CHAPTER THREE: A FULL MOON
     
     Candlin Becker and Simon Socorro were prematurely close the first time 
that they walked through the darkened crosshatches of Atlantic City streets. 
That time, making their company roll eyes at what was obvious, the two tackled 
and hugged each other, roaring with laughter, because the time for holding 
hands and kissing hadn’t come yet. Then, when that time came, they giggled and 
tripped on curbs and patches of grass, their weight thrown clumsily around the 
other’s shoulders or waist. But now, finally, this time, their last time, they 
walked with an impenetrable wall between them. They were strangers at last. 
After a year of sleeping together, the queasiness between those who’d never met 
caught up to their roaring and giggling. Now, this night, they were strangers 
for the first time, and they didn’t know how to be strangers, or why they’d 
become strangers.
     This was the night that Simon was to die. 
     They buffeted off one another’s field of repulsion for several blocks 
before Candlin asked to walk home alone. Easily, Simon agreed to find his car 
in the seven-dollar lot, and then find his college friend’s apartment in 
Hamilton. He guessed the lonely drive might suit him well. He might sing with 
an old cassette, a Jimmy Buffet Greatest Hits that he’d lost between the seat-
cracks, beside an open window that would whip him with cool air. He might 
remember to feel alive. 
     Candlin already knew that her walk to her family’s house would jerk and 
weave with incredible tears and confusion. She already knew that she wouldn’t 
be able to remember much at all, except pain.
     “Simon?”
     “Yeah?”
     “Are you going to call me ever, Simon? Or is this it? Is this all, I 
mean?”
     “I can call you,” he said. “I can call you if you want me to call 
you.”
     Candlin nodded once, her big eyes squinting at him. She often squinted, 
and squeezed her lips together, when her thoughts were more than her words.
     “Are you sure you still want me to call you?”
     Sniffing, then sighing at a slow-passing car, she rubbed a pale hair 
from her red face. It was moist with tears, and it refused to be tucked behind 
her ear, behind her ear that had lost an earring to the beach. 
     “I’m sure.”
     “Are you sure you want to walk home alone? It’s almost a mile. I can 
drive you still.”
     She shook her head, swallowing this time. 
     Simon nodded.
     “I’d like you to call me, if you want to call me sometime,” she said.
     “I’ll call you when I get home.”
     “Home?”
     “When I get to Larry’s house. Or home. Whatever. You know.”
     She was breathing heavily. She was looking up to the stars, but she 
couldn’t see any through the clouds. She was listening to her heart pounding in 
her ears. She was wondering why it was doing that.
     “I’ll call you, Candlin. I’ll wish you sweet dreams. There’s no reason 
I can’t do that.”
     “Okay…”
     “If you’re walking home, you should start,” he said. “There’s no use 
standing here.”
     “I know, Simon…” she whispered. “There’s no use standing here at 
all.”
     She turned, and took a few steps, then several more. Without stopping 
or turning to look at him, she waved back to him, as if she were cutting at the 
air around her. She stumbled on a broken chunk of sidewalk, but didn’t stop 
moving away.
     “Drive carefully, Simon.”
     “I will,” he said, squeezing his hands into his pockets. 
“Goodnight.”
     “Night,” she whispered under tears. 
     But he didn’t hear her. So, he stood, hurt for a moment by her silence, 
before he turned and walked, marched, in the opposite direction.
     Candlin, going by the same streets they’d come by, then happily, then 
on a crisp night, she found her surroundings grotesquely changed. Now the moon 
was faded. Now the ocean smelled sour. Now the air moved all wrong. And now 
Simon was gone. He was still alive, but she felt more pain stumbling home, 
gagging on rejection, than she would come to feel, slitting her wrists, to be 
with him again.
     She did not yet know, this was the night that Simon was to die. And it 
was the morning that Candlin was to have her life’s greatest shock, when he was 
found, a corpse. This was the weekend that the Socorros would bury their 
beloved, proud Simon. This was Candlin’s last full moon, because when the next 
one shined over the sour sea, her heart would have unknowingly pumped too much 
blood into the bottom of a bathtub, across a gray hall carpet, into pools on 
flannel sheets that they had slept in once. She would have died with her pale 
arms wrapped wetly around a pillow that, to her, was him.
     But this night was only the night that Simon was to become a spirit.
     Unlike Candlin, who wept and wobbled off down a well-lit street, toward 
a childhood home, Simon played with questions about programming in his head, 
and wondered down a foggy, cracked sidewalk, toward the car that carried them 
together to the shore. He had a coin in his hand. He pushed it around in his 
palm. He turned it over and over. Then he dropped it on the pavement, making 
sure that it landed heads up. 
     Soon, he forced himself to smile, breathed in the deep drama of his own 
life story, sucked in freedom to pursue truer loves lost, and turned toward a 
darker chunk of the crumbling place. He’d mistaken the look of a traffic light. 
He’d passed his seven-dollar lot. The car that carried them together to the 
shore had become a point between Candlin and Simon. They both moved ever 
further from it, one knowingly, and one mistakenly. 
     As the fog grew thicker, the mistaken one walked into the shadows of a 
greater mistake. He walked into the shadows of a three-dollar lot, and stood 
stupidly, staring into a crowd of unfamiliar cars. They were all beaten and 
dingy.
     “Shit,” he said. “Where am I?”
     A siren rang a few streets over. There, a corvette stopped by the side 
of the road, and a woman dressed in black stepped out. There, she picked up a 
quarter from the ground. She didn’t notice that it’d been laying heads up. She 
didn’t think that it might be a lucky night or an unlucky night. She knew that 
it night. So, she tossed the coin in the air, and snapped it back into her 
hand, having not looked at it once as it flipped, as it flew. She slid it into 
her denim pocket. She fingered her gun with the same hand. It wasn’t a special 
night. It was the night that she was going to kill Benedict Young.
     Still unable to realize that he was in a three-dollar lot, instead of a 
seven-dollar one, Simon Socorro made several half turns, and wheeled backward 
on his heels. He looked up at the crusty amber lights that bent over the cars 
like hobbled old men. They hummed falteringly. His sneakers crunched on the 
loose worn sand, on the broken blue asphalt.
     He didn’t see his car, or any car he could remember ever seeing before. 
There was a Volkswagen with a huge bumper-sticker reading Support Your Local 
Piper. It included a cartoon of a drunken Scotsmen. Seeing that, Simon 
concluded that he’d gotten himself lost, but he couldn’t imagine where he’d 
calculated wrong. He never thought of the traffic light that misled him.
     “Dammit, you’d think I’d know this town by now,” he muttered. Then he 
half sighed, and half laughed, angry and amused at his own stupidity. Shaking 
his head, he turned and left the parking lot. He came slowly to the abandoned 
street again, with its gnarled, cratered surface. He looked out over the 
buildings, toward the siren, and soon saw where he’d gone wrong. “That’s what 
I get for not paying attention.”
     He put his hands on his hips, and let his head fall limp, his chin to 
his chest. He’d grown impatient for the old cassette, still silent, stuck 
between the cracks of the distant seat cushions. He might have been listening 
for it, when over the distant hiss of the ocean, and over the distant hiss of 
cars, he heard footsteps smacking off the sides of buildings. They were 
bouncing toward him, distinctive to him without much thought. They were the 
heavy, swift steps of a woman in high-heeled boots. They were coming from 
exactly where he was shortly to go.
     He only got the briefest of seconds to look toward the sound of the 
boots, before the shuffle and the gunshots closed his eyes forever. He only got 
had a moment’s glimpse toward the rhythm, hurrying along the erupted slabs of 
sidewalk, but nonetheless, he clearly saw a woman, stepping briskly out from 
the ocean’s evening mist, out into the smear of golden, flickering light. She 
was a sensual, organic shape, set stark and black against the unmoving 
horizontals of a casino-parking complex, the verticals of lamps and signs, the 
diagonals of the roadway reaching toward itself and the boardwalk. 
     She reminded him of the eerie storm clouds that slid too quickly and 
too quietly across the sky before a hurricane hit the coast. For she slid to 
quickly and too quietly toward him.
     He only saw her face for that briefest of seconds – an imposing, heart-
stopping thing, drawing too fluidly, too perfectly near – but he would not 
forget even a meaningless detail. The pinkness of it. The darkness around, and 
in, her eyes. The swoop and sway of black hair like the swoop and sway of her 
waist and hips. Her brow was crinkled. She bit her bottom lip. And, by God, he 
would not forget, that her eyes glimmered more than jewels, as the bullet leapt 
out between them, like a flashbulb explosion.
     The ground caught his soft body with impeccable care. It folded him 
against it snuggly, so that the next bullets tore through his back and arms, so 
that the last one tore through the base of his neck. His body peacefully gave 
up fighting, laying in the certain arms of gravity. 
     When it did, the scenes of his life didn’t flicker before his eyes. He 
didn’t see his birth, his childhood, his school, his family, or his favorite 
pet, through torn film stock, over a vague soundtrack. The flashbulb had burnt 
her face onto his mind. It was only her face, gently fading, like the 
afterimage of a candle slowly extinguishing before a closed eye. 
     When it was gone, his brain was still. 
     And he never had a chance to ask for her name.
     
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