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Waning Gibbous
Conrad is running late for his INDE206 lecture. He takes a sharp left, kicking up his skateboard and tucking it securely under his arm before opening the double doors in front of him with a sharp shove of his shoulder.
He cuts through the hallway of the Computer Science building— a shortcut he discovered just this morning waiting in line for his red eye, courtesy of the guy standing next to him that he reluctantly engaged in obligatory small talk with.
The sound of his footsteps thrum through the barren hallways, the soles of his white sneakers squeaking against the freshly polished linoleum. He passes by the building’s computer lab, collectively nicknamed by students as The Dungeon. He glances through the window and sees a student huddled in front of a monitor, his eyes fused to the screen.
Conrad pauses, watching for a moment as he chokes down line after line of code, until ones and zeroes flow though his veins instead of the crimson tide of blood and he forgets that he’s flesh and blood and a heart, and not an extension of a machine.
He picks up the pace of his steps and hurries past the lab, sense of urgency returning to him.
He chances one last look through the window before the pane of glsss ends, but finds only his own reflection staring back at him.
***
Third Quarter
It’s a sleepy Sunday morning, the kind where even the dust particles seem to drift through the air in a manner lazier than usual. Conrad has just made the decision that Agnes is no longer allowed to use his folding board.
He tilts his head at her disapprovingly, watching with eyebrows drawn in mild annoyance as she clutches the side of her laundry basket for support, trying to prevent herself from being pulled to the ground by the force of her laughter.
He and Agnes are the only two currently occupying the laundry room, the rest of the building slow to rise and greet the sun. The door to the laundry room in her building had broken, and he had offered for them to do laundry in his building together.
She had caught sight of his folding board tucked into the side of his basket, inquiring what it was. He had pulled it out and demonstrated the correct order to flip the panels to transform the fabric plane of a shirt into a perfect geometric square. The efficiency of the instrument had inexplicably been enough to spur her into her current state of mirth.
Conrad reaches out to steady her basket when she nearly tips it over from how tightly she’s gripping it, sinking lower and lower to the floor as she continues to laugh at him. Why she doesn’t want the folds of her shirts to have sharp, crisp lines is beyond him.
He crosses his legs at the ankle and leans against the machine currently spinning his clothes in soapy revolutions as he waits for Agnes’ momentary fit of insanity to pass. The breezy scent of fresh cotton whorls around him, lulling the blunt edges of his annoyance into amusement and fondness. He rests his elbows against the lid of the machine, letting the reverberations tunnel through him until he can feel the vibrations in his bones.
The rhythmic swish of each cycle, the cadence of Agnes’ laughter, it’s almost enough to drown out the absence of a melodic voice over the tinny hum of a phone line.
***
Waning Crescent
Vintage Ray Ban’s resting on the top of his head and an iced green tea in hand, Conrad takes a seat on an empty bench at the outskirts of the quad.
The afternoon sun blazes down on him, but the cup he’s holding absorbs thermal energy from his palms as beads of condensation roll down his fingertips. The earthy bitterness of the tea is an icy bite at the back of his throat every time he takes a sip.
He leans a few degrees backward until his back presses against the bench, the heat from the metal seeping through the thin cotton of his shirt and warming his skin. He idly takes another sip of his drink as he observes the colorful, chaotic crowd scattered before him, their conversations drifting through the humid air of the day.
There’s two girls sitting to his right sharing a chocolate croissant as one of them regales her friend with a story about the date she had last night. Countless students are cemented to their chairs, headphones blocking out the world as they type furiously on their laptops.
A scooter whizzes by the sidewalk in front of him, the rider clad in an inflatable shark costume and cheerfully waving a fin at bewildered passersby. Conrad raises an arm to twiddle his fingers in greeting as the shark flashes by him in a blur of yellow.
His eye catches on two boys play wrestling in front of the fountain in the middle of the quad, their movements familiar and practiced. One of them cups his hands to scoop water into the hollow of his palms that he immediately flings at the other boy. Their shrieks of laughter echo all the way to where Conrad is sitting.
The one who flung the water is marginally taller, with a mop of dark curls shot through with streaks of gold. Conrad reaches for the sunglasses perched on his head to cut through the glare of the sun so he can get a better look at him.
When he flips the sunglasses down over his eyes, the two boys have disappeared.
***
New Moon
Conrad shuffles his feet, shifting around on the velour of seat D7. The person sitting directly behind him lets out a pointed cough and Agnes elbows him sharply in the ribs. He turns his head to narrow his eyes at her, but the gesture goes unnoticed in the dim of the theater.
Agnes had convinced him to attend a screening of The Graduate with her at the Stanford Theater, relentless in her cajoling until he had begrudgingly acquiesced.
He shifts on his seat once more to the intense displeasure of the person behind him before turning his focus to the screen.
Conrad watches as Ben takes a call in a glass phone booth, his inner turmoil reflected to every passerby on the street, every car driving by. His storm of emotions on full display to the world, protected only by a thin pane of electrified sand.
Conrad slouches down against the back of his seat. He tunes out the endless tangle of Ben’s life, instead crafting an email to Dr. Namazy about an upcoming conference he’s hoping to attend in the quiet of his mind.
His attention is drawn back to the screen when he hears Ben asking Mrs. Robinson where Elaine is. He nudges Agnes gently, whispering that he needs to use the bathroom. He makes his way through the maze of limbs, mumbling apologies to every person whose legs he crosses over as he navigates toward the exit.
He steps outside the theater, cool night breeze ruffling his hair as he begins walking to the convenience store he can see a couple of blocks down the street. When he walks in, the soft tinkle of the bell hanging on the frame of the door announces his presence, but the man sitting at the register flipping through the paper doesn’t spare him a glance.
Conrad peruses the aisles, grabbing his two items before making his way to the register. He hands the man a crisp twenty. Tells him to keep the change and to have a nice night.
Conrad steps back out into the night air, lowering himself down gently to sit on the edge of the curb looking out at the deserted parking lot. There are no stars above him to bear witness as he empties out the contents of his bag. This close to the city, the air pollution has rendered them invisible to him, and him invisible to them.
He looks down at his hands under the harsh glow of the streetlight next to him, skyscraper windows winking at him from across the street and the neon glow of the sign announcing the convenience store open illuminating him from behind. The sleeve of his blue color-blocked fleece has created a series of soft, uneven folds, exposing his wrist to the cold kiss of the wind.
He got a temporary tattoo this morning from the ArtX club tabling in the plaza. The dark curves of the symbol now standing in stark contrast against the smooth tan of his skin. The ink will disappear in a few days, but the quiet persistence of his simultaneous vice and dream will remain tattooed across his heart. Conrad yanks the cuff back down over his wrist.
He taps a cigarette out of the box and clicks the lighter until a flame flickers to life. Takes hold of the cigarette between his left pointer and ring finger. Lights it. Doesn’t bring it up to his lips.
The cold pavement of the curb seeps through his tailbone and curls up his spine. He lets the cigarette dangle between his fingers, tendrils of smoke painting the dark canvas of sky in ephemeral patterns. He remains perfectly still, memorizing the secrets the smoke spells out in the silence of the night until the fiery embers peter out and extinguish.
He stands, brushing nonexistent dust from the crisp lines of his jeans. He throws the cigarette in a trash can, the domed lid swinging back and forth. Throws away the rest of the box.
He walks back to the theater on the side of the pavement closest to the road, letting the roar of the cars as they speed by, the flash of their headlights, the sharp gust of air, all wash over him. He keeps his eyes fixed on the sidewalk under his feet, ensuring that he never steps directly on the cracks separating the tiles. If he places his feet precisely in line with each other, each square of pavement is seven steps.
The dark of the movie theater is a different shade of black than the dark of the sky. He’s poised at the top of the stairs, about to begin the descent to his seat when the cavity of his chest is cleaved open. His heart topples out, down the stairs, splattering blood on the walls, on the people in the aisle seats.
Ben is standing at the window looking down at the wedding, desperately screaming Elaine’s name, pushing his lungs to their limit as he does everything in his power to prevent the woman he loves from marrying another man.
Conrad timed it all wrong.
***
Waxing Crescent
It’s a relatively cloudy day, the sun still preparing to make its grand debut. There’s a poster sale outside the bookstore, tables laden with albums sprawling across the plaza. Conrad is leafing through an especially large album, sporadic rays of sunlight glinting off the lustrous finish of the prints.
He’s turns a page and painted emerald greens, navy blues, and woody browns fill his vision. He finds himself looking through the window of a desolate East Coast diner on the corner of a dark street.
Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.
The diner only has four inhabitants. A bartender dressed solely in white. A man and woman sitting next to each other, a couple. And a few of seats down, a man casting a solitary figure, the only one with his back turned to the window.
There’s an ache of loneliness emanating from the scene. The diner is colored in isolation, as if it’s been cut from the bustling fabric of reality and dropped into a pocket where they’re the only people in the world, bartender pouring misery into a glass for each one of them.
Conrad runs his fingertips over the glossy finish of the paper, tracing the outline of the faceless man.
He buys the poster.
Decides he’ll be the one to keep the diners company.
***
First Quarter
Technically he’s not supposed to. Or allowed to. But Conrad does it nevertheless whenever one of his classes gets cancelled or he has a rare block of free time to kill.
He roams the halls of the Science and Engineering building, opening doors with the crook of his elbow to slot his head through the crack and let the rise and fall of professors’s voices drift up the stairs to him. Door after door until his interest is piqued.
It’s 11:07 am and he’s slouched down in the aisle seat of the second to last row, auditing a ME281 class without the professor’s knowledge. He’s eating the packet of Skittles he acquired during BIOE230, another class that wasn’t his but he commandeered earlier in the morning.
The professor had been a slight woman with sandy brown hair and kind eyes. She had brought Skittles for the entire class as part of an activity to introduce the foundations of probability theory. She asked students about their weekends as she passed the candy out, and in return shared that she had two kids who played every sport under the sun and had spent the entirety of her Saturday cheering them on at their games. Conrad ensured that he smiled at her, thanked her for a magical class before exiting the lecture hall.
The flimsy plastic crinkles around his fingers as Conrad scavenges through the packet for his last yellow Skittle.
The professor for the class he’s currently lurking in is an elderly man with a thick Irish accent, voice dangerously monotone to the extent that Conrad feels his eyelids becoming slightly heavier.
He catches hold of the elusive oblate spheroid, triumphantly popping it into his mouth. He lets the sugar dissolve into his bloodstream, catalyzing the release of insulin which shuttles glucose into his cells to then be converted into ATP, energizing him.
The too sugary Skittles are the only thing keeping him from completely drifting off. Conrad thinks it would be less than ideal if the professor caught him slumped over asleep in his chair, and demanded to know his name. He’s not quite sure what he would say in that situation. Oh I’m not actually in this class, but congratulations sir on managing to turn the fascinating field of biomechanics into a complete and utter bore. It has a certain ring to it.
Conrad opts for having another Skittle instead. There’s only green ones left now, he always partitions them by color.
He’s categorically opposed to the orange and purple. When they were younger, Conrad used to trick his brother into eating them, slyly telling him that purple was grape flavored like medicine to keep you healthy and that orange was the most special because it was both the color and the flavor.
Today he managed to give them away to a guy he passed in the hallway who he recognized from his INDE204A class last year.
He always had the yellow ones first. Then green. Red is last. The professor with the kind eyes had told the class that 0.2 of their Skittles should be red.
Conrad’s packet had none.
He quietly exits his seat, has barely stepped foot out of the auditorium before he’s hitting the dial button and the line is ringing. A click, and a voice answers, warm and familiar. Conrad’s chest feels lighter as he tilts the phone closer to his ear.
“Hey, baby brother,” he says, grin curling across his face as he hears the laughter on the other end.
He’s still grinning as he pops a green Skittle into his mouth.
***
Waxing Gibbous
Conrad is walking at a pace slower than usual as he repeatedly runs his fingers through his hair in an attempt to rearrange his windswept bangs. He’s trying to smooth down the tuft in the front that’s sticking up like the ruffled feathers of a baby bird when a familiar contact name flashes across the screen of his phone.
He abandons salvaging his hair, maybe everyone will think he’s going for an intentionally tousled California surfer look, and picks up on the first ring. A bubbly voice immediately explodes on the other end of the line. “Guess who nailed their capstone project?”
“Hey, Taylor,” Conrad says, smile curling at the corner of his mouth.
“Hey,” Taylor returns before launching into an elaborately detailed recounting of her presentation, including a play-by-play of the reactions of her professor and classmates.
Conrad listens with quiet attentiveness, chiming in only with soft exclamations of enthusiasm or agreement.
As he’s meandering down a relatively steep downhill, he sees a lone pinecone lying in the middle of the path. He propels it forward with a gentle sweep of his leg, letting it trace the path in front of him, occasionally nudging it forward when it begins to lag behind.
“And there was absolutely no need for your color-coded spreadsheets for the cost benefit analysis, which by the way, I’m not even sure why you know so much about,” Taylor is saying when Conrad feels it’s essential for him to interject.
“Excuse me for having intellectual hobbies,” he sniffs with feigned haughtiness.
“Whatever, Nerdfish.”
“Nerdfish?” he repeats, eyebrow quirked in equal parts confusion and amusement.
“Nerdfish. Like clownfish because they look funny, and swordfish because they have the sharp bills, and Nerdfish because you’re the biggest fucking nerd on the planet.” Taylor says this in a completely confident and rational tone, as though she’s stating a fundamental truth of reality such as Newton’s law of gravitation, and not the half-baked reasoning behind her decision to nickname him after an imaginary fish.
He rolls his eyes. “Whatever, Blondie.” He knows better than to argue against the storm that is Taylor Jewel.
The pinecone has started to fall behind, and he gives it an especially sharp kick, sending it soaring back ahead of him along the path.
“Anyways,” Conrad continues. “That’s amazing your presentation was well received, you deserve it. If your professor hadn’t properly appreciated it, I would’ve had to inform Dr. Namazy that I discovered the first human life form managing to function without a brain.”
Taylor’s resounding laugh is sharp and bright.
They volley back and forth a while longer until Taylor has to leave for her next class.
“Stay excellent,” he tells her.
“Thanks. Can’t say the same for you, though. Gotta be excellent in the first place to stay that way.”
“You know, you could just respond thanks and like, you too, Conrad one of these days,” he tells her, pitching his voice higher and lilting into a slight Valley Girl intonation to mimic her.
“Fat chance in hell, Nerdfish.” Another bright laugh and the sharp trill of the line as she hangs up.
Conrad can only shake his head in amusement.
He glimpses a pine tree ahead with a festival of pinecones scattered beneath, and deposits his beneath the emerald leaves to join them before continuing on.
***
Full Moon
It’s a Saturday night, and a warm breeze tinged with the slight scent of jasmine drifts through the open window.
Conrad is two shots of vodka in with a warm buzz radiating over him, like several dozen bees just warmed their legs in the embers of a dying fire and are now dancing the waltz on the ballroom of his skin.
An odd trio of drinking vessels adorn the coffee table. A translucent mint green glass cup. A shallow plastic bowl with a blue daisy print. And a horribly misshapen ceramic mug that Agnes’ girlfriend Elena had made for her during a pottery class, Future Doctor Hot Stuff painted across it in swirling letters.
Agnes didn’t have any shot glasses and they had to make do.
There’s a puddle of vodka gradually forming on the table from the minuscule cracks along the bottom of Agnes’ mug. Conrad bites back a smile as Agnes adamantly continues drinking from it, repeatedly changing the angle of her arm as if she’s performing a delicate physics experiment. He supposes it’s kind of sweet. Elena is beaming at Agnes between attempts to improvise ways to successfully drink out of her bowl.
Conrad is the only one not having problems, having had the foresight to call dibs on the sole functioning cup.
He makes a mental note to buy Agnes a real set of cups as an early birthday present, watching in mild fascination as Elena spoons vodka into her mouth using a plastic spork, like it’s chicken noodle soup from the elementary school cafeteria and not 80 proof alcohol. An extremely early birthday present, he mentally amends.
They’re playing Hearts and Elena has just laid down the seven of Spades. Conrad reluctantly tosses down his last Spade, the King.
Agnes sucks in a sharp intake of breath. “Tough luck, dude,” she tells him.
She tosses down the Queen of Spades. The Bitch.
“You suck,” Conrad intones as he’s saddled with thirteen points in one fell swoop.
Agnes looks entirely too smug.
He could ensure Agnes collects every last Heart in order to tie with her. Or, he could go for the ultimate win.
Agnes has no remaining Diamonds and Elena has no remaining Clubs, he remembers this from when they both broke suit several turns ago.
He examines his cards carefully. If he does this there’s no going back.
He takes one more moment of consideration before he places down the Jack of Diamonds. Elena throws down the five of Diamonds and Agnes breaks suit with the six of Hearts.
Now with the power, Conrad leads with the ten of Diamonds. Elena follows with the seven of Diamonds. Agnes breaks with another Heart.
Conrad has already collected six out of the thirteen Hearts when Agnes finally catches on. “Oh, you sneaky son of a bitch,” she mutters, frantically examining her remaining cards.
Conrad smiles beatifically at her. Throws down the Ace of Hearts.
Elena resignedly places down her eight of Hearts. Agnes grudgingly lays down her five.
Repeatedly in possession of the power now that Elena and Agnes only have low cards remaining, Conrad collects three more Hearts.
Agnes is bemoaning her tragic luck as Elena attempts to placate her, tracing soothing circles on her back while fighting back a smile. For a heartbeat, Conrad can almost picture Jere here, all carefree laughter and charm as he exchanges conspiratorial grins with Elena. And Belly. Glaring at her cards as if they’ve personally offended her, muttering half-hearted curses at him while commiserating with Agnes. The thought warms his chest as Conrad places down his final card.
The King of Hearts.
Conrad has always found it interesting how the King from each suit has a different expression. The stoic Spade. The pensive Diamond. The apprehensive Club.
And the earnest Heart. The slope of the King’s eyes gives him an air of melancholy wisdom.
Conrad would’ve been an impeccable King of Hearts, once upon a time.
Elena and Agnes throw down their final cards, a Diamond and a Spade.
Hearts were broken, but Conrad now has the power to reunite the fractured suit.
There’s a Japanese art of repairing broken pottery using gold or silver lacquer, emphasizing the fractures rather than concealing them. Kintsugi. A way to acknowledge the past while still honoring the beauty and strength in healing.
He sweeps the King, the final Heart, into his pile of cards.
He imagines the King rebuilding with gold, letting light shine through the cracks. Conrad is using silver.
And he shoots the moon.