dontravis.com
blog post #355
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| Sun-Moon Eclipse Courtesy of Pixabay.com |
Inasmuch
as I’ve been sorta under the weather this week, Mark Wildyr agreed to guest
post one of his stories this week. It happens to be one of my favorites. Thanks
to Mark, and I hope you readers enjoy the story as much as I do.
*****
THE
SUN AND THE MOON
Part
1
By
Mark Wildyr
Michael Lanier was my best friend and
next-door neighbor. Had been since forever. At the El Rey Community College,
the initials M&M didn’t represent chocolate candy but Mitchell George and
Michael Lanier. Yet we were so different nobody understood why we were such
buddies—probably me least of all. I was physical; Mike, cerebral. He nurtured
me in the classrooms, and I protected him on the playing fields. I was a
healthy, popular, golden-haired blend of many cultures and bloods; he was a
dark-haired, pale, enigmatic Celt. We got along like the opposite poles of
magnets. If I could keep him out of his notebooks, he was a great guy. He had
volumes of the things filled with his constant scribbling. They were part
diary, part observation, and part poetry.
How close we were was brought home
hard when his cancer showed up last year. I hadn’t understood how much of a
hole he would leave in my life, my heart, my soul. The last time I saw him was
etched into my brain for eternity.
“Sunshine,” he had wheezed weakly.
God! “Hello, Sunshine.” That was
his way of greeting me each morning. Thereafter it was Mitch or Mitchell, but
always the first time of the day was “Sunshine.”
“Hi, Tiger. How you feeling? I
saved you a place on the soccer team.”
He gave a shadow-smile. “Gimme a
week, okay?”
Damn, I hoped I could get through
this without bawling. I didn’t mind him seeing me cry. I just didn’t want him
to know how scared I was—for him.
“Mitch, I want to give you some
things, okay?” He nodded to the table beside the hospital bed. That sentence
wore him out and tore me up inside.
I damned near lost it when I saw
what was there, going blind in spite of my resolution not to weep. The silver
Celtic cross he’d worn around his neck for as long as I could remember lay atop
a thick, blue binder, one of his famous notebooks.
“The cross is to remember me by.”
He clutched my hand, surprising me with his strength. “The notebook is to know
me by.”
“I know you, Mike. Better’n
anybody.” I gouged my eyes with my palm to clear away the tears so I could see.
“Maybe. But promise me you’ll read
it. Might take more than... once.”
“I’ll read it until I can recite
it,” I swore.
“Don’t go nuts on me, Mitchell.”
Michael Roger Lanier died that same
night. I didn’t know a jock could blubber so much, but that’s what I did in the
privacy of my room. My parents understood and left me alone to work through my
grief.
Now the cross hung around my neck where it
will remain forever. I read through the notebook twice simply because I’d
promised, sobbing over some parts and laughing over others. Someday he would
have been an author or a poet or a journalist or all three. His writing
reflected him so perfectly I felt we were reading it together.
But I was still puzzled by his last words
to me in the hospital. There was nothing in the book I didn’t already know
except for one poem or poetic essay that I did not understand. He’d gone mystic
like he sometimes did in real life. Determined to figure it out, I sat down in
my bedroom and reread the piece he’d written just before they discovered the
cancer about a year ago.
Naught but a
distant star, I am Venus glittering low in a sun-starved, moonless hemisphere,
one of a myriad of astral motes slung carelessly across the distant cosmos.
The hair on the back of my neck
rose, unbidden, unexplained. I glanced around the room, freaked out by my own
skittishness.
The Helios of my
universe cuts bright and blinding across my path, nourishing even as he
eclipses my luminance with his green Phoeban fire. Oh, how I long for this
enervating, nurturing Apollo, this Greek Charioteer, this beautiful Egyptian
Ra, would not his glowing incandescence sear my caress, shrivel my kiss, and
turn fevered passion to pale ash. Thus is Venus fated to orbit second in his
precious vortex.
I whirled about in my chair,
convinced I was not alone. But I was. Hackles raised, I rubbed my puckered
forearms as if they were cold. I swallowed and resumed reading.
Then comes Luna to
my sky, whose shimmering beauty merely bedims my glow with his shaded shine.
This Artemis, this brother of Helios, this sibling of Eros, accepts my timid
suit, my kiss, my shy caress, enriching my aura with a molten, milk-white
nimbus.
Selene’s
time is tender but fleeting. Then again Hyperion’s son ascends, obscuring my
silver-footed king whose taste is oh so sweet, except… he is not my Roman Sol.
I finished reading, uncertain why
my upper lip was touched with sweat. Whatever the cause of my unease, it
receded as I closed the notebook. I was alone again. Of course, I was; I had
been all along.
No doubt this was the piece Mike
intended me to “know him by.” I’m a jock not an intellectual, but this was
something he’d asked me to do, so by damn, I’d understand this piece if it blew
out all the circuits in my brain. So I dragged my fanny down to the library and
took a stool before the biggest, fattest dictionary in the place and started
making notes. An hour later, I moved to a reading table to assimilate what I
had learned.
Venus, of course, was the second
planet from the sun, moonless and the brightest star in our solar system. And
Mike equated himself with Venus in his poem. Helios was the ancient Greek god
of the Sun, sometimes known as Apollo. The Egyptians called him Ra; the Romans,
Sol. Okay, so Mike had a sun in his heavens. So far, so good.
And the sun turned off the stars. Shit,
he’d have my ass for thinking like that. The sun obscured the stars, or
eclipsed them, as he put it. And it was both enervating and nourishing, like
the real sun, I guess. It was necessary to nourish life, but if it got too hot,
it drains you. So this sun made the planet feel inferior. Okay, got it.
Then comes Luna to my sky.…
Luna was the Roman Goddess of the Moon,
sometimes known as Diana or Phoebe or Selene or the silver-footed queen. And
Artemis was another name for the moon goddess. Hey! The guy found himself a
girl. The devil had fallen in love and never even told his best friend.
But wait! Something was wrong. I hauled
out the notebook and read:
Luna bedims my glow with his shaded shine.
His shine? The goofball mixed up his genders.
He meant her shine. I frowned as I reread something else. Artemis the brother
of Helios? ‘Silver-footed king?’ Uh-uh. Mike wouldn’t have made one
mistake like that, much less three! He’d turned the moon goddess into the moon
god.
The notebook slipped from my fingers as
the truth struck me.
*****
What
has Mitch discovered about his friend Mike? That Mike loved him? Not much
question about that, but there more? Tune in next week and find out.
The advance buy link for
The Voxlightner Scandal follows: http://www.dsppublications.com/books/upcoming-releases-c
Now
my mantra: Keep on reading and keep on
writing. You have something to say, so say it!
My
personal links: (Note the change in the Email address because I’m still getting
remarks on the old dontravis21@gmail.com. PLEASE DON’T USE
THAT ONE.)
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/donald.travis.982
Twitter:
@dontravis3
Buy
links to Abaddon’s Locusts:
See
you next week.
Don
New Posts are
published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.
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