Moon at Half Past Noon

A Sunday bazaar. The salt-scent of frying dough and the grit of low-tide dust.
Her father, hunting for something to fix them with, stopped at a plank-board stall.

Look, Zoya. My childhood.
He held up a Tintin, cellophane yellow,
corners soft as erasers.
I had these, he said, a peace offering
for a war she hadn’t declared.
She gave the eye-roll, perfected at fourteen—
that sharp, defensive flick of the head.
Dad. They’re just cartoons.
But he was already bargaining,
counting rupees with a tender focus,
buying the whole set. A plastic bag heavy
with a past she didn’t want to carry.

At home, she stacked them like a barricade.
Her phone glowed—the hive-mind she understood,
where every pulse was a vote on her worth.
Boredom, later, made her pick one up.
The Blue Lotus. The pages smelled of attics and old tea.
And then she found the leak.

Not a leak. A boy’s handwriting.
Pencil, gone grey, a tight script
crowded in the gutters of the panels.

Page 22 (snow on the Himalayas):
This cold lives in our flat.
Father unpacked it from his coat.
It won’t melt.

Page 45 (Tintin’s face, determined):
Why does no one here have a jaw like that?
Our anger is a wet cloth.
It just drips.

Page 71 (a silent panel):
If I speak, the wall will crack.
I am learning to be the wall.

Zoya’s breath hitched.
Her phone, on the bed, dimmed to black.
The digital itch—the who saw, who didn’t—
fell away like a scab.

Here was a different path.
A pain in graphite marks, not pixels.
A boy hiding his war
in the white space of a Belgian cartoon.

The friction in her chest loosened.
She looked at the plastic bag on her floor,
no longer a burden, but a bridge.
She didn’t love her father more—not yet—
but the “toggle switch” of her heart
stuck for a moment in the middle.
She was seen by a dead page.

She read until her lamp was a small sun
in a black universe.
The boy in the margins was solid.
More solid than her father’s knock.
Zoya. Dinner.
In a minute.
She wasn’t lying.
She was in 1989,
in a room that smelled of dust and boiled lentils,
watching a shadow sharpen a pencil
until the lead was a needle.

She would be fickle tomorrow.
Snap at the milk being too warm.
Post a selfie and wait for the “likes” to feed her.
But tonight,
the silence in her room was crowded.
The dam the boy had built in the margins
had finally broken over a girl
he would never meet.

She closed the book.
Opened her notes app.
Deleted Hello.
Deleted I found you.
Typed instead:
My father bought your silence.
I am listening.

She saved it as a draft.
A seed beneath the skin.
A message folded into the dust between years,
not knowing if the paper would hold,
or if she was just talking
to the dark, to the dust,
to her own lonely, beating,
proof of a heart.