The Moonglasses
by Jeffrey Greene
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
I could tell that even from a hundred yards off, she recognized me and, as we met, a faint half-smile was the closest thing to a greeting I’d received yet.
“Hi, Frances.”
“Hi. Company?”
I nodded, and we walked in an almost companionable silence for a few minutes. “Hope I didn’t scare off your friend,” I ventured.
“Friend?” she repeated, with the first glint of sarcasm I’d heard from her. “You should know from Colin Hackworth’s big mouth that I don’t have any friends.”
Fearing I’d crossed a line, I said, “The person I saw up the trail, walking with you. He was there, and then he wasn’t.”
She was silent a moment, then: “He left. Said it was too cold for him.”
“Ah. And since you have no friends, he must be another haunter of the towpath. Like us.”
“Hm-hm.”
“I didn’t know you knew that Colin had told me your, uh, history,” I said. “For the record, it was unsolicited. I just listened.”
“Guess it got under your skin,” she said. “Like your women damaged, do you?”
“Not typically.” Her sudden volubility had taken me by surprise.
“What other reason could you have for trying to get close to someone like me? Are you a collector of human oddities, like P.T. Barnum? Is that why you keep showing up, Drew? Do I interest you?”
“Yes, you do, but not because I want a look at your scars or ‘draw you out of your shell,’ as Colin put it, but because you’re someone worth knowing. I don’t mean the sun-phobic recluse of legend, but the person you keep hidden behind those glasses.”
She made a disgusted sound. “Everyone hides, all the time. I just don’t lie to myself about it.”
“Well, isn’t it a thing worth hiding from, when you get old enough to realize that behind the arbitrary name and personal history, we’re just random pieces of cosmic dust? But I guess you learned that earlier in life than most of us do.”
“Don’t ever ask me about that.”
“I wasn’t going to. My question would have been: ‘Are you ever lonely?’”
“Compared to whom? You?”
“All right, me. I’m not wild about the human species, but having someone to give a damn about is how most of us get through this life.”
“Well, most people bore the shit out of me, if you want to know. Blabbing into their little boxes, squandering their precious few moments of existence before death swallows the faintest memory of who they were. I like being here at night. Really thins the crowd.”
“Fine. Just tell me to shove off, and I will.”
We walked in uneasy silence for a good half-hour before she spoke again. “Cold, yet?”
“Freezing.”
“Let’s head back.”
As we walked through the icy moonlight, the sound of our boots loud on the frozen ground, I felt like taking her hand but knew it would be my last mistake with Frances Kerwood. Every human relationship has its own rulebook, its passports and border guards, and I’d realized that she either couldn’t or wouldn’t respond to the slightest expression of affection or desire. But tonight had given me hope that she was slowly, warily unbarring the gates to her keep, and patience might or might not lead to whatever friendship or intimacy she was capable of. At least we’d agreed on something; it was too cold to stay out any longer.
* * *
I waited until the weather had warmed to the high forties before coming back, about an hour after sunset. It was moonless, cloudy, and darker than usual, which seemed to explain why, when we encountered each other, Frances was wearing only a black eyepatch, her large, slightly slanted right eye caroming away from my fascinated gaze with the deftness of like poles of a magnet. It was the first time I’d seen her without her glasses, and I could tell she didn’t like leaving open windows on her soul. But I took it as a friendly gesture, and my spirits rose.
“How are you?” I asked.
“About the same,” she replied. “You?”
“Same.”
She nodded, then pulled something out of her coat pocket and handed it to me. It was her dark glasses. They were weighty in my hand, with thick lenses that felt as if they were made from some crystal denser than glass. We hadn’t started walking yet, which was unusual enough. She seemed to be waiting for me to ask her something.
“Heavy,” I said, handing them back to her. “Are they prescription?”
“In a way.” She put them on. “Do you know why I wear them?”
“Well, I don’t want to offend you.”
“Go ahead. I’m curious.”
“Well, Colin thinks it’s because you’ve been out of the sun so long that moonlight actually hurts your eyes. He calls them your moonglasses.”
“Interesting,” she said. “And without hiding behind Colin’s colorful, if erroneous, conclusions, tell me why you think I wear them.”
“I think it’s because you’re self-conscious about the lost eye. The glasses ensure your privacy.”
She smiled slightly and shook her head. “Superficial, if not completely untrue. Maybe you weren’t aware that I’m nearsighted.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“But there’s another reason I wear them, that I’ve never told anyone: they were a gift. And when I tell you who gave them to me, and how much they’ve helped me see at night, you won’t believe me. Which is why I’m telling you, Drew. I have faith in your skepticism.”
“I’m listening.”
“Let’s walk.” We headed south on the trail, in the direction of White’s Ferry. I noticed that she was slowly scanning the forest as we walked.
“This happened months ago, in late summer,” she began. “It was a nearly cloudless night with a full moon. I’m always happiest when the trail is empty, and the moon was so bright I could see far up the trail. Then I saw someone walking toward me, a tall, dark figure — clearly male — that so easily blended in with the tree shadows that he seemed to appear and disappear at will.
“At first I thought it was a mirage, the kind a person with my eyesight and lack of depth perception sees at night. But there he was again, walking toward me on the trail, much closer now, in full moonlight yet still black as a silhouette. I stopped, unsure of going forward. I always carry pepper spray and was stubborn or stupid enough not to turn around and head the other way.
“When the distance between us was about a hundred feet, I couldn’t understand why his face was still so difficult to see. He almost seemed oblivious, or indifferent, to my presence, as he quickly passed me and moved on, still somehow hidden. Then I heard him stop. I stopped, too.
“He turned back to me, and started speaking in a language I’d never heard before. It sounded like music, with a continuous rhythm as if he were singing under his breath. I said, ‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’ He sang/spoke again, taking slow, tentative steps toward me.
“I held my ground, gripping the pepper spray in my pocket, and saw that he wasn’t hiding in shadows, that he was in fact a black man, the blackest human being I’d ever seen, his skin perfectly matching his all-black clothing, which looked like a skin-tight body suit, revealing a very muscular, athletic body.
“He had to get close enough for me to see his face clearly. It was stunningly beautiful, an anatomically perfect face, like the bust of a Greek god, and his head was entirely bald, as if hair would mar its perfection. He seemed about my age. He was wearing dark glasses, which struck me as odd. They were these glasses,” she said, pointing to hers.
“He began a sort of pantomime, pointing to my eyes and then to his, and I slowly understood that he had noticed my squinting nearsightedness. He took off his glasses and handed them to me with a gesture that I understood to mean, ‘Please take mine.’
“It was then I realized that this man wasn’t an ordinary human being, but something else, because his eyes were as perfectly black as the rest of him. There was no white to his eyes, no color anywhere, and noticing my stare, he smiled, and I saw that his teeth and gums, though flawless, were as black as anthracite.
“I put the glasses on, and it was as if I were looking through binoculars equipped with their own light source. The trunks, branches and leaves of trees, everything in the forest was sharp and clearly visible, but it wasn’t the eerie, infrared effect of night-vision glasses. More like ultraviolet might look, if humans could see that part of the light spectrum, as some insects can.
“I looked up at the moon, and its surface appeared closer, clear and incredibly detailed: the ridges along a crater’s edge, the shadows, the white, exploding patterns of meteor strikes. But there was something else, too. With the glasses on, I had depth perception, as if the lenses were able to simulate stereoscopic vision. It finally hit me that these glasses weren’t made by any human technology we’re familiar with.
“Then I looked at Mr. Black — as I’ll call him — and where he’d been standing I could see nothing but a transparent space that blocked out a man-shaped piece of the woods behind him. I took off the glasses, and there he was, smiling his midnight smile. He made gestures and spoke in his lovely language that seemed like musical impressions of wind in the trees, birdsong, rushing water, the hiss of snakes, pantomiming an explanation that I somehow understood.
“Not by accident but by design, I had been permitted to meet a wholly nocturnal being. I’d probably been observed for months, if not years, by these night people, and my poor vision and love of the night had been noted. Mr. Black had been sent to gift me the glasses that would both improve my vision and protect my eyesight — which they believed I needed — from the almost too-bright moonlight.
“I could see my benefactor squinting painfully in the lunar glare, and it was obvious to me that these were indeed moonglasses — Colin unwittingly hit on the truth, there — and I tried to hand them back to him. But he only smiled and shook his head, and then, with startling speed he turned and cleared the canal with a single leap — it was pretty narrow where we were standing, but still a spectacular jump — and disappeared into the woods.
“These days, I keep a look-out when I walk, hoping to spot some human-shaped absence moving among the trees, but the night people keep themselves well-hidden, as I imagine they have since the sun people made their noisy appearance on the scene. But I’m sure they’re aware of my gratitude.
“It’s a comfort to know that there are intelligent people on this planet that enter and leave the world as they find it. There can’t be very many of them, with habitat destruction continuing everywhere but a few places, like the 184 miles of the C&O Canal, a national park with protected forests hugging the river, where the night people can live and die in furtive peace.
“Over the millennia, they must have evolved a skin color on the electromagnetic spectrum that the diurnal human eye can’t perceive: pure black at night and, by day, invisible in the presence of light. It doesn’t surprise me that they’ve avoided discovery all this time. We’re such visual creatures, with too much faith in the reality of what we see and too little in what we can’t see.”
We walked for several minutes in silence, Frances probably wondering if she’d correctly calibrated the degree either of my credulity or unbelief, and I resentful of her confidence in the latter. The truth was, we didn’t really know each other beyond a few nights of silent companionship and one evening of conversation. As for her story, I wasn’t sure what to believe, and unless she was willing to let me try on the glasses myself, which I knew she wouldn’t, I’d probably never know. But the one thing I refused to do was live up to her expectations.
“I’m wondering why you lied to me just now, Frances,” I said. “You said you hadn’t seen Mr. Black after he gave you the glasses. But I think you did see him again the other night. That man I saw walking with you on the trail, who seemed to disappear: it was him, wasn’t it?”
She stopped walking, looked hard at me for a long silence, then shook her head and smiled. “I see I’ve misjudged you, Drew,” she said.
“Then it was him.”
“Yes.”
“You said you have no friends. Isn’t he one?”
“I’m in his debt and feel privileged to know him. But a friend? I accept his occasional companionship on the trail, as he accepts mine. We can’t talk to each other, and that suits us both. I’m not sure I have the right to call myself his friend, being of the race of destroyers.”
“I don’t know if you’re telling the truth, Frances,” I said. “Your story raises a number of questions that I’m not going to insult you by asking. If this is a game, I’m game to be the butt of the joke. If all you’ve said is true, then we share a secret that must be kept from everyone else. If not, then maybe we’re both lying for the good cause of finding our level of mutual trust. If you’ve had enough of me, fine. We won’t see each other again. I just hope you’ll remember that I am your friend.”
The black lenses of the moonglasses regarded me for a long moment, then she removed them, and with her fingers briefly straying over the scar on her cheek, she took off the eyepatch. The blank, scar-puckered socket seemed to magnify the fierce beauty of the mind regarding me out of her incomparably clear gray eye.
“Okay,” she said, and we continued our walk.
Copyright © 2026 by Jeffrey Greene
