Silver Moon Rising

Sometimes love really is eternal...

The bright moonlight bleaches colour from everything it touches, all is black shadows or silver highlights. The moon itself is full and heavy, as ripe as a peach. As ripe as you were once, my dearest, when you were in your prime. You were so beautiful, my love.

I touch the cold marble of your headstone, run my fingertips along the fresh incised lettering signifying the syllables of the name I worshipped as a goddess. You made me, you know you did, and I was your willing adulate. Forever in my heart, my dear sweet bride, you will always be immortal. How can Death itself combat a love that will exist for eternity?

You had so much energy, in the vibrancy of your youth, so full of life. Your lips were plump and crimson as blood, your firm yet yielding flesh fuelling and enriching my devotion. You were majestic, compelling, your Eastern European accent exotic, alluring, elevating. How we partied, all night long; after rest we'd feed, drink our fill, and enjoy the nightlife all over again. I revelled in your effervescence! How you soared! No-one could touch you. The world was your oyster, without a care on the world, sparkling gloriously in the night, crackling with energy. How could I imagine it would ever end?

I can still hear the echoes of your delightful laughter, though the memories of your passion invigorates me still, I am bent and old, hollow and empty.

Would that I had departed the first of us, my sweetheart. How I would have given up so many years, every atom of my vitality, instead of lingering on in this empty half-existence without your supporting smiles. But you were called away before me, sucking out my breath while it was drawn painfully out of you. You were the one who embarked on that long, lingering decline, not I. My curse was to watch in suffering silence the eclipse of my inspiration, the well of my existence.

My eyes well up with tears on this cold clear moonlit night, at those horrid memories of your hollow cheeks, pain-dulled eyes, wasting torso, suppurating sores, the inevitable decay. Helpless, doing my best never seemed enough. I tried, my love to sustain you, hold, keep and protect you, but still you slipped away from me, fading like morning mist. The end was merciful relief, my love. Now you lie still, Rest in Peace, my darling wife, waiting patiently, timelessly upon the moment of resurrection.

"How much further, Guv'nor?" comes the wheedling voice. His companion wheezing with the unaccustomed sweat of physical work. The pair had stopped twice already for cigarette breaks. They look big and strong, but the young have no stamina, no enthusiasm for work. That's why they will never amount to anything.

"I can still see your head and shoulders," I reply calmly, measuredly, keeping frustrating contempt out of my dry, croaking voice; so near, yet still too long I suffer, "Just another couple of feet to go. Come on the pair of you," I encourage brightly, "Dig, it'll warm your blood against the chill of this clear moonlit night!"

Servants, honestly!

Being so frail and weak, I'm forced to rely on others. What was it I enticed them with? Jewels left on a favourite aunt, a beloved sister, or mother? I forget. My memory is as weak as my bodily frame. I am a shadow of my former self. None of us are what we were, what we became, what we'll become at the time of reckoning, of resurrection.

Servants, you had a name for them, in your own funny, endearing, inimitable Transylvanian way that you have, what was it, now, my sweetheart?

Ah, yes, I remember, now, as the moon is my witness:

"Schnacks!"


The end