Acquaintance

Annie is sticky from eating moonbeams by the time we spot her face beaming between the boughs of a silver maple. A gleaming liquid dribbles down her chin, her eyes fixed and round.

From the forest floor, Charlotte points and grins wickedly at me over her shoulder as we finally cease the search for our missing friend. She begins to make elaborate wafting motions with her hands, and then closes her eyes, pretending to suck each of her fingers as if they’ve been dipped in honey. She finishes with a puff of mock satisfaction and quiet, burbling laughter.

I’m smiling, smelling something saccharine on the air: almost sap or syrup yet tangy and somehow metallic, like tarnished silver.

The cool night strokes our arms and legs, leaving chilly seeds and gardening goosebumps.

We watch and wait, the glee slipping from our cheeks as Annie rises from her perch and stands, glowing against the inky sky. Her pale, ruffled nightgown flutters down to her bare ankles and flaps around her in the breeze. She stretches a single arm toward the luminous half-moon floating in the dark.

Desperation hollows Annie’s cheeks. Lips parted to slurp from the moon, the lines of her body tense toward the sky. Woven into the orchestral thrum of the crickets’ evening debut, “A Cool Night in August,” she’s the conductor and we are her rapt audience, awed and separate.

She wants and craves and doesn’t find . . . and for a few moments, she’s unrecognizable.

We’re mournful then.

Later, when she clambers down to meet us, and when the last of her sweet moonbeam grace has dripped and drained back into the night’s deep ocean, she is different.

And differently sticky.

Emmanuel Smirnakis ’23