In the night when the moon looks lonely

“It looks lonely, doesn’t it? The moon.”

They sat squashed side by side on Enid’s bedroom windowsill, not quite touching. They were fourteen years old. It was early summer, the languid heat of the season already a stifling promise on the air, begging for windows to be thrown open in hope of a breeze.

The windows were not open. The windows were never open.

The curtains were drawn just a crack, a keyhole splinter, allowing the silvery light to slice between them. If Jenny glanced to the left, she would see the pale glow of it reflecting enormous in Enid’s blue eyes, like the full moon might swallow her pupils whole. It would dance across the curve of her cheek, across the bow of her lips and she would be different, wilder, freer.

Jenny shivered, and wasn’t sure if the feeling was pleasant or not. She let her fingers fall from the curtain. Her heart hammered.

“I guess,” she replied. “It is pretty, though. You were right.”

Moon watching was a forbidden past-time in the village, for the same reason that going out at night past curfew was. Jenny’s mum would board the whole window up if she knew what they’d done. She didn’t think Enid’s mum cared what Enid did though, so long as no one saw her, so long as she didn’t give people a reason to talk.

Enid did not let go of the curtain. Her grip tightened on the thick blackout material, hard enough that her knuckles bleached white. She pressed her face up against the pane, drinking up the night sky like she was starving.

“It’s always up there on its own,” Enid murmured. “I’ve checked, you know? Every night, with nothing like it. There are stars sometimes. But that’s not the same. It’s not a star, it’s the moon.”

“Hey.” Jenny swallowed. “Cut it out. What if your mum comes in?”

Enid laughed.

There had been a thrill, in the first glance, of breaking the rules. It had been a secret between the two of them. Something special that was only theirs. Still. One stolen glance was more than enough, wasn’t it? Lest the moon steal them away in turn, like people said the moon did with foolish girls who broke the rules. It got into them. It changed them. And Enid’s voice…

There was a longing in it, a hunger, that Jenny had never heard before; something bottomless and howling that scared her. Something familiar. It was a longing she sometimes caught on Enid’s face too, lurking ghost-like beneath the surface, when she looked at Jenny and didn’t think Jenny was looking back.

Jenny was always looking back, but watching Enid was a little like moon-watching was.

Enid opened her mouth as if to say something more, still peering out, and Jenny couldn’t, she couldn’t. She felt almost dizzy in the light.

“Enid, it’s not funny. Cut it out.”

She made a grab for the curtain. Their fingers grazed. The room plunged back into darkness. For a beat, neither of them moved. For a beat, Enid looked so lost, so raw, so human that Jenny couldn’t breathe. She studied her hand where they’d touched like it didn’t belong to her.

“Sometimes,” Enid said, “I just want to go out there in the middle of the night and scream. Don’t you ever want to do that?”

There was a plea in her voice, though it was fading.

Jenny stared at her. She knew what her mum would think of such a question; what everyone would think. Nice young ladies didn’t go howling at the moon like wild things, however much they might want to.

The plea was gone.

Enid smiled back, and then she was simply Enid again; funny, mad, always up to some kind of trouble, Enid. Defences up.

“God, J,” she said, shoving Jenny’s shoulder lightly as she clambered down from the window ledge. “You’re such a baby. It’s fine. We’re fine, aren’t we? It’s not like anyone saw.”

The next full moon, Jenny heard a wolf outside her window, and her parents said she was not allowed to be friends with Enid anymore.

***

It was autumn and the world smelled like change.

Jenny was fifteen, and she wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, only that the waiting ached in her ribs, only that she dreamed of running through deep forest with the crisp scent of pine trees in her lungs. Enid was with her, hot at her heels, moonlight-radiant and laughing. It was a chase, but she was not prey. Prey didn’t want to be caught. She didn’t tell anyone about the dreams. She knew better than that too.

There were whispers of a growing wolf pack living in the nearby woods. Animal attacks. Pets let out late left bloodied on the street. The radio blared warnings not to talk to strangers or strange people. Mothers, lock up your sons and daughters! Some people talked about going out, going hunting, but the notion was always squashed. Nobody was willing to say why, even if everyone knew.

(No one wanted to hunt a wolf in the woods, and wake up in the morning with not a wolf but their child’s corpse slung over the back of the pick-up truck, bleeding out.)

So, instead, the curfew was extended, tightened. There were renewed lectures at school about lunacy, about moonlight, that contagious rabid thing. Lycanthropy, hissed, hushed, like the curse it was. In autumn and winter, especially, they were to come straight back home after school. No dawdling. No dallying.

Jenny. Jenny. Jenny.

The nights deepened endless and quiet like a closing door, and even the torrent of rain pelting against the pavements couldn’t make Jenny’s bedroom feel less airless. Less restless. At least, in winter, it didn’t feel like there was something happening out in the world that she was missing out on; her real life, just around the corner, just out of sight waiting for her to catch up to it. But autumn…

Jenny, I think you’re like the moon. You’re the brightest thing in my sky. Come to the window, Jenny. I miss you. Don’t you miss me?

So, instead, everyone eyed each other with the greatest of suspicion, paralysed against making the first move, just in case. They brought silver crosses and hung them delicate around their throats, and everyone went to church on Sunday and prayed to God even if God never talked back. Maybe everyone was used to people not talking back by then, not really, so it only seemed right that God didn’t either. Or maybe it was just that God didn’t talk to her.

The village council posted pamphlets through letter boxes. First, they warned of a bite, then it turned into a scratch, and finally a mere touch. It was important, so very important, Jenny’s mum and dad sternly told her from across the vast expanse of dining room table, not to let them touch her.

Jenny couldn’t remember the last time anyonehad touched her.

Come look at the moon, Jenny. Don’t you think it looks lonely?

In the night, she lay awake. She listened to the wind howl her name, she listened to the tap of branches on the windowsill behind the blackout curtains and the boarded window, like a friend asking to be let in, and she…

She went down into the kitchen and took pale low-fat yoghurt out the fridge because her parents didn’t believe in having snacks in the house, and ate the whole tub standing in the dark, and still felt hungry, still felt hollow, still felt howling.

She wondered if that would ever go away.

***

“You’re out late,” Enid said. “Not like you, J.”

J. It had been years since Jenny had heard that nickname, been anything other than plain sweet Jenny, or Jennifer if she was in trouble with her parents. She swivelled on the spot, already breathless, heart already thudding, expecting – what?

Enid looked much the same as she always had; older, but a more or less an ordinary girl, in jeans and a leather jacket and boots chunky enough to kick out the bones of the world. She didn’t look any different to how she looked in daylight. Unlike Jenny, she wasn’t even clutching an umbrella in one hand, desperately shielding herself from the moon like they were all taught to do. Then again, Enid didn’t need to, did she?

“I lost track of time,” Jenny said, her mouth dry. “I need to get home. The curfew.”

It was winter, the air was frigid and bleak and biting. The darkness had come on swiftly, like it always did at that time of year. The moon was a slither of a moon. A crescent, according to the books, smaller than Jenny had ever seen it before.

They were seventeen. The howling outside of her window had stopped. The nights felt terribly silent. She could have been the only girl left.

“You should get home too,” Jenny said. “Your mum will worry.”

Enid didn’t laugh, but she raised an eyebrow to call Jenny out on that particular bullshit. “I’ll walk you home,” she said instead. “Come on. Dangerous predators on the street and all.”

Jenny thought about protesting, she knew she should, and knew she didn’t want to.

“Don’t worry,” Enid said. “I don’t bite.”

Jenny flushed and scurried after her, feeling some taboo had been broken, because – well. No one talked about it. As far as she was aware, most people didn’t guess anything about Enid at all. If she was – well, what she was – then her and her mum had hidden it well. Enid’s mum had always been good at hiding things that she found inconvenient or distasteful, and it helped that no one looked outside at night. It helped that everyone had something to crush down in the pit of their stomach. Something that didn’t fit.

She didn’t know what to say.

It felt like she never knew what to say, but Enid didn’t flinch from it.

She’d been in the library, devouring ghost stories, tucked in a quiet corner that even the librarian forgot about. By the time she’d lifted her head, brain reeling from her reading the sky had already been dark. The moon, with its contagion, had already been on the rise.

She couldn’t see the moon through the fragile protection of her umbrella, but she could see the way it shone across Enid like it had done that day in her room when they were fourteen. It painted her almost lovingly. It flecked her irises like pearls, when their eyes met, stealing glances that they should long since have stopped but never quite had. The glances reached where everything else did not.

The moon did not feel so terrible, so mad, a thing then.

It did look lonely, though, in the sky. Still the only one of its kind.

She wondered if the wolves in the wood were lonely too.

She didn’t think they were; not anymore, not since the first one. There were so many more of them now. They ran as a pack every month, never questioning if they belonged, never trying to be something that they were not. Maybe it was not stealing. Maybe the moon had looked back, and given them that.

“Do you like what you’ve become?” The question blurted out. Even Enid looked momentarily startled by her asking it.

She stopped, at the end of Jenny’s street, with a glance at all the houses with their boarded up windows, like eyes deliberately blinded.

“I don’t remember those nights,” she said, after a long moment, like she half expected the very question to be a trick to summon hunters and police. “But I feel happy when I wake up.” She tipped her head, and smiled that Enid smile, a little (gently) feral, filled with challenge. “Do you?”

Jenny. Jenny. Jenny. Don’t you sometimes just want to scream?

“Goodnight, Enid.” She took a step closer and – stopped, faltered, longed – turned away. She squashed it down, squashed everything down, beneath Enid’s glittering and knowing gaze. “Thank you, for walking me home.”

***

Eighteen. Her parents were so relieved, apparently the wolves didn’t go for adults, as much. Sailing would be smoother going forward.

They talked about how the rest of her life would go, the neat road through university and career and kids and settling in a nice house in a different but ultimately the same suburb as her parents had. Rinse. Repeat. Wax. Wane. Endless.

It was spring, and the scent of flowers was heady upon the warm air. Sunlight dappled across lush grass, bright and pristine, and everything was so very nice, wasn’t it?

She would dream, instead, of concrete jungles, filled with smiling figures and oh what big teeth.

No.

That night, she went up to her bedroom, and waited. She finally knew, after all, what she was waiting for. She hoped she wasn’t too late, that she hadn’t missed her chance. What if it didn’t come? What if the night was peaceful, and the moon hidden behind clouds? She would take a train out of the village. She would not look back.

Jenny. Jenny. Jenny.

She released a shaking breath.

She took the front door keys from her parent’s bedside drawer, softly, and slipped down past the kitchen and out. The grass was cold beneath her bare feet. The moon, the first time she’d ever felt it on her skin was a cool caress, a sip of water after years in the desert.

It was not yet a full moon, but Enid stood at the end of her driveway like something mythic, a handful of pebbles clutched in one hand. She tossed one up so it tapped, neatly, at Jenny’s window and grinned.

Jenny walked towards her, with a rush of shyness, with the teetering sense of some chasm beneath her because she’d been so scared, so stupid, so alone and she didn’t know how to do any of it anymore.

But Enid took her hand, and pulled her into the woods, and seemed to know exactly what to do.

Together, they howled.

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I’ve noticed a lot of your writing has a menagerie of characters. I’d love to see what you’d do with a werewolf or werewolf pack if you are interested in the idea.