For the third night in a row there’s a ring around the moon. I’ve watched it while I walk; a gossamer ring of smoke floating motionless in the night sky. I’m sure I’ve heard some kind of saying about it, probably from my dad. Dad served in the Navy and had all kinds of predictions and proverbs about the weather; “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning” was one he always repeated when he saw a scarlet sunset.
“Ring around the moon, make my lover come home soon” I whispered to the sky, but it sounded more like a spell than an adage.
No doubt there’s a simple atmospheric explanation for the phenomenon, but tonight the moon looks like a crescent-shaped glimmer of sinister light flickering in the center of the single, round eye of a gigantic, dark owl. A vapor trail cuts the ring around the moon nearly in half, making an eerie jagged scar across the owl’s lonely eye. It looks as though it is SEEING me through that one wounded eye, and I don’t like it.
Three nights in a row. That has to mean something.
I keep my eyes down as I walk around the house on the corner at Vine St. Their yard is always so cluttered with bikes and cheap plastic playhouses, and naked dolls and toys the kids use to dig holes in the sparse lawn. I’m sure she’s running an illegal daycare in there. If I were her neighbor I’d report her, but I live almost two miles from here and only have to see it when I walk or drive by.
When I pass her house I look back up at the moon. The ring is still there and I wonder if it isn’t a message to the neighborhood witches to meet in a nearby grove like the one behind my house. Almonds – which I know are about love medicine, or at least fertility because of their shape – grow in the undeveloped acres behind and in front of my small ranch home at the edge of city limits.
Yes, I know this much witchcraft: almonds for fertility. My sister-in-law preferred to call it folklore, but same thing. By whatever euphemism, they didn’t help me and I’m surrounded by the damn things.
The air is getting thick and makes my clothes cling damp against my body. It smells like mold at this time of night, heavy with the possibility of dawn. I walk around the short way to the back of my house and sit under the protection of the sun umbrella which I leave open to keep the patio set from fading in the hot southern exposure.
With eyes closed I imagine I see a circle of dark figures dancing around a glimmer of firelight which leaps star-ward from an iron cauldron. The shapes of their cloaks reveal that they are women and even beneath their heavy velvet hoods the light is enough to illuminate their faces. Each one is a perfect copy of mine, the tired mouth, sagging cheeks, two eyes resting on crescents of dark, puffy flesh.
The almond branches sway and dip to pull their hoods away, but the women sway and dip too and are not caught. The flesh on my arms prickles and I taste the milky fat of almonds on my tongue.
I already know how this ritual ends so I twist myself away from the workings of my imaginary coven and open the back door. I turn on all the lights in the living room where I sit and plead with the sunrise to hurry. To pass the time I try to remember all of Dad’s weather proverbs, but I can’t recall any about the moon.