She parked on the side of the road, the wheels on the driver's side still resting on the pavement, the faded yellow line a faint blur of color under the edge of the car. It didn't matter. Even during daylight hours there was little traffic. Now in the empty hours past midnight, there was only her car and the black spiral of asphalt and the fields that lined it, a fringe of brown and muted green along the edges of a scarf.
There were no street lights here, ten miles out on country roads that boasted only a few trailers and the run-down remains of poor farmhouses and crumbling tobacco barns strewn like detritus in abandoned fields. And yet, she could see clearly. She could see the long stretch of black road that dropped out of sight over a slight rise, wishing that she didn't know that all that lay on the other side was more empty road.
Looking up, she could see more stars than she could name in a dozen lifetimes of lying on the grass, head pillowed on her arms as she searched the heavens for a shooting star or a comet or a question to match the answer she found in the stillness of the winter's night and the dome that curved above her head. The three-quarter moon hung awkwardly in the right hand corner of the sky, a lopsided, off-center painting that reflected back the light of the sun, a celestial alchemist turning gold to silver.
She could see the mighty, barren oceans that covered its surface. She had always thought that they were the reason that the moon controlled the earth's tides; those monstrous, empty seas, now filled only with longing, calling the vast waters to them, beckoning them home.
She leaned against the hood of the car, felt the still warm metal through the material of her jeans. Before her was the road and the two enormous fields of cotton that stretched out on either side. The plants were in full bloom, row on row of them, an endless carpet of dark green and white that finally disappeared into the shadows of the bordering trees. Under the lambent glow of the moon, they looked like fields of snow, brittle and cold and pristine.
She wished that they were snow. She wished that she could walk out on them, hear the crunch of ice beneath her feet. She wished that she could simply lie down on the frozen blanket of ground and go to sleep forever.
She couldn't. It wasn't real. Just an illusion of light and shadow, of color and darkness. Just like the rest of her life. Nothing substantial. Just a slight of hand, a trick of the moon.
A trick of the heart.
Her heart was always seeing what wasn't really there, venturing forth, open-armed, completely unguarded. Always looking for something real, something that wasn't just a trick of the light. Always searching for that face that wasn't merely the right smile; always waiting for the perfect words, only finding the ones that hid the same old lies, the same old manipulations. Always searching for something that wasn't a trick of the moon.