May Flash Fiction: Good Morning Moon by Jim Bartruff

Good Morning Moon
Jim Bartruff

How much like a beginning it was here. Yesterday, the transformers tolled like cathedral bells all over town. The last auxiliary generators stopped around dawn. You could hear them cough. It is dark now: the black bowl came down, the one we’ve all known was there but never saw, and in it the white stars we always suspected were there but never met, there they were.

And with them, tonight, a young man after Alissa the last two years came to the door with his acapella doo-wop group. They sang her happy 16th birthday from the lawn. It was unbelievably moving from a Dad standpoint. They were all from the ‘hood’ and tolerated Peter as that rarest of creatures: an honest counter-tenor. A senior, six-two, curly blonde hair, twice state swimming champ, gregarious, the one girls offer anything he wants if he takes them to the prom.

Alissa is still a clone of a much younger Natalie Portman. She was sidelit by candlelight, in her bathrobe, holding the door a third open and not another inch. The coyness in her smile was unintentional—one can only wonder what it did to his heart.

There are miracles and miracles and I hope this reaches you on one of them.

Worse than trouble is coming.

But there was this.

Jim Bartruff’s work has appeared in Fat City Review, Gambling the Aisle, New Verse News, Two Hawks Quarterly, American Tanka, JAMA, Canto, Barney, Marilyn, and many others. He is a past winner of the William Carlos Williams prize while attending the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and Academy of American Poets prize as a UCLA undergraduate. A third-generation native of Los Angeles, he has been a print journalist, screenwriter, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland, Oregon.