Silver Coin Spotlight

***This is an older tale from back in the metroplex, done about five years ago. A gentle blend of sleep-deprived fiction and field notes from a monkey watching expedition...***

The moon looked like a silver coin spotlight. Its gaze saw through the pettiness of sin and salvation, recognizing it as trivial. Under such impartial clinical light the masks of the saved and the damned became transparent, showing them for what they really are. They are, in truth, one in the same. Sides of that coin.

The sound of footfalls on cold naked pavement resounded across the nameless wastes on non-time and counted centuries. A little warmer and it would have been perfect for stargazing. A darker place to look at the celestial candelas and that silver coin spotlight of a moon would have been preferred, but a rockstar philosopher once mentioned; "you can't always get what you want." He also reasons;

"But if you try some times
you just might find,
You get what
you need..."

Ain't that the way?

Matching om tattoos on collar bones were very impressive. Brands of demon and man were shown in recompense. It was supposed that it was becoming fashionable to have the collar bones inked. Maybe so, but some of us have never bothered with fashion. Others are slaves to it. I have a tendency to make fun of the fashionable. Ask a few of my friends who are in its thrall. We're still friends anyway.

Pushed, pulled, or drug, it didn't matter. Exhausted and sore. Pops, creaks, groans, and bone rattles at the slightest movement. Stay until Billy Idol sings his Generation X classic and press on.

Vagrants sleeping in door frames. A mask of the dead, flashing to corpses in places like Marrakesh, Kabul, or Calcutta. This is what desperation, pestilence, famine, and death, looks like. A sad and haunting lesson.

Watching the moon from a high place was what was important. Look up. That's the face of the Divine if you look close enough. Nothing else matters.

Sometimes, late at night and into the small hours, he'll look up his street, watching for her silhouette to come walking up and ask for a cigarette. The memory makes him smile. He waits for a postcard. He waits for a moment. Any moment. He waits for her to come home.

The whole time, the silver coin spotlight moon looks down. It does not pass judgment. There is no need.