september moon

[ a version of this story is accepted to appear in Silver Birch Press Beach&Pool series July, 2016]
https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/a-purple-sky-prose-poem-by-norman-belanger-beach-and-pool-memories-poetry-and-prose-series/

“Look at that moon!” he says.
It is pink and beautiful, the full moon. The whole bay seems to glow, rose tinted and brimming. We are both quiet a while, watching it, as it rises and rides the evening sky that is just now shimmering with wistful, distant stars. 
“It’s a super moon,” he says. His brown eyes are bright, penny copper, lit up. He smiles at me. 
“A thing to wish on,” I say.
We’re both tipsy. The little cottage is like a houseboat adrift on the tide; we float, still high on the place, rafting, bobbing, the two of us, just us. We exchange stories: of the blue heron wading in the moors; of the color of the water and the feeling of it, cold and exhilarating on naked skin; we talk about the things we did today together, as though they happened long ago, in some silvery past.
“The dunes?” he says, touching my arm, “remember?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any more wine?” he asks.
I pour us both a last glass. The empty bottle sits between us on the wood planking of the deck.


“What would you wish for?” I hear him say, his voice sounds far away, dreamy, drowsy from our day at the beach.

I reach for him, and from my pocket I pull out my heart, the jade green rock I found today at Race Point, while he dozed under his hat. The smooth soft stone sits in the palm of his hand
.
Next door, in Maisie’s overgrown wildflower garden, crickets sing in tall green grass as though summer will never end, despite the chill that comes in on a breeze and makes us shiver into our sweatshirts. 


The sky suddenly explodes with starlings and stark white gulls. On the shore plovers and pipers and little peeping birds hop in the sand. We look across the way to Wellfleet, where the last winking daylight glints off the house windows. Out on Long Point, the old beacon stands mute and pale on a sandbar finger. Her light flashes green. By now the moon is high, practically overhead; the sky is purple.
“What would you wish for?” I ask.
“Just this,” is all he says, still holding the stone, still feeling its pulsing warmth, and its weight.