Meet Me in the Moon Room Read Online Free Page B

plants sprouted from the carpet like celery and stars filled the windows like flood lights. No, wait! Those were giants, maybe gods, yikes! maybe even aliens grinning and shining flashlights in at them. Heavenly voices sang heavenly songs, and the smell of cinnamon and oregano filled the air.
    “Hey,” Rebecca said. “Didn’t this Epiphany of ours sort of, well, come right out of the blue?”
    “I’d say that’s where it came from all right,” Kenneth said.
    The Ghost of This Particular Christmas crawled onto Kenneth’s lap, and the three of them, Rebecca and Kenneth and the baby Byron, not to mention the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways In Time and the Ghost of Maybe We Should Have Gone To My Mother’s For Christmas, were sufficient for a midnight mass celebrated with celery and flashlights, some soft humming, and unfolded socks.
    Later Kenneth leaned down and kissed Rebecca on the cheek and said, “Go call your Mom, before it gets too late, and give her my love.”
    “I will!” Rebecca said and got up and rushed out of the room. “Then I’ll make cookies!” she called.
    Kenneth looked at Lord Byron lazily licking himself. “Meanwhile,” he shouted back to her, “I’ll wind the cat.”

Finally Fruit

    W hen Escotilla, Arizona assembled for the feeding, the townsfolk discovered the monster had grown fruit overnight.
    Sam Briggs, holding tight to the neck of his beer bottle, stumbled out of the Oxblood Tavern and leaned against the wall. He pushed his crumpled western hat to the back of his head and looked here and there, blinking his eyes as if amazed to come at long last awake and find himself in such a place as Escotilla on a hot August morning.
    Escotilla had struggled for years to put Sam Briggs in his place. He was a little too young to be the town drunk. He was much too old to be sowing his wild oats. His father had been the pharmacist, but everyone agreed that Sam would never follow in his father’s footsteps. He hung around the Oxblood, drinking beer and pinching the bottom of Lila Moore, who owned the place and still played the bar girl. All anyone could say for sure was that, besides being generally good for nothing, Sam had some secret sin bottled up inside of him—some scar on his soul that he covered with too much beer and too much loud laughter. Pinned down, Sam would have said there was just something he’d forgotten, something right at the tip of his tongue that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
    That morning he couldn’t shake the feeling that the thing he’d forgotten, the thing that had, in one way or another, determined the course of his life, had to do with the monster and her new fruit.
    Squatting in the dusty town square, she looked like a squashed Sumo wrestler with a huge tropical tree growing from the top of her head. Had two big men been able to get close to her, had they dared stand on her massive shoulders, they could not have encircled her shingled, cream-colored trunk with their arms. Her eyes, as big as dinner plates, were closed, but her long lashes fluttered. Her wide mouth hung open a little, and Sam could see the white spikes of her teeth gleaming in the morning sunlight. A family of four could have eaten dinner comfortably around either of her pink splayed feet. Her wiry black and gray hair flowed over her back like dead vines.
    Sam watched Mike Mitchell leaning against the rail of the bandstand, his trumpet loose at the end of his arm. Mike squinted up at the bunches of elongated, tapered yellow fruit under the monster’s broad green leaves and peach-and-white blossoms. He stroked the mustache at the edge of his upper lip. Mike thought the mustache made him look dashing. Sam thought it made him look slick and untrustworthy. But what the hell? It would be a shame if any of the old gang went and got respectable. As Bandmaster, Mike had come the closest of any of them, but what would the band play this morning? Where would Mike find his inspiration this