The Lost Moonbeam

Moon Tales tell you urban and nocturnal fiction stories. These are nights invaded by a magical realism with no purpose other than to make you enjoy a strange story. Our first edition immerses you in illusions and heartbreaks represented by a beautiful and mysterious moonbeam.

The streets are like cluster bombs for memory. Each corner surrounds you in a memory to avoid. Through the hidden streets of my mind, I was heading towards my brightest night. A night without a king or rules to obey.

Lights and music float in the environment. The moon watches over us. And in the midst of that altered state of consciousness, some girls came from Brooklyn. In their stanzas they enclosed psychotropic alchemy. Scenic madness to burn the night to the music of Prince Rama. The Sala Sol venue was half empty, but the audacity of those girls had me trapped.

A Bourbon to immerse myself in the night and a look that crosses the dancehall. I saw your face in so many bodies and in so many rooms that I was not surprised to see her again in that scandalous female figure. Memories of endless drinks and grimaces of pain before a bar rushed into the night air. Those eyes that had told me so much rudeness approached me but a flash of light precipitated the truth. She was not you..

It didn’t matter. Your perfume possessed me and her bold words sounded like an old Johnny Cash riff. There was no going back. We drank from the same bottle and kissed during the last song by Prince Rama, while her restless legs took off from the floor. Nightly substances sprang from her hands starting a strange trip to the alleys of the city. She was a moon in the middle of that darkness.

Sneaky kisses and prying eyes were our traveling companions. She was my guide at questionable reputation place and her conversation revolved around forgotten philosophies and secrets. Our bodies convulsed in the next bar, thanks to her mouth turned into ambrosia. She became my shaman. Songs, lag and colors adorned that after hours which we got lost in the bathroom.

Labyrinths hid under her blouse turned into treasure maps, while dangerous curves loomed in her body mixed up with mine. The night became blurred and the lights escaped from her face to the point of contemplating my old memories. My sorrows quickly evaporated creating a irrational pleasure map.

From her lips came a sweet elixir capable of making me fight with the doorman of that dirty club. Violence is the last refuge of fools and those defeated by time. I felt that way. The clock advanced and I feared that this frenzy would end in a goodbye or monotony. The pleasures were inexhaustible and a mysterious force gave us enough lucidity to cross the city. I wasn’t in my right mind. She had affected me with the same perversion my life had shaken me in recent months.

In the distance, we could see the river. She, as the beautiful Lady of the Lake, carefully removed her delicate shoes and her provocative dress. On her body, she had tattooed a verse of the Song of Songs. Nobody except the moon looked at us and for a moment, freedom wears the body of a woman. She threw herself without hesitation into the depths of that polluted river turned into the lagoon of lost love. I jumped behind her. Just when I kissed her, I saw your face. I saw you again, with the same wicked smile when we said goodbye in that train station.

Suddenly, my muse submerged leaving behind her a halo of indifference and bubbles that glowed strangely with the reflection of the moon. I howled defiantly to the star king of the night as a reverence and let myself be dragged to the bottom of the river in search of my doom.

That seemed like a kind of lunar baptism. She vanished. I searched for that body of sin under the waters, but its anatomy had disappeared. I splashed like a child without an answer until my eyes closed. When I opened my mind again, I was in a poorly lit interior with fluorescents that tried to mitigate the sadness of the place. I felt helpless and damp. I had lost that moonbeam that had lit my eyes.

A policeman approached and revealed the secret. I was at the Leganitos police station, in the center of Madrid. I screamed for a rescue of my missing lover. After a strange grimace he accompanied me to fill out some papers and show me the images of the cameras. In them, I was seen throwing myself to the river naked and lonely. Then, I signed a paper. It included a positive analysis of unknown substances and an interesting fine.

I smiled. Night had played me a dirty trick but I could not stop thinking about the irony of kissing the moon and let its influence disappear with the dim lights of dawn. It was my fate: Illusions that are lost to make way for others. Since then, I did not stop looking for that lost moonbeam in the river during each lunar cycle.

Cover Photo: Juan Carlos Cortina