Your best chance is a moonlit waterfall. Like the falls in Yosemite National Park, where the spray throws up a net of shredded water, defying gravity.
An hour after sunset, or an hour before sunrise. Creep up on it, lest it melt like a sherbet spell on the tongue of night, and your chafing, blistered efforts leave you breathless for nothing.
He’d always wanted to go to California. Other kids dreamed of Disneyland and Universal Studios, but he asked her, How big do the Redwoods grow? And, How many stars can you see from the Griffith Observatory? She didn’t know she’d go alone.
And here she is. She parks the rental at a distance and hikes and huffs the rest of the way, a bloated middle-aged version of the gap year student she never was. Clad in khaki and boots and armed only with her phone, because she wanted to travel light.
And there it is. A ghostly version of its daytime cousin. A tearful smile trembling in the dark.
She edges closer to Lower Yosemite Falls. Water roars and the breeze glistens her face. She only has eyes for curved stars. Nebulae. Galaxies. A universe, refracted and pulled into the pearly arc.
He was always drawing rainbows in the dark. She’d laughed. Why is the sky black? she said. He put down his crayon. They’re moonbows. He beamed, proud of what he’d learned from Professor Brian Cox on TV.
She lifts her phone and takes aim, snapping away with numb fingers. Silently, as if even fake shutter clicks would shatter it.
She pauses and thumbs through her gallery. She frowns at the poor reflections. As if any device could capture it.
Closer? She puts her phone away and approaches the foot of the falls, reaching out like an alien child.
When she can go no further, she plants her muddy soles on the banks. She extends her fingers, the very tips of her being, aching to wrap herself in shimmering stripes.
She takes too long. Her moonbow is fading and so are its secrets. If only she could leap into the space between water and air.
Under the painted cosmic ceiling of the Children’s Ward, when the spaces between his breaths had started getting longer, she couldn’t stop thinking of moonbows. And what she would have given for another chance to show him one.
Day breaks, like a heart. She takes it all in, ’til its last lingering photons. And all she can do is commit it to memory, in all the colours of a mother’s love.
Farhana Khalique is a writer, voiceover artist and teacher from southwest London. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Lighthouse Literary Journal, Litro, Popshot Quarterly, The Good Journal issue 1, sister-hood magazine, and has been anthologised in The Brown Anthology: Language, City of Stories vol. 1 and 2, Dividing Lines, and Happy Birthday to Me. She has been longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, shortlisted for The Asian Writer Short Story Prize, and won a Word Factory Apprentice Award 2018/19. Find Farhana at @HanaKhalique and www.farhanakhalique.com.
I cried. Beautiful and moving.
Hi Kirsty, I’m so sorry for the late reply, only just seen this – thank you so much! -Farhana