Full Moon Fiancé

Diana, where are you? Her phone lit up with the message. Dead leaves crunched under her feet as she stepped over thickets and brambles. As she was reading her phone, her dark, curly hair snagged in a branch. She had to stop to untangle herself and cursed quietly. Hello? Answer me? I’m worried about you, the phone chimed again. Diana barely had time to read the message before she got another one. I know what today is, just promise me you’re okay, and reading it, Diana sighed deeply. “You’re relentless, Remi,” she muttered as she hit the button to reply. Her fingers fumbled a little with the screen. Yeah, just at home, watching horror flicks. Might take a bath, she typed out. She hit send, a twinge of guilt hitting her for the lie. But it wasn’t a complete lie. That was what she had intended to do for the day, just sit around and cry, drink red wine, and watch movies where no one is happy. But that was before. She had fallen asleep again, in the middle of the day, a habit she had developed and tried to break a hundred times over in the last year. And she had The Dreams. The same ones, over and over, like a movie in her head. And when she woke up she was putting on her shoes and running out the doors before she even knew what she was doing. Before she knew what she was doing, she was pushing past branches that scratched her cheeks and catching her arms on thorns, staining the leaves of the plants she passed with tiny droplets of her blood. She tucked her phone back in her pocket, deftly avoiding a large tree root in her way. She wasn’t on a path, but there were slight tread marks on the ground where she had walked back and forth many times along the same route. She didn’t care about the thorns that pulled and pricked at her skin, scratching and snagging her. Like a woman possessed, she made her way to where it happened. Where her life ended one year ago. She had been suspended since then, not living. Just surviving. Surviving in between the grief, the crying, the screaming, The Dreams. The Dreams. Diana shuddered just thinking about them, but she didn’t bother to call her family or her friends. Even her therapist was probably sick of hearing about The Dreams. Not even the powerful sleeping medications that Diana took could stave them off. She had tried it all. Drugs, hypnosis, talk therapy, that weird eye movement treatment her doctor recommended. But nothing worked. Nothing she did could stop her from waking up every night, sobbing, reaching out to the empty space in her bed where Joshua used to sleep. She was headed to where he had died, of course. One year ago, one terrible, long, barely survivable year ago she had lost Joshua. Every day of the last year had seemed to bring some new twist of the knife in her heart. His birthday, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, almost every day seemed significant in some horrible new way. The worst had been their wedding day, a breezy and perfect summer day when the weather was ideal and the sun shone down on her as if it was taunting her. Now, in the cold October air, Diana was shivering slightly. She hadn’t thought to bring a sweater. But she couldn’t turn back, she was too close. Too close to where they said he had died. Where they had found his bloodied, tattered clothes. They never found a body. His clothes, his cell phone, and his wallet were left in a tiny clearing, so small it almost didn’t qualify as a clearing, it was nearly just a gap between trees. They never found the body, never found the little blue good luck stone she had given him the day before he took the bar examination. He took it everywhere with him, even though he claimed not to be superstitious. He said it made him feel better to have it. To remember that she believed in him. But they never found it, and it hadn’t been in his car either. She knew he was dead, she knew the police had even DNA tested the blood they found after she insisted, hysterical, that it couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be his blood. No stone, no body, no dead Joshua. That’s what she told herself, and the police, and the Westerly family, and her own family, and anyone who would listen, over and over for weeks. Deep down, she had known. She had known it was his. But she had held out on that desperate shred of hope for as long as she could. A rabid dog, the police told her, a rabid dog attack. Happens from time to time in sleepy backwoods America, where the forest held dangers. What he had been doing in the woods, no one was entirely sure, but they found his car crashed into a metal guardrail a mile away on the nearest road. He had only been five minutes from home by car. As best the police could guess, he had hoped to make it through the woods so he would be home faster. Diana collapsed at the little makeshift memorial she had constructed, sobbing. “Why didn’t you just call me?” she asked the little wooden heart engraved with his name that she had secured in the ground. She fell face down against the cool wooden grain, crying. “I would have come to get you,” she whispered. It was not the first time she asked these questions to the unanswering plaque, and she didn’t think it would be the last. For the moment, she simply cried. Her head remained prone on the little homemade plaque and one hand caressed his initials. Joshua Anthony Westerly. She used to call him Jaws, used to like to sneak up on him, humming ominously. It always made him jump and laugh, and then he would chase her around their house. She thought about the way he used to grab her, pulling her by the waist onto the couch and tickling her. It almost made her smile. “I’d rather be jaws than dots,” he would whisper in her ear. Her full name was Diana Olive Tremaine. He had always loved her middle name, talked about naming a daughter Olive. Their daughter. After a long time, her tears seemed to dry up. She still heaved with silent cries, but no sound or tears came out. This happened often, a heavy feeling in her head and her heart, followed by a numbness. It was worse than the crying. At least when she was crying, she felt something. It had to have been hours. The sun, which had been low in the sky when she had started her journey, was nowhere to be seen. She was contemplating heading home when a sudden loud growling pierced the air. She sat straight up, her eyes roaming wildly across the dark, almost pitch black landscape. To her horror, a pair of eyes stared back at her. “Oh…,” she said. She was too scared to say anything else, her voice trailing out into a sort of low, fearful hiss. The growl got louder. Diana reached her right hand toward her left, twirling her engagement ring on her finger nervously. She didn’t even blink. The eyes moved closer to her, inch by inch. She had seen this over and over in The Dreams. Except in The Dreams, she watched as Joshua sat where she sat, his jugular ripped open by a growling, drooling, massive dog. A dog so large it almost seemed impossible. In The Dreams, he called her name. But now the eyes stepped into the minute clearing, and a tiny shaft of moonlight cast a long shadow. But she couldn’t quite make out what was staring at her. Fumbling in her pocket, refusing to take her eyes off the shape, she pulled out her phone. She managed to turn on the flashlight, swinging it wildly toward the shape. She gasped when she saw a hulking, massive dog. Or maybe a wolf, a dark reddish colored animal. She couldn’t be sure, but it suddenly snapped its jaws and it pounced wildly onto her, midnight black paws pads the size of her own fists hitting her shoulders and knocking her backward into the hard, packed earth and the wooden memorial marker. Despite the danger, she felt a pang of anger, shock, and sadness as she felt the memorial knocked out of the dirt and fly to the side. The wolf reared back, baring fangs and preparing to attack, she knew. She knew it in her gut and in that moment, she knew the wolf would attack her and she would die. “Joshua,” she muttered, realizing that they would meet the same fate. She reached up and beat her fists against the massive, furry chest of the creature, but it didn’t seem to notice. It did abruptly stop growling. It looked down at her, suddenly quiet, and peered almost curiously. The wolf sniffed, a long inhale. The wind picked up, the fur rippling in the breeze… only Diana realized it couldn’t be a breeze. Her hair didn’t move. She felt no coolness on her skin. But the fur kept rippling, and not only that, it got more pronounced. It seemed as if the wolf was shaking before her eyes, vibrating, harder to focus on. And then, impossibly, amazingly, a man sat where the wolf had been. And she gasped, then screamed. It was Joshua. Nude, except for a necklace with a small blue stone. He stared at her in shock. Diana made eye contact with him for one brief, wild moment. Then her vision blurred and went black. Before she passed out, the last thing she heard, she thought, was the soft sound of her dead fiance muttering her name.