Harvest moon

 

Harvest moon

 

            THE FIRST dictator had an attachment to windows that would be reverential if he had been a spiritual man. When he looked out of any window in the Palace, he saw only empty sky.

 

            Infinity. That was the extent of his powers, the interminable, the indefinite, stretching to a point where ambition vied with vision and vision lost every time.

 

            Every window in the Palace confirmed the powers of the first dictator. Or the windows were constructed to affirm the idée fixe of the madman.

 

            But one evening, the first dictator looked out of a window and saw, bathed in the light of the harvest moon, small black figures moving on the ground.

 

            A quaking courtier explained that these antlike figures were farmers harvesting the great man’s grains from the great man’s fields for the great man’s granaries that would be sold back to the great man’s subjects, with taxes and profits going to the great man’s coffers.

 

            The first dictator, after dismissing the excessive possessives, focused on a single grain of truth that did not reside in the sycophantic answer: the moon that lightened the burdens of his subjects.

 

            The Planet Primus, existing in the gnarly nowheres of this narrator’s imagination, was a very cold one. It was not only the harshness of a madman’s rule but biological survival itself was difficult, the moon being the sole source of light sustaining life.

 

            Yet, for as long as the moon was up in the sky, the people left their windowless hovels, worked and created, traveled to their neighbors, bartered, and exchanged information. Full moons brought harvests.

 

            Rising from the sea, a harvest moon was at the brightest phase, its light dwindling as the dark and the cold seeped back and overcame the lunar nimbus until another of the sea’s spawns rose from the waves and took its place in the sky.

 

            For the people, a harvest moon signaled life restarting, survival seeming less harsh in the midst of community. But the first dictator did not like at all the hope the harvest moon ignited in subjects he liked best isolated and abject.

           

            Kept in the dark, people are easier to control.

 

            So the first dictator dictated to the sea,  an ally terrified about having its territories encroached and powers diminished, these new terms: with the sky as an arena, each moon rises from the sea as a marauder, hunting down and devouring its older, weaker predecessor, to reign until the sea sends the next adversary for the nightly entertainment.

 

            And that is how the first dictator, just from standing by the windows, drove out the old stories of community and replaced these with the cataclysms of disaster and competition.

 

            Who would have thought windows made such good arsenals?

 

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917322631)

 

 

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 30, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Inventories

             

            LEARN from housewives. Before dispatching an armada of destroyers to the Planet Primus on the far reaches of its system, the Technical Committee (TC) checked the archives for what is known about an extraterrestrial chunk of real estate that is three-fourths submerged in water.

 

            The archives custodian brought out only one small box containing a few brittle sheets. These were lists, much like the ones a cost-cutting, space-maximizing housewife keeps of the stocks left in the refrigerator and “aparador (cabinet)” so she knows exactly what to pick up at the market, no more, no less.

 

            The first list inventoried resources:

 

            One planet. For exploration. Dry core peopled. Ruled by dictators.

 

            Sea colonized. Moons harvested six times in a cycle. Lunar source of power and spectacle. No signs of depletion.

 

            The second list sketched the assets:

 

            Abject subjects. Terrorized by law and extra-legal justice. Animation suspended. Trade-in value of window-display democracy. If wrapped in oxo-degradable plastic, may be disposed of as “malata (earth-friendly)”.

 

            Greedy, corrupt dictators. (Note: Adjectives are cheap; hence, the overuse; placed here to flag lazy archive researchers that these are the key vulnerabilities, generic to the type but always dependable for exploiting.)

 

            The third list was more wordy as if the list-makers, in describing what the planet had in store as its sole liability, desired to advise and arm in advance the TC of a future but inevitable invasion to destroy the Enemy of the State long before an actual violation on the pure supposition that malice harbored in malcontents erupted at the least provocation, sometimes even with none:

 

            Mothers. Incubators of the Moons. In street slang, “bolsa (pocket)” for limitless capacity to breed and grin. The ideal pocket is capacious but invisible, an extension of the organism that is meant to remain flat to the point of invisibility, expand or contract upon demand, hide well any found ephemera or secrets.

 

            This last inventory had a more recent note attached to the original sheet, “Peligro (danger)”:

 

            “Manggugubot (anarchists)”. Mothers recently infected with perverse psychotic attachment to their children, particularly the males that are regularly sacrificed for the surface spectacles, War of the Moons. “Why kill?” movement bonds mothers. Last dictator unable to put down uprising from total absence of subjects, wiped out in the final purge.

 

            Conclusion: “The Mothers of the Moons have disintegrated into ‘maot nga bolsa (ugly pockets)’ of dissent and rebellion.

 

             “Discard and dispose; no need to restock.” It was, as the archivist noted, a quite small box of mean content.

 

           

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

 

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 23, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

 

           

           

Creation

             

            FIRST, draw a straight line. Pretend it is a snake lying on the ground.

 

            Mama looked at the “S” my stick left on the seabed. That is not a straight line.

 

            Yes, Mama, I said. The ground is crooked; the snake lying on it is crooked.

 

            It is perfect, my Moonling.

 

            That is a story the oldest of the Mothers does not grow tired retelling. It requires imagination—some of my fellow mothers say, a suspension of imagination is closer—to see her as being once a mother, spewing bubbles.

 

            We call her the One. A name no one remembers anyone giving. Then again, no one remembers the ones before her. The Mothers are Nameless. Birthing makes us thinner each time. In time, Mothers disappear.

 

            Or perhaps we just cannot see them and the Nameless are still among us. We see through the One, a colorless frond undulating in the current, more Sea than presence. Only the One’s voice is undiminished, naming, telling, humming.

 

            Or perhaps it is our own voices we hear in our heads.  The figure for “one” can stand for “I”. “I” can be the line drawn on the seabed that shimmies as I look at it. I.

 

            Few things in our world lie flat and straight, Moonling.

 

            Our Father, the sea, bends us.

 

            Our edges are soft. Our Father, the sea, bends us.

 

            Can you cut a circle, Mama?

 

            In her stories, the One cuts up the Planet Primus into two parts: us and the Others. The Others are dry mass and air and primitive life. To keep the Others from invading and colonizing us, the sea pays a tribute with his spawns, foam and waves creatures of the deep for food nearshore forests for their houses water corridors and bridges for their ships and, of course, the Moons, our sons, for light and time and sport.

 

            Time for the Others is reckoned by cycles of six moons, each rising from the Sea, each devoured by its successor. Supplying the arena entertained by the gross deaths of his sons has not made the sea saltier than it is. What are tears to the ocean?

 

            Beneath the sea, the bestiality pits Mother against Mother until the One penetrates their laments and cries for vengeance. Where do killers and victims come from? When the killer also becomes a victim, who mourns? Why kill?

 

            We looked at each other and saw ourselves bringing forth life, steering most of the bubbles away from the currents that whip them into sea foam, tickling telling teaching the Moonlings that later rise from the sea as Moons and never come back.

 

            Perhaps it is not birthing that makes us fade. Perhaps it is waiting for sons that never return that brings us closer to joining the Nameless.

 

            A line is perfect, seen from all sides.

 

            What is perfect, Mama?

 

            You are.

           

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 16, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Proof of life

             

            CHILDHOOD is a flavor.

            In Omnicast Mega (OM) Central, which transmits the evercascading babble of unvoiced thoughts circulating around the planet, Chocnut has a mental hiccup.

 

            Our talebearer is one of millions in a pod ejected by a carrier and left to feed in an incubator simulating the pre-Covid (PC) childhood favorite Chocnut, now replicated with flavor of ground roasted peanuts, flavor of powdered milk, flavor of cocoa, flavor of…

 

            A nanosecond after Chocnut registered the Sound, it also had its first spasm. The involuntary setback is, if its system was only wired to name it, called a memory.

 

            After PC, the TC scrapped foundations that made the old society as stable as a stack of crumbling Chocnuts. Memory was dealt a mortal blow when the TC replaced motherhood, mammalian and primitive, with carriers that parthenogenetically reproduce without mates and eject pods by the millions in Chocnut incubators that speed up the feeding stage 100 times so larvae can be deployed around the colony.  

 

            Now everything works. No remembering, just feeding. The news broadcasts destabilizing PC society were superseded by omnicasts, all-penetrating transmissions of every nascent thought and desire that may hiccup in units purged by program of memory and imagination.

 

             “Take care (TC)” may be benediction or threat since, by TC (technical committee) rules, the unvoiced, made public via omnicast, removes the need for expression.

           

            Chocnut, our talebearer, monitors FM (Far Mega), the deep spaces out of reach of the AM (At ease Mega) spectrum for the colony but still within the orbit of the TC’s sleepless omniscience.

 

            The Sound Chocnut recorded at 00:00:20:20 emanates from the dead exoplanet Primus. Unknown to Chocnut, who has never heard of history (refer to last Sunday’s tale), the Mothers of the Moons rebelled, finally refusing to let their children rise from the sea, only to be devoured by their siblings in cycles of six bloody moon phases.

 

            After Primus and its last dictator disappeared into the pure opacity of moonless dark and cold, the playgrounds beneath the sea churn warm from the nocturnal frolic of the Moon children, watched over by their Mothers. Perhaps it is an iota of this joy that escapes above the sea, a susurrus sieved and transformed into a playlist by Chocnut, who is suddenly assailed by a faint peanut-flavored memory.

 

            Weaned on the cold teats of artificially flavored motherhood, did Chocnut have a childhood? We will never know as another Chocnut reports after time out. TC (take care), terminated Chocnut.

 

            TC, repeat the omnicasts as an armada of destroyers departs for the Mothers of the Moons. Take care: disobedience is proof of life.

 

 

 

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 9, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Dictator’s goodbyes

THE DICTATOR knew he was dying. 

He calculated that before the six moons rose from the choked sea of the planet Primus, he still had time to say his goodbyes. 

He was, by Primate reckoning, relatively young but he acquired power early and the power had swallowed him whole. As he lay on his deathbed, the Dictator plotted how to overpower Death. He was certain that even before the death rattle sounded in his throat, his most trusted would throw out his not-even-dead-yet body and fight, down to the last standing ape, for power. 

So after the first moon rose wetly from the sea, he invited all the Premium Primates of Planet Primus to see him personally for his goodbye gifts. The line stretched beyond the Palace. 

First to bend an ear to hear the Dictator’s whisper was his personal doctor. The Dictator knew the fool had at least an excellent talent for his own survival. He gave the quack a paper appointing him the Most Official Physician (MOP), with power over all healers. 

Fearing that he would be blamed for misdiagnosing the Dictator, the MOP’s first act was to wipe out every healer. When the second moon rose and gobbled the first, it would have wrinkled its nose (if it had a nose) at the stench rising from the diseased and the dead strewn all over the planet. 

The Dictator enjoyed saying goodbye. To the Chief Orangutan of Palace (COP), he gave a blank check for intelligence funds after whispering he was weary of listening to the birds’ intrigues. 

In Primus, communication, from announcements to intrigues, was coursed through the birds. They were the only ones whose tongues were not tampered with (birds’ ears are covered by feathers but the COP, who swapped Science for Obedience remedial, was not even curious to Google this). 

So the birds followed the healers. By the time the third moon cornered and gulped down the second moon, such a din rose from the planet, where the survivors gabbled without cease after forgetting, in the absence of messengers, how to listen. 

Fast forward to the gorging by the sixth ravenous moon. There are just two visitors now waiting outside the Dictator’s room (actually in the entire decimated planet). 

The Dictator did not recognize the girl at first. He lost count of the moons since he last saw his subjects. 

But he always distrusted the female ones. Rightly so as, without waiting for his goodbye, the girl gave him hers: she took out a quill and with its sharpened end, slashed her throat so a bright, red smile widened and glinted back at the Dictator. 

Death then stepped inside the room and gently cradling the girl, walked away. Halt! cried the Dictator. What about me? 

No one was left to answer the Dictator. 

(mqtabada1@up.edu.ph/ 09173226131) 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 2, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”