To the Moon

This is a short dialogue I wrote. It doesn't go with anything and it is not part of a longer story, but I think it works just fine by itself. Feedback and contructive critsism please, if you wish to share any. It's one of the best ways I can become a better writer.


“I love you to the moon and back,” he told her.

“I love you to the moon…,” she began, but her reply faded into a string of inaudible syllables as her gaze shifted toward a mosaic window behind him.

Through the translucent glass fixed inside the hollow walls of the cathedral, past the metal cars and buildings and people, Beyond the interstate with its networks of malls and material, even past the patches of trees permitted to transpire only to alleviate the boiling urban heat, sat a gold coin.

The coin looked to be about the size of a coat button though her distance made it difficult to judge. But it was bright, brighter than anything she had ever seen, anything that existed in this so called beautiful world. Brighter than his eyes. Or hers for that matter. The beams of light began to blend to together and blinded her, engulfing the parameters of her vision. That coin, probably worth nothing at the shops downtown, but that is not why it mattered. It was what it could be with all that radiant potential energy. Shinier that all the gowns in all the malls off the highway. Brimming with more clarity than church bells.

The boy just stood there, clearly uncomfortable with his fiancée’s lapse of consciousness. “What was that?” he interjected.

“I love you to the moon,” she replied.

The boy gave a nervous half smile and blinked a few times. Why she had left her part of their routine dialogue seemingly incomplete for the second time he did not understand. He wanted to ask her what she meant, but decided to let it go when she told him impatiently,

“You know, like the Space Shuttle Challenger crash of ‘86.”

She gave him a wide smile. It was evil and rude but she couldn’t help it. The boy’s face grew into a pathetic mixture of horror and defeat, his eyelids drooping at the corners is a way that only filled her with more certainty. She turned around and left without another word through the double doors located behind him, directly underneath the mosaic window.

She didn’t look back once.