One-Sentence Story: Walking on the Moon

The Wandering Moon by William Blake

The day the American astronauts first walked on the moon I was a high school senior and I was somewhere really strange, too, in a cabin above an isolated monastery in the desert outside of Los Angeles, on a retreat with a group of boys and girls from my school under the guidance of a single student teacher—an idealistic budding psychologist I guess you could call him—where during the day we sat in a circle and talked about our feelings and where at night we all slept in sleeping bags—boys and girls together—on the floor in a single large room and where we had our meals served to us in the monastery dining hall by silent monks wearing long brown homespun robes as if we were in Europe in the Middle Ages, and where one boy kept trying to talk me into have sex with him and I kept refusing him, not because I was a virgin who believed I should only have sex with the man I loved, but because I knew from our group conversations that he had been recently been institutionalized for having “flipped out” and I found the thought of making love to someone who was insane rather off-putting (I remember him saying with some bravado that he had managed to get himself discharged by pretending that he was normal even though he was still hallucinating wildly, and the doctor had told him that if he was capable of even pretending that he was well, he actually was well enough to leave) and that night—a night on which the moon shone so brightly in the clear desert sky and so many more stars were visible to us than we could ever see in our daily lives in the big city—he lay next to me in his sleeping bag, whispering that my hair was beautiful and that I was pretty and couldn’t we just…, and I wondered whether the monks asleep in the monastery below had any idea of what was really going on in their retreat center or whether they would even care if they knew, and I wondered, too, what kind of future this boy would have, in and out of mental institutions already, although with the war in Vietnam still going strong—with its napalmed villagers and heroin-addicted American soldiers—at least he didn’t have to worry about the draft, and recently I overheard my mother’s closest friend telling someone that I was a very unusual teenager because I became an adult when I was only seventeen—she said it both proudly and fondly—yes, at seventeen, Nina completely stopped being a child.

by Nina Zolotow

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