"child of the moon"

Beneath the flashbulb of the January full moon, curled foetal across the pathway before me, the pathway to the triangle site, lay a child. His skin was glassy white, depigmented by the lunar effulgence, shorn of hue like a subterranean. He stirred at the sound of the crunching gravel, sat then stood, his eyes blinked carefully in greeting. A child of the moon, he seemed, his hair silver and thick. I felt the same compulsion to cradle him that I felt for my own progeniture. Slowly I rested the tips of the fingers of a single hand upon his shoulder, found the skin as cold as meat. He led me some short distance to where in heavy rains the Yare had burst its banks once more, the brownish water about the dried reeds, a deft fondler, and swollen into bleak pools across the adjacent fields, crooked trees jutting from their middles like the very last frail edifices post-catastrophe, allusions only to a distant biodiversity superseded by a huge hopeless spread. We looked a while at the rushing water, at the moon cast in it. His vocalizations were not of the English tongue and had the timbre of birdsong. All about us were goldfinch, scores of them. He held me to his bare chest within which occurred a detonation. I felt soaked in moon. The air was creamy with it. He pointed a lean digit toward the water and was then gone, the song of the goldfinch left in the dark behind him, tellit- tellit - tellit.