FLASH FICTION:WHEN I WAS small, the house next door was a dark forbidding barn with no windows facing the road. It was surrounded by a high wall and sometimes, late at night, strange noises could be heard coming from the other side.
One day I was playing close to the wall when I looked up and saw a big round face with eyes like small dark buttons. It was a boy a few years older than me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He tilted his head from side to side, blinked his eyes and made a noise like a cow: “Mmmmmoooooon.”
“That’s not a name,” I said as he disappeared down behind the wall.
I had an old copper penny, found in a dirty puddle. It had a hen on one side and a harp on the other. I hurled it high into the air where it turned small and dark, just like the boy’s eyes. It came down on the other side of the wall and there was that unmistakable noise of metal striking skull.
“MMMMMOOOOON!!,” said the voice that was now filled with pain.
I ran away, back to the safety of my house and I never saw the boy again.
***
Three weeks ago, I was in an Irish bar on Roosevelt Avenue, under the tracks of the Seven train.
I noticed a hunched man sitting at a table in the corner by himself. He was wearing a heavy overcoat and his cheek bulged as if he were chewing on a big wad of tobacco.
He reminded me of that boy on the other side of the wall; there was something in the darkness of his eyes and the tilt of his head.
I called over the bartender, a sour man with eyebrows that looked like centipedes running for cover to his fringe. “Who is that chap over there?” I asked.
“That’s Jimmy Moon, he’s a mad bastard. Howls on the nights when she’s full in the sky.”
“He reminds me of a boy I met when I was small.”
“Good for you,” said the bartender, as he turned and walked away.
I tried to get the man’s attention but he wouldn’t hold my gaze. He sipped on a beer and rolled the lump around in his cheek.
I went to the men’s room and when I returned, Jimmy was gone. A train roared overhead. The bartender was lost in the sports section of the Post.
I raised my pint and as I got close to the end I could hear something rattle. I shook the glass and I could see the culprit hiding in the last drain of foam. It might have been a flat copper washer, an inch and a bit in width. Or it could have been an old Irish penny, the hen and the harp worn away from thirty years of rolling and roiling inside a man’s mouth.
I haven’t had a drink since.
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