Kay Luna signed her name on the rose-colored check in her regular yet peculiar fashion.  The first name inscribed looked to be routine enough, but Kay Luna’s imprinting of her surname nearly always caused a double take.  Although the “L” was an extravagant, cursive flourish, the letter itself was swirled in the norm.  But the “u” following bore Kay Luna’s particular embellishment.

In the signing of her name, Kay Luna drew out the “u,” elongating the vowel after which she festooned the letter with two half circles attached to the end, bent upward.   In the mid-section of the expansive “u,” Kay Luna dashed onto the paper two petit spots of ink - meant to be eyes.

In short, each time Kay Luna did her signature, she broadened and adorned the “u” in her last name to create a merry, cheery happy-face.  And so Kay Luna, age fifty, signed her name since quietly rebelling from Sister Mary Mercy’s standard form cursive writing in the fourth grade.

“There you are, love,” Kay Luna said as she slid the completed check across the counter in the direction of the youthful and shy checkout clerk at the Publix market on Federal Highway in North Ft. Lauderdale.  The checker, really still a boy, blushed a shade darker than Kay Luna’s check face when she called him “love.”  He muttered an embarrassed and barely audible “thank you for shopping at Publix” as Kay pushed the cart of paper bagged groceries away from the checkout stand, foregoing the proffered bag boy assistance.

Kay hustled across the parking lot, pushing the shopping cart at its top speed, wanting to quickly retreat from the oppressive August heat.  She wasted little time in popping open the trunk of her car, packing the market load inside.  Returning the shopping cart back to the store front, Kay hurried back to her car, slid inside, fired up the engine and flicked the air conditioning blowers to “high.”

Kay’s thick, straight, gray hair blew easily in the generated breeze nearly as if she sat outside in an afternoon air current off the Atlantic.  She flipped on the CD player in her car, a disc featuring mournful whale calls accompanied by a softly played flute smoothly engaged.  While she drove, Kay practiced her breathing, deep inhales filling her lungs, and a study she engaged throughout the day.

She intoned one of her usual mantras - “ohm” - while driving, breathing and taking in the soothing sounds of the sea born mammals and reeded instruments.  Occasionally, she even closed her eyes for periods longer than prudent when operating an auto along a rushing roadway.

Within half an hour, Kay Luna pulled her car into the shared driveway of her duplex home.  Kay rented her narrow, two story home from her conjoined neighbor, an elderly and hard of hearing Cuban national named Carlos Perez.  Perez, as he preferred to be called, owned the divided house for several years and leased half to Kay.  When Kay eased her car into the driveway, Perez was hand watering the tiny strip of grass and healthy flowerbed that ran along his side of the house.

“Hello, love,” Kay called to Perez as she exited her car.  He did not hear her.  Consequently, Kay repeated her greeting, her voice markedly raised.

“I’m watering!” Perez snapped, all the while continuing to spray water from the hose onto the deep green patch of lawn and the multi-colored clusters of bougainvillea blossoming in the neatly tended flower patch.

Walking towards the rear of her car to begin removing her marketing bags from the trunk, Kay glanced over to her own strip of grass and noticed, easily, that her lawn was not nearly as richly colored as her immediate neighbor’s plot.  She planted her own garden but filled the top soil with an assortment that lacked the color symphony of Perez’s bougainvillea.

“I wish my lawn looked like yours does, Perez,” Kay halfway sighed, hauling two full grocery sacks out of the trunk.

“You talking to me?”  Perez demanded, not hearing what was said.

“I said:  ‘You’re lawn, its lovely.’”

“I water,” Perez firmly extolled.  He gestured with his free hand in the direction of Kay’s grass.  “You need to water more!”

Despite living in the States for almost fifty years, since Castro took Cuba, Perez still spoke in choppy, heavily accented English.  He tossed the running hose to the side, making certain the water kept streaming onto his grass.

“I help you,” he stated in an authoritarian tone.

“Oh, love, that’d be swell.”

Perez plodded to the trunk, hoisted out three of the packed sacks and followed Kay into her house.  He maneuvered through her cluttered living room, through an equally busy dining room and into Kay’s kitchen where he mimicked her by placing his wad of bags on the counter next to the refrigerator.

“Thanks love.  I’ll get the rest,” Kay advised.

Perez waved Kay off, groused a grumpy sounding “no, no,” and strode from the house.  He shortly returned with the remaining sacks of groceries.

“So have you decided?” Kay asked Perez as he placed the final three bags on the counter.  He snorted in reply.

“Well . . . have you?” Kay asked, undaunted and with a smile.

“Voodoo . . .” Perez muttered.

“Not voodoo, I’ve told you that,” Kay patiently stated as if explaining the Dewey Decimal System to a library rookie.  Her calm reply was met with another gruff inhale by Perez.

“I really need you, love.  The book calls for a circle of six.  And, with you I’ve got six.”

“Voodoo, I say,” he muttered.

“Not voodoo . . .”

“Hmph!” moaned Perez.

Kay cautiously tapped the slightly shorter, rather stooped man on his left shoulder.

“Come on, love.  Think of it as an adventure,” she prodded.

“Do what?” he asked, not hearing clearly.  She leaned in a bit closer Perez.

“An adventure.  Think of it as an adventure.” 

“Hmph,” he grumbled again.  “Foolishness, that’s what I think.”

Kay chuckled.  “All right, all right.  I’ll call it foolishness if you’ll come.”

“I come then, to see the foolishness,” Perez retorted and then he departed with a mumbled “goodbye.”

“See you tomorrow, love,” Kay called out in the man’s wake. “Be here at ten.  We need to be there in plenty of time for midnight.”

Perez said nothing further in reply and merely waved a hand behind his back as if shooing off a pesky pet.  Kay cracked a broad grin.

Kay spent the remainder of the day at home, eventually sitting down with her well thumbed “Book of Colandra,” particularly the section captioned “The Full Moon Dance.”  Since stumbling upon the “Book of Colandra” at the Warwick Book Shoppe in Del Ray, Kay read “The Fall Moon Dance” so many times she felt as if she almost memorized every phrase.  She knew the Full Moon Dance well, but for the following night Kay wanted to make certain she understood everything about the lunar enchantment perfectly.

The next night the moon would be full, Kay Luna’s chance to do the dance in the “Book of Colandra.”  In order to successfully complete the dance’s promise, a circle of six was required.  Planning for the following evening, Kay lined up the owner of Warwick Book Shoppe, a rail thin woman in her late twenties, named Raven.  In her perpetual all black choice of attire, Kay early on concluded that Raven looked like the bird whose moniker she bore.

Kay also invited two spinster women, twins in their seventies, Aggy and Po, who dabbled in the occult and White Witchcraft for forty years or more.  Aggy and Po were most enthused about joining the circle for the Full Moon Dance.

The final person Kay asked to attend was Trent Pace, a bug eyed thirty year-old who owned “The Sunflower,” an organic diner Kay favored for meals away from her home.

Of the group, only Perez needed repeated cajoling, Kay felt, to make certain he would attend.  The group was to congregate at Kay’s house by ten o’clock the following night.  Together they would drive to the old Glade Lawn Cemetery west of the city, a place where Kay Luna’s husband, Mark, was buried two years before, taking a grave plot next to his parents, Hazel and Fred.  In the most recent years only a handful of the newly dead were laid to repose at Glade Lawn.  The boneyard first received the dead over a hundred years earlier, the place nearly filled with but a few spots remaining for the relations of those who passed before.

According to the “Book of Colandra” the promise of the Full Moon Dance perfectly performed was the addition of a seventh member to the mystical circle:  The, as of late, quite late Mark Luna, departed husband of Kay.

Shortly before midnight, after reading over the passages pertaining to the Full Moon Dance for the umpteenth time, Kay returned to her bedroom, sleeping soundly until dawn.

With the sun, Kay rose from her bed and prepared a steaming bath tub into which she poured copious amounts of organic floral and herbal extracts.  On a small CD player in her bathroom, Kay turned on a piece entitled “Morning Gloria,” which featured the placid sounds of a gentle spring rain with the faint accompaniment of an oboe.  She lit sixteen candles in the small room.

Kay slipped into the hot bath and wiled away the first couple of hours of the day.  She regularly turned on the hot water spicket to keep the temperature up, each time she did so she added more extracts to maintain the scent and texture of the relaxing bath.

Following her long bathing, Kay made herself a light breakfast of fruit and rye bread, lightly toasted.  The meal completed, she telephoned the members of the circle for that night’s Full Moon Dance.  She reached Raven first at the Warwick Book Shoppe.

“May the blessing of Osiris be with you,” Raven greeted, picking up the telephone on the second ring.

“And to you, Raven,” Kay brightly rejoined.

“I’m so excited about tonight,” Raven said next, in her breathy manner of speaking.

“That’s why I’m calling.  Just wanted to make sure you’re coming.”

“Of course,” Raven emphatically said.  “I never miss the chance to make contact with those on the other side.”

“Oh I know love.”

“I’ll be at your place at ten,” assured Raven.  “Can I bring anything?”

“No, no,” Kay replied.  “I’ll have snacks after.” 

The women signed off and Kay next telephoned Aggy and Po, the septuagenarian twins.  Each of the older women took a phone extension when Kay announced herself as the caller.

“Ten o’clock, right?”  Aggy asked.

“Yes, love” Kay replied.

“I just finished the ‘Book of Colandra’ myself,” Aggy advised.  “I wanted to be prepared.”

“That’s right,” Po interjected.  “Aggy wanted to be prepared.”

“Great,” Kay enthused.

“I think it’s best that more than one person in the circle really understands the ‘Book of Colandra,’” Aggy added.

“That’s right,” Po agreed.  “She thinks it’s better if more than one person knows the ‘Book of Colandra.’”

“Yes, love, I do agree,” Kay nicely remarked.  “Well, then, I’ll see you both at ten.”

Kay followed her phone call with Aggy and Po by dialing Trent Pace at The Sunflower.  Her phone call with Trent was rushed as he was busy preparing for the noontime lunch rush.  He assured Kay he would be at her house no later than ten o’clock that night and that he would bring along left over desserts from the day’s service.

Kay spent the hour before noon reviewing “The Full Moon Dance” section of the “Book of Colandra” a final time.  She then ate a lunch of barley soup with tofu, baked summer squash and almond milk.  Lunch finished, she wandered out to the front of her house, intending to walk next door to remind Perez to be over to her place at ten o’clock that night.  Much like the day before, Perez was running the water in front of his house concentrating on his flower beds when Kay came outside.

Perez caught sight of Kay the minute she exited her front door.  He waved at her in the manner of shooing off a bug.

“I know, I know.  Be at your house at ten o’clock tonight for the voodoo,” he said.

“So you’ll be there?”  Kay smiled at her neighbor.

“What?” he asked, not hearing her words.

Speaking louder and cupping her hands over her mouth, Kay repeated herself.

“I just said I would be, didn’t I?”

With that said, Perez made the “be gone - be gone” hand gesture once more and returned his attention to his flowers.  Satisfied that Perez would be at her house that night at the appointed hour, Kay went back inside and took a nap, lying on the sofa in her living room.

After about an hour’s rest, Kay rose from the sofa and decided to go outside for a mid-afternoon walk, half expecting to see Perez still futzing around on his lawn.  Kay’s duplex was located on Hendricks Isle, a tiny finger island surrounded on three sides by canal-like waterways and on the fourth by Las Olas Boulevard.

Kay began her afternoon stroll behind her duplex, on a dock that ran the length of her side of Hendricks Isle.  A few dozen boats of various sizes and shapes were moored along the dock, many of the vessels providing full time residences for their owners.

Walking along, Kay stopped to talk to a couple of fellows she encountered along the way, men hard at work up-keeping or bettering their anchored crafts.  Kay was in no particular hurry, well enjoying the pristine aqua sky and even the sour smell wafting off the churned up waterway.

After chatting with the second of the gents tending to a boat, Kay spent a full quarter hour watching a couple of parrots dart from tree to tree.  The little tropical creatures were not native to Ft. Lauderdale.  However, when Hurricane Andrew crashed into South Florida some ten years earlier, a number of pet parrots ended up suddenly loose either as a result of the storm damaging residences setting the gaily colored fowl free or by owners who released the feathered pets when evacuating the area in advance of the violent storm.

Regularly, Kay spotted the same two birds flying about trees near the canal, often wondering if she knew the souls inhabiting the brightly adorned flyers at another time in her own life.  Kay believed reincarnation of a human spirit into a parrot’s body was a step forward in the never-ending chain of rebirth.

Kay returned home in time to watch a syndicated talk show on television featuring a transvestite in love with a lesbian.  Like with the parrots, she wondered if she might have encountered the spirit of the muscular transvestite or the leather clad lesbian in another form sometime, somewhere in the past.

At six o’clock, Kay prepared herself a bowl of lentil soup, an organically grown spinach salad and chai tea.  She took her dinner in front of the television, watching the nightly news, local and national, and then an entertainment magazine program.

A couple hours later, Kay dressed in anticipation of the Full Moon Dance, selecting a gauzy looking and flowing white dress.  She wore her wedding band and a thin gold charm around her neck.  In time, the people she invited to for the dance circle at Glade Lawn Cemetery appeared at her home, even Carlos Perez showing up on time.

Kay, with the help of old Aggy, carefully went over with the others the movements and requirements of the Full Moon Dance. While still inside Kay’s house, the group dress rehearsed the dance from “Book of Colandra” that they would do for real inside the fences of the graveyard at midnight.

Alternately throughout the dry run in Kay’s duplex, Perez muttered “voodoo” or “foolishness” more than once, Aggy scolded:

“Kay  . . . he can’t say that.  He can’t say that.  It’s not a part of the Full Moon Dance.  It’s not in the ‘Book of Colandra.’”

“That’s right,” Po agreed.  “He can’t say that.”

“Perez, love,” Kay interceded on each occasion.  “We’ve got to perform the Full Moon Dance exactly like the ‘Book of Colandra’ tells us to.”

“Hmpf,” Perez replied.

At eleven o’clock, the group piled into Raven’s mini-van and set off towards Glade Lawn Cemetery.  Starting the van, Raven turned to the others.  “May the blessings of Osiris be with us.”

“Indeed,” Kay said, as Aggy and Po bobbed their heads in unison.

“Yes, yes,” Trent Pace, the organic grocer, chimed in while Perez mumbled something indistinct.

Reaching the graveyard gates, Kay climbed out of Raven’s van to open them up, the entrance having been closed but not locked at dusk.  She waved the van through, shut the gate behind the midnight travelers and then rejoined the group in the van.

“This is so exciting,” Aggy gushed.

“That’s right,” Po agreed.  “This is so exciting.

Raven, following Kay’s directions, maneuvered the van around and over the meandering trail that made for a roadway through and across the cemetery.

“Here, here . . . here we are.” Kay eventually said as the van rolled by the cemetery section at which Mark was buried.  Raven eased the ride to the side of the lane, quickly shutting down the motor.  Kay checked her watch: 11:40.  “We’ve plenty of time to get ready.”

The troop trooped over to the plot in which Mark rested in repose.

“Oh my,” Aggy remarked.  “This is a nice area.”

“That’s right,” her sister said.”  This is a nice area, a very nice area.”

“Yes it is . . .” Kay’s voice trailed off as she looked longingly up at the full summertime moon.  The six visitors took on a soft blue pale in the light of the midnight moon.  The night air was most still.

“You should plant flowers, plant flowers here,” Perez said, pointing at the grass-covered plot.

Kay smiled “Yes, love, I expect you’re right.  Flowers would be nice.

“A perfect night,” Trent remarked, more to himself than to the others.  “Just a perfect night.”

Raven closed her eyes, involved in centering herself for the Full Moon Dance yet to come.

“Well, let’s take our places,” Kay said, the group moving to form a circle around Mark’s grave.  “Does everyone remember what we need to do?  Is everyone ready.”

“I’m ready,” Aggy said.

“That’s right, we’re ready,” Po followed.

Raven opened her eyes and in a voice as firm as tombstone marble said she, too, was ready for the dance.

“Ready,” Trent said as well.  Perez stood silent.

“Love?” Kay softly said to her neighbor.

“Yes. Yes,” he said, waving her off.  “Yes, Yes.”  He mumbled again and then some more.

At the exact midnight moment, church bells - perhaps the burial chapel on the Glade Lawn grounds - tolled the hour.  Directly, the Full Moon Dance began, after Raven intoned her standard creed:

“May the blessing of Osiris be upon us.”

Kay spoke the appropriate incantation from the “Book of Colandra” as she and her gathered others danced their way round the resting place of her Mark.  Even perturbed Perez managed the ritual with some degree of aplomb and an absence of grousing.

Per the directions of the “Book of Colandra” the pace of the dancing increased towards the end, leaving all winded. Aggy and Po found themselves clutching the tombstone grasping for needed breath at the conclusion.             In a moment, the sextet stood silent sentry around the grave plot.  They waited.  They watched.  They listened.  Kay felt.

At half past twelve a few minutes after the turn of incantation ended, the Full Moon Dance completed, a soft breeze blew through the palm fronds of the tropical trees planted near and around Mark’s plot.

“He’s here!”  Aggy said.

“That’s right,” Po agreed.

“The blessing of Osiris is upon us,” Raven added.

“Oh my,” Trent, in hushed voice, rejoined.

Perez, for his part, rolled his eyes.

Kay looked around her circle of friends, neatly surrounding the resting place of her husband.  With a hand to her heart and a tender smile across her lips, she turned her gaze to the night sky.  “You know  . . . I think he’s always been here.”  She tapped her chest twice as a solitary tear rolled over her cheek, reflecting the full moon.

© Mike Broemmel 2008