The Luna
You are four billion years old. Old and battered and pockmarked. Yet you march on. Hung like a glowing bauble between heaven and earth. You are hurtling through the freezing, lonely expanses of black space being tugged at and broiled by the sun above. And being loved and dreamt about by the earth 384,300 kilometers below. Forever in orbit, the creatures below see you rise above the sea’s edge and disappear beyond it with wonder. With your tides that have risen and fallen for millennia, you have made it possible for man to exist. It was these tides, scouring the surface, leaving small pools of life giving water in their wake, allowing life to spring forth like a fountain. You shine full and round upon the lands with your ghostly glow like a white candlelight. You shine dim and hidden as thin as a bended quill. Unlike the sun, you allow man a lofty glance at your light, and in that moment he transcends. And all the while your mysterious power heaves the oceans about as restless as the wind. You impose your will upon the seas, upon all waters, pulling a great mass of liquid in your wake. And the waters…they listen and heed your word.
The Lunatics
As the young Sumatran woman pushed the needle through his skin for the fourth time, James Hendy winced. This one hurt. Having one’s ear sewn back on always does. Still, James thought, things could be worse, considering the caper that he had just pulled off. A helicopter, jet ski’s, boats, cameramen, surfers… all here in the middle of sun blasted West Sumatra quite literally up a river without a paddle. All to meet not so much a wave as an astonishing natural phenomenon. They came in search of a rumored tidal bore that, pulled by the moon’s power, created an upheaval, an imbalance on the planet, that resulted in a great bulge of water moving the wrong way around the twisting bends of a remote jungle river with tree snapping strength. On this, their last day, things had gone terribly wrong for James Hendy as he tear-assed around on the jet ski. The great force of nature, this moving mass of water at the mercy of three gravities, had caught him, eaten him, and by the time the tangled wreckage cleared, a propeller had sliced his ear almost clean off.
The young Sumatran woman pushed the needle through his ear again. It burned. But James sat as still as he could, taking it. He felt like a completely different kind of surfer now. Remembering that the waiting was the worst. You could set your watch to this wave. You heard it before you saw it. Chewing up the riverbanks like an approaching dragon. And then it is there, in the distance, something impossible to believe. You blink your eyes, squint them, and your mouth goes dry. There is no paddling around it. No duck diving it, no escaping it. It is an advancing army. So you put yourself in its path and you pray. Hopelessly outnumbered.
Water from the Moon
She was impressed how bravely this white man was taking the sutures. She could feel from his skin that he was a good-natured man, although clearly insane.
Here in her small village searching for water from the moon, that which you can never have. For 22 years she had lived with the Seven Ghosts, the water spirits that moved up her river by the power of the sister moon. Roaring like a wild animal, erasing all in its path. It was a force to be avoided, feared, prayed to, to ask forgiveness from. Even the animals ran from it. It was not something to be taken lightly. Not something to tease and play with. The moon’s eye was all seeing, all powerful, the night spirit. Search as much you like…you will never find her. The Seven Ghosts are spirits. And the moon is an emotion, she thought. That is all. Like a candle.
For what lover’s night is complete without both their unearthly glows?
