Moon Ghost

by Nina Holtz

On the brittle surface of the moon, you, Mom, walk alone. Your feet lick the ground like candle flames, unhindered by the weight of Earth’s gravity. With each step, a puff of moondust bursts around you, and then you leap again with slender legs and arms that gleam against the darkness. Across this hollow landscape, you become the dancer you always claimed to be.

A thread in the sky links the moon to the earth’s surface. On sunny days, it blinks and shimmers like a strand of spider silk. It is a railway track, a two-way trip up into the clouds and beyond the earth’s atmosphere, through space.

The construction was astronomically expensive and took decades—men in white suits hammering steel beams together in zero gravity, their oxygen tubes linked to satellites like umbilical cords. Now, we look up and forget this line to the dead was not always part of the horizon.

The train becomes a flashing silver bullet as it reflects the sun’s rays, shuttling passengers up into the sky until the train becomes so small that it appears indistinguishable from the railway itself. Even low to the ground, each car is tinier than a fingernail in the distance; a trail of glistening ants marching toward the white coin of the moon.

This is the way I will reach you.

On Earth, a man sits at a restaurant table. His hair has just begun to thin, but its straw-blond color blends into his scalp, making him seem balder than he actually is. He could pass for forty, but the lines around his mouth and the grey creeping into the blond settle his age in the fifties. He flicks his watch forward on his wrist, the practiced action of someone who is training himself away from his phone.

The man orders a steak, medium rare. I set his meal in front of him, the thin red juices of the meat already leaking across the plate. I know this is not how you imagine me—the pressed white shirt and matching black apron and skirt set, serving a man whose meal costs the same as a day of my salary. I am glad you can’t see it, can’t look as the man slices through the meat like butter and lifts a thin, wavering piece to his lips. He watches me as he eats. His irises are the palest of blues, nearly blending into the whites of his eyes. He chews slowly, stretching out the agonizing silence. Then he swallows and nods. I am dismissed.

After he leaves, a one-hundred-dollar bill sits on the table. I pick it up and look at it for a long time, as long as the man spent chewing the first bite of steak. Then I slip it in the front pocket of my apron.

After the steakhouse, I work the graveyard shift at a twenty-four-hour CVS. In the pharmacy bathroom, I strip out of my sweat-soaked tights and into the CVS-standard khakis and red shirt and press Band-Aids across the blisters on the backs of my ankles. If I am lucky, and it is a quiet night, I can sleep at the register. I have learned to fall asleep with fluorescent lights on, the buzzing becoming a white-noise lullaby. Tonight, as I watch the empty store, I feel the clean shape of the hundred-dollar tip.

When Neil Armstrong took his giant leap in 1969, he saw more than just chalky grey rock. He saw his grandfather. And the other dead. Ghosts of those long departed, drifting across the moon like plastic bags caught in the wind. Ghosts who wouldn’t appear on camera, but who appeared to Neil and Buzz and Pete and Alan and Edgar and David and every moon landing trip since, until doubt and accusation and psychoanalysis gave way to brashness and belief and guts and we built a railway to the sky.

But trains require tickets, and the price of the trip was set nearly as high as the moon itself.

So when you died, Mom, I started saving up. I don’t know how long until I’ll have enough for a ticket. But I’m coming. I am.

I return to the apartment just as Paige is leaving, the two of us passing each other bleary-eyed in the purple light of dawn. She’s the one who takes after you, your delicate sparrow’s bones. Angular elbows and cheekbones. You used to hug us like you might cut us with the sharpness of your edges.

Paige works as a receptionist at an optometrist’s office, watches people blink as their pupils dilate in the waiting room. As she heads out the door she hands me Maya. She’s five years old now and clings to my shoulders as she sticks her thumb in her mouth. When my sister got pregnant her stomach expanded like a hot-air balloon, her limbs barely able to hold on as her daughter grew. I wonder if that was how you looked with each of us, like a melon stuck with toothpicks.

When you died we jammed suitcases and books and toys into a one-bedroom apartment, opened the windows all year long to air out the smell of toddler shit. Maya sleeps in Paige’s bedroom. When I lay her down on the twin mattress by the bed, she curls up in a ball, eyes closed and breathing quick and fast like a small animal. Her curly hair is her father’s, but those fragile bones are all you.

“Are you in college?” asks the man in the steakhouse. I think that it’s a shame he doesn’t have a beard. When he goes fully bald, his head will be the same color and shape as a pale-brown egg, the kind you buy at grocery stores and don’t think too hard about where they come from.

“Art school,” I say. The lie comes easily, as suddenly a more elegant backstory springs to life—the starving artist paying for school by working as a waitress.

“Really?” the man says, leaning forward. I can’t tell if he believes me, or if he, too, is drawn in by the romance of a fictional life. “What kind of art do you study?”

“Portraiture,” I say, because that is one of the few art terms that I know.

“Oh? I’ll have to commission you sometime.” A wide grin.

I shift uneasily on my feet. I’m thinking about how this conversation is going on too long and how I have other tables to serve. The man misinterprets my discomfort. “Please, sit.” He gestures toward the empty chair across from him.

“I’m sorry sir, but I’m working right now,” I say.

“Then another time?” As I’m figuring out a polite way to say no, he takes a wallet from inside of his suit jacket. He pulls out two more of the impossibly clean hundred-dollar bills and lays them across the dinner bill. The act is purposeful. I know he is watching my reaction even though his head is tilted down toward the table. “Tomorrow night?”

I started working night shifts because I can’t stand to look at the moon anymore; its presence in the sky is a constant reminder that you are just out of reach. A ghost among ghosts. You used to press your nose against the top of my head, like you were searching for that milky new baby smell no matter how old I became.

If Paige hears the click of heels as I walk out the door, she doesn’t comment. I meet the man at an art museum just outside the city. I’m wearing a dress I haven’t worn since high school, which tugs at my hips and pulls at the weight I’ve gained on my stomach. The man holds the door open for me as we walk inside the building. He looks so obviously fifty, with his too-wide necktie and thick hands, and I force myself to focus on you—surely dancing on the cracked surface of the moon.

The man calls the museum a “private collection.” He doesn’t show a ticket to the woman at the front desk, just walks right past into the first exhibit. I look up at the gold letters over the archway and recognize from his credit card receipts: this wing is named after him.

Everything about the building is white and oddly curved: the s-shape of the walls, the circular floor tiles, even the round-top door to the bathroom. My heels echo. The first room is filled with broken chairs suspended from the ceiling. Wires hold each piece of each chair taut, and as I look closer I see other items mixed in as well. A spray can hangs next to a hairbrush next to a frying pan. It’s an explosion caught in one moment. “This way,” the man says into my ear. He guides me with his hand on my back.

In another room, an enormous painting dominates one wall. A red square on top of a background of dark purple. The longer I look at it the more the red square expands in my mind, filling up my vision until it dominates the canvas. The red is somehow too bright and too orange, the harsh color of an emergency exit. As I stare at it an unsettling queasiness fills my stomach. “A Rothko fan?”

I jump. The man is too close once again, just behind my shoulder. “Yes,” I say. “You have to see the collection in the Reina Sofia,” he says. “Have you been to Madrid?” I have barely been out of the state.

I shake my head. “You like to travel?” I ask.

“Yes. I go to Europe every summer. I have a house just outside of Florence.”

“Sounds lovely.” I turn back to the red in the painting, its overwhelming harshness. I pause. “Have you been to the moon?”

It’s a sensitive question. In the silence that follows I wonder if I have overstepped. “Yes,” the man says finally. “To see my brother. Twice.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say.

“It’s alright,” the man says. I glance back at him. His pale blue eyes have gone distant. “He was . . . different.”

“Different?”

“Not what I expected.”

“So they say.”

“Yes.”

“Still, I’d like to go one day.”

This raises his eyebrows. “You? Why?”

The canvas wavers in my vision. I rub my eyes quickly. “To see my mother.”

Pity presses his lips together, and he rests a gentle hand on my shoulder. “A parent dying is a natural part of life. Sometimes it’s best to accept and grieve.”

In that moment, I hate him. I hate him more than I have ever hated anyone. He seems to feel this because he drops the hand from my shoulder and steps away. “Shall we go to the next room?”

I nod. “Yes.”

When I walk back into the apartment there is $500 in cash in my pocket. The man pressed the folded bills into my palm and said, “For the cab home.” I was thankful that the date ended there.

Paige is lying on the couch, Maya asleep in the bedroom. She flicks through her phone lazily with one thumb. Sometimes, with how small she is, it’s hard for me to imagine her as the older one.

“Where were you?” Paige asks, not looking up from her phone.

“You sound like mom,” I say. She doesn’t respond to the jab.

Paige stands, walks to the bedroom, looks back. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

“What does that mean?”

She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. This is a new action, one she learned from parenting a toddler. “I know you’re saving up money.”

I cross my arms. “And?”

She opens her mouth like she wants to say something more, then closes it. “Nevermind.” The door slams behind her.

You raised us in a one-floor ranch house with walls made of paper-mache. With two girls, it was clutter on top of clutter: Barbies with half-shaved heads and missing limbs, snapped crayons scattered like confetti, stuffed animals loved down to nubs, junk drawers of report cards and birthday cards and bills all shuffled together, dishes with pasta sauce crusting on their rims, open bags of chips and cans of soda luring flies on the counter. You used to say I can’t hear myself think, even in silence.

On the moon, there are miles and miles of open land ahead of you. You run forever because you don’t need to breathe, sprint because you can and because your body no longer reminds you of its age. The earth is a perfect blue sphere cresting the horizon, its clouds curling in pale wisps across the surface.

Beyond Earth, the sky is darker than you have ever seen it. There are no city lights to soften the blackness, an inky color so deep it feels like looking at something with your eyes closed. Only the stars, a scattering of glitter across the black, break up the void.

Everything here—the land, the moon, the sky—is infinite. You run faster than you ever could on Earth.

The bottle of chardonnay opens with a bright pop of the cork. The man bends forward to fill my glass, and I glance at the stubble on his chin, the unbuttoned collar of his salmon polo shirt. Satisfied, he leans back on his elbows, swirling the golden liquid before taking a sip.

It’s a beautiful day. The first chill breeze of autumn blows through the park as young professionals jog with their dogs and children run shrieking after their parents. Under the shade of a maple tree, the man has laid out a checkered blanket and a wicker basket filled with bread and cheese. The picture-perfect picnic.

“How’s the wine?” he asks.

I taste it. “Very good.” I have no idea.

He smiles, pleased. “It’s from a vineyard run by a friend of mine.”

I swirl the liquid in my glass and examine it to show that I am impressed. Across the lawn in front of us, a toddler sits on her father’s shoulders, giggling in delight as he runs in circles. She has the same brown curls as my sister’s daughter.

When the pause sits between us for long enough, I broach the subject again. “Would you ever go back?”

The man looks up, a cracker piled high with cheese in his hands. “To where?”

“The moon,” I say.

He stuffs the food into his mouth. Chews. “It’s very expensive.”

“Says the man with his own wing in the museum,” I say. I can’t help myself.

He shrugs. “Fair enough.” He sighs and shakes his head. “To be honest, I don’t know. Do you really want to go that badly?”

His hand lifts and curls around my wrist, a calloused thumb running across the back of my hand. His skin feels cold and oddly wet. I force myself to stay still and look him in the eyes. “Yes,” I say.

A smile twists his lips upward. “Maybe I’ll take you one day.”

The father is playing catch with his daughter on the lawn now, tossing a neon football high over her head so that she has to jump to reach it. When he throws it too far, she laughs again and sprints away to catch it. I am watching them, but all I feel is the heavy weight of the man’s hand on my wrist.

“Maybe.”

The man is drunk. It is not obvious, but I know. He orders whiskey after whiskey with his steak, and his pale eyes become dark and clouded. I try to stay away as much as I can, dropping the glasses in front of him before hurrying to another table. The emergency-exit red of the painting hovers in my mind.

At one point he reaches out and grabs my wrist as he did when we were on the picnic. He doesn’t say anything, just looks up at me with an unreadable expression. I snatch my hand back, the knee-jerk reaction of touching a hot stove.

I decide to hide in one of the bathrooms until he leaves. I tell one of the other servers that I feel sick, indicating with feigned embarrassment that I might need to spend some time alone in the bathroom. She chuckles and nods in sympathy.

In the dim hallway that leads to the bathrooms I sense him behind me. I freeze. His footsteps advance until I can feel his hot breath on my neck. He presses himself against my back, places a wet kiss on the side of my head. His tongue scalds the cold shell of my ear. I can feel the fingers creeping under my shirt to touch the bare skin of my hip, the hardness between his legs. My ability to move returns, and I duck away from him, twisting out of his grip. I run out of the hallway, and then walk as quickly as I can through the restaurant. The place is a maze of leather upholstery and the thick smell of seared meat. It isn’t until I’ve made it outside that I glance back at the restaurant windows. I don’t see him among the diners, but my heart still beats wildly, a heavy rushing sound in my ears. I keep speedwalking down the street, glancing behind me at every turn, until I’ve walked for long enough that my heart beats more from exertion than anxiety. I sit down hard on a bus bench, the metal cold against the back of my knees. It’s barely dark out. A hint of pink sits at the edge of the sky, and the moon looms round and white above. I can see the thin line connecting it to the edge of the horizon, the distant railway tracks blending into the fading sunset.

Mom. When was the last time I called for you out loud? I say the round vowel sound of the word into the darkness of the street. “Mom. Mooooooom.”

I feel silly. My chest hurts. It hurts it hurts it hurts. “Mom, it hurts.”

Maya and Paige find me kneeling over a box filled with cash and receipts. Six months’ worth of tips and penny-pinching. They sit beside me.

“I’ll never have enough to go,” I say. “Not even if I save for decades.” I could fly to Madrid for less than $500. A trip to the moon is much, much more.

My sister doesn’t say anything, just sits and looks at the box with me. She, like you, has that steady, slow-moving river.

Mom, it’s cold out tonight, can you feel it? It’s snowing for the first time this winter. A thick white blanket falling down on every surface. It’s so bright and quiet. We all stand out on the street, Paige, Maya, and I. The snowflakes start again, coming down fat and fast. They catch on Maya’s wool hat, Paige’s curling lashes, my red hands. In the distance, the railroad becomes a white blur, blending in with the snow. We look up at the full moon, an icy light above.

I wonder if you pause. Your feet finally still, the dust you have kicked up hovering in the air like a held breath. I wonder if you see us, as we, too, search for a figure on a distant globe.

Published August 17th, 2023