Lunacy by Daphne Loads
“See, I told you! Every time! Every time!” Mum shouted and thumped the calendar on the wall. We always had those big red and black ones printed with bold numbers that are easy to read. They also show the lunar phases, and Mum was pointing to a solid disc indicating a New Moon the following day. She was convinced that what she saw as Dad’s unreasonable behaviour was governed by the waxing and waning of the moon. Whenever he outraged her, perhaps by staying out after 9pm, or by speaking to one of the villagers she despised, she would indicate the relevant symbol on the calendar: New, Full, Half or Quarter. Dad pointed out mildly, not for the first time, the flaw in her theory. “There’s always a moon of some kind,” he said. The little symbols appeared on the calendar once a week, and it was inevitable that Dad’s crimes, such as they were, would be committed on or around one of the moon days. Of course, Mum was right to sense a connection between what the moon does up there, and what we humans do down here. Although she went too far, she was just trying to take some comfort from the illusion of predictability and control that her moon calendar gave her in a bewildering world.
But it was Mum’s own watery and unstable moods that were pushed and pulled, disastrously as it turned out, by the magnetism of the moon.
Daphne was born in Norfolk, England in 1959. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University and lived and worked abroad before settling in Scotland. She retired from the University of Edinburgh in 2020 to focus on her writing.
Image was acquired from Wikimedia. It was marked as Public Domain
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The suggestive darkness of the last sentence is chilling. Great read.