The Pale Full Moon Is a Real Man’s Pill

He can spot a con from across a park. He just can’t tell who the mark is.

The full moon is Halford’s pill. Under its light he was cured of the poison the poets and dreamers call love, and he’s lived clean ever since: no drama, no debt, and no damned kids. He sleeps alone and calls it winning.

Then he wakes to a Saturday morning that’s gone strange. The day’s heat rises from the ground instead of falling from the sun. Someone has chalked a shape on his driveway that won’t scuff off under his shoe. Sharp, broken lines from a poem he knew by heart in his married years keep surfacing, out of order. And in the park, a stranger stops to say she’s looking for an escaped animal. A beautiful stranger, who remembers his college, his verses, and admirers he never knew he had.

Halford knows a hustle when one is standing in front of him, and he has this one figured out before she finishes talking. By noon he’s home, satisfied, certain of what she wanted from him. But he’s wrong about her. He’s wrong about what the moon woke him up to. And the debt he is sure he never took on is about to be read back to him, line by line, by the one reader who truly understood the poem all along.