Remembering the Moon by Laura Crean

Remembering the Moon - Chapter Two - Feathers and Flashes

CHAPTER TWO - Feathers and flashes

It was a Sunday and I wandered around the house like a lost soul tidying up with a strange compelling urge to clean up my act!  Maybe the messy house of a bachelor frightened women away.

It had been exactly one week since the mysterious meeting with the girl in my garden and the moon still haunted me when I thought of the way she had looked at it.  At work I had tried to concentrate, but everything I did seemed to lead to thoughts of her.

After lunch I sat in the garden to enjoy the rare sunshine, pleased that my garden was starting to look like a garden and no longer just a building site.  My eyes kept drifting to the bush in the far corner and as I closed my eyes her pale face and the moon almost melted into one memory in my mind's eye. The cool moonbeams disappeared as I opened my eyes on the warm rays of the sun kissing my face and in the tail end of the daydream she was the sun's rays and it was her lips on my face.  My hand came up to touch her imagined skin but of course it was only my own rough unshaven cheek my fingers found.

I rubbed the stubble and shook my head to clear the vision and caught sight of a strange flash of light from that same bush as the sunlight hit something,  I almost leapt out of my chair, running at full pelt down the garden. I tried to keep my eyes on the exact spot but as I reached the bush a cloud covered the sun and the flashing stopped.

I moved in to closely inspect the area she had been caught up in and found a few strands of her hair twisted amongst the twigs. Was it just me or did they appear much thicker than strands of hair should be?

I unwound them from the spiky bush and held them up to the light to examine them.  No!  I shook my head to myself; they couldn’t be human hair, her hair!  They must be something else, maybe some kind of thread.

I put the strands in my pocket thinking they couldn’t have been what had flashed in the sun, so I slowly scanned around the area of the foliage, pushing back the thick greenery to look among the beds.

I was just about to give up the search when the cloud broke and a sunbeam shot past my shoulder and I saw something glittering in its path out of the corner of my eye.  I turned to the source and found a strange object caught between two rocks – a feather!  Not your common or garden bird’s feather but a long, white swan-like feather glittering with a silver sheen.  That was what the sunlight was catching?  How on Earth had it got here and what sort of bird in heaven’s name could bare such splendid plumage?  It would have to be a huge beast of a swan and it almost appeared to be sewn through with a silver thread!

I held the feather up to the sun to get a clearer look; it was absolutely perfect.  It was the sort of feather you would expect an angel to adorn.  No she couldn’t be!  Was she?  That was just impossible, my imagination running wild because of her beauty; she couldn’t have been a real, live angel, but what other explanation?     I took the feather back to the house and fumbled around in the kitchen drawers for a sandwich bag.  Carefully I put the feather and the hair (or cotton or whatever it was) in the bag and sealed it, my hands shaking as I found a tote bag to put it in.  Tomorrow I would take them to be examined.