The Girl on the Moon

by Raymund L. Fernandez

for Kinutil CDN / 13 August 2014

There is truly a man on the moon. He saw this the other night. The face, not much dissimilar from how artists conceived it in the early 1900s. The mouth set as a circle in a look of surprise. There would have been a rocket sticking out from its left eye. 

He imagined it in his head. He stood by the roadside outside his house looking up at it for some period of time laughing to himself. But as his brain would have it, this image did not last long. Soon his brain grew bored and conjured for him other interpretations for what was really just a configuration of shadows on a  planetary orb; which on this night shined so brightly, they hurt his eyes.  

The brain is a crazy thing for producing disturbing images in one's head. One minute he was thinking something quite so amusing and then the next another quite so gruesome. And what he saw was the decapitated head of that headless child from a picture circulating in the social networks. In the picture, she wore a bright blue summer dress over white leggings which fell into tiny black shoes. She could have been just lying face down on the ground to rest after too much play. Except she was missing a head. He supposed his brain was only now seeking with some measure of despair to repair that incomplete image with the imagined picture of a blue little girl's face, her eyes become wide-eyed blue circular shadows, her mouth shaped into a little"o", calling down at him from the heavens in a frightful dog-howl. 

 There was a new armed group running amok in the Middle East, as if there were not enough of them already. The pictures from that particular war shows how this group has a taste for the most gruesome blood-shows, chopping off heads of even children and otherwise sticking the heads of their victims on the spikes of fences; as if life was some sort of Gothic anime fantasy movie. And he had to ask: From what depths of Hell are these people coming from? 

Like everyone else, of course, his brain strives to make sense out of everything, starting with the question, why? Why would they do this? More than that, why would they take video pictures of themselves doing it? What can beat that for a selfie?  Is this some sort of new formula for waging war? Are we supposed to be impressed by all these into some particular way of thinking?

Immediately, his knee-jerk is to approve the American president's move to stop their continuing advance with bombs. This much he approves. And yet, he is wary with himself whenever he thinks this way. America has put in a lot of ordnance into the Middle East. And yet, we still come to this. Bombs and artillery shells have been dropped everywhere here. The problem seems only to worsen with every bomb.

There was a column in the social networks who pointed to these men as evil. One even suggested the anti-christ himself must be behind all these claiming no ordinary mortal could do these things they are doing. They must be possessed by and of something profoundly evil to the core. In cannot be a legitimate God who could drive these men to do what they are doing.

But he must snap his fingers at himself for thinking these things. One must careful. The social media doesn't really give us the true and complete picture of anything. Regular media is quite more believable. He cautions himself even so. Talk this over with friends. The pictures are incendiary because they are meant to be. The fact they are being broadcasted by the perpetrators themselves makes the whole act many times even more horrific. And yet, one cannot help but ask if there is a trap here. Could it be that the end goal of all these is precisely to make us feel this insidious and profound hatred we find growing inside us now?

It is occult logic to think how hatred and fear feed only on hatred and fear. And yet, there it is, the age-old reality, the inevitable logic of war. It is upon us now as if it might have always been there, only sleeping. 

He is thinking this as he looks up into a moon seldom ever as beautiful as he sees it now. And all he feels is a howl a-birthing inside him. It is good time to come to bed.

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