I left Hairball to his manic mantric singing. I walked toward the house and stopped to rub some white pine needles on my fingers. The evergreen smelled fresh and alive. The needles were long and soft to the touch. I looked back at Hairball. The moon had risen higher and Little Meadow was even brighter. The windpicked up Hairball’s singing and blew it away. By the time I got up to the house he had become a silvery ghost dancing in the moonlight, a nowhere man longing to live on the moon.
Scott Lax
coming-of-age, literary-fiction, the-60s, vietnam-war