THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE MOON, wink wink. It’s all a bunch of baloney, wink wink, Ms. Alderwoman, despite mass hallucinations amongst global online communities, most vocally us Americans. I’ve heard they used to sell it, as a toy with kids’ meals at Burger Boss, but others say that’s just a myth. If you ask for the Moon, you get dead silence at the register until you ask for something else. Asking for the Moon while recording it has gotten to be a real online craze, I don’t know why. I try not to go online, wink wink, or anywhere these days.

Nights are the worst. Our streetlights are out so there’s nothing to find your way by. They say that’s how it always was—the vast night sky, I mean, not the lights which I hope your office’ll fix soon—but that’s not how I remember the night, it’s not.

I remember nights, five or six years ago when I was nineteen, twenty, with a football or frisbee at the top of a hill, first winds of fall on me and my roommates’ bare calves, train tracks that lit with fluorescence and churning metal every few minutes, another light from up higher—who am I kidding, you must get these hallucinations, too.

The people at the register must get them also but they have to be hard on Internet freaks as their job. “This Moon thing is a bad joke,” a spokesperson for Burger Boss said to the news, I swear but I can’t find the clip—there was b-roll of their menu on the wall, fries dunking into fryers. “We don’t have anything to do with what’s going on up in the sky, ya know,” she said with her most simpatico smile, chuckle, then back to serious and sincerely nonplussed.

I look for this video for over an hour, then when my brain feels sufficiently atomized, I put my phone on the bedside table. Aaand I’m looking for it again.

I used to work at a restaurant so I know what it’s like—customers who are so unwilling to understand you. I mean, I never really had customers like that, but I would always imagine their hatred of me as I totally, and I mean royally, fucked up their pita toppings. They never filmed me or anything but I know they got their poorly-filled pitas and felt middling about life for the next hour, or half hour. That alone haunts me.

I quit within two weeks and never worked in food service again, so the resolve you must have, to be the butt end of an Internet challenge where strangers berate you about a topic you couldn’t give less than a shit about, or worse—you give a shit but can’t discuss for the sake of employment—must feel utterly Bonkersville. That’s where we live now.

People in Bonkersville used to be the next country over, the next county over, the next house. Now Your House™  is made from Bonkersville brand wood.

Now there’s Bonkers in the hardware, there’s Bonkers in the air and we’ve been breathing it this whole time. Jokes on me. Jokes on you.

Jokes, on The House™.

My energy or stamina for writing a coherent letter to you, Ms. Lopez, is flagging.

My wife put a salad bowl with a fork on the beside table but I’ve been writing this letter in my notebook which I’ve been working up the courage to do for days and I’m afraid that if I reach for the salad, I’ll spend another hour on my phone instead.

That’ll make me mayor of Bonkersville, where “the Moon” was a real thing and was beautiful, had a glow about her sometimes and I’d say to my wife, look she’s in her nicest gown, the clouds around the Moon all a-shimmer with rainbow, that’s Bonkersville discourse.

I can’t ask Elle what she thinks about all this ‘cause I’m afraid of her remembering too and she’ll cry which means we’ll both have to cry for what we used to think was there.

It used to be, I can’t help it. It used to be that every night, we had a friend who was just the sun reflected through a floating rock and that rock was orange and humungous and hung over the road as we drove from the last drive-in diner in Chicago to who knows where, not home, we wouldn’t have taken that route with all the trees in forever rows if we’d have been going home. We were just following the fullness of the amber Moon, big as a movie screen in a cinema, bellies full and Moon full and full of full of shit. That’s all full of shit.

Shit pouring out of my eyes and ears, shit all over the place ‘cause we haven’t cleaned this apartment in months, shit gone bonkers.

I’m going to have my salad now.

This is a good salad, wow. It’s got, like, raisins and onion in it.

Almonds.

See, I’ve got snot running down my nose because of CDC-labelled “lunar hallucinations” but I can’t let my wife see. Tears drying on my cheeks. We don’t talk about what goes on. I think we both wished we could talk freely. But we both know it’s me who’s not ready to be an adult about things. I’m the one who’s over-sensitive, over-obsessive, over-hypocritical and scared of facing anything for real.

God, this is a good salad. I just don’t know how to talk about certain things.

I crossed out a paragraph here about me being an insecure partner and resentful of my wife’s past sex life and stuff ‘cause you don’t want to hear about that. I’m telling you about the Moon ‘cause of the street lights we want fixed but I see so much news about the government that worries me like crazy.

You know what, I think this letter’s a bust.

Maybe I gotta start over from the beginning again. •





Julián Martínez is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants and is from Waukegan, IL. His work has appeared in HAD, hex literary, Little Engines, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. He hopes you take a good long look at the moon tonight if you can.

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