The Landing by Len Kuntz

There are pictures to prove it.  In one we are standing on the moon back when it mattered.  Gravity holds us flat-footed.  Our visors are opened and you can’t make it out clearly but that’s me, the one on the left.

We decided to take the moon for our own when we were young.  In our naivety, it seemed entirely possible.  Mother sewed our suits and we built a craft out of supplies from your father’s workplace.  It took an entire summer to construct, but time was what we had.

It was me who suggested a reprieve.  The demon sun had scorched my neck all week and I’ll admit it now, I was having second thoughts about our expedition, and space travel in general.  Truth was I had been flattered just being able to hang around you.  If you knew me, you mightn’t have liked me because every moment my mind schemed for your attention.

At the river I tried too hard.  Some people have social graces, flushed with confidence, but I can be soulless and shaky, needy and flattened.  I was never certain you loved me.  I kept reaching for it, for you and your lips to just say something approximating the effect, even if the words had to be parceled out, even like that.

I swung with the rope and soared, somersaulting off a stiff, hijacked car tire.  I saw blue.  I screamed nonsense.  I might have pissed myself.  I know I thought your name.

Water exploded and I landed violently in a broken collapse of momentum that frightened more than hurt, yet I know now that this was an awkward and urgent warning, a portent, a plea perhaps.

“You’re fucking crazy,” you said.

It was the sweetest thing you’d ever told me.

You bent down and sank your slender fingers in the water and snaked them several times through the sluicing waves, much the same as I imagined them raking through my scalp.  “I’m not going in there.  It’s fucking freezing.”

“Don’t be such a wuss,” I said.

You skimmed a stone and in your eyes I saw you retrieve a memory about Mandy, the girl who loved you first but broke your heart.

“I’ll never do that,” I thought but did not say.

When your shirt came off the sun shivered, seemed to shift nervously, seeping into the mud-green water, stinging me like an eel, electrifying my world with the alarm of possibility.

“All right, but I’m only staying in for a second,” you warned.

“Do a running jump.”

“What are you now, my track coach?”

But you dropped your jeans and stripped down sockless and took my instructions nonetheless.  You tore up the sloped path, wincing from the stones poking your feet, wind tucked up under your cheeks, perfectly perverting every inch of sun-tanned muscle and cord.

When your ankle caught the exposed tree root, I thought it was a ploy on your part, an act, a second thought of cowardice, but, no, as it turned out, I was the only coward there that day.

I saw you jackknife into the shallow ribs of the river.  I heard your head crack the lurking boulder, saw the floating film of blood, watched your stunned body drift log-like with the current.  I could not yell, could not move or breathe or think.  My hesitancy might have cost you everything.  I know it did me.

Last night your father burnt the capsule.  First he tore it apart.  Bare-handed, his bloody knuckles beat down the steel sheets and each time he tore a panel loose he looked skyward toward the moon and wailed.

When he was done he drove the pickup to the smelter and tossed the broken pieces into the flames.  He was sober and strong, deaf to all the flagrant hissing.  He shook his head, his fists.  Shook.

He doesn’t know I have the urn with me now.  I don’t intend to keep it, only to hold you, for us to spend this one night in company, dreaming again.

Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington State where he's at work on a
novel.  His fiction appears, or will soon appear in such places as ELIMAE,
WORD RIOT, MUD LUSCIOUS, DOGZPLOT, SHOOTS AND VINES, and others.