The Moon is a Raisin

It had been a year since our last box of my mom’s ‘lifetime’ supply of raisins had been shipped. Maybe this was because it was 1969 and the people had avoided the red grapes, the really red ones, or smashed all of them with their palms until there were none left to dry, until the juice ran down their heart and marriage lines like the bloody Nile. The red scare had been immediate for all of us, and we had given up the color out of lingering terror, out of the dread of consequences. We painted our mailbox blue. The supermarket changed its supplier for two percent milk, avoiding the brand’s red bottle cap. The worst was I threw all my red sweaters from the highway overpass into the water: cashmere turtlenecks swallowed by the mouth of the reservoir. Or more possibly the shipments stopped because my mother’s shipping address was no longer adhered to our house. She now owned a horizontal address instead of a vertical one, her mailbox a headstone.

I was twelve in 1969, and in my first year of middle school. It was at that point I wanted something permanent, to stick, and so I took up the job of timer for the girl's track team. I figured myself irreplaceable: the man who could stop time. I held the yellow stopwatch as I watched the girls’ legs, milky white, pumping in perfect ground perpendiculars. Their feet ripped from the red track cement, sneakers dragging pebbles stuck to their soles, to be sucked back down to the earth. I pressed the button whenever necessary. 100 meter, 200, I stayed until dark. I often daydreamed of the legs, their mechanical stamping in odd metronome, and other things that kept me drooling. I would regularly get yelled at by the coach for not paying attention to the time.

“How are we going to break state record if we can’t check the times?” he asked me. And then later, “Are you sure you really want to stick around?”

It was this year that my father began his war against the fruit flies. They had infiltrated to occupy, and our kitchen swarmed with dense clouds. My father first suspected the unclean plates that sat in the sink, frowning their way down the stainless steel basin in a wilting tower. There was ketchup-stained porcelain, chicken bones, spaghetti interlocked with cheese strands. Banana peels lay like boats or belly-up trout on undrained water. My father, in seasonal fashion, washed the dishes, but soon realized that they were not the source of the flies. Instead, he searched the non-perishables. Oats, canned beans, raw rice, until he found the culprit: the last shipped canister of my mother’s raisins.

My father threw the canister out, leaving in it fruit fly egg carcasses. Above the kitchen sink, he attached a red landing strip, really red, that flew half-mast to hail down the flies. It helix’d like the DNA models I had seen in my biology classes. The flytrap was sticky. I took my father’s word when he told me it was tasty for the flies who got stuck.

1969 was the year when my father and I listened to the moon landing on the radio. It was 4 PM, and one of those days I could see the afternoon moon like a faded bubble, a wax glob lure from some sky fisherman. I learned how the craters dimpled, and how the dirt was like a fine powder. Then, about gravity, and how the astronauts floated with each step. I imagined the girls at my school unstuck. Their legs would pump in air and they wouldn’t be dragged down to earth. They would be angels. But I’d still man the stopwatch, affixed vertically to the moon’s face. I wondered if time worked the same in space.

One Autumn afternoon when I stayed late with the track team, I saw the coach hit one of the girls. The air was frigid; the grass-hairs of the football field were so frozen that not even the wind could move them. I held the yellow stopwatch in my hand. My fingers were numb. Her cheek, pale white, flushed red in an imperfect palm-imprint. Like a birthmark. I stopped the time and stood helplessly by as the coach screamed at the star runner. The girl’s legs were shaking. He had hit her because she said she was too cold to run.

“That’ll warm you up,” the coach told her afterwards. “Now get back on the track, you’re stuck here for another twenty laps. And you,” the coach motioned at me, “you better time her.”

I started the stopwatch, but I kept my eye on the girl. As the time passed, the sky bruised into darker blues and I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore; I couldn’t feel the stopwatch in my hands. It was a super moon that night and its hulking surface felt closer than usual. It made me feel small. As the sky blackened, I could only see to the end of my hands. It was so dark I couldn’t even see the color of the track cement. I could have been left on the field for all I knew, I’d never know. The team and coach could have gone home; not given a look in my direction. The girl might have done  her laps, but I couldn’t see her. I thought she did. I thought I was necessary; I thought I timed her. The only thing I knew was that when I looked up into the moon’s sleepy face, warm and comforting, its folds skinned out a smile: its craters creating the last raisin in all of the U.S..

I checked the progress of the fly trap every day after that, and each time, it added more husks to its ranks, expanding like a congregation. The flies were frozen in place, stuck to the strip until I brushed them off with a finger, and then they would fall, dead, into the sink. And I was reminded of when my mother was alive, sticking my fingers into one of the canisters, and pulling out a hand coated with raisins. A temporarily living skin, and craters like the moon.