fiction by sam moe

Hunger Moon

The farm was down the street from the sea, hidden behind fields of heather and wintergreen, poppies, corn marigolds.

Late in the day, I watch the blue dogs stop to eat brush. My heart is an empty mine; no gold, too warm, a waste of time. We need to gather ice before dinner, but I can barely hold a thought long enough in my head before it floats to the earth—small pink murexes, nothingness. There were tables to be set, beers in the cooler, steak and shrimp in the fridge. Someone tracked sand all over the floor—not me. I live lonely these days. The dinner party was a mistake, I knew deep within, but there was nothing I could do. We promised each other we’d make amends, forgive one another for the blood. He was coming to dinner with his new wife, our old friends, coffeecake filled with walnuts, bowls of yellow rice and beans, slivers of maduro made soft and golden in the oven. We were going to sit at the table with my new partner, drink wine, chew ice, recall things we went through while waiting tables. If I weren’t left alone for so long, rotten with hope, this wouldn’t be happening. Even my date, a bartender with curly black hair and lime green bandanas, was a tripped wire. She wasn’t over yet, finishing her shift. She’d left her leather jacket on my couch, my comforter smelling of her.

The farm was my mother’s. She left her bookshelves intact, filled with dried flowers hanging upside-down , half-smoked cigarettes, blue-tinged wine glasses, walls slightly amber, windows all coated in navy-stained glass. The kitchen yawns, a mouth—she once told me it’s hungry, it has needs, you have to feed it. I never asked why she didn’t feed me.

She threw elaborate dinner parties, seafood in bowls, foam-hued bottles of liquor I couldn’t name, French rolling off her tongue even though we were Ecuadorian and she’d barely taught me Spanish beyond shut up / be quiet / pray. Her hair was dyed black, fingernails red, lips slightly purple. Buzzed and hanging off the balcony, stoned in the old light of the fridge, misunderstanding medical terminology, telling me I would survive the winter if I could just stop having panic attacks, the hives were from food, the ruminations were from lack of sleep, and the lack of sleep was because I didn’t eat enough dinner. I’d asked her if I could have some of her too-rare steak and she’d cut strips, its surface embossed from the grill, word in the center reading WIFE in all capital letters, every piece of meat printed with words—feeding me part of the WI, making me think why, wine, willow, winner. But when I asked for more food she shooed me away from the table and, later when I checked the fridge, it was empty.

We had no money, she’d say, shrugging in the doorway. My heart between my teeth, I hadn’t seen her standing there, rouge on her cheeks, hair messy, everything smelling like sweet, spilled Riesling.

 I’m starving, I wanted to say. But I knew it wouldn’t matter.

Those days I’d crawl through the field, not wanting to alert the floodlights or her still-hungry gaze lurking in the top window, sneaking into the house a mile down the road, loading up my coat with jars of cream and condensed milk, mozzarella ready to be sliced, half-moldy bread which I’d later cut the spores out of and flush down the sink.

But she was dead and I was eating again.

I was in love with too many people, so what. It was Saturday, I had a bloody nose, I couldn’t stop seeing her ghost in the hall, translucent, yellow as a street lamp, her mouth a thin line. 

—Oliver, she said.

—He’s married, I replied.

She shrugged, dragging her feet around the floor.

—Who cares? Ruin a thing or two, it would do you good.

As she said this, she tipped a glass over, letting old milk and fungal spores leak across the counter. She was a cat past its expiration, a fox-human. She could three-plate carry when she was still live, her tattoos fading with death and age.

—Eat his wife, she suggested.

—We don’t eat people here, remember? 

—You were always a terrible daughter.

Smack and the stack of books I’d been reading on the couch tumbled to the floor.

—She’s not good enough for you, either. Eat her, too. Eat everyone.

And with that, she dissipated into shadow.

*

Lily and Ivy showed up first, bundled in cable-knit sweaters, thick gloves, scarves printed with small fish, Lily in her work uniform—all black, apron still tied around her waist, singular pocket stuffed with money—Ivy in pale cotton pants with thick boots, her hair, normally blonde, now dyed red as overripe cherries. She complimented Lily, whose own dark red hair was growing white and gray near the tips of her slightly pointed ears, they were in love in a way I couldn’t access. Pure, simple, no cheating, no violence. Their mothers didn’t haunt them, they didn’t hunger at all hours of the night, falling asleep with the backdoor open, winter creep coating marble countertops, porcelain bowls of bananas and green apples. They didn’t slip, didn’t despair—I had a theory they never bled.

“Where’s the newlyweds?” Ivy asked.

She loved gossip, knew something had happened between Oliver and I before he met Shell, but what she couldn’t be sure.

“I’m not sure. Shell’s probably taking her time baking a complicated pie. Oliver overslept, he texted they might be late.”

My first blue dog, a greyhound named Sampson, walked over to me, sniffed my leg, nodded in the direction of my mother’s absence. I sensed her near the bookshelves, thin fingers flipping through pages in my diary. Sampson’s twin, named Cove, slept in front of the fireplace, her nose glowing red-orange like a cartoon heart.

“I’m sure they’ll be here soon,” Lily said, kissing Ivy on her exposed neck.

They giggled, tucked into each other like swans.

Sampson and Cove whimpered as a second car creeped into the driveway. My heart, always a fickle creature, blossomed and died in my chest.

Oliver held the door open for Shell, eased a scarred hand through his hair, watched his wife walk toward the front door. She and I were the same height, though Shell had bangs and I didn’t. Where I had green swamp eyes, Shell’s were hazel like coffee with milk. She was a dancer, Puerto Rican, and soft-spoken unless pissed off, wearing a floor-length cotton dress with black boots and a pea coat, so New York City even when she was in a Massachusetts suburb.

I hated that my mother was right. When I looked at her, all I thought about was consumption. Folding her muscular body into a compound butter before sprinkling gold leaf and parsley on top, beautiful blue oyster tipped back into my mouth, it would only take one bite. She was the kind of woman who used to wait tables with her hair down. Like Lily and Ivy, she was perfect in a way I could never be. Whereas I was covered in scars and oven burns, she was smooth-skinned. I bet Oliver seduced her on the dining room table, always making sure to look into her eyes.

My mother’s alter flickered. Even her photos moved: the glossy print of her dancing in a sundress, twirling, pausing; Sapphire beneath a chandelier, lights turning green then yellow. A field of wheat where she was once stung by a bee, swaying in a breeze. Goldenrod, poppies, hummingbirds, morning glory. Beneath the surface, ticks and spiders, thin blue snakes, footprints, blood.

I swallowed hard, feeling a sensation of ocean in my ears, water in my nose, my hands pressed against my eyes. Gently, Sapphire tugged my hands, placed them by my sides but when I turned to thank her, I found Oliver standing there, playful eyes, heart already half-empty, one foot on the doorframe.

“How’ve you been?”

But it sounded more like How has she been, and I didn’t know how to tell him I was nauseous at the thought of her—ghost incapable of resting, empty doorway space, mothering branzinos, lending me a hand with the garlic, the lemon, tomato jam for compound butter, whispering, not enough salt, más azúcar, generously dumping half a container into the mixture. 

Ill, I thought. I’ve been ill. “The same. Spending time with Serena, walking the dogs, drinking too much coffee.”

“Are you still writing?” he asked. This, too, an accusation. As if I were supposed to have stopped grieving ages ago.

After quitting the restaurant industry I was a new woman, remaking myself into the creative person I’d always wanted to be. I had whole days to myself, hours swallowed by napping on the couch, Serena’s hand between my thighs, dinners alone on the floor, Sampson and Cove hunting for snacks in the yard.

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

But I’d only been writing poems about him. In the background, her ghost, telling me when I’d used too many adjectives, pissed off at ink smears on my thighs.

Soft metal of a zippo lighter and Shell’s slender hand relighting Sapphire’s candle, her manguito long and coated in lace, perfume sweet as sugar cookies, leche, the air smelling so much like huevos molls I almost passed out thinking of home.

“Lo siento.”

She squeezed my arm once.

“Thanks, Shell.” My voice practically a whisper.

Just a few months ago, lilac snowstorm, ice crystals encasing leaves like pendeloques, clicks in wind. My gloved hand in Oliver’s, Shell ahead. The two hadn’t started dating yet, but I knew it was inevitable. The way they fell in love quickly, seconds later they were engaged, ring blue like the lake below. I slipped several times, holding onto Oliver for protection from the cold water beneath, heart twisting maliciously in my ribcage. I wanted to tell him then, how I felt about him, but it was probably obvious from the way I couldn’t let him go. I had dreams nightly about transforming into a butterfly on his windowsill, the mason jar in his cabinet, a loose button he fingered on his coat. Oh, to be a needle in a sewing kit in his bathroom, blood under his bandage from a too-deep burn in the kitchen, a copper snake, an ice cube melting on his tongue.

Shell excused herself, the weight of our unresolved emotions perhaps too much to bear, an excess of amor, almuerzo, enough to make a bocadillo, desire so eager it could remove teeth.

Oliver didn’t speak. I heard him mutter, en el nombre del padre, del hijo y del Espíritu Santo, blessing the air with both hands.

—Same, shame, hissed my mother’s photograph.

I waited until he walked away before placing the frame upside-down.

*

Serena joined us right as dinner began.

Ivy had been playing Julio Iglesias so loudly I’d started to get a headache at the corners of my eyes—“El Choclo” filling every room of the house, spilling through loops in cups, creating rivulets in the polenta. Mussels opened and closed like singers, their shells clicking, insides pale orange coated in garlic, crushed red pepper, cranberries and lavender.

Outside, storm weather. Serena complained about the drive to the farm, frustrated her Ford Taurus couldn’t handle the crushed brick roads which fed into sand, occasionally small stones, everything tinged rosy from dust and age.

The others didn’t respond; we all had jeeps or trucks, we were used to driving on messy terrain, complicated backroads which tipped into cliffs. When Ivy and I were kids, we would take her father’s truck to the edge of the beach, daring the water to swallow our tires. Her hair was still blonde back then and, when I came home covered in her strands, my mother always asked if I had been with one of the neighborhood boys, each of them like cherubs with rosy faces and soft hands. None of them blonde.

—I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’d reply before making up lies about mermaids and thieves crawling out of the bottom of the ocean, soliciting from me my coat (which I’d given to Ivy), my gold necklaces I’d sold to buy us breakfast, the mesh bags of lobsters and crates of crabs from Lily’s father in the bed of the truck.

—So, you’re a fisherman now, too, she’d said.

—I’m nothing, I told her. Besides in love, which I didn’t share. There was already so much strife between us, from the times she tried to place deer antlers on my head for rituals to the day she pretended to drown me in the tub. 

—Un bautismo, she’d said, though neither of us were religious, and I knew she thought Jesus was only interesting because he was sexy.

Ivy met Lily at the restaurant we used to work at. They were both bartenders, Ivy good at making witch-themed drinks, hair soft to the touch, enticing Lily to braid her locks in the backroom, wreathing the back of her head. They whispered about plants, homemade remedies. At her request, Ivy shaved Lily’s head in the employee bathroom. Oliver sat at the bar that day, observed the three of us, asked why my heart hungered.

Once, when his parents were away on vacation in Key West, Oliver and I took to their beach house. It was February, but wasn’t it always? I was in love with him, but then again, I was in love with everyone who’d ever touched me and would continue to fall for whoever seemed warm enough, sweet enough to brush against my arms in the marketplace. The woman who accidentally dropped turnips at the garden store, a customer who liked her margaritas with sugar instead of salt, even Oliver’s mother, a consistent flirt whose veins ran with fire, fingers always warm to the touch.

That night at the beach house, after arguing about what was going on between us, he tugged my body toward him, hands in my pockets, whispered, What do you want, you who has everything?

Nothing, I longed to say. Instead, I bit his lower lip and midnight flipped into six in the morning, the two of us with purple bags under our eyes in the old country diner—sticky counters, Oliver grinning at me over a green mug, too many waffles, whipped cream, strawberries that resembled little hearts.

“I honestly don’t know how you do it,” came Serena’s voice.

I realized I’d been daydreaming with a scallop on my tongue, twisting it in circles like a candy. “Do what?” I asked. I contemplated swallowing the meat whole.

“Live out here, in the middle of nowhere. You’re so far from everyone. Doesn’t it get lonely?”

My mother’s ghost rattled the windowpanes. “I’m never alone.”

“That’s true,” Ivy added. “She’s got us.”

Lily instinctually reached for her hand, squeezed once.

“And we’ve just bought a place ten minutes down the road,” Shell said.

She smiled at Oliver, whose eyes danced, hazel as horse mane.

“Yeah, but you can’t possibly feel fulfilled surrounded by all these couples. Unless you’re feeling fulfilled by your creative writing endeavors?”

She lifted a wine glass full of Pinot Grigio, swished it in circles, frowned at flakes of food collecting at the bottom. She drank the whole glass, poured another, frowned at me in a way that made me want to push her out the back door and into the sea.

“I don’t mean to be rude about the writing, but what else is there?”

“What do you mean?” Oliver asked.

I didn’t know how to respond so I placed another scallop on my tongue. The butter was so sweet it made my teeth ache.

“I mean, creative writers don’t really have personalities. You’re just drive and desire all the time, nothing else.”

“We have personalities,” Shell said.

She had been writing poems on the backs of receipt papers for as long as she’d been a food-runner-turned-bus-girl-turned waitress. She came from old money, wore jewels so heavy around her neck and from her ears I wondered how they didn’t give her migraines. But she’d won our twisted game of love, and I couldn’t fault her for wanting Oliver too much, too quickly. Even though I’d held his hands in the forests which always haunted me as a teenager, even though I’d begged him, kissed him until both of us were so dizzy with affection we needed to take a break, she’d won. And what had I gained?

I contemplated telling Serena to leave.

—Malcriada, my mother whispered in my ear.

It remained unclear whether she meant me or Serena.

“I get it now.”

Serena waved a steak knife through the air. I wondered who had given the weapon to her, since we were eating seafood. In her other hand, she held a lobster claw, large enough it looked connected to her body, juices dripping down her sleeve.

“You’re using this farmhouse as an excuse to be closer to your mother. She didn’t love you, you know? My mother didn’t love me either, even though I begged her to.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I finally said.

“And you’re just using your trauma-bonding as an excuse for bad behavior. Haven’t you slept with half the people at this table?”

“That’s enough.”

Ivy stood, walked toward the front door. She opened it, the cold air shocked my nervous system, prompting my teeth to turn green as sea foam. “If you don’t love Tess, you should leave,” she said.

“I’m not driving in the storm. Are you ridiculous?” Serena asked.

“Ivy’s right. If you’re not here to support our friend, you should probably just leave.” Lily’s voice was so stern it reminded me of my mother. Briefly, my lungs shriveled, veins like nervous spider legs swishing through my blood. To my surprise, Serena rose.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll come with me,” she said, extending a hand to me.

“You should stay, the storm is only going to get worse,” I said weakly.

“Just because I don’t have a truck doesn’t mean I can’t drive. Besides, there isn’t enough blood in this food. Eating from the ocean is old news.”

And with that she grabbed her leather coat, key ring, and the rest of the wine, barged out the door into the snow.

“At least she has no-slip shoes,” Shell said and the table burst into laughter.

*

Serena hadn’t texted hours later. I began to worry she’d gotten into an accident.

“I’m going to go look for her,” I told the others.

“I’ll come with you,” Oliver offered.

My dogs whimpered, sensing something I couldn’t understand. My mother tried to calm them, but she wasn’t strong enough to bridge the gap between the ghost realm and the human realm, managing only to tickle their chins which caused Cove to sneeze and Sampson to growl.

Once a nervous wreck prone to asking people if they were serious (about loving—including, coming with me), now I was certain I wanted Oliver beside me in the car, so I didn’t question his motives.

I could feel the others watch us as we left, their worries spilling from their minds into the foyer. My mother lurked near the doorway and, for the first time, she didn’t speak. Her candles had all gone out but one, the flame Shell lit, which danced in a purple-blue haze.

“Young fire,” she’d said, snapping the zippo shut.

We took my truck. I was familiar with the backroads, regardless of the seasons, and Oliver hadn’t been out here since we’d stopped seeing each other. We’d met a few times at the bar, but he told me he wanted to be faithful to Shell.

“You’ve never been faithful before,” I recalled saying.

Somehow, our friendship survived.

We found Serena’s car in the center of the road. It hadn’t crashed, but from the skid marks in the road we could see she’d slid, hydroplaned into the opposite lane. All around us were soft green pines coated in thick snow. Their trunks were sticky, I grabbed several on my way toward the edge of the forest. I called her name, but heard nothing in return, not even the howl of a wolf.

“Where do you think she went?” Oliver asked.

“She might have walked to get help. But my house is the closest location—maybe she got lost?”

The wind hissed, whispered. As we entered the forest, I felt Oliver’s hand in mine, his lips curled in a half-smile. Everything about him screamed secret, love, decay.

Time warped, cold persisted. My coat wasn’t enough, half the buttons falling off, the scarf my mother knit wrapped tightly around my lips and neck, only my eyes and part of my nose still visible. I wondered what she would do if she were in this situation. Probably beg me to stay, yell at me for leaving in the middle of dinner. I could hear her now, te callas echoing each time I mouthed off.

Up ahead, a figure sat in the center of a clearing. The snow was untouched, and it became unclear to me whether this creature had died sitting cross-legged in front of an unlit pile of logs or if it had dropped from the sky. Upon closer inspection I noticed it was Serena, or someone I thought might be her, curly-haired, pink-tipped ears. Soft antlers were growing from either side of her temple. I felt Oliver press his hand against my arm, telling me not to go any closer, but I couldn’t help myself. I walked into the clearing, Oliver not far behind, only realizing it was a lake covered in snow when we were halfway across the ice. Too late, I thought to myself, as jagged cracks tore holes. The woman who I once thought was Serena turned to look at us, her eyes pale like ice, her smile sad. In that moment, she looked more like my mother than anything. Then the world fell away, my body fell into what I’d later come to describe to the other ghosts as blood-numbing freeze.

*

Everything went sideways for hours afterwards. They wouldn’t be able to pull our bodies from the lake until spring, but of course it was already too late then. When we took our last breath, the lake became steady ground upon which to walk, so we did, Oliver and I crossing the threshold between forest and farm house, eager to return to the place where my mother haunted. We noticed Lily, Ivy, and Shell whispering by the fireplace, feeding bits of yellow rice to the dogs. They lapped at the women’s fingers, singing about the deliciousness.

The three of them appeared like ancient witches and when we entered, translucent and filled with lake water, they opened the circle and let us into the center. My mother was there, too, as she always was, woman-knife, hands outstretched for us. We became two rows, one of ghosts and one of humans. The humans tucked our souls into small blue dog statues with detachable heads, placing us on the mantle as decorations. They didn’t realize we were now stuck, staring blandly through coal eyes, bumping against porcelain stomachs, calm on the outside, twisted on the inside. One night, Serena returned, her hair covered in thick horns, and we thought she might be el diablo que mi abuelita warned us about as kids, but instead we found she was a lost creature from Hell, bored and sad in her human body, prone to outbursts, lonely and tired, not wired for kindness but even still she scooped our three bodies into the pocket of her coat and whisked us off into the night before feeding us to the hungry waiting mouths of Sampson and Cove, my mother’s ghost body spilling into the jaws of a wolf, the three of us blue with desire beneath the full snow moon.