Meet Me in the Moon Room Read Online Free

Andreievich ran his hands over his head. He looked bewildered. For a moment, she saw the young medical student who still hid inside that ravaged shell.
    “Look what you’ve done to me, Brenda,” he said. “Just look what you’ve done.”
    Harvey’s face rose like a bad moon behind Yurii’s shoulder, and Brenda scooted away from the two men and got to her feet.
    She spoke to them with her eyes, said, I have slapped you awake, Yurii, set you free. Take the hand of your new friend, and the two of you run free, laugh and play in the snow. Be happy children.
    She slipped off her white barber’s smock and handed it to Harvey.
    “Hey!”
    “Hey!”
    Let them spit and sputter. She grabbed her purse and headed for the sunshine.

Beatniks With Banjos

    K enneth was seized by invisible forces while he, Rebecca, and the cat they called Lord Byron were sorting socks and drinking eggnog and feeling blue on Christmas Eve. Kenneth had been turning a festive green and red plaid sock rightside out when the tremors hit. He lost all feeling in his hand, but the sock moved anyway, as if his hand were opening and closing and twisting on his wrist like the head of goose. Kenneth could see a quivering yellow tongue and the slick black void of a throat as the creature zoomed in to stop just inches from his face. Red eyes like blood blisters rose from what he supposed were still, at some level, his first and third knuckles, giving the thing an oddly unaesthetic asymmetry.
    “I am,” said the goose sock, “the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways in Time.”
    “And I,” Rebecca said, “am the Ghost of Maybe We Should Have Gone To My Mother’s For Christmas!”
    Kenneth looked over at her and saw that she had the mate to his red and green goose creature on her own hand, but on her the sock was just a puppet and the voice was coming from her own mouth. Couldn’t she see what was happening to him?
    Rebecca grabbed Lord Byron and put a sock over his head. The cat staggered around pawing and singing like a Christmas drunk. “And this is the Ghost of Christmas With A Bad Attitude,” she said. Lord Byron hunkered down in the great pile of socks and made a deep and dangerous sound, and Rebecca relented and snatched the sock off his head. He reached out and swatted at the air a couple of times, but then he seemed to forgive and forget and rolled over on his back in the socks.
    Kenneth believed that cats were mechanical devices, but he knew better than to voice that opinion aloud. This was probably his most dangerous secret.
    “Can we get back to the business at hand,” said the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways in Time, and Kenneth dared another look at its terrible face.
    “What do you want?” Kenneth asked.
    “Disclosure,” Rebecca said.
    “I’ve come to warn you of the Curse of Internal Consistency,” the ghost said.
    “But internal is good,” Kenneth said.
    “But not when you keep it to yourself,” Rebecca said.
    “Consistency is good, too,” Kenneth said.
    “So you’re saying I don’t make sense?” He recognized that tone. She was gearing up for round two.
    “Yes,” the ghost said, “internal is good and consistency is good, but they don’t go together.”
    “You mean they are not consistent with one another?” Kenneth asked.
    “Exactly,” the ghost said. “At some fundamental level, internal consistency is not consistent.”
    “So, if you’ve come to warn me off internal consistency and internal consistency is not consistent, what then is the problem?”
    “The problem,” Rebecca said, “is that you’re talking to a sock on your hand and ignoring Lord B and me altogether.”
    “The problem,” the ghost said, “is that even now you’re frantically trying to tie all of this together into a system of experience that is consistent with what you foolishly believe the universe is like. You’re trying to make sense of it all.”
    “But that’s how we work,” Kenneth said. “We find the patterns in