound Ryan how oddly people behaved just before such an occurrence. He was particularly humored by the antics of older residents, who had endured countless storms of various magnitudes in the past, but yet invariably seemed frazzled at the first suggestion of a fallen flake.

  Frank Banner lived through many blizzards, and was distinguishable as the biggest boozer ever to stumble along an icy sidewalk. On a night reserved for such imminent adversity, he found it grossly unnecessary to alter the customs he had set for himself. Guzzling gin in abnormal quantities seemed like an appropriate reaction no matter what calamities the weatherman forewarned.

  Tonight, Frank slouched on his favorite couch, clasping a container of alcohol with the awkwardness of a famished infant holding its bottle. His tattered robe remained half open at his waist, exposing colorless mounds of hair on his chest and navel that was matted by a spillage of booze. Despite embracing the disposition of an unruly child, there was no trace of naive wonder in his vacant eyes; all of his recollections seemed destined to drown in a deluge of alcohol.

  To an outsider, Frank was man who appeared to be causing his own inevitable demise. The teardrops that sometimes slithered in serpentine lines along his grooved cheeks had undeniably been mistaken for the remnants of gin. But in some ways this man behaved no differently than anyone else. Like so many others on this night, he waited for the snow as one anticipated an overdue bill in the mail. A common dread had spread like a viral infection among the masses, and now the hours for fear of things yet to come incubated in the environs.

  Even the deepest levels of incoherency did not entirely abolish the memories Frank had harvested from his lifetime. Alcohol had the ability to filch ambition from a man’s soul, but its potency was decisively reduced when matched against what the human mind had already internalized. In order to ease his pain, Frank’s thoughts sometimes reverted to a time when he was a much younger man, a time when his commitment to booze ranked secondary to his devotion to family. To remember himself at his best and most sober, he envisioned the days when his daughter was still a little girl.

  Kim Banner had always been a curious child, quiet and wistful in her ways. Frank recalled the special moments they shared together when she was only nine-years-old, where she habitually crafted stories from crayons and scraps of paper. He always cherished her artistic renderings, but most of them had been either lost or neglected with the passage of time. As far as Frank was concerned, all but one of her creations was gone forever.

  Before the furniture became his place of refuge, Frank stashed a precious item beneath a couch cushion. Surprisingly, it was one of the few possessions he still owned that was not laminated in dried vomit. Frank always contended that even the vilest of all men treasured something; he was not being prophetic with such a proclamation, but merely honest. For years, he tended to this particular item as one cultivated a flower’s fragile petals. He shared it with no one, not even his beloved but heavy-handed wife. He fondly recalled that his daughter had given it to him as a gift on Father’s Day before her tenth birthday.

  On this evening, the television screen’s blue-tinted reflection provided a sole source of illumination for the drunkard. Frank reached under the couch’s center cushion, clumsily brushing aside stray wrappers and food particles in his quest to rediscover the first of two items that he always kept within range of his fingertips. The second item, which had only recently found its way into this stealthy spot, was a locked silver box about the size used to store cigars. Frank secured the key to its lid with the intention of opening it one day.

  The immediate item of appeal was his daughter’s gift: a ragged, discolored booklet bounded unsteadily with tape and rusted staples. The scrapbook’s front cover contained the words ‘Kim’s Life’ scrawled in grape-colored marker. The item was purely a testament to a child’s love for her father. It was constructed in a relatively simplistic fashion, replete with hearts drawn randomly along its borders and neon-colored rainbows arching across barren vistas. And although the scrapbook may have seemed lackluster even in the eyes of a rather insipid child, Frank rated it as priceless as any piece of art he had ever gazed upon.

  The gin bottle Frank held slipped from his grasp so that he was able to unfurl the booklet comfortably across his lap. He balanced it upon his knees like a fine piece of porcelain. It seemed natural for him to savor each memory etched from his daughter’s fertile mind. Tonight, his fingers found a particular page where Kim had imagined how her future family might have appeared. She had drawn a woman holding hands with two small children, both apparently boys and colored with the same hastiness as the rest of the images on the page. The woman in the drawing was meant to represent Kim as a mother, and the children, of course, were intended to be her own. Beside them stood a nondescript man, a dog, and the classic one-dimensional house outlined with a simple square and rectangular roof.

  Perhaps only a disillusioned parent would have justified the artistic merit in this creation, but the captions scribbled beneath the stick-like people generated unmistakable attention. A red crayon served as a prophetic marker in this instance. Kim had printed the word ‘twins’ directly beneath the children. None of this struck Frank as especially captivating until many years later. It was only after his daughter’s unforeseen disappearance that he started to earnestly search for remnants of her past. Ever since that day, he remained woefully intrigued by the illustration. But it was not the prospective hindsight of his daughter birthing twins that stimulated his curiosity. Something else existed in the drawing that was only discerned with scrutinizing eyes.

  A meticulous assessment of this creation revealed that each boy had been illustrated in a comparable fashion. Both were sketched using primarily black crayon, but after examining the images’ balloon-like heads, Frank noticed that his daughter drew their faces with strikingly dissimilar expressions. Normally, a nine-year-old novice designs a human face without dimension, with three dots representing the eyes and nose, and a curved line substituting for a mouth. In this instance, one of the two drawings followed the ageless diagram of the happy-faced-child.

  The second and slightly smaller boy had been given a much different visage by Kim’s hand. Although age had faded a portion of the drawing’s detail, the original intent was still detectable. In this depiction, the eyes were set on the oval head with two gray dashes, which produced an irrefutably vacant expression. Additionally, the single line meant to duplicate its mouth had not been angled to imitate happiness.

  Even at his most inebriated, such a rendering by his daughter’s hand made little sense in Frank’s mind. He recalled that Kim had experienced a relatively carefree childhood. She had no siblings to distract her from her avocations, but developed casual friendships with neighborhood children throughout her youth. She encountered no abnormal circumstances that generated a melancholic disposition. Furthermore, Kim’s relationship with her parents, while not entirely unflawed, offered no definitive insight into relieving Frank’s bewilderment.

  Of course Frank realized that a single image crafted by his daughter did not categorically provide evidence for her interior motivations. But the fact remained that Kim had not created another image in the entire booklet quite like this one. To suggest that Frank was a superstitious man was a gross overstatement. In truth, the man inflexibly resisted shifting from one point to another. He was like a rusted rivet in a ribbon of steel, seemingly incapable of pivoting from his beliefs. In his younger days, he criticized those who squandered time searching for supernatural explanations to situations that were readily remedied by conventional methods.

  Frank was the first to confess that only feeble-minded fools fell prey to believing something that was not pos
sible. But no matter how many times he tried to convince himself of the artwork’s triteness, his eyes methodically returned to the twins’ faces. No amount of gin shielded him from the harrowing fear he sensed when he tried to rationalize the booklet’s content. The truth remained as unanswerable as the very disappearances of his daughter and her family.

  It was all too sickening for Frank to brood over on this night. He closed the booklet on his lap as delicately as he first opened it. His line of sight then gradually focused on the room’s shadowed ceiling. A perpendicular light cast from a nearby window and revealed the images of some random tree branches scratching upon the walls. In the near darkness, these limbs appeared like a revolting creature’s claws reaching down to crush all within its range. Frank gulped his gin from the bottle in copious portions now. Amid his delirium, his squinty eyes searched for something beyond the sheetrock cage to which he had condemned himself.

  After a few minutes, Frank returned the booklet to its hiding place beneath the couch’s cushion. His attention drifted momentarily to the metal box. He patted the container tentatively, as if introducing himself to a strange animal. As he consumed his booze, the scrapbook no longer stimulated his interest. Only the metal surface’s cool sensation attracted the touch of his fingertips. But tempted as he was to jam the key into the box’s slot, tonight was not the proper time to unhinge its lock. He reserved that chore for another evening when the moonlight was not shielded behind a fortress of steel-colored clouds.

  The moonlight was absent from the sky on this night, but Ryan still crouched in a chair beside his bedroom window and watched the clouds as fervently as ever. He used no telescope or binoculars for this occasion. After all, no stars glittered through this barrier of storm clouds tonight. The pending snowfall appeared to be only moments away.

  Ryan had always found a certain level of tranquility during such snowstorms. The clouds in the firmament appeared like a billowy sea, aching to unleash its frozen tide upon the soil in bits of soundless fury. In this silence, the snow was unique. Unlike the rain, ice, hail, or almost anything else that plunged from the heavens, snowflakes offered no perceptible sound when descending upon Earth’s landscapes. And before the initial tracks of life ruptured the snow’s purity, it looked like crystallized waves layering the terrain. Somehow, to Ryan’s eyes, it seemed foully unjust that such a paradise was instantaneously tarnished by mankind’s manipulation. Within hours after its emergence, plows and other vehicles transformed the picturesque scenery into an ungodly compilation of brown slush that merited nothing more than pitiful scowls from its onlookers.

  For this reason, the first few hours of snowfall spawned a mode of reflection where Ryan’s dreams became increasingly lucid. It was not uncommon for him to press his face nearly to the glass of the window and watch the snow methodically laminate the fields in mounds of white. Amid these secluded moments, he subconsciously focused on the contrasts between the blackness of space and the fractured beauty that accumulated in frigid piles outside. So much of the universe remained unscathed, never to be infringed upon by the pursuits of Earth’s creations.

  In space, darkness was interminable, replete with an equally endless array of stars that burned through the epochs of time. For Ryan, it was humbling to acknowledge that the galaxies continued to exist in celestial glory long after the last life perished from this world. The notion of a lone universe’s vastness curtailed the arrogance of even the most intrepid men. Ryan was no different in this regard. He felt incredibly inadequate whenever he tried to internalize the complexities of the fathomless pathways that unfurled in the heavens beyond his bedroom window.

  Tonight, the snow started in a powdery mist across the horizon. Shortly after the materialization of snowflakes, the ground became mantled in a blanch-colored haze. Meteorologists had notoriously surmised the patterns of storms, and in this instance they had underestimated the potential accumulations once again. Early reports called for at least eight-to-ten inches of snowfall, but it was soon evident to Ryan that the storm exceeded such an amount by at least four additional inches.

  By nine o’clock in the evening, no trace of verdant earth remained visible where the snow had amassed. It formed in untouched stacks upon rooftops and railings; it flanked the arched limbs of evergreens and street lamps. And further away, in corners of the once-tilled fields, grain silos appeared like frost-capped peaks among the twinkling suburban backdrop. Before the night was done, all things inanimate found a temporary refuge beneath a shell of frozen crystals.

  Even when Ryan opened his bedroom window and allowed the chilled air to sweep against his face, he could not escape a feverish sensation boiling beneath his skin. A cold sweat pooled on his shoulders and chest. The suddenness of this condition alarmed Ryan because he had sensed a gradual improvement in his health earlier in the day. For reasons that he did not quite comprehend, the storm ushered in intense feelings of disharmony. He almost viewed it as a harbinger to an even greater peculiarity.

  Such an irregularity took formation in the sky where moonlight normally reflected its ashen glow upon the landscape. Between the clouds, wind, and blitz of snow, three scintillating shapes emerged. Ryan’s eyes trained on the objects without hesitation, as though he anticipated their arrival in the gray heavens tonight. Whatever hovered in the air over Belle Falls on this evening was as discernable as the snow-smothered fields. But unlike the snow, no conceivable explanation existed to justify the origin of these spheres.

  Each of the three objects came into sight in a crescent-shape on this occasion, which was a minor variation in Ryan’s prior perception of them. Their metallic surfaces, however, still maintained their unmistakable luster, and they hovered in synchronized movements as opposed to arbitrary patterns of flight. From Ryan’s position in front of his bedroom window, each object seemed no bigger than a dime held at an extended arm’s length. During such a storm, the incandescent objects almost went completely unnoticed. By the time Ryan grabbed a pair of binoculars from his dresser’s drawer and focused them toward the sky, they had slipped behind the silvery clouds.

  Ryan remained perched on his chair by the window for another two hours, praying to be fortunate enough to glimpse at the objects again, but his high hopes plummeted in vain. The objects did not return to the sky tonight. Through the years, Ryan had conditioned himself to expect disappointment, but he had now learned to question the foundation of preconceived notions. Until recently, he was almost too afraid to scrutinize his earlier beliefs, but such a fear hindered his ability to analyze the mysteries of the universe. He now endured a humbling transition of thought.

  The boy still had no plausible explanation for what he observed in the sky on this evening, but he was no longer contented to accept obscurity as a remedy for his ignorance. The moment had arrived where Ryan needed to reach out to the heavens and permit his imagination to envision the atmosphere in a way that even the most advanced telescopes could not accurately perceive. Yet no matter how far or wide he permitted his mind to wander into the darkest chasms of space, a place much closer to home remained vaguely shrouded in self-doubt.

  Although Ryan was adamantly opposed to the idea of revisiting Dr. Evans for any reason, he now conceded that only one untested method remained in order to navigate through the muddled provinces of his past. Up until now, he denied the legitimacy of hypnotic therapy, but the proposition of its success suddenly seemed more viable than any of his others choices. Delving into his forgotten years presented another enticing premise to the forefront of Ryan’s thoughts. He had never understood the disappearance of his family, but now he clung precariously to the fanciful hope that they were not truly gone, but merely suspended in a region somewhere between the sky and stars.