Lunalae By Robert Reece

The first thing to disappear was the dull, half-moon circle on the fingernail of his left index finger. He’d never considered that spot in his life except for the day that he noticed it was gone. Then he remembered that he had thought about it once before. He smashed his fingernail with a mallet when he was a kid. He was trying to nail a novelty license plate that said “Future” to the back of his soapbox derby car. He made the license plate a carnival in Idaho for 1 dollar, and he made the soap box derby car in his garage one summer because he wanted to feel like he was living in the 1950s while every other kid was atrophying into gelatinous blobs playing video games. He didn’t want his dad to scream at him for using his special rosewood mallet he’d received at a Toastmasters convention instead of the old hammer in the toolbox, so he never mentioned that he took it to nail that license plate from Idaho. Even when his fingernail turned greenish purple and eventually fell off, he kept that hand hidden from his parents.

The nail grew back by the time school started. By then, he had already crashed his plywood race car into a fire hydrant on its maiden descent down Casperson Hill, the steepest street in the city, and it splintered into a thousand pieces along with his dreams of being either an automotive engineer or an F1 driver. The license plate fell through the sewer grate. When he walked to school, he could still read the word Future in the sewer muck until an early December rainstorm washed it away. So now, nearly 35 years later, he was brushing his teeth before bed when he noticed the missing spot on his fingernail. A dull panic crept through his body like a torpid fire alarm. Better to sleep it off, he thought, and see things more clearly in the light of day. But sure enough, at breakfast, he confirmed that the piece was missing. He could see right through the hole in his finger and read the ingredients on his cereal box. But now, just eight hours since he first noticed it, a couple of other fingernails looked the same. He thought of measuring it to see how much it had spread, then calculating the rate at which it might take to overtake his hand, his arm, or even his whole body. But that idea gave him the same kind of dread he used to feel when he thought about planning how many years it would take him and Kathleen to save for their retirement by putting away a tiny piece of each paycheck for the next 1000 years. He didn’t want to boil his entire life down to a simple mathematical equation. The rate at which he was now disappearing felt the same. Maybe it was better just to see how things progressed in life. With a vague notion, but no particulars that could make things stifling in their mundanity. Kathleen gave him a quick, half-smile as she rushed out the door to her Zumba class. Now that he watched her go, he wondered when was the last time they had actually spoken to each other. Had it been years? Were they one of those couples that became nothing more than outdated furniture in a dusty house? To gather his thoughts, he sat in the backyard on the dilapidated chaise lounge for a long while, listening to the wind in the jacarandas, violet flowers raining down around him onto the dead grass. By now, nearly a third of his body had disappeared, even though it still gave shape to his clothing. The process was accelerating. It was all happening so fast that he didn’t even consider looking for a solution. Should he call 911, his cousin who was an ER nurse in Boston, Chat GPT? He wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or devastated, so he sank into his fate like a rock at the beach in a rising tide. Numb to his fate without agency. He considered disrobing once he was completely transparent and skulking around, listening silently to his neighbors. But what they could reveal wouldn’t solve his predicament, and he didn’t really want to know their secrets anyhow. Best to sit there, feeling the bit of solar warmth that penetrated through the clouds and get washed in those jacaranda tears. Maybe this was just a more rapid version of how most people fade away anyhow, he thought. Like after someone dies, unless they are historically significant, memories fade, stories fade, connections fade, and eventually there is barely any trace at all. So why rage against it and lose any precious energy he had remaining? What a waste anger now seemed. He wasn’t in physical pain, and he didn’t feel like he was dying. It was more like morning fog evaporating. By the time he got off the chaise lounge, his body had vanished, although he was covered in jacaranda blooms. He studied what remained of the daytime moon that hovered like a tranquil lavender fingernail between the cumulus clouds. It was in the exact same shape of the mark on his finger where everything started. It wasn’t even 10 a.m. and he was completely erased. When he looked in the mirror, the sight of his clothes hanging in the air was more distressing than being transparent. It looked like a ghost wandering through the bedroom in his pajamas. So he disrobed and stepped out front. It felt liberating in a strange way, to walk around the neighborhood without clothes on. But it wasn’t like the kind of absurd freedom a nudist might feel. He wasn’t truly naked or clothed. He just was. Nobody noticed him at all. Not even dogs could smell him. His voice was absent as well, and nobody heard him when he yelled out. Then, a new dread coursed through his mind. Perhaps this was all that existence really was. Just a state of being present with no effect on the world. That dread gave way to a wave of dripping melancholy. Why hadn’t he communicated with Kathleen more? He wished he had said goodbye that morning. Any morning. Maybe if he saw Kathleen again, she would somehow feel his presence even if he couldn’t touch her or say her name. They had been married for 13 years, so maybe they were connected in some deeper way that would allow her to feel him and know how much he loved her and how much he wished he had been more present. In some ways, maybe he had started to disappear long before he noticed the spot on his fingernail. Maybe it started when the adoption fell through. He tried to quit the memory and decided to walk to the strip center where Kathleen had been taking her Zumba and dance classes. His heart fell when she didn’t feel his presence as she walked outside. But he felt like his chest would cave in when the gym instructor kissed her in the parking lot. The seconds he watched them seemed like a painful eternity. Like he was staring at an eclipse. The only consolation he took from that devastation was that Kathleen pulled away and told the man, emphatically, that she was married and this couldn’t happen. He watched her cry in her car afterward. He was standing just outside her window the entire time, separated by a thin layer of glass, and yet he could have been half-way across the universe. He walked back home and sat in their bedroom. For some reason, he smelled Kathleen’s pillow and stared at the strand of hair that was left there in the shape of a brunette question mark. He looked at the knick-knacks on her nightstand. There was the framed picture of them that someone took at his dad’s funeral. It wasn’t meant to be morbid, it’s just that it was the last time either of them had dressed up for a photo. The rays of the sunset had framed them with a reddish gold light that looked like a Renaissance painting. That’s why they had the picture framed. Not for the memory of the funeral, but because they looked so nice together. He thought about his dad’s rosewood mallet. About his old soapbox derby car. The front door opened and shut, which snapped him out of his reverie. He could hear Kathleen sniffling. He felt like an intruder as he watched her in the kitchen, wiping her tears away between sips of orange juice. Like he was some foolish, ghost stalker. So he went to the garage to give her some space. He heard her talking on the phone, with her best friend Nadine. She had some thinking to do, and Nadine was the perfect sounding board. They decided to go away for a girls’ night out. He stayed in the garage as she left, and before he knew it, part of his body started to reappear. He could physically move things around now. Without understanding why, he decided to build a soapbox derby car. The style and shape were the same as the one he had made as a kid, except this was bigger and had two seats. What materials he couldn’t source from the garage, he gathered from the hardware store in the strip center next to Kathleen’s dance studio. Simple wood chassis, wheels from the lawnmower, friction brakes, steel rods for axles. What took him three weeks to build when he was 12, he now accomplished in a day. By the time the car was complete, his entire body was back as well. Nadine dropped Kathleen off the next morning. She called out for him in the empty house. She found the garage in disarray, bolts and sawdust everywhere. Stranger than that, she could tell that the framed photo on her nightstand had moved. She always noticed things like that. And next to the photo was a simple note he had written saying, “Meet me at Casperson Hill.” He tried his best to make the shape of a heart next to his name, but it looked more like a lopsided strawberry. It made her crack that little half smile he loved so much. She drove to the top of Casperson Hill and found him waiting in the gold sunset light next to his handcrafted soapbox derby car. He asked her to join him for a ride. She giggled at his faux chivalry as he took her hand and helped her climb into her seat. She wrapped her legs alongside him as he sat up front and held the steering ropes. With a couple of kicks in the gravel, the plywood car started to roll down the hill. They looked like two overgrown kids hurtling across the asphalt towards suburban oblivion. The wind lashed their hair back, and they laughed like they used to before the miscarriages and adoption papers. As they raced down Casperson Hill, the entire world streamed by them in layers of blurred color and mottled sunlight. He reached back over his shoulder with his free hand. She held it tightly, and neither of them cared if they crashed or raced on forever. She glanced at their intertwined hands, but she did not have the heart to tell him about the small piece of her fingernail that had started to disappear.

Robert Reece

Image: Workman’s fingernails stained and broken against a background of wood from Pixabay.com