Short Story: Oh, shiny moon

Photo: Library of Congress.

The toy car rattled across the fake green marble of the vinyl tiles, its wheels whispering over seams that led from the living room into the waiting dark. The Zenith television roared behind me, Peter Jennings’ voice cutting through the static like a knife through water. I left the blare of the lamps and the hum of the ceiling fan, crawling away from the noise and light, away from the living, into the deeper hush of the house.

Beep beep.

My little Hot Wheels darted forward, its ZAMAC shell hot from the furnace of my palms and the humidity of my breath. The hallway smelled like floor wax, sweat, and something faintly metallic, like a coin pressed too long between the fingers. The car zigzagged, bouncing against my fingertips as I crept onward, knees bare, skin sticking to the warm floor, toward the kitchen.

And then I heard it.

Clink. Clink.

The sound of dishes being lifted, maybe, or set down too hard. The sound was soft, domestic, familiar, except it wasn’t supposed to be there. I stopped the car mid-roll. The kitchen was a black square of nothing. The hum of the refrigerator was gone. The clock above the stove didn’t tick.

Mommy was in the living room, I knew that, cross-legged on the carpet, scissors snapping coupons from the Midweek, while Jennings recited the details of a Northwest Airlines crash in Detroit. Daddy was lost in his Walkman, ABBA crooning through the foam headphones he’d found cheap at the Pearlridge Swap Meet. My baby brother circled him in his little walker, squealing at nothing, wheels squeaking.

So who was in the kitchen?

A sound rose. A voice, not speaking but humming. Low, wavering, as if from far away. I felt the hair on my arms rise. It was a song I almost knew. A lullaby that no one had ever sung to me, yet one that had always been waiting somewhere behind my ears.

An Ilocano folk song, though I wouldn’t learn that until years later. The words meant “Oh, shiny moon.” But that night, the moon was gone. The windows showed nothing, no sky, no streetlight. The only light came from the flicker of the TV in the other room, leaking faint blue veins across the wall.

The humming grew clearer.

I could see her now, or something like her. Tall. Thin. The outline of a woman, her body made of shadow that seemed to absorb every other shadow. Her hair fell long, heavy, uncombed, like a black waterfall cascading to her waist. It did not move, yet it seemed to breathe.

She moved among the counters, fingers, if they were fingers, tapping against aluminum pots, chipped bowls, mismatched lids. Clink. Clink. Every sound sharp enough to sting the air.

Then she turned toward me.

For a heartbeat, I thought she had eyes. But they weren’t eyes. They were the absence of them, holes where the dark went deeper. Her face was not a face. It was an unmaking of light. A smudge against the world.

My body locked. The toy car slipped from my hand and rolled forward into the black, where it stopped against her bare feet, or where her feet should have been.

She leaned forward.

The humming stopped.

And in the silence that followed, I felt something touch my cheek. Not a hand. Not even air. Just cold, as if something had passed through me and took the warmth with it.

From the living room, Peter Jennings’ voice broke the quiet again. “One survivor has been found.”

The shadow didn’t move.

But in that moment, I knew. Whatever she was, she wasn’t just visiting. She had always been there, waiting, beneath the hum of the refrigerator, beneath the floor tiles, beneath the sound of my own small breath.

Mommy’s voice broke the silence first.

“Ayyad, what are you doing in there?”

The shadow didn’t fade. It just stepped back. Not vanishing, but thinning, as if the darkness itself were swallowing her up again. I blinked, and she was gone. Only the hum of the refrigerator returned, weak and uneven, like it had been holding its breath the whole time.

The little car was still at the edge of the linoleum, its chrome body faintly reflecting the TV glow from the next room.

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. My throat was dry. My body refused to move.

Mommy appeared at the edge of the hallway, her slippered feet brushing against the vinyl, her face tired and half-lit by the television flicker. She smelled like the tabloid ink she’d been cutting from, and faintly, of rice. Her voice softened.

“What are you doing crawling all over the floor in the dark?”

I looked at the sink. The dishes were neatly stacked. No pots out of place. No sign of motion or sound. The kitchen had returned to what it always was, dull, quiet, small.

But I could still feel her.

The shadow’s chill clung to me, a damp film on my skin. I wanted to tell Mommy, but the words wouldn’t come. I didn’t know how to describe something that didn’t have a face. Something that knew those songs on the Ilocano radio station.

Mommy sighed and bent down, her knees creaking. “You’re sweating again,” she said, brushing my hair back from my forehead. “It’s too hot?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t hot anymore. I was freezing.

She picked up the toy car, looked at it with that familiar half-smile, and said, “Come. Time to take a bath.”

As she led me toward the bathroom, I glanced back.

For just a second, just a blink, the shadow was there again. Standing behind her. Taller now. Head bent low, as though whispering something into her ear. The hum started again, soft and slow, the same tune for the same moonless night.

Mommy didn’t hear it. Or she did, and pretended not to.

The hallway light flickered as we passed. The air smelled faintly of burnt hair and salt.

Later that night, I woke to the sound of water running. I thought it was Mommy washing dishes again. But when I crept out of bed, the sink was dry, the faucet still. The sound was coming from the bathroom.

I pushed the door open just enough to see the reflection in the fogged mirror.

A woman. The same tall shadow, her back to me, long hair streaming over her shoulders, hands dipped into a basin that wasn’t there. And in the mirror’s glass, I saw something that wasn’t in the room—me. Standing beside her, a smaller shadow, mouth open in silent song.

I ran back to my bed, clutching the sheets, praying to a God I barely knew.

By morning, everything was normal. The pots were in their places. The floors gleamed. The house smelled of fried eggs and vinegar.

But when Mommy called me to eat, she was humming. The same tune.

“O naraniag a bulan,” she murmured under her breath, slicing tomatoes.

Oh, shiny moon.

And as the sunlight hit her face, I noticed something missing.

Her reflection in the window wasn’t there.

It was 1987, and our little Kalihi house stood in a tangle of others just like it, packed close together behind chain-link fences and banana trees. The streets were slick with humidity and the smell of diesel from city buses rattling down King Street. The new Ilocano families were building concrete houses beside old wooden ones with clapboard siding and glass jalousies, homes left behind by plantation workers who had nowhere else to go when the sugar fields closed. Some called it the poor side of Honolulu, but we called it home.

And every night after that, when the moon hid behind the clouds, I swore I could still hear her hum.