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Bethany Bruno
The Moon’s Apron
Mama always hung the laundry at night, beneath a moon that swelled fat and silver, trailing silk light across our backyard. Said the moon softened fabric better than the sun ever could. I’d sit barefoot on the back stoop, knees hugged tight, watching her shadow sway between sheets like a lighthouse keeper tending ghosts. Her skirts swirled with the wind, and her pale arms rose and fell in rhythm, lifting garments that floated like saints in surrender. She never looked back at me. Not once.
As I grew older, the air around her work began to shimmer. The sheets smelled of salt brine and lightning. Stray cats crept from the marsh to sit in a ring around her, silent as parishioners. And once, just once, a pinned shirt lifted its arms and waved at me, a boy-sized greeting stitched in cotton and hush.
The summer before I left for college, I woke to find fog coiling through the yard, thick as spun milk. Mama stood ankle-deep, her feet sinking into the earth as if the ground knew her. She whispered to the shirts, stroked the collars. They rustled in answer, like old friends too long apart.
“What are you doing?” I called.
“Teaching,” she said, without turning. “Tonight is their final lesson.”
The fog licked her knees, then her waist. When I stepped off the stoop, the mist pricked my skin like nettles, hissing secrets I wasn’t meant to hear. I called for her, but the clothes only flapped in reply.
Come morning, the line was bare. Not a clothespin left.
I still hang laundry under full moons. And now and then, when the wind blows just so, a sleeve lifts and waves. Not to me, but past me, toward something I can no longer see.
Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. Born in Hollywood and raised in Port St. Lucie, she holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her writing has appeared in more than seventy literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, The MacGuffin, McSweeney’s and 3Elements Review. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.
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