Moonlight Reunion

A tiny tale of family drama.

For Ryan Kunz ’ Flash Finale Friday. A story under 1,000 words that ends with a pre-selected final line.

Here’s mine…

“Isn’t it that time of the month?”

“So?”

“Won’t that just make it even worse?”

Denise looked at me with her sweet smile. The smile I still couldn’t say “no” to.

“I want to meet them.”

“After everything I’ve told you?”

“Even more so.”

“Why?”

“Please, Lenore,” she asked. That tone. Those eyes. I couldn’t fight them any more than I could fight her smile.

Maybe her being an orphan and having no living relatives was a part of it. And maybe she was too embarrassed to mention it. Or something.

She just kept looking at me with that little smile. Her eyes searching mine.

I sighed. “Okay.”

I could never refuse her anything.

We went.

The family kept the hostility and disdain they had for us as reigned in as they could.

But it slipped out.

The slightest curling sneer. The askance, judgmental glance. The underlying bigotry, barely buried in a casual comment.

It became too much for me at one point and I stepped out onto the back veranda. I tried to breathe deep, inhaling slowly as I looked up at the full moon shining bright. She stood as a calm, silent witness in the night. If I could only be like her.

Denise came out a moment later, alighting by my side. Saying nothing. Just slipping her arm in mine.

“I just can’t take it,” I finally said. “Now you see why I avoid these things. I always want to bite their heads off. That’s why I left and never came back.”

“We never have to come again. I just wanted to see for myself. I needed to.”

“Why?” I knew I had asked before, but she had never really answered.

She turned to me.

“Because they hurt you. All those years ago. And I just wanted to see if time and awareness had changed any of them. Made them kinder. More understanding. Deserving of forgiveness.”

She looked toward the house.

“But they are as awful as they must have always been.”

She took a breath and returned her eyes to mine.

“And I needed to know that for certain.”

She took my hands in hers.

“Because sometimes we can choose who and what we are…and sometimes we can’t. But we can always choose what we do. How we act.”

A bird cawed and flew by. I followed it for a moment as it became a silhouette against the full moon.

The moon.

I turned back to Denise.

She got that smile, again. The mischievous one.

Suddenly, I knew why she wanted to come—now of all times.

I couldn’t help but smile. It felt evil. Wrong.

But, oh, so right.

“Why don’t you take a little stroll,” she suggested.

I nodded.

Consent.

And made my way down the steps.

I could hear the bones and sinews cracking as the transformation began behind me on the veranda.

I arrived at the lake’s edge just as the screaming began.

It was a bloodbath.

Denise left no survivors.

And that’s why I don’t do family reunions anymore.