Loveless Moon

I stood at the edge of the autumn field feeling sad and lonely. I stared down into the wishing well, fishing pennies from my pocket. The face of the moon wobbled a bit in the surface and was distorted as I tossed down my coin. The water's surface shattered into tiny fragments of tiny moons, that shimmered and sparkled in the watery disk beneath the circle of bricks that was the well.

As the water calmed, a new face began to coalesce. Not of the moon but of a lovely maiden. Her skin was pale, her hair long and floating in the dark water, sparkling with shiny pennies like gems. Her eyes big and black and her lips were red and beckoning. I was so moved by emotion I sent praise to the moon and leaped, feet first, down to my love. As I splashed into the water I was captured in her long black hair as if snared in a fisherman's net, coins rattling together around me.

I could not see the surface but eventually felt stale air against my face. I felt wet hands smooth the pennies from my face and her breath filled my lungs. I opened my eyes and saw her face, smiling as if she'd finally found the perfect wishing penny and she held me to her bosom, gently stirring my hair with her fingers. 

I looked up to see the moon smiling down upon us. But not a smile of approval. No, not that at all. More like the smile of relief. The smile of someone who has paid his debt and is finally out of some diabolical contract. And was there just an ounce of pity in that grin?

I began to feel as though it was not my wish that had been granted and I again gazed upon my love, pennies and dimes like polka dots across her neck. And farther down her arms and waist the coins overlapped, like scales. Like fish scales. I came to understand, without proof, that the half of her still under water was not legs, nor feet, but the metallic, scaly fins of a mermaid. A mermaid of the wishing well! A seamstress looming wishes into garments, garments to dress her lovers in so they might sink, heavily weighted, to the bottom forever.

She gazed upon me as a mother does a dying child, loving but resigned to fate. She seemed to have many arms, gathering coins tossed by lovers or fools, perhaps both. She wove them into something whole and deadly heavy. I cried up to the rim of the well to please stop wishing, stop believing in this magic. But they could not hear me over the voluminous hum of their desire.

She dressed me as my will softened. I stared into her deep black eyes, absorbed by her focus and her love. And I loved her back in that dreamlike moment. Wholly and truly loved her. I had received my wish, macabre though it be. And I was quite prepared to die for love like any romantic fool.

She leaned in and kissed me, pennies filling my mouth, throat ad belly. I failed to scream and she released her many-armed hold on me and I began to descend, groping for anything to hold onto but her scales were oriented as to allow only slipping farther downward.

I held my breath as I sunk like a ship whose hull had been torn by a jagged reef as it steered into the siren's call! Seduced and destroyed in a single act.

At the last I stared up through the murky water and shiny, scattered wishes, floating and sinking, spinning and sparkling with false promise. 

I stared up, following the voyage of my last breath rising toward the tiny disk of night sky where the moon had gone off, freed of its burden.