“Never mind,” he said behind me. “I like you. Can we do it?”
“What?” I said, not looking at him. “What did you say?”
“I said, can we do it?”
“Do what?”
“You know.”
“Oh, that. No.”
“But the moon.” He pointed at the sky, though there was no moon to be seen because it was hidden behind clouds.
“No.”
“Why not?”
This is what I had learned about breachers—you were either weak or you were strong. How you presented yourself determined what happened to you. Roddy Ewell did not bother to attack, because he assumed I presented no threat. He thought, between the two of us, that I was the weak one.
He should not have thought that.
When I didn’t answer, he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my body. I could feel his penis, erect, against my bottom. I turned myself out of his grasp and shoved him backward.
“Stop it,” I said. “You’re pathetic.”
He cringed, surprised. “What?” he said. This was not going as he had imagined it. My defiance had caught him off guard.
I hated his weakness. I wanted to kill his weakness. I could feel the violence in me twitching all up and down the nerves of my body.
“You’re different,” he said. “You didn’t used to be like this.”
For reasons I did not care to explore, this was unacceptable to me. I reached for one of the empty bottles from the bin next to me, and I threw it at him. He flinched, and the bottle hit him in the shoulder then fell and smashed on the concrete.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Don’t say ouch.”
I took another bottle and threw it at him. He knocked it away, but it made a gash on his forearm, and there was blood.
“Ouch,” he said. “Stop it.”
“Don’t say it. I told you not to say it. You don’t come to me unafraid. Don’t you dare. You think I don’t know how to make pain?”
I attacked. I leaped at him, this meager boy, even though I was smaller than he, smaller than everyone. I threw myself at him, and we tumbled to the tarmac of the parking lot, the grit digging into our skin. He held his arms up to defend himself, but it made no difference. I clawed haphazardly, my fingernails digging bloody troughs in the flesh of his arms, his chest, his shoulders.
“Stop!” He sobbed. “Please, please stop it!”
I couldn’t hear for all the horror happening in my head. I didn’t think. I couldn’t tell what was happening. All I knew was ravenous hunger. I wanted to eat that little-boy soul. I wanted to chew it up and swallow it so that maybe he could be a little stronger, or so that maybe the world could.
I could hear my own voice, like a mongrel dog’s, grunting and gurgling, and I was surprised. I was blank. The world was white skin and red blood.
I tore at him until he wriggled out from under me. We were both bloodied and raw.
He ran into the darkness, the soles of his feet slapping wetly against the pavement.
I remember nothing else. My mind was truly lost.
I woke the next morning weeping, huddled in a tight ball against the front door of my house. My body shook with the pain of its injuries and the suffocating strength of my sobs. For a long time, I could not stop, and I put my fist in my mouth to hush my cries.
After a while, I had calmed myself enough to go inside.
That was the end of Beggar’s Moon.
*
Between moons, I went back to the mine. And I discovered something new in my exploration—a large, hollowed-out chamber, an echoing cistern. Even though its entrance was near the mouth of the mine, I had never noticed it before because it required that I pry loose a collapse of stones and crawl my way through a narrow aperture.
It was a majestic place, a sacramental place. The cave was circular, the dripping walls rising high like a dome in a church. At the very top of the dome was an opening, the size of our kitchen tabletop at home, through which I could see the dusky pink of the late afternoon sky, the overhanging bristles of tree branches.
The floor of the cave was mostly flat, but in the middle was the mouth of a wide shaft, roughly the same size as the opening above, that descended down into pure abyss. I wondered if the shaft and the opening had shared some kind of purpose in the old days of the mine, so symmetrical and aligned did they seem—as though God had poked a gigantic needle into the pincushion of the world. I crept close to the edge of the chasm and felt my stomach do vertiginous tumbles. I stared down into the void so long that I lost track of myself. I hugged a nearby outcropping of stone because I didn’t trust myself to stay sane exposed to such nullities. If I leaped in, I might fall forever. I wondered if I would die of fright before I hit the bottom so that my landing might be a curious ghostly bliss.
I thought maybe that’s where my previous self had gone, down there in the depthless black, and I spoke to her.
“Lumen Ann Fowler,” I said, trusting that my meager voice would carry down the well in the absence of any material to impede it. “Lumen Ann Fowler, Lumen Ann Fowler.”
I knew that repetitions of three had power to them. And if you could summon Bloody Mary by uttering her name three times in a mirror, then I reckoned you could summon a lost girl in a similar way.
“It’s me, Lumen,” I said. “I came looking for you.”
I waited, listening to my own breathing in that silent place.
“I know who you are. I remember you. Do you want me to prove it? Your mother wore orchid gloves at her wedding.”
I swallowed, and there was grit in my throat. I leaned my head against the outcropping of stone and gripped it tighter.
“It’s all right,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything. We can just be quiet for a while.”