Bad Moon A-Rising
flash fiction: inspired by creedence clearwater revival
Whenever there was thunder on hot summer nights, my gran would hurry from her armchair to the window and watch the clouds kneading over themselves across the sky. She’d giggle and say, “There’s a bad moon on the rise.”
I’d smile back at her but I never understood why she said that until she went into Kilmarnock hospital. We were looking under her bed, trying to find her favourite slippers, and instead found a box of vinyl and photographs.
In one picture, splintering at the edges, was my gran. Caught mid-dance, arms splayed, flared-leg pointing out in a kick, waist-length hair sweeping overhead in a cartwheel. On the back, she’d written: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Oakland, CA, 1970. There were dozens more from concerts across the States that year.
My gran: the sweet old lady, hunched over by gravity to half my height, who gave me rhubarb and custard sweets by the handful like they were produced in her pocket. The woman who barely tapped a toe to the radio. The doting, cuddly granny with white clouds for hair, who cried at kids films on Saturday afternoons and always looked old to me. But sometimes, when caught in the right light, she had started to look somehow like a baby at the same time. The same woman was in these photographs.
On her final night, just before she drifted away, I looked at the moon from the hospital window. I stared until a film came over my eyes, blurring the milky blue light on the trees and tarmac and signs and roundabouts and houses laid out in the distance like dominos ready to tip. I knew it would be her last moonrise and part of me wasn’t sad.
She’d headbanged with the best of them, felt the bass from towering speakers thrum in her chest, let guitar riffs soak into her bones, screamed the lyrics to her favourite songs with a room full of strangers who, in that moment, probably felt like family. When the show finished, maybe she sank pints of cheap beer and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes in a blissful afterglow, ears ringing and lips numb from kissing an American boy.
My gran: the sly old fox who travelled from a small Scottish town to witness the tail-end of the summer of love with her own eyes and never said a word about it.
I wish I could’ve seen the version of her before kids, before grandkids. I’d never known the world without her but she knew it before me.
Watch the video of the story…