“Blood Moon” by Joseph Bathanti (poetry, ’91)

An excerpt from Blood Moon by Joseph Bathanti (poetry, ’91), published at storySouth:

Blood Moon

Lorraine Venoble had insisted on driving home from the country club. She was angry and a little drunk, though not a whit drunk as her husband, Charles, known as Pink because of his complexion, who functioned well drunk, never speeding the way his wife sped, that night, along Cashion Store Road.

Beneath the sanguine moon, spreading ruby light over the heaving cropland, she welcomed the hot wind in her clipped hair, gone silver prematurely, something else she blamed Pink for. She flicked off her headlights. The gaudy moonlight washed the land incarnadine. Pink grinned like an idiot, threatening some boyish platitude to placate her: how beautiful she looked, an entreaty to pull over so they might undress and make love in a field of dying chiggers and beggar lice—his notion of romance.

Deep in the woods, at intervals, flame spurted in long skirmishes along the earth. Fire, more suggestion than fact—dream, even. But real fire, nonetheless, set by the county in controlled burns—an ironic way of appeasing the conflagration that threatened St. Joan’s County each drought-ravaged Indian Summer. The season when skunks, led from their lairs by the harvest moonscurried often in pairs through the fields and flirted with the road. Was the blood moon, however, that bewitched them to tarry that extra moment on the white line that spelled their ends. They lay like totems at intervals along the roadbed: elegant little muffs of plush black and white, fur ruffing as the gold sedan whooshed by. Their unmistakable yeasty smell like strong stout that Pink found stirring and Lorraine abhorred. […continue reading here]