Thread: The Man in the Moon

“Crazy…”

The record blared out, crudely explicit against the placid moonlit sky.

“Crazy for feeling so lonelyyyy”

The waif-man hitched his bony body up in his seat to appreciate the picturesque window view more aptly. The moon seemed to sing to him tonight, a dreamier, creamier song than the music playing within his little bed-sit. It was a song both inspiring and soothing, a melody that propelled the listener simultaneously forwards and backwards, whispering the stuff of greatness whilst sedating the creative spirit. An equivocal song, Tom thought, for whilst you lived on it, you became a mere shadow of the “great man” you dreamed to be; stone-cold poor in worldly terms. Whilst he lived on this faraway song, the few, shabby possessions surrounding him could not inspire his poetic sentiment, or offer any transcendent magic. Too engrossed in the window view, Tom knocked over his glass of gin, soiling his only tiny table. He cursed to himself.

“Crazy for tryin’, crazy for cryin’”

God damn it; hungry men, like himself, often gazed amidst the stars for such sustenance, and it made them into absolute failures. That coy Siren of a moon, captivating these wanderers with its fatal, flimsy promises of success! The men who would rather gaze towards the moon than concern themselves with the “here and now”: the Western gold that you could hold in your hands, the facts, the figures, the reliable and objective reality that stood erect and unexceptional before thine own eyes. The men to whom it seemed inhuman to cease to reach, and to close your fist on something tangible. The men who, even now, will be reading this with a slight superciliousness, glad to dream in the face of adversity. Which is really only the adversity of real life and responsibility, encroaching upon their luxurious dream worlds.

Is it?

“Crazy for loving you…”

Tom cursed himself for his failure as a provider. His child, the all-too-beautiful result of no love affair, had rocked in a fourth-hand cradle as Tom pursued yet another “magic woman”, all through the night. Now a striking nine year old, Melissa felt no attachment to her father, knowing just as well as every one of his “magic women” just how much of a failure he was. Tom had made a half-hearted effort to reclaim her as his own child, once, but her jaded mother had snuffed out every advance. Tom’s second plan, an attempt to ambush the child as she played outside in her own street, led him to receive such a scathing rejection as a child of seven could muster:

"I don't want a father. Noone wants you, Tom, leave me and Mummy alone."

And as the days turned into empty years, Tom felt the throb of loneliness more than ever, cursing himself for neglecting the little girl who stared at him with hatred, through the very eyes she had inherited from him. Tom’ fortunate eyes had never been afflicted with such noxious hatred, which, as we all know, affects the hater much more than the hated. But then, Tom had never allowed himself to be wronged. His careless focus had been cast up into the stars all these years as he stumbled and stamped through other people’s lives with clumsy, heavy steps.

It was Melissa’s mother who left him, may it be noted; not the other way around. To her, though, it seemed better to leave a void in her daughter’s life, rather than exposing her to a dud version of the father figure she deserved. And Tom had hurt her, my god he had hurt her! Ruby had dreamt of gallant knights and pushed her way to the front row of every pop concert, desperate to see her heartthrob. She had married her high-school boyfriend, whose every step she worshipped, and looked away as he returned home every night in the dawn hours of iniquity. When he finally left her, she had lived a half-life, denying to herself that her Prince Charming had never existed. She had been committed to the dream alright, a full-time dreamer, and it seems that her impregnation by a stick-like poor man instigated a belated wake-up call from these childish dreams. From then on, every aspect of Tom represented a blow to her. Every failure to turn up at her prenatal medical appointments, every stammered, tactless excuse and every penny he failed to pay her towards the cost of their child. Quite quickly, Ruth was certain that she did not want Tom to be a part of her daughter’s life.

There were two sides to this story, of course. The newly-adult Tom really had felt a curious passion for Ruth, the plump, thirty-year old divorcee who lived across the road from his childhood home. Her piggish eyes, with their faint crow’s feet, looked somehow softer and less threatening to him then the kohl-rimmed gazes from his female peers at school. He had seen her crying one day, through the window, the glass smothering the sound so that she looked like a wailing, hysterical heroine in a silent movie. Her face told the redeeming, melancholy truth that lay beneath the shallow, sullied neighbourhood gossip concerning the bitter divorcee. She had suffered at the hands of her absent, philandering husbands, repressing her tears before him out of sheer gratitude for his being there at all. And now, with him gone, the tears would not stop and a manic ugliness had overwhelmed her.

Tom quickly fumbled in his pocket for his keys- an escape route- he did not have to reach, he could pass this by, he was not supposed to have seen it! But he could not have forgotten what he had just seen. In a rash jolt of impulse, he ran up to Ruby's front porch and rang the doorbell. For the first time in his life, he felt the urge to be a man, a real man, to take up this tragic heroine in his skinny teenage arms and- and what?

She flung open the door, with an audible gasp, her pig-eyes widened with the expectation of seeing her estranged husband once more. But it was not so. They stared at each other. Shame, hopelessness, despair and confusion filled the space between them, as silence pended.

"I-I saw you. Through the window, I mean. I couldn't help it. I thought maybe you might want someone to talk to, but-..no, no, I'll go."

Tom turned to leave.

"Don't."

Tom stopped.

Maybe you could come in. Just for some tea. We've never properly met" she said, all in one breath, adding, somewhat irrelevantly, "I know your mother".

Tom nodded, meekly, pathetically.

"Okay."

Their relationship quickly became of a sexual nature. Whilst, on that first encounter, Ruth had short of fastened Tom's young arms around her neck, and pressed his lips to hers, Tom’s testosterone-fuelled urges allowing him to take an increasingly dominant role. They made love twice or three times a week; she would press her doughy body against him as if she was trying to squash out all consciousness of what she was doing. A caricature couple- Ruth's pillowy bosom the same height as Tom’s scrawny neck- it was incomprehensible to anyone how Ruth could have been attracted to this man-child. Incomprehensible, of course, to anyone who had never felt the throb and indignity of loneliness. And once upon a time, Tom’s presence in Ruth’s life had served a purpose: he was someone to sleep by her side to stop her crying in the middle of the night, a deep voice to soothe her when she felt restless and alone. He had been a source of light for her once and so she could not blame him for everything. He was too young for what she expected from him, and when she fell pregnant- not a possibility they had considered, she thought she was infertile- and told him, he had panicked.

There was another factor, of course. Tom, in his own blundering, naïve little way, was obsessively romantic. Women represented an inviting enigma for him. When he loved, he would love with all his being, each sinew of his body unified in a throbbing longing for his darling beloved. But, like a child eating sweets, he would rush, gobbling up his all-too-transient passion until soon there was none left. Sensing that the affair was coming to an end, Tom had already began to lose interest.

By the time Ruth fell pregnant, Tom had already moved on to his new obsession: a girl of his own age whom he had met through his job at a local burger restaurant, a pallid-looking little thing with similar twitchy, nervous affectations to himself. Whilst the girl in question showed no interest, Tom the Romantic once again felt his urgent young heart urging him forwards. And so, justifying his actions with cinematic sentiments, he denied the unwanted child to be his own, jeering at Ruth’s pregnancy to anyone that would listen, dubbing her “that old village bicycle”, running from her in the street and declining her calls. His reaction was, again, characteristically childlike. He hurt like a little boy being careless with a slingshot, he could not strike a blow like a real man. This had lasted a month until he half-heartedly agreed to try and fulfil his role as a parent. But it was too late, too much hurt had been caused already, and, in any case, Tom’s waiter job was never going to be enough to support a family, and he was without the ambition to find another. Later, Tom had told himself that- lonely or otherwise- the pair had harvested up the few blossoms of their passion for each other. To live in the barren aftermath was to be chained together for the long march to death; neither of them could stand it.

And so, with this in mind, he had released from the responsibility that- in any case- he was no longer allowed. At the time, he had felt an uneasy sense of rejoice, like a man who pockets a bank note dropped in an un-crowded street. But time had crept onwards, and then it had walked, and nowadays it began to sprint, and he had aged and struggled through life alone, without solace. Tonight, when he looked up to the moon, he saw something different from his opiate dreams. He saw barrenness, he saw a cold alabaster surface where nothing had ever grown. He saw hostility and he saw pain, he saw frowning faces with disapproving eyes, he saw loneliness and melancholy, and he no longer heard the enchanted song. And then, with a gasp, he came to see, reflected in the night sky, the man that he could have been, but never strived to be. He saw a proud father embracing his daughter, a warm, tangible reassurance that there were strong, virtuous men in the world. He saw his would-be wife, a little older than him but still attractive in a plump, rosy way, smiling at his side. He had a 9 to 5 job in a local office, leaving him time to return home to his family each evening, to a home-cooked meal and a grateful family. The prospect looked homely, cozy and secure. He took another sip of gin, and the scene was gone, replaced by a cruel sense of clarity. It could never be.

This dawned on him in a tragic half-realisation. He had grown wiser over the years; a scholar of his own mistakes. And he realised now that he was just as empty and sad as Ruth had been, except now Ruth had another chance of life through their little daughter, and he had nothing. And the moon began to sing again, playing on in the background in the way of consolation, but it meant nothing to him now, and never would.

First off, I would like to say that this is a good piece, but as many would say, "good is the opponent of great." To be honest, I have a few issues with this one, and first up are the dashes. True, they are needed more often than not, but to see these too many dashes in the first two paragraphs just made it a bit bad for me. I mean, look at this sentence:

The waif-man twitched his bony body- spider-like and spindly, he often moved in such twitches- up

Four dashes in one sentence? That has got to be a record. The sentence here looked a bit fragmented, see? And the dashes surely were of no help to eliminate that look.

...cursing himself for neglecting the little girl who stared at him with hatred, through the very eyes she had inherited from him. Tom’ fortunate eyes had never been afflicted with such noxious hatred, which, as we all know, affects the hater much more than the hated.

Look at this line. I see a lot of inside rhymes that it almost looks like a poem. Not that I'm against poems, well and in-fact I do, but to have these rhymes in a short story makes it sound a bit redundant. Oh, and the usage of hatred in both sentences wasn't exactly steering clear of redundancies.

The lack of dialogue also makes me wonder a bit. Sure, a writer can choose not to add dialogues, but to have not a single conversation in a story? Rare, don't you think? Not that this is a mistake, but... I don't know. I guess I was just used to stories having some form of conversation between two people, or at least between a person and his own self.

These slight creases aside, the emotion was there. I mean, you can unmistakably feel it. The frustration of the man at not being able to see his kid, the guilt over the mistakes he had done during his life. It was all there. Honestly, that scene where the protagonist couldn't help feel sad about not being able to see his daughter? That hit me. It was a touching scene, something I'm sure you could work on more.

And I love that song.

Thank you so much for your helpful comments, I have tried to add some more dialogue and edit a few things. I would really appreciate some feedback!