Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun

Author:Kenneth Calhoun [Kenneth Calhoun]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780804137157
Google: pTO0AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00F1W0R3C
Goodreads: 18465697
Publisher: Hogarth
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

SHE had gotten in the habit of watching the sunrise from the deck. Though, looking west, what she saw was the flat plain of the leaden ocean slowly separate from the sky as it took on color. The sun rose behind her, behind the compound on the bluff and the university towers above. In the evening, it lowered itself slowly into the Pacific without a sound, igniting both sea and sky with pink and orange.

When they first arrived at the university, she and Chase had become participants in a daily ritual, sometimes driving down from the school and joining others who parked along the coastal roads at dusk. It delighted these two inland kids—refugees from the smoggy suburbs—that the locals would do this: gather at the edge of the earth, go still and quiet to watch the sun die its daily death. They would witness it together, everyone sitting in the padded pews of their cars. Then, as if a service had ended, turn their ignitions, check their rearviews, and drive off into their lives.

“It is religious,” she had once said.

“It’s better,” Chase responded, though minutes later, after driving in silence back up the bluff and into the dorm parking lot. She recalled sensing his growing disdain for the place. It had killed her that she was partly responsible for his increasing detachment at school. But there were forces, like the shifting plates of the earth, pulling them apart, however typical and predictable: his need for insulation and control, her desire to have new experiences, to live beyond their plastic past. There were other problems. His—she didn’t know what to call it—sexual hang-ups? She could so easily recall the dark weight of him in the bed next to her, sinking deeper into shame as his body failed him yet again. “You don’t understand,” he said in the darkness, “how much I want you in here.” She heard the thud of his fist against his bare chest.

Where is he now? she wondered, as the sparrows in the coral trees began their dawn chorus. Last she heard from him was a voice message from Idaho. He was on his way up to Montana with Jordan, their friend from high school, insisting that she see him on her birthday, back at her parents’ house. She had agreed, but wondered if she should have. Maybe it was best to make a clean break. Or maybe he was changing, as he said. These are the kinds of things she used to worry about. That was only a week or so before the insomnia story became the only story, before she learned that her dad hadn’t been sleeping. Before survival became everyone’s occupation.

She stood at the railing and looked down the bluff at the rocky beach below. Her eyes scanned the water’s edge and she realized she was looking for the body of an administrator—a Swede named Annika—who had thrown herself over the edge a week earlier. A refugee from the main campus, she had become increasingly distressed at being away from her homeland as the crisis escalated.

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