CALL ME CYCLOPES

Now the moons flower is full. It’s light sinks down from the sky and stirs the lagoon into a field of yellow sparkles that leave me spellbound. Open-mouthed bliss, eyes swimming.

Or rather my one good eye is swimming. The other is pink and puffy and swollen half-way shut. It’s a donut. PINK EYE…maybe? Who knows! My new name around the pearl farm is Cyclopes. It’s true, if you were to see me now, you would be looking at a lopsided monster and you would wonder if my parents were cousins or some other form of relation.

Anyway, with the one donut eye I can’t think straight. Only crooked. And the whole thing is making me tired and a tad depressed. Let’s face it, very depressed. Get it? Face it!

All I can do is sleep, and wake to eat bonbons, and look at fish from afar, and tease the sharks, and sleep again.

But everyone else on the pearl farm is doing the same thing, so maybe the way I feel has nothing to do with my donut eye, maybe it’s just due to the weather or the planetary alignment or maybe it’s just the full moon.

The moon crawled into all of our windows and woke us up last night. It screamed profanities at some, stole the pillows of others, placed a bunch of crabs inside someone’s underwear, but it only sang a Tahitian love song to me. I fell right back to sleep with a tropical smile and my weepy donut eye.

I know what you really want to know about though. You want to know how to play with sharks! Ok so, here’s what you do. 1- You catch a triggerfish. 2- You put the triggerfish on the end of a strong rope. 3- You put that end of the rope in the water, and hold the other end with both hands or one really strong hand. 4- The sharks come and you pull the rope up and down and all around and sometimes you leave it in the water long enough for the sharks to really have at the fish, but not too long, otherwise game over. Sharks = 1/ Humans = 0 / Triggerfish = -1.

The eye of the triggerfish is reptilian looking. Yellow, surrounded by brown and white patterns. I consider making an eyepatch and sewing it’s eye on top, hiding my donut eye behind it, like a true pirate.

Tomorrow I will tell you more about how I became Cyclopes, but for now, that’s enough. I must watch the sunrise with my good eye.