Luna - Moon Rising

Luna – Moon Rising

By Ian McDonald

She cries out. She is in Boa Vista again, Boa Vista full of green and life, light and water and warmth. The serene, full-lipped faces of the orixas watch over her as she explores the river, wading barefoot through pools, scrambling up the small cascades and falls, her dress soaked through. A drone floats over her head, her madrinha's watching presence. The detail goes far beyond her own memory; she hears every leaf stir, sees every shadow and ripple, imagines she feels the cool cool water between her toes, smells the warm verdure of old Boa Vista. Noises from a stand of tall, swaying bamboo distract her from her mission: there are paths cut through the canes, irresistible to young explorers. The tracks wind in: she glimpses movement through the screen of wands. The path delivers her to a clearing in the centre of the grove. There is Lucasinho, on the growing edge of kidhood, wearing a long-skirted, flowing sky-blue dress and make-up.

“Lady Luna, Quuen of the Moon!” he cries and curtsies deep to Luna. “Yemenja Queen of the Waters welcomes you to her grand ball!” He bends down to take her hands and half-squatting, half-bounding they dance around the clearing, laughing and laughing and laughing.

“How old was I ?” she asks Luna-familiar.

Three, says the grey-silver ball hovering over her chest. Lucasinho was thirteen.

Now he is fifteen and she is five and they are in his apartment in Xango's eye. He has tasked some long-armed, high precision bots and they are passing a long evening playing with faces. Each programs their bot to spray-paint them a new face: the winner is the one who gets the biggest reaction. She remembers this.  She doesn't want to see it again, in detail that time has dimmed. The animal faces, the theatre masks, the high-fashion make ups and the fight-faces of the martial artists. Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Then Lucasinho turns away from her and the bot arm is busier than she has ever seen it, weaving and dancing and dodging in and out, drawing circles, making sudden runs across Lucasinho's hidden face.

He turns back to her.

His face is eyes. Nothing but eyes. A hundred eyes.

She screamed then. She screams now. She fled then, but she stays now. She can look at the face of a hundred eyes. She has seen worse.

Now she is six and she goes by her secret path to her special pool that is fed by Iansa's tears but Lucasinho has found the secret path to her special pool and he's in it, with a friend, and they're both naked and looking at each other and when she says, This is my pool, they turn round and go “Oh, hey” and step away from each other. Now Luna can understand what they were doing but the all she said was, “Well, I'm going to join you” and they fled like she had poured poison into the water.

The boy's name was Daystar Olawepu, Luna-familiar tells her. He was in Lucasinho's colloquium in Joao de Deus. Luna realises now that the reason they ran was not because she had caught them playing with each other's penises, but because Lucasinho had smuggled the boy through the security grid. And she thinks, “but he didn't get past the security grid, because the security grid checked everyone. Daystar was let through. And she thinks, Daystar is a pretty name.

Now she is seven and Boa Vista is full of movement and music and lights and peuple in wonderful clothes and she is chasing ornamental butterflies between the guests. She is in a white dress with bold red peonies and wherever she goes she is told how pretty she looks.

Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Photo by Elena.