I can just see my boat bobbing easily over there, at an almost safe distance that seems so very far. I look down. The dark water is there, surface rippled with wind and mocking moonlight, and if I can just get down there, get into the water, I can swim to my boat and everything will be all right, and so slowly, carefully, every movement dragging like it was pulled backward by lead weights, somehow I get both feet over the railing and I wave to Debs so far away over there and I make a huge idiot sound to let her know to come get me and I know she will because family is so important no matter what and she sees that now I am sure of it and then I am over and falling and even as I fall the water seems so impossibly far away—and so dark, so deep and dark—
—and then there is a warped and rippled picture of the moon with its happy savage face that morphs into Me rushing up at Me and I hit Me with a soundless crash and Me breaks apart still soundless into a million bright red shattered shards of moon glow that slowly bend their darkening beams around me as I fall through the flickers of light-dark-light until the last of the cool silver light fades away to welcome shadows and now there is cool and comforting peace and I start up again, up into the blackness that whirls me away to the happy welcome of the moon’s dark side and I fall up and in and away and the wonderful chorus of silence swells up as I rise up and up and I feel like I am home again at last as I slide down, down through the beautiful shadowy silence and into the cool and welcoming moon-Mommy Darkness at last and—
Jeff Lindsay is the
New York Times
–bestselling author and creator of the Dexter novels, most recently
Dexter’s Final Cut
. He lives in South Florida with his wife and three daughters. His novels are the inspiration for the hit Showtime and CBS series
Dexter
.