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The Big Moon Egg in the Earthworm's Mouth

The big moon egg in the earthworm's mouth glowed pale blue. Atchinson lowered his weapon for a brief instant, squinted, tried unsuccessfully to regain complete focus, and raised the weapon again. He sighted along the length of the barrel but wasn't really sure of what he was doing. He had never been a very good shot, despite his military service where, also, he had not been a very good shot. Weapons bored him. The most thrill he had ever gotten from guns was as a little boy pointing a branch at someone's belly and squeezing an imaginary trigger. "Pow! Pow! Pow-pow!" he would shout, face convulsed with make-believe fury. The object now was to strike the giant earthworm dead center in its throat, cause it to drop the egg. He fired. Miss. The earthworm swayed angrily from side to side.

He smiled weakly without removing his eye from the gunsight. "Look," he said angrily, "I was the best shot in my unit, I've told you that, haven't I?"

"O.K., O.K." she merrily conceded. She was a slender, pretty woman with Peter Pan-style brown hair and wide blue eyes and didn't know just now that she could have asked Atchinson to walk off the roof and he would have done so, for love of her. Which frightened him. 'You've gone right off the map," he told himself bitterly. 'Calm it down.' But he couldn't.

The big moon egg in the earthworm's mouth. Karen beside him. The feeling that never again would he enjoy himself so much. He fired. The shot exploded the moon egg, continued on through the earthworm's mouth and the worm went down covered by yolk and shell, which was not the object of the game. Beside him, Karen stood in disappointed silence. He stepped back from the video game, balanced himself, rubbed a fist in his eye and looked around at the other players in the arcade. What was the point of such games anyway, he asked himself. And had no answer.

Taking up the crutches, he led her outside and they strolled down Thompson Street. They had no plans, the atmosphere festive and it was Saturday night, leaving the whole of Sunday to sleep in if they wished. She was beautiful beside him, her eyes catching the lights, her bright smile braving his occasional self-remonstrance about slowing their pace.

They drove home to watch television and make love. During her passion his mind returned to the big blue moon in the earthworm's mouth. What was the idea of it anyway, he wondered? Some giant earthworm reached up and snatched the moon out of the sky? He didn't get it. He kissed her and thrust. She sighed, eyes closed. No, the earthworm would have to be as big as the sky to hold an entire moon in its mouth. So why earth worm as opposed to, say, space worm? His tongue dispassionately traced the hollow curve of her shoulder and neck. Where was the worm going with the moon anyway? It didn't seem to want to swallow it. Bury it then, maybe. A worm that stores away moons the way squirrels hide nuts. Maybe bury the moon in the ground, all the moons of all the lonely nights. But in which ground? How deep? And then what? And then...and then...and then...

She kissed his forehead and turned over to sleep. Atchison's eyes roamed angrily among the many framed photographs on the dresser: football in college, climbing the Rockies, his graduation portrait from officers' training school and their wedding photographs. All of the photographs showed him, or them from the waist up, even though some had been taken well before he lost his leg in Bosnia two years ago in a munitions accident on base that, naturally, was not reported in the press. It would have looked too dumb: ARMY QUARTERMASTER BLOWS HIMSELF UP WITH LIT CIGARETTE IN AMMO DUMP. It was a small cache but made quite an explosion and he was lucky to be alive. You saw the signs up all your life about flammables and explosives but gave them no thought, they were not for you, and only one in maybe a hundred thousand suckers get to learn what such signs truly mean and he was it.

He was lucky in that no one else was killed or hurt: he would have stood trial for manslaughter, which is automatic in military court martials for criminal negligence. Instead, he was amputated from the leg, rehabilitated, and uneventfully and honorably discharged with a full pension for life. No inquiry, no charges, nothing. He had been, as the Army recruiting commercial said, all that he could be, and had returned less one leg and with no skills or prospects or aspirations to show for it.

Through it all Karen was incredible. Made the difficult adjustment to his new physical state with just a few nights alone with herself on the sofa to grieve. Then, she was with him and never brought it up again, not even in their worst quarrel.

They fought a lot. He couldn't help it. He spoke of it with the doctor at the Veteran's hospital where he went for an occasional check-up, ventured the idea that some sort of chemical imbalance caused by the loss of the leg was responsible. They disagreed, advised psychiatric counseling. What did they know? It was possible to see it in just standing before a mirror, no medical degree was necessary, just a little common sense: the stump resting upon absence. Swaying there one legged stood a partial man. How could it not affect the flow of important things to the brain, even the heart? How could it not damage the process whereby certain chemicals or nutrients or whatever was processed in the body to release anger inhibitors, or, alternately, express happiness? How could Karen not occasionally fantasize about other men?

She was sleeping deeply. He roughly shook her awake. She looked at him, confused.

"What do you want?" he asked in a loud, carnival-barking voice. A voice that promised big things coming down the pike if one played ones cards right.

"Nothing," she yawned sleepily " I wanta go back to sleep, awright?"

She turned and he shook her again.

"I asked you: what do you want?"

"Billy, please. I'm really zonked!"

"Anything," he said loudly, his lewd grin hinting at hidden preserves of power at his fingertips.

"But I don't..."

He shot to his elbow and leaned furiously over her: "Pick. Anything! But, pick! On me!"

But she really was beyond reach now: "Ask...I'll...in the morning...promise..." and slept.

It was nice in the car. Air conditioner turned up. Lots of room on the patent-leather seats. The cassette deck loud with a maudlin Judy Collins song. He drove of course, the prosthesis off and tossed in the back seat, his foot jumping left-right, left-right, back-forth, a tennis sneaker match between gas and brakes. He loved it. She sat with a frozen smile, not really resigned but willing to play along. There was really no choice.

"So how long were you waiting for me out there?" he shouted above the music.

"Not too long. About twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes?!" he smiled scornfully "If time is money, say a buck a minute, that's the cost of a high-priced meal."

"I didn't mind," she said.

"Well, I do. We ought to get you a cell phone and a beeper. Bring you into the Twentieth Century. How would you like that?"

"It's not really necessary, Billy," she said sincerely.

He slammed on the brakes, their torsos pitching forward painfully against the antiquated canvas seat belts.

"Billy!" she snapped "You shouldn't. That really hurt!"

He hooked her neck and drew her close and crushed his mouth to hers. His arm, incredibly strong, held her locked to his face, her awkwardly twisted body still trapped by the seat belt. When he let her go she fairly sprang backwards, gulping air, a drowning expression on her lipstick-smeared face. His own face was hard with glee in which he obviously took no real stock and it made her sick to look at him. She had to turn away. She began to cry.

"You live in the last century," he said, his teeth bulging out of his fixed grin "But I don't have the time. Besides, you're younger than me."

She stared at him in amazement. "What are you talking about? We're the same age!"

"Only in some ways," he said, snapping up the gearshift on his steering wheel "Only in some ways." The car moved into a slow, tentative crawl.

"What are you talking about?" she wiped her lips with the heel of her palm, the fingers stiffened to their full extension.

"You don't know what it means to lose a part of yourself. I've lost running, O.K.? I've lost...I can't even dance down a street again."

She was incredulous. 'Dance? Since when...when was the last time you did that in a public street??"

He looked at her calmly and more sadly than she had ever seen him before, and didn't say anything.

Maybe, he thought later as they shopped, the moon was a pearl hung from the neck of his love, or maybe it was something that he had lost that he did not know about and now would never have the chance to know. In the hospital, a week after the surgery, he had asked the nurse about the leg's disposal. Was it bagged for landfill? Used for research? Chopped up and dumped in the sea? Chemically dissolved? Cremated?

"That's your choice," she had replied.

He asked to see it.

They wheeled him to a room of storage freezer units where it was kept, slid open a giant stainless steel draw from which they removed the leg and laid it on a table. He began to cry and they left the room, to give him time to say goodbye. So many times he had laid on it when he slept. Had seen its toes sort of peering back at him when resting and in the shower gazed down at them like God with a kind of amused pity as they struggled in the floodwaters. He had pissed on it drunk, slid home on it playing baseball, and pivoted in football and crossed it over his other leg in conversation. And he had rested on it, seesawing on his knee between his wife's knees. He had gotten down on it to pray in desperate times. He had slapped it when laughing, shook it when nervous, and now it lay there, absurdly apart from him and the permanence of the separation crushed him pitilessly. It had turned bedsheet white, mottled with bluish gray and purplish patches of discoloration and still stained with a bright orange band of iodine at the amputated end, near the hip. This part had congealed into a puckered, toothless grin from which protruded the blue-white knob of the hip joint, carried in its jaws, a big moon egg in an earthworm's mouth.

He heard Karen's voice calling his name from a distance, turned to look at her.

"What?" he asked.

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