The Moonglasses
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
I first saw her the night my friend Colin Hackworth and I were hiking a quiet stretch of the C&O Canal towpath, near the Dickerson Conservation Park. It was November and chilly. We’d been walking for about an hour when he nudged me and whispered, “Here she comes. Don’t break stride.”
It was an exceptionally clear night, and the full moon seemed to enamel the mottled white bark of the ancient and now-leafless sycamores growing undisturbed along this entire stretch of the Maryland bank of the Potomac River, which was all national park land. I saw a dark-clad figure in a wide-brimmed canvas hat approaching us at a brisk pace, some hundred yards up the trail.
She drew near: a pale, thin woman of medium height, probably in her early thirties, dressed in black pants and parka, hiking boots and a daypack. Oddly enough, she was wearing wire-rimmed, round-lensed sunglasses, light-tinted enough, one assumed, to see the trail even in this light, but dark enough to hide her eyes. Her face was thin if not quite gaunt, with prominent cheekbones, a high forehead and a longish, slender nose, her lips pressed in a tight, apprehensive line. Her skin was almost spectral in the moonlight, and a large, splash-shaped scar marred the smoothness of one cheek.
As she passed us, Colin said in a low voice. “Hello, Frances.” She acknowledged his greeting with a barely perceptible nod, but didn’t slow down. I stopped and watched her continue away from us without a backward glance, wondering what would possess this woman to walk the towpath alone after dark.
As if mirroring my thoughts, Colin said, “She’s been hiking this stretch of the trail for years. Far as I know, without incident. And always alone.”
“You don’t seem to be on speaking terms,” I said. “How did you learn her name?”
He told me he’d known her since high school, if not well enough to call himself a friend, describing her as one of those “skinny, intelligent, socially recessive girls whose beauty tends to blossom post-high school.” She would have been the valedictorian, he informed me, if not for “the accident.” Frances Kerwood had been cripplingly shy, and too proud even to try making inroads with the popular crowd. In her junior year she developed her first real crush on a boy in her English class, and he, vain and easily flattered, didn’t bother discouraging it.
He was part of a tight-knit group of friends in the school’s drama club. Around midsummer, the four boys and three girls, including Frances, who wasn’t in the club but had been invited by the boy she liked, went on a “picnic” at Black Hill Regional Park, armed with illegally purchased vodka and beer.
The common goal of underage drinkers — getting smashed — was quickly achieved and, never before having tasted alcohol, Frances soon found herself walking in an instinctive race against the spins.
Quite unnoticed, she wandered away from the group into a large field sunny with wildflowers. She finally gave up and vomited at the base of a huge plant with a thick stalk and lobed leaves several feet wide, topped with clusters of small white flowers. She collapsed into the plant and passed out in its shadow.
It turned out that the plant she lay against is one of the most toxic in the world, the Giant Hogweed, native to the Caucasus region of central Asia, that can grow twenty feet tall and has in recent years become invasive in Britain and the Eastern U.S. The entire plant is covered with sharp white bristles that deposit the plant’s defensive sap onto the skin at the slightest contact.
It contains furanocoumarin, a phytotoxic chemical that, if not washed off immediately with soap and water, reacts upon exposure to the suns’s UV rays, destroying the skin’s epidermal and dermal layers, a process called phytophotodermatitis, causing severe burns within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
Frances got the sap on her bare legs, her left arm and hand, the left side of her face and worst of all, her left eye. She lay in the sun for almost two hours before her friends found her and got her home. Her parents put her to bed that night, furious at her for behaving so recklessly, and completely unaware that a day later, they would find her screaming in agony from second- and third-degree burns erupting in blisters the size of blown-up bubblegum on all the exposed areas. They had no idea how and why the burns had appeared, since they, like most people, knew nothing about Giant Hogweed. They called 911, and she was rushed to the hospital and quickly admitted into the burn unit.
“She lost the eye,” Colin said. “And the scarring was pretty bad, complicated by infection, and the healing process took many months. Her parents pulled her out of school, hired tutors, and she still graduated with honors, if quite alone. The drama club kids never saw her again.
“Rumors circulated around the school, some of them true. She’d become a recluse. The blinds in her house were always drawn, since even a brief exposure to sunlight could burn the affected skin. She only went out at night, walking alone in lonely places, and on nights of the full moon wore sunscreen, apparently believing that even the reflected light of the sun could burn her. She saw no one. After graduating from the University of Maryland taking online classes, she moved out of her parents’ home and rented an isolated house in the country.
“You saw her, Drew. Did the scar on her face look that bad?”
“Noticeable, but not bad enough to hide herself away like this. Did she get a glass eye?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her without her ‘moonglasses,’ as I call them. I’ve been trying to thaw her reserve, and tonight may have been a breakthrough. She nodded; you saw it.”
“Yes. But a ‘breakthrough?’ I could have blinked and missed it.”
“Yeah. And it was probably meant for you,” he said. “Even before this happened, Frances was a loner. The burn scars and missing eye were her excuses for a complete withdrawal from social life. I’ve read that the sensitivity to sunlight can last as long as seven years after Hogweed burns as severe as hers were.”
“But it’s been much longer than seven years, hasn’t it?”
“Fourteen.”
“Hasn’t she ever risked the experiment of exposing one of her scars to the sun?”
“Probably not. What she went through was pretty awful. Avoiding the sun became a way of life for her. Even if she could go out in the daytime now, I doubt she would. And not just because of the scars. I think she loves her night life too much to give it up.”
“What is it you want from her, Colin?” I asked “Are you just curious, or is it something else?”
“Not really sure. I guess I’d like to coax her out of her shell. Or at the very least, get her talking. She interests me.”
“Me, too,” I admitted. “But I wouldn’t count on anything more from her than that little nod.”
“Maybe,” he replied.
* * *
We didn’t see her again that night. There was no need to bring up the subject of Colin’s longtime girlfriend, and what she might think of his fascination with this strange bird of night. He knew how impossible the whole thing was.
But I was unattached, and a few nights later I came back, this time alone. It was two hours after sunset, the waning moon hidden by clouds, and I walked with care over the gravelly towpath. Hardly anyone was on the trail that night. A pair of trail cyclists loaded with camping gear passed by heading north, and something big crossed the dark trail ahead of me, probably a deer. I didn’t know how often Frances came to this particular section of the trail but hoped to get lucky. It would be a nice walk, anyway.
I hiked for close to an hour before stopping to drink water, and happened to notice someone behind me. It was her. I capped the bottle and continued south, moving at a steady pace. Fearing that stopping or turning around would alarm her, I kept going, occasionally slowing down as if to look at something off the trail and glancing back to confirm that she was still behind me. She must have speeded up, for she was close enough now for me to hear her footsteps. I slowed down to let her catch up, and as she passed me, I said, in my mildest tone: “Good evening.”
“Hi,” she murmured, slightly slowing her pace in what was perhaps a rusted reflex of good manners.
“I was here the other night with Colin. He called you ‘Frances.’ My name’s Drew.”
I could see the conflict in her body language, the impulse to pull away warring with the not-quite-extinguished desire to talk to someone. “I remember you,” she said.
“Would you mind some company?” I asked. “I won’t talk if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, but made a gesture indicating that I might walk with her if I could stand keeping my mouth shut.
So we walked together for a good hour, and since she didn’t speak, I didn’t, either. Colin had gossiped pretty freely, and it would be a double betrayal to reveal what he’d told me about her. It was an odd feeling, walking in silence with a stranger whose past I shouldn’t have been privy to, and would have to keep pretending that I was as innocent about her life as she was about mine.
Her “moonglasses” effectively shielded whatever expression might have revealed what she thought about her self-invited companion. She stoically suffered my presence, as if she’d decided that since I was the friend of someone she’d known in high school, I was sufficiently harmless to be ignored. I hadn’t expected even this much accommodation from the “recluse.”
We’d walked about two more miles before I decided that any longer would be trying her patience.
“This is where I turn around,” I said, slowing down to a stop. “Thanks for the company.”
“You’re quiet, at least,” she said.
“So are you. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” she said, resuming her walk.
During the hike back to my car, I asked myself why I’d driven twenty-five miles for the chance of meeting a woman who clearly preferred her own company. Was the desire to know her as sincere as I wanted to believe it was, or was there something morbid in my interest?
* * *
The only other car in the lot was a very old Toyota, probably hers, and I added that piece of information to the little I knew about her, other than the wretched luck of a summer’s day fourteen years before. I’d felt closely observed during our walk, though she had barely glanced at me. Her silences seemed more contemplative than nervous or distant, and I was fairly sure that Colin had been wrong about her. There was more to Francis Kerwood’s solitude than fear of the sun and brooding over the unfairness of her fate. The trajectory of her life may have been changed by the accident, but it didn’t define her.
Over the next month, as late fall became a colder than usual winter, I encountered her two more times. We didn’t converse beyond greetings and goodbyes, but I felt that she was getting used to my presence, and slowly relaxing her guard.
If, while walking, we happened to encounter an animal, I was the one who pointed it out. She would merely nod, her mouth forming the faintest of smiles. Once, when I misidentified a fox squirrel as a flying squirrel, she corrected me.
“Are those binoculars you’re wearing?” I ventured to ask, impressed by her night vision, even with the tinted glasses. She looked at me with a startled expression, as if any conversation besides ‘hello’ and ‘goodnight’ was breaking one of her rules. “I know by sight most of the animals around here,” she replied.
That was our longest exchange for a while. I found it interesting that she wore the glasses even on moonless nights. I understood why she’d want to keep the scars covered, but her uneasy surprise at my comment puzzled me.
I walked the towpath three more times in January, but didn’t see her on the first trip, probably because a recent snow had melted and re-frozen, making the trail treacherous, and I’d left early.
The second time, I waited until the moon was full and the sky cloudless. It was well below freezing, and I was bundled up and walking briskly to keep warm. Visibility was excellent, and while heading northwest from Dickerson, I spotted her far ahead on the trail, in her black hiking clothes, coming toward me. I was surprised to see that she had a companion, and even from two hundred yards away it was obviously a broad-shouldered, powerful-looking man.
I stopped to re-tie my boot, and when I looked again, there was no one with her. I was sure I’d seen him, but where had he gone? If he’d headed back the way he came I would have spotted his receding figure. He must have taken some trail into the woods on either side of the towpath.
Copyright © 2026 by Jeffrey Greene
