The Cuckoo Colloquium

39 - Moonch

Dead Moonch walking.

That's what she was, a rabid, soulless ogre, stomping its way into extinction.

The tarsier had bitten her, and she could feel the virus penetrating her blood cells. She remembered a movie about an enormous Saint Bernard that gets bitten by a bat, and the rabies virus turns the poor dog into a murderous monster, killing children, terrifying the town.

"I'm a rabid bull-dyke-the worst kind."

She hobbled up to a ridgeline and peered at the horizon-like an old woman who has grown near-sighted but is too vain to wear eyeglasses-and all she saw was a bumpy green carpet of hills and trees, the rolling panorama she was intending to cross ...

Was it west? - It didn't matter any more-the jungle had no intention of letting her out; it surged at her like spiteful ocean waves as she lumbered past gigantic buttress roots, twenty feet over her head, and feral orchids leered at her.

"Do a back flip!" the Doreen-thing proposed from somewhere above- another lethal suggestion.

Moonch stopped cold...

The coach makes Moonch one of the four spotters for Doreen Zitney on the trampoline, because Doreen can actually do a front flip. Moonch has no interest in attempting a flip, though she can do the basic stuff-the knee drops, the helicopter.

Phil Johnson, doing basketball practice, standing there, watching Doreen do her front flips ... Phil Johnson, with the freckles and the wavy, blond hair. Dimples, too. He watches Doreen, his eyes sparkling, and Moonch begins to burn inside...

"Do a back flip," Moonch, the upper-class junior, advises from her position on the floor.

Doreen, a sophomore, with the white, curly hair and the uneasy glimpse at Phil Johnson; the indecision in her eyes...

Doreen needs work on the backflip, but she goes for it-because of Phil Johnson-and falls back into Moonch, who retreats a step, and so Doreen slams into the frame and then flips over onto the floor, dislocating her elbow.

It isn't pretty, and the whole gym activity stops-the boys basketball practice, the badminton games, girls doing flag twirling practice up on stage; the coaches then swarming over...

"What was I supposed to do, block her, let her crash into me, and shit? - I don't think so!" goes Moonch's alibis.

Moonch is never allowed to spot again, and whatev-the twinky is obviously made of glass. And Phil Johnson never talks to Doreen again, Moonch is pretty sure of that.

"It was kind of a backflip, Doreen, just not the one they want," Moonch offers once. And with her new plaster cast that no one would sign, Doreen just looks off with eyes that have lost life.

Poor Doreen; she is so trusting.

Moonch then wrinkled her forehead, working something out...

"I liked Phil Johnson! - I'm not a lesbo, I'm just a jealous, run-of-the-mill bully ... with rabies!"

This was a major revelation! How come she saw it so clearly now? Was she bi? The Missing Link? How would someone define a Moonch, anyway?

Just like that, her luck changed-On the ground she found some berries! She preened at the little mound in her lap she had collected, and they were quite good, the ripened ones. It was like some video game-after a kind of epiphany, she received a gold coin for making major progress.