"The Flowers of the Moon" (Short Story)

Its existence remains unknown to most people, but there is a green lagoon, hidden away by the old lush trees, just beside the main road that circles Macau’s most isolated island, Coloane.

Green...?

No, that's not right, it's not really green.

It’s more like… Turquoise. Yes, that’s it. A gleaming turquoise, as if the blue waters have been slowly seeping the green from the falling leafs for thousands of years and now the lagoon is an uncertain blend of trees, ocean and sky. That would be the most obvious explanation, of course, but that is not the truth behind its origin. Its origin has been lost somewhere along the vast shores of the unrelenting river of time and can now only be heard by those who can understand the whispers of the trees and, I can assure you, seldom do the trees sing that song, for the lagoon is the ending paragraph of a tale of an almost unbearable sadness.

It is this tale that I shall share with you today. It's not only about the turquoise lagoon, but also about the island's luscious green forests and black sand beaches, and most of all, about a very special girl with silver hair, the color of moonbeams.

So sit back, make yourself comfortable and let me see if I can still remember how it goes.

Hundred of years ago, no more than forty families lived in what is now known as the village of Coloane. Life was harsh back then. The terrain was too rugged for proper agriculture and nearly every family lived from the bounty out of the sea. Wooden boats, fishing poles and fishing nets were more precious to them than silver and gold.

Chau family was one of the poorest. The husband was Kim. A slim man, with dark eyes and the wisp of a charcoal-black fuzzy beard dangling from his chin that he used to stroke whenever he was gathering his thoughts. The wife was Sam. She had long light-brown hair and big honey-colored eyes that were flaked with specks of gold whenever she was out beneath the sunlight. Their house was no more than a weather-beaten shack with a thatch roof and a worn-out blanket for a door but, inside, a small fireplace and the affection they had for each other was enough to keep them warm throughout the nights. In spite of this, there was an enduring taint in this otherwise unblemished love, as Sam had been somewhat dispirited for years, because she had always been unable to bare children. Yet, with each passing year, she would do her best to occupy that vacuum in her heart with the love from her husband.

One night, she was dreaming of the moon, when she was woken by a strange wail coming from outside.

Stray cats, probably.

The commotion was scaring away her sleep, so she got up from the bed to shoo the cats away. When she pushed aside the blanket to the outside, she almost fainted to see the tiniest baby on the other side of the threshold.

Am I dreaming still?

The white light of the full moon reflected on the baby's pale skin, but even more so on an odd long mane of silky silver hair, that flowed through the dirt ground like a river of stars. For a moment Sam did not know what to do and just stood there bewildered, looking around for whoever could have left the child there, but she got no more answers than the soft whisper of the night breeze.

Is this a joke?

Since no one else was around, Sam instinctively took the baby into her arms and cuddled her against her breasts, which immediately tamed her cries and made her snuggle deeper into Sam's chest.

How fulfilling it feels, just holding her in my arms.

"Kim! Kim!", she whispered to the inside, trying not to affright the baby.

The silver hair that cascaded almost all the way down to the floor, made the reflections of the moonlight dance in the blackened walls of the night.

Kim appeared from the dimmed interior in his small clothes, rattled by the calls and dazed from the sleep. He blinked his eyes a couple of times to assure himself that they were not playing tricks on him and was also, comprehensively, mystified by the presence of the baby and her odd silver hair. As he took her tiny white hand into his big, callused hand, her grip was loosened and a small piece of paper dropped from her hand to the floor. Perplexed, Kim picked it up and found that there were characters inside, but he couldn't read. He showed it to Sam, but she just looked back at him. Puzzled, they took the baby inside and with no other option but to make her the most comfortable they possibly could and she slept silently between them until the first sunbeam leaked through the window, lighting up the faint speckles of golden dust that fluttered through the room.

The following day, they took the child to see Chan Sifu, the oldest man on the village and one of the few that could read. Chan was revered by all, not only for his age, but also for his wisdom.

"Oh my! Oh my! What have we here? Hmm...?", he said smilingly when he saw the baby arrive, cradled so protectively by a mantle in Sam's arms that only her face was exposed to the light early breeze.

As in every other morning, he was sitting on an old, weather-beaten wooden bench, sunbathing on the first morning light, enjoying the blue horizon where the River of the Peals finally kisses the ocean.

"Well, wasn't it time already, child? Although for the sake of me, I must be getting old, for I don't recall seeing you with a belly...", he said laughingly, before taking a puff from a long wooden pipe from which he forged a fleeting white cloud, quickly carried away by the morning breeze.

"She isn't our daughter, Chan Sifu ...", explained Sam, "she just appeared at our doorstep with nothing but this in her...", she nodded to Kim, who handed him the piece of paper.

Chan's eyes narrowed below a pair of thick white eyebrows as he concentrated on the writing.

"It's from an old tale", he explained, as he scratched the barren on the top of his head where only a few gristly white hairs remained, "called The Flowers of the Moon, if I am to remember correctly. Here it reads, 'The flower's roots sink into the ground and her hair soars to the sky, cut either and the flower shall die...' Very odd, very odd indeed... The full tale goes that, sometimes, at that instant just before the break of dawn or at those very last minutes of dusk, the Sun and the Moon brush in the skies for an instant and shards fall to Earth. With just enough moonlight these pieces grow into what the ancients used to call the 'Flowers of the Moon', little babies, born out of moonlight. They were known for having long silver hair, if I recall correctly, but this is all just bedtime stories that my grandma’s grandma used to tell, obviously, no one has ever really seen..."

Sam uncovered the head of the baby and the long mane of silver hair spilled to the floor.

For a moment Chan was speechless. "Well, there's something you don't see everyday...", he finally said, "she seems to belong to you now. The Moon brings us gifts and the moon brings us trials, they used to say... and what is a child if not both, hmm?", he stated with a loud long laugh that only had three teeth, then he took the pipe to his lips once more, exhaled another fleeting cloud of smoke and stood staring at the glimmering blue and gold horizon. "You have been chosen for a reason, maybe your prayers weren't falling into def hears after all, Sam? Hmm?"

They looked at the baby and for a second it seemed as if she was also smiling, but unlike Chan, her smile had no teeth, just two pinkish gums.

The couple took the baby home and it soon became as if she was a baby of their own. They named her Pui.

As the girl grew, they came to find that it was not only her silver hair the only singular trait, but the color of her eyes as well, the color of the ocean when trespassed by the searing mid-Summer Sun, a deep green smudged by the watery blue of the sky. These green eyes contrasted with her silver hair like a lotus flower stands out upon a dark pond. Her hair seemed to flutter gently on the night breeze and by the time she could walk, they had come to find that it stayed always the same length, it never grew so much as the width of a finger, so most of the time Sam tied it up like a crown around her head, except during night time, when Pui used to sneak outside to sleep beneath the moonlight. From the very first day, she never ate fish or meat or vegetables, but bathed in the moonbeams at nighttime which made her hair glitter.

For everyone's astonishment, the old tales were true.

Despite these strange traits, the girl grew happy and as carefree as a child can be, much loved by her parents as well as the rest of the village. She was a blessing to anyone she encountered, always smiling and always loving. Kim would take her fishing and he would tell others how the fish would bite easier whenever she was around. When she wasn't helping her parents with the family chores, she spent most of her time with her friend Lok, only a couple of months older than her, but a good foot taller. They would explore the forests, take baths in the sea, lay in the sun or doze beneath the shadow of the trees if the weather was too hot.

"How come your hairs are silver... and so so long?", Lok would ask her from time to time when the only sounds were those of the falling leaves rustling against the ground and the songs of the birds.

"Because, silly, they are moonbeams", she would answer, "have you never seen a moonbeam?", and she would giggle. Lok had never, in fact, seen one, but he never pressed on this matter, lest she keep making fun of him.

As they grew older, the friendship Lok had for her grew into something stronger, a tightening of his stomach every time she touched his hand or his dark hair, or when she sang in the forest when they were alone or when she snuggled against him when they would take a nap in the sand. But he wasn’t worthy of something as delicate as Pui. He wasn’t even a fisherman, he knitted fishing nets for the fishermen to take to the sea, how could he expect to compete with the audacious boys that braved the storms in wooden skiffs?

Keeping these feelings inside was like trying to hold the mighty Ocean inside his clenched fist. Nevertheless, day after day, he kept them contained, the waves endlessly breaking against the cliff of his resolve.

By the time Pui and Lok turned sixteen, a particularly hot Summer had cast a terrible drought upon the little island, withering whatever few crops had been carefully planted over Spring. The livestock was consigned to the lethargic shadows of their shelters and even the sea became barren in places that were once teeming with fish.

Early one morning, after weeks of helplessly witnessing the village bearing this arduous scarcity, Chan approached young Lok who kept persevering, as usual, by weaving fishing nets under a grove of palm trees by the seaside, and placed by his side a strange white bolt of a soft sparkling thread.

"You have knitted the finest fishing nets these old eyes have seen”, he said, “so I entrust you with this task. This here, my child, is a magical thread weaved in places so far away and so long ago, that today their existence is but a myth…”, Chan looked tired as if his next words weighted heavily on him, “The people of these lands… They always warned me that with magic comes a price and, for the sake of me I had hoped that the people of this village would never have bear it”, he sighed, “but I fear that if we don't put it to use now, there will soon be nothing left to save."

Lok discarded the incomplete work he was laboring on and held the strange shimmering spool, studying it for a moment, then, nodding in silent agreement started to unravel the magic thread that seemed to flicker as it was stretched and bent.

Throughout the day, Lok knitted hastily. Movement followed movement in complex patterns the inexperienced eye could not follow nor comprehend. When afternoon came, splattering the skies in a fiery-red, his fingers already hurt and blistered, but he never stopped.

The moon rode high when Pui came to see him, holding a candle to light her way, a firefly carried by the night breeze.
"You must rest, Lok. Come. We'll have something to eat and tomorrow you’ll return to work", she urged him, an affectionate hand resting on his shoulder.

"No! Tomorrow it must be finished, so we can throw it at first light", his tone and resolve were adamant.

"My stubborn, stubborn friend...", she sighed half-expecting this outcome, "then you leave me no choice, I'll stay here and keep you company."

His reply was the unending movement of his hands.

She sunk the candle in the sand and sat beside him, telling new tales and remembering old stories as the moon navigated the diamond-encrusted seas. His fingers worked uninterruptedly to the sound of the waves rolling on the shore and, as the firmament shifted in its imperceptible twirl, Pui gently lost the battle to sleep and went silent, her long hair like a river of melted silver flowing through the dark sand. Finally her candle burned out leaving him only the faint light of the stars and yet he never stopped. He only needed the soft strain of the thread and the slow-paced breathing of Pui's dreams.

When morning came Lok had too dozed off, but his work was completed. The ample net laid spilling from his lap to the sand where Pui still slept, scintillating to the first rays of the Sun. He was the first to get up, waking to the sound of the waves and cacophony of the many birds. Unsnarling himself from the net, he walked to the sea to wash his face, finding the taste of salt on his tongue quite agreeable.

"Lok?!", he heard a soft call from behind him.

When he looked back he didn't understood why Pui was all covered in the magical net.

"What are you doing?", he reproached her, "stop playing, you're going to get all tangled up!", but however she wriggled around, she couldn’t seem to extricate herself from the net.

Looking more closely at the net, hanging from her head like a veil, he understood what Pui already knew, but was unwilling to put in words - in the darkness of the night, he had somehow weaved her long hair into the net, alongside the magical thread.

"Pui! I'm so sorry!”, he asked, desolate, “What are we going to do?"

She had no answer. Her hair was so tightly woven in the net that it was now impossible to say where one began and the other ended.

"The way this is knotted...", he said after looking closely, "it will be impossible to untangle”, and the following words came hard and heavy, ”...without cutting your hair".

An uneasy feeling made him nauseous.

As morning progressed, the whole village had heard of the magical fishing net and gathered at the shore to see it firsthand. When what transpired during the night became common knowledge, the argument escalated like wildfire, leading to angry words and people pushing people - they needed to cast the net at the sea, otherwise they would starve, but they could not use it without cutting Pui's hair, lest they slice the magical thread into a thousand little strings and make it useless. Furthermore. there was Pui’s strange nature. What would happen if they actually cut her hair? Would she die? And what if they didn't cut it? Would they starve? The argument between both side continued well into the noon and was still being debated as red shafts pierced through the clouds and the sun plunged once again into the ocean.

Chan came walking among the crimson-gold tidal pools that gathered in the wet sand, beneath dusk-red skies and, when he spoke, all other voices were silenced.

"It is true the nature of the girl is mysterious and unknown to us but, fool not yourselves, she is much as part of this village as any person here. There is no telling what will happen if, indeed, we are left with no other choice but to gamble her life for the sake of us all… And yet, witnessing all this petty fussing and fighting, I wonder if the trial we’ve endured for this village and its people is not already lost. For tonight, let us each go to our homes and reflect on this."

Saying this he walked back, the silent clamor of his words carried by the breeze and echoing through the fiery skies. Some people still lingered, forlorn they were, but most went about their lives.

Then night fell, troubling and unpleasant.

Lok knew fully well Pui’s recklessness when it came to self-sacrifice and under the canopy of stars he implored to her, "Don’t do it, Pui, please don't do it or you'll die!"

"How else are we supposed to feed our families, save this village?", she asked in a collected tone that evinced a wisdom beyond her years, "There is no telling what might happen, but I believe this is something I must do. Like Chan Sifu said, let's think about it and tomorrow we'll talk..."

"But Pui... I can't bare the thought of living without you", tears streamed down his face, salted like the ocean.

She studied his face in silence, as if she was trying to memorize every trace, every detail, then smiled as to mirror his affection and, without another word, turned her back and went home to her parents.

The peaceful stars came out and the azure sea stretched to eternity, but nothing could appease the anxiety burning Lok from the inside. She will be sick, she could die - the sound of these thoughts reverberated in his head like thunder. The island without Pui, a WORLD without Pui, he couldn't let that happen, he WOULDN’T let that happen, come what may!
He waited until the village was sound asleep and under the cover of the night, his steps concealed by the chirping of the crickets, went to the beach and for hours he dragged and pulled every wooden skiff from every fisherman in the village and piled them into one huge pyre. Then without hesitation, he gathered kindling and set the pyre alight. The flames rose quickly and soon the whole stack was afire.

Let's see how good is their fishing net when they have no boats to carry it.

He remained as the sole spectator to his work. The flames escaped into the night sky and the halo of light that shattered the night was cast on his sunburnt face that did not show the slightest shadow of regret.

I would set afire every boat of the world, if that would mean her unscathed.

Suddenly there was a loud whistling noise and the sound of wood cracking. The piled up skiffs lost balance and tumbled down right on the place where he was standing. Instinctively he took to his knees and covered himself. Either luck or misfortune made the skiff drop on him inverted so it didn't knock him out, but trapped him between the burning wood and the cold sand. The sudden heat and the smoke sent a gush of panic to his brain. He tried to overturn the boat by pulling at one of the sides, but the wood was so hot that it burned his fingers and made his skin blister. With an overwhelming sense of urgency he tried to upheave the hull by thrusting his shoulders against the hull, but other skiffs must have been piled over it because the weight was too much. The burns on his back bit savagely through his flesh, soon the smoke and the lack of oxygen drained him of his strength and of his will.

His last thought was of two eyes, green like the sea, framed by silvery long hair, the color of moonbeams.

Eventually the enormous fulgor from the fire woke up the villagers from the nearest houses and soon all the village had gathered on the beach, trying to put the fire out with buckets of water, but the flames produced a wall of fury and without any other choice, they witnessed the fire devouring away at their livelihood.

When Pui and her family joined the others, the net still wrapped around her head like a white crown reflecting the red flames, she quickly guessed what happened and looked for Lok everywhere, but was unable to find him. She assumed he could only have fled to the isolation of the forest, so without hesitation, stole the pocketknife from her father's pocket and, under the cover of the dark, shaved her hair at skin length, sneaking away to the forest. As she ran, she felt her strength starting to wane out, but she kept going towards the mountains, braving the dark as she called out Lok's name.

The next morning that beach was a graveyard. Charred frames of boats and embers. Bones and ashes. The magical net was later found not far from that place and was finally cast to the sea upon a makeshift bamboo raft and, indeed, came bursting with fish. The village had been saved, but the price had been tremendous.

With the passage of time the black ashes of the fire were scattered by the wind and the tide and darkened the sand from the tree line to the ocean. As the generations passed the story was forgotten but the name of the beach remained - the Beach of the Black Sand.

And in the forest there came to be a lagoon formed from the tears that Pui cried every day she spent alone and weary in that forest, waiting for Lok to come. Tears the same color of her green eyes.

No... not really green.

Turquoise.

---

Note from the Author:

First of all, thank you for reading. Although sad, I hope you enjoyed the tale of Pui and Lok, which has shaped the very nature of the Island of Coloane, one of three islands here in Macau. Like the previous short-story this one was also written a few years ago to be submitted to a local contest. Editing it for Steemit allowed me to rewrite a few parts here and there and, I hope, improve it. The story obviously falls into the fiction category (or does it?!), nevertheless the places are real, there is really a fishing village in the Island of Coloane, there is a beach called the Beach of the Black Sand (Hac Sa Beach) and there is really a green lagoon that only those who have trailed the paths of the forest have seen.

All of the photos used in the four parts that make this story are taken from Pixabay under the CC0 Commons License, but here is an actual photo taken by us of the said lagoon.