Moon Death
By Michael H. Kew
Into my ears bled birds and sealicks on hull. Lounging in the vaka, Old Polynesia, I sank spine and abdominals and let arms hang across sides, hands a-soak in deliciousip water, itself a pristine marvel of chemical composition.
Meanwhile, man jigs and recasts. Just parrotfish. Very unusual, he said.
Flummoxed.
“Must be something to do with the Moon.”
In our peripheral, first-quarter Mahina hangs high—pendant, an empyrean portal. Observing it quietly, contentedly, I summoned a strange Niuean saying: Mate a Mahina, mate ala mai; mate a kuma, mate fakaoti—‘To die like the Moon, is to die and rise again; to die like the rat, is endless death.’
Weirdly this raises the ancient Greeks.
Whom claimed Earth to be of four elements—gi (earth), neró (water), aéras (air), fotiá (fire)—and the cosmos, exotically, was borne of aithéras, or ether, a fifth natural fundament of immaculacy. Its medieval Latin name was quinta essentia (“fifth essence”), and it was believed that, if humans could somehow isolate and distill, quinta essentia would cure all the world’s ills. This never happened, of course, and today’s cosmogony is far more complex, though it too bellies into four elements: normal matter, radiation (photons), cold dark matter, and neutrinos (hot dark matter). But “quintessence,” the derivative of quinta essentia, can describe the purest state of anything.
With this, my mind drifted further into a soft metaphoric “quintessence,” a force in a mysterious scalar field, something Anglo physicists called “dark energy,” a shorthand hypothesis for the universe’s rapid expansion, indeed what quickly clasped around me and the fisherman.
Observing faint celestial bodies in the astronomical twilight, I remembered a paragraph I’d read on a tarot website, something about the pairing of a Moon card with a Death card:
Death transforms, so the present relationship will become “deeper” as the Moon gives a compatibility between two people on some unconscious level. It’s like the two are acting as one, as if guided by some invisible hand. You both develop a “knowing” about each other. In other words: a psychic link.
“You looking at heaven?”
The man noticed my skyward gaze as he continued to jig, line pinched between his right thumb and forefinger. The contour of his broad, sinewy torso looked top-heavy in the tiny canoe. I could no longer see his face clearly. He was a shadow, a sketch, an avatar.
“I feel close to heaven when I am out here. I can feel my father. He sees me. He’s watching us. Is your father alive? Back in the States?”
Hot question.
“Yes.”
“You’re lucky, mate. I hope you tell him that you love him. Do you? I didn’t get to say that to my father before he was gone. It happened so fast. One time, after out fishing by himself, he had a heart attack and that was the end of him. In the middle of the night my mother found him dead in a puddle on the grass outside their home. The hose was still on. He’d been washing his boat. He’d only caught one fish—a skipjack. It’s still in her freezer. She won’t touch it.”
He reeled the line in and tossed me the spool.
“Wish I had some bait. Here—want to try?”
I stroked a few clicks closer to the buoy and clumsily hurled the lure as far as I could. I jigged into…the past, the present, the Old Polynesia. Within minutes, something struck—forcefully. I yanked the line up and, with my index finger, raised the fish a few inches from the water.
A small skipjack.
A requiem?
The man began to weep.
“No, mate. Please. Throw it back.”
Plucked from Rainbownesia, available globally via Amazon.
