Children of the Moon (Patreon)

"Full moon's coming up. Whaddya suppose they'd do if we just ran off for a few days. Just a few . . ."

She mused placidly, offering up the idea with just enough steadiness in the up-all-night rasp of her voice that she very probably meant it sincerely. Half listening, he traced the back-and-forth of the dancers as his mind swirled over in a kind of helical thought-paralysis and the only way to hold off the rush of being intensely present with the girl -- this real cherry of an unfettered marsupial -- seemed to just be watching those dancers through the gauzy midnight air.

". . . find ourselves a bare mountaintop, way up high. To, you know, commune with the heavens. In a big sky . . ."

Each word crept gently from her throat, bathing him in aural kind of belonging just for being the subject of her proposition. He was wound up in her like some waterlogged oligochete sinking into the slippery maw of exactly the kind of primordial business Elder Soapstone-Hopper would've chided him for. But the frazzle-furred curmudgeon was neither here nor anywhere among the tree-kees that still drew breath in the jungle steam.

". . . watching for astral travelers out in the -- hey, are you listening?"

"Yeah. Commune . . ."