Moon Song: a short story

By Tom Mock

This story is now available in Moon Song and Other Stories.

 

A twisted, modern Little Red Riding Hood retelling, the lost and the damned stalk the streets of a beach town looking for something to make their aching hearts whole in this dark fairytale told under the light of the moon.

 

Drunken, bawdy, deadly, the search leads them down many paths, ardent and self-debasing. Some become monsters. Some even stumble into the daylight and find their way out.

 

Nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and a finalist in the Press 53 Open Awards, "Moon Song" was first published in the Spring 2017 edition of Menacing Hedge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Mock
• Release date: Jan 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224420254

Book preview

Moon Song

By Tom Mock

Copyright © 2017, all rights reserved

Cover art and design by Katie Pegram

Nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize and first published in the spring 2017 edition of Menacing Hedge

Contents

Dusk

Little Red

House of the Water King

Clean

Nobody

Dusk

The moon pulled us like the tide from our reedy beds, the wild ones, the damned.

The grasses swayed in the settling dusk as we stretched across our field and scanned the distant beachhead for movement. There was only the surf grinding against the sand. We kicked at the dry earth, rolled cigarette smoke on our tongues, waited as the night thickened around us. Speech was halting, words rough in our mouths.

We were Aaron, Demetrius, James, and I, but we were already forgetting our names. They fell from us like ash.

The air was heavy and wet. The ocean wind blew a film of sweat from our necks and combed our unwashed hair. Restless with aching hearts, we turned south as the moon climbed, on the hunt again.

We carved our way through town, senses alive and straining into the night. A set of chain swings creaked in an empty playground behind the school. Some nights, school-aged boys and girls met there, tried the sticky sweet taste of smoke and each other. Some nights we interrupted them.

We shook the fence, each of us to a section, challenging the stillness of the grounds, trying to flush out anyone hidden in the dark. When nothing stirred we shook harder, heaving the chain link back and forth in a rippling wave—but nothing. Silence but for the creaking swings filled the playground, and we unlaced our dirty fingers from the fence. If anyone was there, they were luckier than most. On another night we might have slipped in without a sound and plucked them up before they suspected anything, but tonight we had no patience for subtlety. Tonight we were