Pauline was finishing the washing-up after breakfast while watching with amusement the bullfinches and blue birds quarreling in the garden over the crumbs of bread she had just thrown out of the ... [+]
Once in a blue moon, the sea forgot its boundaries and crept into our homes. Not like the hurricanes that howled and thrashed, no, this was gentle, as if the ocean had grown weary of its solitude and longed for the warmth of our houses.
We woke to find schools of silvery fish swimming around our stoves, coral spreading over the chopping board like a carpet, and seagrasses draped over the ceiling fan, swaying like strings of tiny grapes. The children squealed with laughter, racing down the corridor, kicking the red joss paper bin that tumbled slowly, caught in invisible currents.
Mother, as old as the Tibetan hills and just as wise, waved her fan and said, "It's the blue moon, child. It's the blue moon again. We bear witness to it." And indeed, when we looked out our windows, we saw fragments of our memories—as people, as guests of the wind, as the mossy hills in the Arctic before the Arctic froze—under a moon so blue it made the night sky glow. I understood that it had happened before, and it would happen again.
For one night, our little island forgot itself. We danced with mermaids in our living rooms. The lines between land and sea, real and unreal, catastrophe and bliss, blurred like the boundary between sky and ocean.
The next morning, we went about our day as if nothing had happened. Yet sometimes, when the moon is full and pale, we find ourselves looking out the window.