The Transformation Of Amy Lunaro: Chapter Nine. {fiction}
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The next day, Amy woke on the full moon — she could see it behind the soft morning clouds, pale white and translucent, patiently waiting for the curtains of night to reveal her in her glory.
She knew just a little about the moon, that it moved the tides. And she knew that humans were mostly made up of water. And she wondered, could we be moved by the moon, as powerfully as the ocean was.
And she wondered, how something could be so powerful just by sitting there and being filled with light.
She hadn’t looked up at the moon since she was a little girl. She had been looking in for so long that she had forgotten to look out.
She thought maybe when you get to the point where you can no longer look in, you finally look out. And maybe that’s when you finally leave the prison of yourself and join the world.
She remembered being small and talking to the moon, feeling it fill her skin until it sparkled, and then letting that light fill the chalice of her heart until it swelled and glowed like the moon itself.
Despite the fearful swirling soup of her mind, she pretended she believed in magic again and she made a wish — to be free from herself and to be loved.
Then she rolled over and reached for The Power of Now; she’d found it helped to read someone else’s clear calm thoughts when her own mind threatened to drown her.
Eckhart Tolle was talking about being present in your body, how being present is our only place of power, not in the past, not in the future, but right here right now, and she practiced that, moving her awareness into her body, breathing into the moment and calming the storm of her mind.
She moved into the kitchen in her sweatpants to stand over the coffee pot as it gargled and then began to waft out its waking aroma. She chugged a mug, then ran down the back porch stairs to the water.
And then she ran for her life. She ran like her past was behind her, chasing her, and she ran so hard her lungs went ragged and her legs ached and throbbed.
Once back in the house, she grabbed the keys and left for Al’s like that, dripping sweat, and red as a sunset.
She was pulling into the parking lot for eggs and juice when she felt a tug from a new force, a force from within her she had just begun to feel, one she wasn’t sure was real. “Slow down,” it seemed to say. “Pay attention.”
She noted it, then stepped out of the car and crossed the dusty lot and onto the creaky wooden porch. Even before she swung the door open, she could hear Springsteen singing from the speakers, “Wendy, let me in, I wanna be your friend, I wanna guard your dreams and visions,” he cooed.
On her beeline to the cooler, she passed the wine. It whispered to her, seductively in the way that ex-boyfriend who only ever brings you misery and derailment does, despite the promises of, “This time I mean it, things will be different… I love you…”
“Shut up, wine,” she thought.
She passed the newspapers. Violence erupting all over the world. A world on fire. Syrian and Sudanese refugees running for their lives, and from their homes, with nothing. Just to survive. She felt sick. She felt sick of her sadness and her solitude and sick of herself.
She stared down at a small Syrian child in a stoic woman’s arms, the child’s big pools of brown eyes seemed to be looking straight at her. Her chin trembled and a wall of tears blanketed her eyes. She put the paper down gingerly and crossed to the cooler.
In the checkout line, she held the cardboard carton of organic eggs from a local farm and a jug of fresh squeezed orange juice. Springsteen was now erupting in passion, “I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul,” he cried.
The E-Street Band was exploding in a cacophony of sax and guitar and cymbals. Behind her, a deep voice was humming. She felt his energy on her neck and her skin bristled. She felt a sensation in her hips she hadn’t felt in over a year, a loosening.
She hadn’t realized her hips had been so tight, until they flooded with warm liquid energy. Her face somehow became redder. She trembled, she felt transparent. Could he see the blood pumping through her body, into her pelvis, into her face, her lips, her flesh rising to receive him?
She could smell him, too, he smelled warm and musty and safe and dangerous. Like moist earth and caked sweat. She licked her lips.
“Hi there…” the cash register girl was saying. “I can take you now.”
Amy was caught on those words, “I can take you now,” and she could only think of sheets and bed and being… taken. She found herself attempting to shake herself awake, she needed a good crisp Cher snapoutofit slap, and with that she managed to drop the orange juice.
She knelt, and her head banged into his. She looked up. Deep green eyes that led all the way to God.
“Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry,” she said. He smiled. Perfect big white teeth. Dark shiny thick hair, black as night, and huge muscled hands that lifted the jug with a broad finger, a crescent moon of dirt under his finger nail.
“No problem,” he said. He smiled at her, so confident, at ease, like he was one with all that was.
Sweatpants had been a bad choice.
She didn’t really have many other clothes, she’d packed one bag. Her therapist had said, “Take as little baggage as possible,” to start over.
Amy had stared at her blankly.
“That’s a double entendre,” her therapist had said.
“I got it,” Amy had snapped.
He passed her the dented jug of orange juice.
“Good thing none of it spilled,” he said in a voice so low it hit her deep in her belly. She stood there as if her tongue had been cut out, her pulse was racing, and her heart beating louder than Max Weinberg’s drums. She snatched it from his hand. He was a Greek god in overalls.
What was it with all these beautiful people in overalls? What was in the water that they all glowed like characters from a CW show? All of them ready for their closeup, yet no desire for the limelight?
She thought of that movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty she had seen on the plane to Maine, of the line, “Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.” And she realized her whole life she had been begging, busking, for attention, but it had never brought her any peace or fulfillment.
“You’re up,” he said, nodding to the front of the line.
She was flustered, and stumbled up to the checkout. The young girl behind the antique register smiled at her — a short voluptuous girl of twenty or so with dyed black hair and a gleaming silver pentagram around her neck.
Amy stared at the necklace, then down at the girl’s hands, as she rang the items up with her short chipped black nails.
“You okay?” she asked Amy, warmly, in such an adult manner that Amy felt reduced to a five-year-old.
“Yes, yes, thank you.”
“No wine today,” the girl smiled.
“Nope,” Amy said a bit shortly, pursing her lips. “Not today.” She thought of Leanne. “Ya can’t push a button that’s not there.” Well, this girl had pushed a button. The wine button.
Amy fumbled in her sweatpants pocket for a twenty-dollar bill, and felt him breathing behind her like a panther in the jungle; she could feel his eyes glowing on her neck. She could feel the heat of his body all along the back of hers. How close was he? Inches? Nothing between their flesh but fabric?
My God, she thought, get me out of here.
The girl reached for a paper bag from behind the counter, just as the song on the radio switched. The familiarity split Amy open with a knife, she had heard it maybe ten million times. It was an old song of James’, written just as they were falling in love. She felt her stomach lurch up through her throat.
She started to sweat at her temples. “She’s the brightest light I’ve ever seen,” James screamed, “and she just might guide me home.”
Fuck.
“I don’t need a bag,” Amy said, hurriedly. She took the handle of the juice, right where the beautiful man had held it, and she scooped up the eggs. She couldn’t look at him. It’s as if she was paralyzed, her neck in a vice. She felt him smiling at her softly, coolly.
She heard that voice from within, “Turn around and smile,” but she couldn’t; she was frozen in fear. And then she walked — no, she ran — right by him, out of the door, when she heard the checkout girl say, “Hi Jack, how’s the farm?”
She sat in her car and collapsed. She looked around at no one in particular.
“What the hell was that?” she asked. Like, who is running this show and what are they smoking? She finally meets a beautiful man, he talks to her, she ignores him, she’s in her sweatpants, and James comes on the radio? Jack. Jack. She always loved that name. What a strong, sturdy, sexy name.
Jack. Amy and Jack. It sang. Of course, she would have to speak to him for him to fall in love with her. She had forgotten how to be human, though. She had forgotten how to think or talk or care about anything but herself.
For a moment, she felt this nagging sense of betraying James to fantasize about Jack. But wait, it was James who had betrayed her… hadn’t he?
No, James, she thought firmly, envisioning herself dancing in a white pantsuit along with Diane, Goldie, and Bette to “You Don’t Own Me,” at the end of First Wives Club. James didn’t get Cassandra and Amy’s life-long celibacy.
If this was anyone else’s life, if this was a Sandra Bullock movie, she would be saying, “Move On.”
Why wasn’t she? James was gone. He hadn’t returned a single text. And that had killed her. That response, the lack of response, was the response. Nothing. As in, you no longer mean anything. You mean nothing.
How did she go, she thought, from being someone he planned his life with, someone he shared his body and heart and dreams and family with, to being someone whose text he wouldn’t even return?
Sometimes the pain was enough for her to want to just Virginia Woolf it right into the ocean with stones in her pockets.
But, “After death,…” Leanne had said, “…life.” And this Jack man had made her feel a tiny spark of life — no, maybe even the rumblings of volcanic lava — within the corpse of her body. She couldn’t wait to get to her two o’clock appointment at Leanne’s.
She decided she would drive past Leanne’s house in case she was outside.
Amy rolled down Church Street slowly, like a stalker on a stakeout, and saw what she had hoped for — Leanne bent over her rosemary bush in a white linen dress and straw hat.
She parked quietly and stalked barefoot up Leanne’s grey slate path.
“Hi,” she said softly.
Leanne jumped at the sight of her.
“I’m sorry,” Amy said, “Did I scare you?”
“No, not you — your hair did. Good God, girl, your life is hard enough, why do you have to run around town looking like that?”
Amy’s face fell. “I was just going to get eggs at Al’s.”
“Well, here Al’s is like Grand Central Station. You can’t go nowhere here without being seen. So… run a brush through it.” She looked over Amy’s sweats ensemble. “And… tuck something in.” She looked closer. “Is that zit cream?”
Amy’s hand fluttered up to the corner of her lip and she etched away at the chalky white substance with a thumbnail.
“I was running, on the beach.”
“That’s good. That’s good news. But…” she shook her head. “I’m just trying to help you out, kid. I know I’m a little rough around the edges.”
“No… no, you’re right. I should… I should try. I should try a little harder.”
“That’s the spirit. You never know who you might run into. There might just be life after ‘WhatsHisName’.” Leanne refused to name him, like Voldemort.
“Well, actually, I saw someone today. His name, I think, is Jack.”
“Woo hoo,” Leanne let out a low whistle. “What do you know about that! Isn’t that a fine specimen!”
“So you know of him.”
“Every woman on the island ‘knows’ of him, my dear. Why, if I were thirty years younger…” She turned back to snip at the rosemary. “Don’t want to make the bunnies blush.”
Amy bit her lip. “So he’s like, a heartthrob or something?”
“He’s the main eye candy of the female community.”
“Oh.”
Leanne turned around. “And you saw him like ‘that’, huh?”
“Yeah.” Amy sighed. “Shoot.” She looked down in resignation. “I don’t know what I was thinking, getting… ” she shrugged. “Excited. I mean, you said it yourself… I’m a mess. I probably horrified him, if he noticed me at all.”
Leanne clucked.
“Look, kid, you can’t give up so easy. That’s the sure sign of a loser. Every winner needs something to aspire to. And desire… well, desire created just about everything in this world. Yep, everything started with a dream. Stay with it.
Looks like you’ve got yourself a reason to put two feet on the floor and brush your hair. And that, my friend, is just what the doctor ordered. Make no mistake. That’s a cause for celebration.” She put down the hedge trimmers and peeled off her Crocs by the front stoop.
“Come inside, I’ll make you some tea.” Amy smiled, and happily followed Leanne into the house.
This is an ongoing series from a forthcoming fiction novel by Sarah Durham Wilson of DOITGIRL.
Tune in weekly for the next chapter in ‘The Transformation of Amy Lunaro’.
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