after ‘The Western Wind’ by Samantha Harvey

The moon was made to mush and I poured it into the bowl and added water and stirred with my grandmother’s wooden spoon and I worried it would break, crack against the thick glop that refused to budge until I stirred and stirred harder, working against my fear of breaking until it rewarded me with an uninterrupted swirl. 

The moon gave in to its new liquid shape and I was glad to have finally done something, anything. 

The room in the tower with the wooden table the wooden cups tucked into carved holes made snug to fit. I hear that the other villages have tables of marble but, no matter. 

The three baby giraffes had the cups to their chins. The table was high, at least on this it was enough – made just right to allow them to sit and drink without straining and distending. 

It would have been something to witness them drinking the mixture in. I poured the moon from the bowl and into the three wooden cups with my backs to the baby giraffes. I imagined their eager, liquid eyes. Blackness, but not of night. The blackness of early innocence. Enveloping, pure. 

Another source of pride, and I stung to resist it. The pride: pouring the moon so neatly into the cups that an equal gap was left up top. The rare, brief elegances. But this was not mine. This is where I was drawn, and I merely followed. 

I set the cups down onto the gaps and now, at least, I could look. They did not look at me – they were too eager for their meal. But in this eagerness I found gratitude, and I held it warm to my chest. The warmth turned into the remembered words of the Edict: “You are to pour, the rest is theirs. You are to then turn and walk away. They will only flower in your absence.”

It was not in me to break edicts, least of all this one. So I allowed myself this one small thing, this one last thing: to look upon the giraffes as they drank the moon with a total abandon. The abandon of rest. The marker and promise at the end of my mission. All that makes edicts and towers necessary. 

I took the spiral staircase and when I opened the wooden door that released me from the tower, I looked up to the moonless black sky and thought about the consuming gardens to come.