Tears Of The Moon

Something inside me has been trying to come out for the longest time.

It sits in the dark with mute patience, as obvious as a great black cat with eyes as large as towers, flicking its tail and staring. Making not a sound.

I’ve tried to sing it, to shout it out.

I’ve tried tears, but it refuses to be flushed out.

I’ve offered it my fingers as a guide, to bridge the caverns of my heart and flow, like blood onto a page.

Still, the words don’t come.


I thought maybe if I went for this creative writing class, I’d be able to give it a voice.

If you’re stuck with a character and don’t know what she/he wants to say, try interviewing him/her. Think about the character before you go to sleep and see where the dream takes you.

said Sharon.

And so here I am.


The sky is a hazy grey, bled of colour as the veil of waking parts and I step into the plains of the dreaming. Strange, I’d have thought it would be the other way around.

I am standing on a path. The air is cool and smells faintly of candyfloss. All around me, the plains begin to shimmer, throwing up wavy images like reflections on the surface of a rippling lake.

I hear – no – feel the calling. If I concentrate with eyes closed, it feels like white noise and flashing crimson. A blood rush. I can almost taste the metallic earthiness of the pull, tugging at my skin, reaching into my flesh.

The path beneath me changes as I move forward.

Sometimes it’s a channel of waves, sometimes a bitumen road. Other times it’s a railroad track, oftentimes a nondescript dirt path.


I come upon a crossroads with a roundabout in the centre. A spotted cow is walking around the roundabout, followed by a small pink pig. Around and round they go, bopping up and down like a merry-go-round. The pink pig is wearing a blue ribbon with a tag on it that says “My ballgown”.

I smile at them and they wave their hooves and trotters at me.

“Where are you going”, the pig asks. The cow just stares with kindly sympathy in its large wet eyes.

“I don’t know. I think I’m looking for something, or someone, I don’t know what” I reply.

The pig blows me a kiss with her little pink trotter and says “Wherever you need to go, I love you.”


The path takes me into the traffic-choked streets of poorly planned cities. I pass through corporate boardrooms where identical people nod and yawn in unison. The chairman opens the door for me, and I step into a courtroom where angry people are fighting and the judge is sleeping. Don't they realise that there’s blood seeping out of their shoes, I wonder.

I walk into an abyss where a woman made of glass sits screaming inside a cage woven of betrayal and lies. With each keening wail the cracks in her skin grow wider, redder, angrier. I stare at her helplessly as she throws herself against the bars, splitting her glass surface into hundreds of tiny shards, held together by quivering rage. Each fragment is like a tiny mirror and I see happier times in them. “The crystal ball lied” she hisses. “Where there was two, there is now only me.”

I tell her that I am sorry, but I have to go. There is something I must find.

“GO, GO AWAY!!” she screams as the glass pieces shatter and fall like diamonds into the dust.


I walk on, feeling the call getting stronger as the road cuts through rows of houses in neat green and red boxes. I step from cloud to cloud over mountain plateaus, distant oceans and dusty red deserts. Sometimes the road takes me through country markets, then into featureless landscapes with only misshapen trees lining each side, bald of leaf, like bony fingers pointing an accusation at the sky.

“What are you looking for?” ask the ugly trees.

“I think I’ve lost my mittens” I hear me tell them.

“Try over there”, they reply, pointing helpfully at a heap of things that had fallen by the wayside, for even though they were ugly and misshapen, the trees are kindly by nature, just that nobody bothers to see that.

I bend down into the glittery dust and poke at the pile of Discarded Things, the Thrown Out, the Forgotten and Unloved. Amidst a few Hopes and too many Dreams, I find a faded old photograph.


A child sits alone, atop a dresser, in front of a mirror. A boy or a girl child? It is hard to tell. The child’s features are out of focus but I can make out curling hair and a chuckle of a smile. There is an imprint of square-rimmed spectacles on its face, as if someone had drawn them on, wanting to see what the child would look like, wearing glasses. Or maybe if behind the glasses was this child. Searching for the child in the mirror, perhaps?

The blood in my veins rise and ebb. Deep within the core of my being, tears shed by moonglow begin to wake from their slumber, like pearls forming on the seabed.

Blood calling to blood.


Ahead, standing on the path, is a little girl.


I walk towards her as she skips off the path and into …

…a school field. The children scamper across the grass as the fierce PE teacher barks out commands to first skip, then run, then skip again. The little girl struggles to keep up while tugging at the elastic band of her navy blue bloomers.

I realise that she is trying to hide the bright red welts, like lipstick marks, on the back of her thighs, just below the elastic band. My heart aches, those aren’t kisses. I can almost see, even though my eyes are shut tight, feathers flying as the feather duster whips through the air, slashing, cutting, stinging.

When I open my eyes, the little girl and I are alone on the playground. Everybody else has gone to class. She’s slowly swinging herself, not getting very high at all off the ground. She looks at me and smiles a brave smile, even though she can’t see from the tears running down her cheeks. There is chilli paste rubbed into her eyes and it's making her eyes water and sting.

I try to wipe away her tears but she stops me. “I need them to help me swallow my food. I’m really not hungry, I just can’t eat, but I have to swallow or else mummy will hit me again”. She gives me a fork and a spoon that have blood on them. I look at her stitches. “I fell down” she quickly says and runs back onto the path.


The road changes as I follow the child into the sepia-coloured road of a photograph, where colonial shop-houses line the street and the five-foot way is tiled with mosaic. Old-time tunes float from the record shop as flocks of swifts call to each other in the fading light.

I step into the back of one of the shops. It is dark and I have to feel my way along the wooden partitions. The child trudges slowly up the stairs to the In-Between Room. She turns back and looks at me.

“Don’t follow”, she whispers, closing the door behind her. “I’m being punished”.


I stand at the bottom of the stairs.

As if bound by roots.

The pounding in my ears is making me dizzy.

I climb, carefully and slowly. Like walking on glass. Each step creaks.

A cane, a clothes hanger, hard knuckles in a fist. Words that cut even deeper.


I open the door and she’s curled up in the dark on a musty old sofa. I stand in the wedge of light at the door, looking in. The child blinks, then rubs her eyes.

“Can I come out now?”

Unable to speak, I reach out to her.

She shook her head. “I can’t. I’m not supposed to come out until mummy says so because I’m being punished”

I move to flick the light switch.

“No please. I don’t deserve to have the light on because I’ve been bad”.


The tears of the moon crash onto the shore, washing the blood away.

I can't breathe.


“The door was never locked” I tell her as I hold out my hand. “All you had to do was open it and come out”.

She stares at me with eyes as large as towers. Then she smiles.

“Do you know what I’m looking for?” I ask her.


The child sits up and brushes her dress straight. Her hair hangs in damp curls around her face. She puts her hand into the little embroidered pocket in the front of her dress and slowly draws out a star so bright it makes my chest ache.

The light fills the room. I can hardly see, but it doesn’t matter.

“I’ve been keeping it safe for you, here in my pocket of happiness” the child says, holding her cupped hands out to me.

I hear the rustle of wings as feathers of light brush past, floating up into the night sky outside.


And then, it is morning.