This story originally appeared on the Soaring Twenties Substack (
). I’m republishing it here for those who missed it and to have something representative of my newer work on The Write Books. More new and exclusive stories to come in short order! Also, a reminder that if you’d like notifications for my Daily(ish) Journal, you’ll need to turn those on, since it’s an opt-in-only section. Enjoy and happy Friday!It was garbage day when he saw it. Or garbage day’s eve, rather, the night upon which Harold Wafflepohl would trudge wearily, wheeled trash can trailing him, from the side gate of his suburban home, that picket-fenced, tick-tacky-composed repository of knick-knacks and bric-à-brac, container for all manner of pointless things, that collection of useless trinkets for which he and his neighbors labored endlessly in dead and dreary glass boxes, punching numbers into keyboards and pushing pencils onto the corpses of a billion trees to a pointless end, tasks upon tasks seemingly without an end, without any ultimate purpose beyond the accumulation of more junk that would eventually find its way into the sacks like the one he carried to the bin and then the bin to the road to be retrieved by those unsung heroes of civilization, those trash men who hide from us the shame of our foul-smelling mountainous wastes by carrying them away to the aptly named dump, that burial ground for the discarded detritus of the pursuit of our material dreams.
What Harold saw was two moons in the sky where there had always been one.
He deposited the trash can at the roadside and stared perplexedly at the new lunar arrival. What little he knew of science told him that there should have been some horrible gravitational consequence of the interloping satellite. And yet nothing seemed to be changed. Save for the new, literally new, moon.
Curiosity gave way to panic as he stumbled over himself to get to the house and alert Margaret to the shocking development overhead.
She was doing dishes, dutifully, the kids all snug in their beds overhead, the only sounds in the kitchen his labored breathing from his near-neverly-jogged jog and the sweet absent-minded humming of his dear wife. The homey scent of fried bacon from their breakfast-for-dinner meal hung in the air.
“Mags,” he stuttered out breathlessly.
“Yes, honey?”
“There are two moons. Outside.”
“Oh yes, there was something about that on the news today.”
Harold gasped with incomprehension.
“You know about it?”
“Oh, not much, I heard about it vaguely.”
“And this doesn’t seem important to you?!”
“Did you get the milk after work today?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The milk, Harry. We’re out of milk. The kids will be in an uproar without their cereal in the morning.”
“Maggie, there are two moons outside.”
“Yes, I know. Broken record much? I’ll take that as a ‘no’ on the milk then?”
Harold simply stood, mouth agape.
“You really can be so absent minded sometimes,” Margaret said. “I understand your job can be very stressful but it’s important to prioritize things.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“The kids need their milk.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“You don’t need to talk to me like that, Harry. Maybe you should just go to the twenty-four-hour grocery and get some milk. It’s important, even though it might not seem like it to you.”
“The moons…”
“Oh will you can it about the moons? I’m starting to get pretty ticked off with you.”
“I don’t need a damn lecture, Maggie.”
She dismissively returned to her dishes and her humming.
Fine, I’ll get the damned milk.
Harold marched in defeat to the garage, that shrine to the unused power tool, that museum of outdoor amusements once played with and only once, that wall of rackets and balls and skateboards and helmets and bats, displayed as anachronistic oddities in this bold age of the videogame. He started up the very expensive, very round-edged “sport utility vehicle” which saw no employ in the name of sports, nor was particularly utilitous, said starting up accomplished by the press of a plastic button. The engine turned over quietly, no satisfying grind of gears or pleasantly tactile turning of a metal key, and he backed away from his very expensive, mortgage-ridden, white-picketed ticky-tacky box of a domicile and onto the road.
There were two moons still. No one was outside looking at them. No one seemed to care.
The fluorescent oasis of the all-night supermarket greeted him coldly after a few minutes’ dark drive in the near-silent, button-powered monstrosity he called his car.
Inside, a college kid on summer break conned the cash register, the steersman of a grand spaceship speeding everyone to a strange consumerist planet where the only law was to buy. Something, anything.
Harold headed for the cooler. One half gallon of whole milk, several dollars more than it had been just several years ago. C’est la vie, thought he.
Upon reaching the drowsy youth behind the register, he set about inquiring after the only interesting thing that had happened in a good long while.
“You notice anything weird about the sky today?” Harold asked.
“Not really,” said the young man. Kyle, according to his nameplate.
“Help me out here, Kyle. I feel like I’m going a bit crazy.’
The kid shrugged.
“You didn’t notice there’s an extra moon out?” Harold said.
“Oh yeah. I saw something about it on TikTok.”
“It doesn’t strike you as odd?”
What Harold wanted to say was “profoundly disturbing”.
Kyle shrugged, beeped the milk on the scanner, read Harold the total.
More confused than angry, but a little angry, Harold paid the tab, waived with a wave his right to the receipt of his receipt and went back to the “sport utility vehicle”.
He hoped, as he drove home, under the speed limit as always, that maybe someone at work tomorrow would show a semblance of concern over that damn second moon.
***
“Now I don’t know for sure, but I really do think that Alan is making a lot more for doing the same work we all do.”
Sharon was gossiping to Frank, as she was wont to do. To Harold as well, but he could barely keep his mind on what she was saying.
“Well, that would be a big-time screw deal, but I wouldn't put it past the management. The big guys are always screwing over the little guys,” Frank said, sagely.
“Did you two not notice anything strange last night?” Harold interjected.
“What do you mean, buddy?” Frank said.
“I saw two moons last night when I was taking out the trash cans.”
“Oh that. Sure.”
“You saw them too, Sharon?” Harold asked.
“From the living room window, yeah.”
Frank’s and Sharon’s respective faces looked as bored as if Harold had launched into a lecture about the minute details of the industrial production of jacket zippers.
Harold couldn't take it anymore. He threw up his hands in exasperation and yelled aggressively.
“Why does no one find this weird?!”
The office manager was drawn to the beacon of Harold’s cries.
“Hey, Harold, I know we’re all a little high strung with the quarterly review coming, and I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but you can’t be having that kind of outburst at work. I’m going to have to give you a citation with the HR department.”
Harold managed a sheepish “okay” and wandered in a daze back to his cloth-walled cubicle, proverbial tail between his legs.
Everyone has gone insane. What do I do?
***
Harold stopped on his way home at the glass and concrete abomination that was the Community College and found his way to the information desk. A cute blonde girl of about twenty was behind it, chewing gum and blowing bubbles (of all the clichés), looking as if the contents of said bubbles were about equivalent to the contents of the space between her dainty ears.
“Is there a physics professor available?”
“Huh?”
“Physics. Or astronomy or something. I don’t know.”
“What?” she said, pulling formerly unseen wireless earbuds from the sides of her now-confirmed-to-be-airy head.
“I want to talk to a professor of physics.”
She punched French-manicured nails at her keyboard.
“Building 10 - Room 2A,” the girl said. “Professor Heschel has office hours.”
“Thanks.”
Harold raced to 10-2A, arriving breathless again (I really have to exercise more), kicking himself internally and silently for the indignity of his run, as if the few minutes it saved him had any effect on the problem at hand. He knocked and opened the door.
“Hello?” said the man behind the desk cluttered with papers and books and dirty coffee mugs and at least seven pairs of glasses, the purpose of which, for a man with the standard set of two eyes, Harold could fathom about as much as the appearance of the second moon. Professor H. was a stone-cold doppelganger for Issac Asimov, unruly sideburns and all.
“Professor Heschel?” Harold said.
“Yes? How can I help you?”
“I’m Harold Wafflepohl, I live in the neighborhood.”
“What can I do for you Mr. Wafflepohl?”
“I wanted to ask you about the moons. The extra moon that appeared, I mean.”
“Oh, I see. What about it?”
The now familiar look of utter boredom showed in the face of the maybe-secretly-an-android-Asimov.
“Is it not impossibly strange? And no one seems to care.”
“Oh, well, I’m sure it’s something a grad student will submit a minor paper on. You know, stretch their legs a bit, fly outside the nest, cut their teeth, you see.”
“You have no interest in it?”
“Well, Harold, may I call you Harold? We have a lot of very important research matters to attend to, even at a small and less than prestigious institution like this one.”
“And a second goddamned moon doesn’t qualify?”
“Now, there’s no need for the profanity, sir. I’m merely expressing that we must have strict priorities to keep all the gears running smoothly. Science, as all things, can get severely hampered by poor logistics.”
“What are you yammering about? By God, man! Why does no one care?!”
Before Harold came back to his senses he had wildly pushed a stack of papers off the professor's desk. As he settled back into an awareness of his body, he found his fists clenched, his heart racing, his teeth gritted, and his appraisal of his own sanity falling rapidly.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave, sir,” the professor said.
Harold mumbled a feeble but sincere apology and left.
***
The weeks passed and turned into months, despair accreting in every nook and cranny of Harold’s life. No one cared. It wasn’t that no one saw or knew about the second moon. It was something that had passed casually and immediately into public consciousness half a year ago. Harold accumulated book upon book, college textbooks on astrophysics and astronomy, books of stranger-than-fiction anecdotes, even books on the possibility of alien invasion. All to find no explanation whatsoever and to have the tomes pile up as so much garbage, destined for the dump he had pondered the first night he saw the two moons together.
He scoured the widely-webbed online world, but it seemed the internet paid no mind to moon-based conspiracy theories which could not be laid at the feet of Mr. Kubrick.
Margaret had suggested a few months ago they should attend marriage counseling.
She’d said: “You’ve become obsessed, Harry. Addicted even, to these moon books and wacky theories. I’m worried about you, of course, but this is hard on the kids and me too. Can’t you just drop it and focus on your family? On us? I need you, Harry.”
But he couldn’t drop it. He had to find out. Something was deeply wrong. Something that couldn’t be wallpapered over with work and softball games and juvenile husband-wife movie dates and barbecues and piano recitals and helping out with college prep exams. The ugly rot eating away at the framing beams of reality would eventually show through the cover up job and burst through the walls like some monster out of a horror film. Doom was impending somehow, and he was the only one who could see it. And thus, the only one that could do anything about it.
As he thought about what just might even be his heroic destiny, as visions of saving the world danced in his head like the famous Christmas sugar plums, a cry for attention broke his hazy reverie.
“Dad? Dad…”
Kerry had been playing the piano and he hadn’t noticed. He’d always liked to listen in the past.
“Where’d you go dad?”
“I was just thinking, honey.”
“About the moon stuff?”
He didn’t answer.
“I was practicing Chopin, dad. It’s really tough but I’m getting the hang of it. Can I play it for you now?”
“I’d love to hear it,” he said.
He meant it too, but as she drew the lovely notes from the keys, he drifted again in his mind. To the sky. To that white-shining disc, to that second sometimes-gibbous-sometimes-crescent specter that haunted his every waking hour. But he knew now what he had to do. Or at least the broad strokes of the mission. Not the particulars, of course. It would take more research. But he would find out what was going on and he would save them all.
“Dad?”
“I’m sorry, honey. I got distracted again.”
***
Harold’s face felt scratchy. He rubbed at his ten-day shadow and yawned. He wore only boxers under a bathrobe, pouring over his books. It was coming together, playing just at the edges of his understanding, but he was close to finding out what had happened eight months ago when that damned moon appeared. The old clock above his desk told him it was after 8pm already. He had called in sick to work.
There was the soft padding of feet behind him. He turned to find Margaret standing in the doorway of their home office. She opened her mouth as if to speak, hesitated, stepped a few soft steps into the room.
“We need to talk, Harry.”
Harold tried to conceal his irritation at the interruption. From the look on Maggie’s face, he had failed.
“Oh yes, I know you’re absorbed in something so important, but this is important too.”
“You don’t understand, Mags.”
“I think I do. And it breaks my heart.”
“I’m the only one. I have to keep going.”
“Well, the kids and I have to keep going too, Harry.”
“What?”
“I’ve contacted a divorce attorney.”
“What? Wait. Maggie?”
“I called mom and the kids and I are going to stay there for a few days while we figure out how to move things forward.”
“Maggie…”
“You’ll always be a part of the kids’ lives, don’t worry about that. But for now, we have to go.”
“Mags…”
She turned and left.
Harold shot up from his chair, too quick. Dizzy, he stumbled after Margaret as she walked down the stairs.
She looked back at him, bleary-eyed. A single tear cut a forlorn path to her chin.
She blew him a melancholy kiss and went out the front door.
The kids were already packed up and in the car, parked at the curb, their sad faces briefly illuminated by the cabin light triggered when Maggie opened the driver’s door.
Off they went into the night, into another life.
Above, the two moons shone brightly.
There's a kind of melancholic-whimsy to this story. I absolutely loved it!
Very fun! I like the style of writing here. Wish I knew why everyone was so blasé about the moons though . . .