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Authors: Stephen Chan
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night, as he cried tear-blind for the first moon girl of his canopy-obscuring life.
There was a Parnell of the body, and the body’s early mind, and this was brown; brown because of the two brown panels that faced his cardigan as he grew, and among the first things that he knew was howmuch had been left behind, and how existence was a loss that could never be reclaimed. Living was to build a bridge over the chasm of perpetual loss, and the stronger you built the bridge, the deeper you dug the chasm.
Among the second things that he knew was that they were better-off than other people who were browner. Each bright morning a Maori boy would pass the shop and his father would sell him, discounted, bruised fruit. Down the road there was another shop, and it was smaller, dingier, somehow irremediably poorer, and the couple who eked out their precarious margins in that compressed space were Indians.
But what he loved as he learnt to know was the clatter of the passing trams, how trams had to stop if their magic masts disconnected from the wires overhead. There would be a blue flash sometimes as mast disconnected but then, in the laws of exact chances, laws that govern how you jump precisely, it would bounce back to its energy-feeding connection. The blue flash was the immutable law of life. Sometimes you had to, for no reason but having to, make a jump – and all freedom that the world allowed was contained in that blue flash, and then you were anchored again, and that was that, and being anchored was brown, but the blue was a momentary transfiguration of all the child’s prayers he said, from his shop front, to the universal non-refugee sky.
For what reasons are moon girls sent to the earth and cross that bridge of light? For years he has asked that question. They are sent to discipline the wants of youth, and the remembered wants of youth. They are sent to accept as gifts the completed hearts of chosen men – for these men cannot choose, and their bodies learn to live with space in place of heart, and the space is called want, and want pulses to the timetable of the moon, and the timetable is the strictest tempo in the world of months and tides and wolves and hearts. And because want cannot replace the heart’s own full beat, the body loves the moon girl as it slowly dies.
Ah, from time to time, the men rebel. Gilgamesh, the great Sumerian king, four thousand years ago, drunkenly refused his fate. One desperate night, at the full-moon feast, he tore a leg fromthe sacrificial ox and tossed the charred and broken rump into the heavens with all the strength of sun-born kings. Ishtar, the goddess of the moon, thought it poor substitute for Gilgamesh’s heart, and took away the single chance the king might have for everlasting life. Atop his bold ziggurat, Gilgamesh accepted that his life was costed out, and hearts were the only fare for the beautiful carnivores of love.
His grandmother told him stories of ancient heroes. One, with full beard, almost like a barbarian’s, had also only one leg. He swung a fine sword meticulously balanced. But when he wanted to deliver a high side-kick, a supporting leg would instantly grow and anchor hero to the earth. A man entire only when he kicked, and only past a certain height. There was a moral somewhere in that, perhaps; but he hoarded the fairytales and learnt how, in sunset’s blaze, the long-haired sword-armed messengers of justice would sometimes translate themselves into the high birds of the sky. And stories were the only hoard of gold in the poverty in which he grew.
Poverty was brown. The electric light that shone on it was brown. The room in which he slept with his parents had no windows and he never recalled the dust being swept nor sunlight’s shaft on dust dancing in the dawns.
His father sought to turn this lack into an advantage of sorts. For an hour each day, between work’s end and the child’s time for sleep, he laid out the trays and second-hand
There was a Parnell of the body, and the body’s early mind, and this was brown; brown because of the two brown panels that faced his cardigan as he grew, and among the first things that he knew was howmuch had been left behind, and how existence was a loss that could never be reclaimed. Living was to build a bridge over the chasm of perpetual loss, and the stronger you built the bridge, the deeper you dug the chasm.
Among the second things that he knew was that they were better-off than other people who were browner. Each bright morning a Maori boy would pass the shop and his father would sell him, discounted, bruised fruit. Down the road there was another shop, and it was smaller, dingier, somehow irremediably poorer, and the couple who eked out their precarious margins in that compressed space were Indians.
But what he loved as he learnt to know was the clatter of the passing trams, how trams had to stop if their magic masts disconnected from the wires overhead. There would be a blue flash sometimes as mast disconnected but then, in the laws of exact chances, laws that govern how you jump precisely, it would bounce back to its energy-feeding connection. The blue flash was the immutable law of life. Sometimes you had to, for no reason but having to, make a jump – and all freedom that the world allowed was contained in that blue flash, and then you were anchored again, and that was that, and being anchored was brown, but the blue was a momentary transfiguration of all the child’s prayers he said, from his shop front, to the universal non-refugee sky.
For what reasons are moon girls sent to the earth and cross that bridge of light? For years he has asked that question. They are sent to discipline the wants of youth, and the remembered wants of youth. They are sent to accept as gifts the completed hearts of chosen men – for these men cannot choose, and their bodies learn to live with space in place of heart, and the space is called want, and want pulses to the timetable of the moon, and the timetable is the strictest tempo in the world of months and tides and wolves and hearts. And because want cannot replace the heart’s own full beat, the body loves the moon girl as it slowly dies.
Ah, from time to time, the men rebel. Gilgamesh, the great Sumerian king, four thousand years ago, drunkenly refused his fate. One desperate night, at the full-moon feast, he tore a leg fromthe sacrificial ox and tossed the charred and broken rump into the heavens with all the strength of sun-born kings. Ishtar, the goddess of the moon, thought it poor substitute for Gilgamesh’s heart, and took away the single chance the king might have for everlasting life. Atop his bold ziggurat, Gilgamesh accepted that his life was costed out, and hearts were the only fare for the beautiful carnivores of love.
His grandmother told him stories of ancient heroes. One, with full beard, almost like a barbarian’s, had also only one leg. He swung a fine sword meticulously balanced. But when he wanted to deliver a high side-kick, a supporting leg would instantly grow and anchor hero to the earth. A man entire only when he kicked, and only past a certain height. There was a moral somewhere in that, perhaps; but he hoarded the fairytales and learnt how, in sunset’s blaze, the long-haired sword-armed messengers of justice would sometimes translate themselves into the high birds of the sky. And stories were the only hoard of gold in the poverty in which he grew.
Poverty was brown. The electric light that shone on it was brown. The room in which he slept with his parents had no windows and he never recalled the dust being swept nor sunlight’s shaft on dust dancing in the dawns.
His father sought to turn this lack into an advantage of sorts. For an hour each day, between work’s end and the child’s time for sleep, he laid out the trays and second-hand
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