Hickey lived in a church steeple. Thinking no one knew, he snuck in at night through the sanctuary doors that the preacher left open for folks and their private prayers. Hickey never said prayers, but he lived one, and so the preacher turned his cheek to all suggestions of eviction.

The prayer Hickey lived was that the moon remain in the sky. He felt a kinship with the moon, because like him, its face was imperfect. He’d heard that some saw a man in the moon, or a rabbit, or a woman with a necklace. He saw in its dark splotches a birthmark, like the one that covered one side of his face, except his was dark red, the color of acne but acne was bumpy, and his birthmark was smooth, like he’d heard that the moon’s was, only people called the moon’s birthmarks mare, which meant sea, but they couldn’t be seas, because the moon, he’d heard, had no water. There was the moon, up in the sky, with no water, and apparently no need for water, completely free of something no one else could live without. Reason enough, Hickey had decided, to make his life a prayer that it remain in the sky.

Hickey didn’t pray to the moon. It didn’t care, it wasn’t listening. He didn’t pray for the moon, because if the moon didn’t even need water, it needed nothing that a prayer could bring. So Hickey decided to just be friends with the moon. When it rose, he was there to say, “Hi, welcome back.” When it set, he told it, “So long, come again.” When the clouds cleared, after a night’s frightful storms, he greeted it with joy, said he was so glad to see it come back, and hoped the storm hadn’t scared it like it had scared him. Once a month, during what people called the “new moon,” it hid itself, and when it returned, he welcomed it back and knew from its slender crescent smile that it was glad to see him.

Hickey didn’t much care for people. They were fragile, always breaking. Everything about people was liable to break at any time, and people knew this, and accepted it with special words. Broken spirits, broken dreams, broken hearts, but not the kind in his chest that beat, another kind of heart that Hickey didn’t understand. People broke up, broke down, broke out in measles, broke out in laughter. Even when happy, people broke. And he’d seen anger break a face, turned it as red and scary as a birthmark.

Hickey had given up on breaking years ago. He’d heard that some people envied him that, envied his tolerance of people making fun of him, saying mean things, knocking him around. Even good people tried to break him, telling him he needed things he didn’t: a home, parents, meals at a table, Sunday school, and something call vocational training. There came a day when he just got tired of people trying to break him. On that day, a night actually, the moon had been there to show him just what to do.

He’d heard people thought he hated people, had got fed up with being broken. But what he’d really got fed up with was no being able to them break back. He wasn’t quick enough, observant enough, caring enough to know what to say or how to say it. He wasn’t witty, wasn’t smart, couldn’t stay mad, couldn’t talk without thinking over what he was going to say. He made his break from people – made his break – the day he said “Fuck you” back to someone who’d said it to him. “You can’t hurt me,” he blurted out to Bobby Burton, that night on main street, blood streaming from his nose. “Fuck you,” Bobby Burton said, balling his fist for the next punch. “Fuck you back,” said Hickey, and it was like his ears stopped working and his eyes stopped seeing and his skin and bones stopped feeling and he was floating above it all, heedless, needless, like the moon.

So he kept saying it. “Fuck you,” to anyone or anything that crossed his path. “Fuck you” for about a whole year, the year he got free of school where “Fuck you” wasn’t allowed. A year of “Fuck you’s” and people left him alone, and once he got as free of them as the moon was free of water, he took charge of his life. He moved into the steeple, discovered the moon, and decided that his job in life was to keep the moon in the sky, and that all it would take was to talk nice to the moon, always give it a smile, never try to break it, like it never tried to break him.

4/30/15