| To create a short story, I combined this tale of childish romance with one of men landing on the moon and exploring a different unknown. I took a fragment of reality and threw it into a soup of pieces, stirred, compressed. I worried that readers might think it just a sweet story, so I added a lurking darkness to keep them on guard. The finished story, "Walking on the Moon," is not the real story, but it is. My brothers and sisters--I have one in the story, five in real life--read the finished pages, sink into the details they know are real, ponder the rest.
"I didn't know you felt that way about me," one says. "I didn't," I reply. "It's not real." But it is real. As real as anything I really experienced. I made it up. So more than 25 years have passed and you know what comes next. I disregard all warnings about the impossibility and do indeed go home again. As happens in reality but seems convenient and hokey in fiction, Brad, a friend and former coworker, moves from Texas to Colorado. He now lives less than a mile from my lost home and has a vacant couch if I can afford the plane ticket. I fly. Lives are like pebbles thrown into a calm pond. They start with a small circle--one house, a city block--and grow outward to encompass a neighborhood, a city, a country, the planet. The boundaries of my Northglenn world were set the first day my sister and I were allowed to walk the three blocks to elementary school alone. Momma wrapped us in coats, mufflers and galoshes and led the expedition. With goodbye kisses on our cheeks she left us standing in the gravel by the monkey bars, confident of our safe return that afternoon. Our school, North Cottages, is three little houses in a row. My sister's class is on the end, mine in the middle. Our coats hang on a row of hooks in the hallways. At lunch, a woman emerges from the basement with a tray of tiny milk cartons. We play and learn until the final bell sounds. We are proud big kids. Walking home by ourselves. No car waiting at the curb. No Momma's boy and girl. The first block is easy. We push the crosswalk button and wait for the light to go green. Once I saw a man wriggling in the street when he didn't stop and his motorcycle was crushed by a car. Second block, okay. All that's left is to turn onto our street and then we are home. "Is that it?" my sister asks. "I don't think so," I say. "Maybe you're right." We walk on and on into a great curve. Fear slowly slithers around our tiny bodies and squeezes out liquid panic. We pass the junior high where my brothers are in class for another hour. We're lost! Gripping each other's mittened hands tightly, we turn around, run back to North Cottages and call Momma to pick us up. Brad and I troll the same streets searching for the three-house school. I'm sure my memory can find it. We stop at the school I'd attended for first grade, but they've never heard of North Cottages. We drive past my old house--it doesn't look smaller like I'd been warned it would--turn at the corner and follow my mother's old directions in reverse. There, in the middle of the block. I recognize the door to the basement. I knock and a woman opens it, smiles and says reality has changed. No longer a school, just a house. But she's heard stories. I'm certain she's hiding the milk cartons behind her back. It doesn't exist, this place, anywhere but a scattering of memories and in a short story I wrote. That's okay. The me that never left here would drive down this street once a week and grin at the memories. Perhaps he'd cry. Maybe he'd write a short story. A different story. That's the truth of the matter. I can't feel cheated of the life that was yanked away with that coat floating in the breeze. I want all of the possibilities, all the moments of the life I was dealt and the others that could have been. I'm an angry child protecting his toys. I write stories to keep the possibilities alive. |
| That's the truth of the matter. I can't feel cheated of the life that was yanked away with that coat floating in the breeze. I want all of the possibilities, all the moments of the life I was dealt and the others that could have been. I'm an angry child protecting his toys. I write stories to keep the possibilities alive. |