“Rosana, it’s dark, let’s go home. Mama says that when it’s dark I can’t play outside anymore.”
“Let’s just run to that streetlamp. Ready? Let’s see whether you can beat me this time!”
The two little girls, only six years old, run until they are breathless, alone in the alley. Rosana wins, she is so determined, as much as Lena is fragile, like a whispering breeze on a humid summer night.
At the end of the alley there is the beach, the rolling of the waves, the darkness of the night surrendering to the moon glorious in the sky.
“Let’s run to the end of the beach Lena, come on, it’s not that long.”
“But it’s dark, and late.”
“No, it’s not dark, there is the moon. Come on, fast!”
“Rosana, Rosana!”shouts Lena, all excited, “look at the sky, the moon is moving with us.”
“Ohhh, it’s following us! And if we stop, it stops!”
“Let’s run faster Rosana. It’s running with us!”
“Lena, maybe the moon is following me. Let’s do this, you go to that end of the beach and I’ll go to this one.”
They agree, they walk first and then they run, their faces turned to the sky.
From her side of the beach Rosana’s loud voice pierces the silence: “Lena, the moon is with me, right here on my head!”
“No, no, the moon is above me, here on my head, not where you are!” Lena’s frailty has disappeared, she is assertive now. “Come here and look, I won’t move.”
“Lena, I tell you that the moon is with me.”
“No and no! It’s here, come and see!”
Their shrill voices almost unnatural in the abandonement of the beach.
Rosana stomps her feet: “You are so stubborn tonight!” She flashes to the other side of the beach, looking only ahead, to be faster. She lifts her eyes, the moon is there above them. She is a bit puzzled and then she says: “Yeah, I brought the moon here, it ran with me, that’s why it’s here now.”
“No, it didn’t come with you. I looked at it all the time, and it never moved from here.”
“You’re a liar!” screams Rosana.
“No, you are lying! The moon stayed with me the whole time.”
“Liar, liar!”
“Let’s do it again” proposes Lena “We’ll start from the middle of the beach and then you run there and I run here.” They agree to the truce. Rosana is again the first to reach her goal.
“Told you! The moon followed me all the way here, and now it’s right above my head!”
Lena is still strong: “I don’t believe you. The moon was always with me, there are no two moons. Do you see two moons in the sky? No, and the moon is with me. Here, here, where my finger is pointing.”
Rosana runs away shouting at the top of her lungs: “I will tell everybody who you are: a cheater, a liar!”
They never played together again.