peter harris – as the moon looked

        Juanita Rose, recently widowed Professor of Economics at California State University San Pedro, ducked underneath the steering wheel of her grey Volvo S80 and watched as a pair of headlights coming from I-5 loomed over the almond orchard where she had just parked her car. It was not her almond orchard of course -- farming was not her forte. She didn't know the first thing about pomology or that such a word even existed. Her green thumb was more inclined towards the planting of money, the flowering of investments, cultivating profit -- in short, the bottom line. Her expertise lay less on crops and more on the prices they yielded in an open market. 
        Ah, the open market...what a thing of beauty and transparency, where everything equals a clear coherent number. More glorious than a golden field of wheat bobbing in a cool breeze under an August sunset, more just than a finely tuned scale, more open than a grave, freshly dug, to bid farewell to a long-loved and financially endowed companion -- nothing compared to that all-knowing, invisible hand that transformed everything into a simple aggregation, a phenomenon directed by the actions of men and women alike, rationally compelled by their self-interest. 
        With its omniscient powers and celestial-like presence, the invisible hand can float over us all.

#

        At one or two in the morning it was unlikely any cars would grace the soft curve of the highway overlooking the almond orchard. The closest town was ten miles south: Pueblo Beach, neither a beach nor the settlement of any indigenous tribe. Pueblo Beach was just a name and just a town. Podunk, Nowhere. Bumfuck, California. A town where few people lived, fewer people stayed, and no one traveled to at this hour. A town that possessed a few tract homes, a small church, a gas station, possibly a Dairy Queen, and that was about it. A dying little town like so many in this great country of ours, whose demise makes this great country of ours so great -- the extinction of old things, wrecking balls into archaic inefficiencies, (like old bitches with too many teeth in their heads.) New things come along and take their place, grow over their corpses, assume their assets then thrive -- the business cycle, the circle of life, it all continues as one; what Schumpeter might have called creative destruction -- what Juanita Rose called 'a stroke of good luck' -- a few strikes really, long overdue and leaving one hell of a mess on the carpet. Broken glass strewn on the sofa and floor. A coffee table with one leg snapped. Shattered pieces of a bloodied statue discarded in a wreckage of furniture. But there was no reason for Juanita to be concerned about all of that right now, she could deal with it when she got home. She'd just have to remember to pick all those false teeth that had spilled onto the floor. The smallest slip up could be her downfall. During some dinner party, someone might notice a molar camouflaged in the carpet's cream-colored floral patterns and interject a question into the conversation, like: "Girl...weren't you married once?" And that single, overlooked detail might open the door to other more inconvenient suspicions. Detective so-and-so from homicide with a warrant in his pocket might stop by for a visit and ask if it wouldn't be too much trouble for him and his men to tear up Juanita's carpet just to see what color the floorboards were underneath.
        Slowly, the headlights swept over the rows of harvested trees, creating shadows like skeletonized hands reaching across segmented earth. As the car zoomed past, those gnarled fingers stretched from the ground, extended, then receded back into the dark soil.
        Professor Rose's heart thumped wildly, pounding with enough force to wobble her car. She took a deep breath and cleared her mind. She glanced out of the driver's side window, hoping the driver hadn't seen her. He hadn't. How could he? The car was too far away. 
        But in that moment of uncertainty, huddled underneath the steering wheel, Juanita felt herself float off to where it was possible to believe none of this had happened, that she was somewhere else: a beach in Jamaica, snorkeling in the Gulf of Aqaba; she tried to hold herself there but her mind kept drifting back to her car and those high-beams sweeping across the orchard like prison spotlights lingering intentionally over her trunk. 
        Was there a fleet of uniforms hiding behind the trees, waiting for her to step out? -- and as soon as she did, she'd hear a voice shout: "Stop right there you gash-licker. Up with your hands and open that trunk -- let's see what you've got inside...slowly now."
        And that raspy voice would be Agatha's, only filtered through a mouthful of healthy, masculine teeth.

#

        Swept of clouds, the night sky consisted of countless twinkling objects: the stars; and a moon conspiratorially illuminating Juanita's planned dump site. Under the regime of its glow, she could easily see across the almond orchard, which meant that those on the other side could see her just as well. 
        The stars resembled lice twitching on a sheet of black velvet, looking down and delighting in the voyeuristic pleasure of watching a woman who had never so much as received a speeding ticket in her life now clumsily putting the final touches to a crime that could send her to Chino forever.
        But a crime is only a crime if one gets caught...right?
        Still crouched in the car Agatha had bought her, Juanita spotted the green binder she had been looking for all week wedged between the passenger-side seat and the stick-shift console. It must have slid down during a sharp right turn. The binder contained lecture notes for Economics: A Distribution of Value, a textbook several of her classes used and one she co-wrote with two of her colleagues, a statistician and a professor of mathematics. Without her notes, she sometimes found it difficult to explain concepts without going into nuanced digressions. 
        In the unit about prices, she had written: 'The real value of any commodity is not the price, but the price one is willing to and capable of paying'. She recited that chapter verbatim by memory.
        If no one knows the price, then no one pays. And if no one pays, then no one has been caught. As long as she kept her cool, Juanita would have nothing to worry about. Everyday millions of crimes occur; they go unnoticed or unreported -- and anyways, who cares about some uppity bitch who lived a long, drawn-out life, contemptuous in her self-seclusion, surrounded by opulent totems of wealth, with no family or friends to impress -- just a doll wife chula college professor who could be set to dance with the twitch of the hag's purse strings? Who'd really miss that vulture of a woman? 
        No one. 
        Certainly not Juanita, the only person capable of resurrecting her memory. That is, unless God exists, in which case everything had been witnessed. Juanita, in her wrath, splattering blood on the original Mondrian hanging above the couch; the statue of an African woman with a basket on her head breaking into pieces as she smashed it into Agatha's pinched, pickled face; dentures flying out of a screaming mouth, the glass coffee table shattering as Agatha's body collapsed onto it. 
        It was only the clattering on the hardwood floor that had frightened Juanita. The strand on Agatha's pearl necklace could have snapped and those priceless orbs might have scattered all over floor and carpet, lost forever in the debris of violence that would have to be hurriedly disposed. She was relieved to discover that it was only Agatha's false teeth. Thank God that necklace was still intact. It was quite valuable.
        Well, if God had seen all of that, then God had also seen the relentless needlings, the condescension, the threats, the strategically timed flatulence during moments of cunnilingus and the screeching laughter that followed afterwards. Maybe God had witnessed all of these accumulating humiliations and understood how the old bag had it coming. She was a crotchety, vulgar cunt if there ever was one. Every additional day of her life lived was one day lived too long. 
        But Juanita didn't worry about justifying her actions to God. The thought never crossed her mind. For practical people like Professor Rose, there was only one god: the dollar. Its morality was unmoved by displays of emotion, the outbursts of rage, the shouting, the profanity, or even the impulse towards violence and the stuffing of old corpses into trunks of cars; none of that concerned the dollar. It spent its time in the company of what could be commodified. To the dollar, murder was the same as charity -- utterly irrelevant.
        So, what did Professor Rose have to worry about? 
        Only not getting caught and that damn headlight.
        She squeezed herself deeper into the footwell, not noticing as the brake pedal pressed against her back.
        She squinted and a web of wrinkles appeared around her eyes. In a matter of a hours, she had aged considerably.
 
        The drive to the almond orchard had been a nerve-wrecking one. In the dark, every vehicle with a ski rack looked like it could be a squad car. Professor Rose checked her mirrors constantly, used her turn-signals even when there was no one else around. At stop-signs she kept herself from accidentally executing California-stops by counting. 
        '1, 2, 3, 4...' -- Strange, for some reason she never got past the number ten; a nice round number that just so happened to coincide with the number of years Juanita and Agatha had been married. But this, of course, was a coincidence Juanita couldn't have noticed at that moment, her mind was occupied with other concerns. 
        She made a left on Watt and from Pioneer Road drove onto the I-5 on-ramp. Despite the adrenaline pumping through her body, she managed to keep the speedometer needle steady under sixty-five. 
        About ten miles north of Pueblo Beach, she got off at the Almond Grove exit and turned down a remote, dirt road. 
        Certain there were no other cars around, she flicked off the car's headlights and navigated the vehicle through the darkness, relying solely on the moonlight to direct her. She had to lean forward to see what was in front of her. She drove slowly and scanned the road for obstacles, any sudden turns -- one drop in a shallow ditch and she'd be done for. All she needed was a nice, secluded spot to dispose her refuse. At the old Harvest Orchard, she had found one. There were no structures around, no farmhouses, no stables, no shacks, nothing that might possess a window where a pair of leering eyes might look out before yelling: "Hey lady, this is private property...and whatd'ya got there bumpin' around in that trunk?"
        She steered her car behind a row of trees before cutting the engine.
        She waited for a someone to say something, but there was only crickets chirping. The damn things seemed to be everywhere, polluting the air with their deafening screeches. Their chirps were like Agatha's screams reverberating off of the branches of the striped trees. Trembling, Juanita reached for the door handle.
        'Am I really doing this?' she asked herself. But before she could open the door, she spotted something coming towards her in the distance, a pair of yellow lights gliding southward on I-5. 
        It was too far to tell whether it was an early commuter or the first cop on the scene. She slid under the steering wheel and hid herself. She started counting again but the counting in her head seemed louder than the crickets so she stopped.
        It was over, she decided. I'm caught.
        She felt her whole life unravel before her. Her career. Her research. Her symposiums and lectures, all falling apart, shattering like the Leekung statue smashing against human skull. Her whole life flashed before her eyes, and in one instant it would be changed forever.
        Juanita listened carefully for sirens, but no sirens ever came. There were noises again, but those came from the crickets.
        Juanita gathered her courage and crept out of the foot-well.
        The headlights passed without pause or hesitation, yet for some reason she felt as if they were still hovering above her. 
        No, that was the moon glowering down at her.
        She lifted herself onto the driver's seat and took a deep breath. 
        The day had been a hot one, but during the evening the temperature cooled. A delta breeze blew across the orchard and into Professor Rose's car. The breeze brushed aside a few strands of her hair but she didn't notice. She felt as if she were covered in fire, melting in some hellish cavern of panic. The sweat oozing from her armpits was soaked up by the seams of her shirt. Her lower back ached a little from a thin, rectangular bruise. But this was the least of her worries now.
        She glanced over the window to check her surroundings. There was no one around. 
        The moon shone, bone-white and bright, on a patch of earth just behind the last row of almond trees. This was where she was going to dump Agatha's body. She figured the ground was soft enough to dig, though there was no reason for her to have thought that; for all she knew the surface could have been nothing but hard clumps. It was the moonlight egging her to that location. 
        But a well-lit area was not without its dangers. It made her vulnerable to possible rubberneckers traveling down I-5. On the other hand, the extra light would help prevent her from making a little mistake, not noticing a little trinket slip off Agatha's body as she slid the corpse into its pit. And in the morning, perhaps that silver ankle bracelet or a glinting ring poking out of the ground might serve the same purpose as a gravestone, might be discovered by some curious hick with a spade in his hand and few minutes to spare to satiate his curiosity.
        Juanita cursed herself for not having stripped Agatha before wrapping her up in the guest-bed bedsheet.
        Even when Agatha was lounging around the house, the bitch had to be ornamented. Jingling as she drifted from one room to the next, from the wine bottle in the kitchen to her glass in the living room. She was like some bejeweled Jacob Marley, clinking and shimmering. There were diamonds on her toes, gold around her ankles, a variety of stones on each finger. A dozen men must have perished in the mines just to decorate her withered, old body.

#

        With the ground sufficiently breached, Juanita wiped her forehead against her shirt sleeve. Above her, the moon glowed; its surface looked like a screaming face -- a face without dentures. 
        What followed was pure automation. She popped open the trunk, lifted out the corpse, carried it a few feet away, and dropped it in the crudely dug grave before shoveling dirt over it. She leveled the mound as best as she could then got in the car and sped away.

#

        The drive back had been a lot easier. Without the incriminating evidence in her trunk, the whole episode at the almond orchard seemed like an unpleasant dream. A dream she could forget. 
        As she pulled onto the I-5 on-ramp, she thought about how empty the shelf would look without that African statue and suddenly she understood why she had removed Agatha's head before carrying it into the garage.

#

        After soaking the head in a solution of hydrogen peroxide, all that would be left to do was scrape off the flesh. Displayed on the shelf, it would be the only artifact in the whole living room that had been earned and not purchased. If anyone asked about it, she'd tell them it was a gift from someone in the Anthropology department. She'd even display it with its mouth open a little, just as the moon had looked hovering over the almond orchard on the night Agatha laughed herself to death.


PETER HARRIS is a native Californian who has been living in China since 2012. He teaches literature at an international school. His works includes poetry, fiction, and political essays. His poetry has been featured in Spittoon and A Shanghai Poetry Zine.


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