Magic Moon Read Online Free PDF

knees. He wasn’t wearing underwear. While he clung to the top of the cage, I cupped him. I took it in my mouth and raked my teeth against him, and he moaned and thrust himself deep into my mouth. I sucked him as hard as I could, like trying to suck that last bit of milkshake from the bottom of the glass. Suddenly he pulled away and dropped into the seat across from me, his fingers locked in the wire of the cage on both sides of us. I kicked my panties free and lowered myself onto him. He filled me. The cage gave a jolt, and we began to move, and I wondered if we’d stop at the bottom and get caught. But I didn’t care, and the cage didn’t stop, it circled and circled and circled, and it seemed that we were the only ones at the carnival, and it seemed I’d known the young man all my life, forever and forever. Everything about him was familiar. His taste, his touch, his scent.
    At the top of the ride, he spilled himself into me in a way I’d felt he’d done a hundred times before. But maybe that’s what it was like when you met your true love. Maybe he felt just that familiar.
    We finally stopped, and I pulled down my dress and wadded up my panties in my hand while he zipped his jeans. We stepped out, and I noticed that the other rides had stopped, and the lights had been turned off. He pulled me through the dark, across thick electrical cords that snaked through the grass, to a gypsy wagon. Inside, we stripped and tumbled to a bed covered in red velvet. I kissed him everywhere while he moaned and dug his fingers into my scalp. I pulled him up my body, and he entered me. As I clung to him, I looked past his shoulder through the small window and saw a blood-red moon.
    I fell asleep, and it was the sleep of the dead. Later, I woke up naked, the sun beating down on my face, the red flower on my belly. I sat up, petals scattering. I was alone in a green pasture. The carnival was gone. Not only gone, there were no tracks left by wheels. There was no beaten grass, no smashed cotton-candy cones. Nothing.
    I found my dress and slipped it on, but there was no sign of my panties. I picked up what was left of the daisy and took a sniff. It smelled like a flower, nothing more. And I remembered what I’d seen as I’d looked over the young man’s shoulder. The blood-red moon. And more than that, I remembered the tattoo on that shoulder, a tattoo that spelled Clementine in ornate script. Clementine was my name.
    I returned to my job at Winn-Dixie, but I couldn’t quit thinking about the boy at the carnival. I got the notion that my mother had visited the same carnival, and that I’d been conceived that night. But while she’d been content to accept what had happened and move on, I wasn’t willing to let it go. I wanted to find that boy. I wanted to be with that boy. And I felt that he wanted to be with me too. Otherwise, why would he have my name tattooed on his shoulder? He’d been waiting for me, he’d been waiting for the night of the magic moon.
    I spent the next two weeks returning to the field, each time with a handful of flowers that I would sniff and sniff and sniff, hoping to recreate that moment. On one of my trips, an old man stepped out from the shade at the side of the road. I’d seen him around, and I heard he was good at conjuring. “There’s a way to stay in that other world,” he said.
    I didn’t want to let him know that I knew what he was talking about, so I just stared.
    “It can be done, but it takes great sacrifice. You can never return here once you cross over.”
    “That sounds a little too much like dying, and I’m not ready to do that yet.”
    “It’s a lot like dying, that’s true.”
    “How do you know so much about it, old man?”
    “Because once upon a time I fell in love and crossed over.”
    “But you’re still here.”
    “No, I came from the other side. I came here to this existence.”
    He began unbuttoning his shirt, just the top buttons, enough to slide it over his shoulder