Luxe Beat Magazine OCTOBER 2015 | Page 86

The Poe

By Kenneth Za

Excerpted from Chapter 6 of The
Poet’s Secret, a novel by Kenneth
Zak © 2015. Used with permission
of Penju Publishing.
-Imagine.
Intoxicant, so rare

that simple, remote, fleeting
spectacle had captivated him. He had
never seen another since, even
though he had returned to the island
several times. But the image he now
envisioned wasn’t that fragile
blossom. He couldn’t get her out of
his mind. He opened his eyes.

Exotic, extraordinaire

Writing could wait.

Seductress, surreal
Enchantress, revealed.
Imagine.
All this, yet more

He jumped up. His feet planted on
the cool dirt floor. He pulled his
notebook off the table and glanced
at the hectic scribbles from the
previous night. There she was,
staring back from every slashing
word. She even filled the spaces
in between.

Come hither, explore
All dared, all dreamed
Eclipsed emeralds, this sea.
Cameron awoke alone in the hilltop
hut. He had planned to write the
entire day. He needed to remember
why he had come to the island. He
closed his eyes and envisioned
sable-trimmed petals, interlaced
with patches of coppery gold
webbing framing brilliant emerald
daggers, the markings of the island’s
rare siproeta stelenes. In full
blossom it resembled a Malachite
butterfly in flight. A local had told
him it blossomed once every ten
years, and then only for several days:
brief, brilliant, doomed. Until its next
bloom it was nothing more than the
barest twig.
Cameron had seen the butterfly
orchid’s blossom once, a few
summers before.
He had knelt by the orchid in awe of
its wild perfection. Something about

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He yanked on a pair of shorts and
stretched his torso into a threadbare
T-shirt. He grabbed his scratched
sunglasses, slid on sandals and ran
from the hut, tracking her footsteps
down the path to the seaside village.
He recalled her pensive look as she
turned away to leave.
His sandals clapped against the dirt.
By the time he reached the village he
was drenched in sweat. The villagers
seemed in a hypnotic lull. The sea
lazed against the shore. Beneath
that calm he knew the sea floor
dropped so quickly that yachts often
moored barely a spit from the sand.
But there wasn’t any vessel in sight.
He rambled past a dozen shanties,
rickety houses stacked no more than
three deep from the water, all
lounging in a permanent recline in
the unforgiving sun. A steel-haired
woman beating a rug outside her

window shook her head as he passed.
He prowled streets nothing more
than alleys, streets so narrow they
didn’t warrant names.

Her grin dropped away and she shook
her head back and forth.

He scoured the small open-air
market. Weary tables clustered
under spinnaker tarps overflowed
with island bounty. Here he slowed.
This was where he first saw her just
the day before. He caught his breath
and picked up a bunch of green
bananas, squeezed several mangos
and mulled over some guava,
wondering if her fingers might have
graced these same fruit. He stood in
the same spot she had been when he
first noticed her, next to a bushel of
pomegranates. He wanted to inhabit
the space she had filled. What the
hell am I doing?

“Where? What’s that?” he asked.

But the island boy had told him the
blossom lasted only days.

Why did people come to Mataki? To
disappear, or maybe to forget, he
thought. Was that why she was
here? He had come to find something,
to remember. He had come to finish
that short story about the butterfly
orchid, to resurrect his voice.

A bone-skinny, russet-skinned
woman offered him a pomegranate.
She looked to be one hundred years
old, but her eyes tracked him like
a hawk.
“No thanks,” he said.
She broke into a gummy grin.
“You lookin’ all obzokee. Maybe you
need it. This one’s sweet too bad,”
she said and sucked at her gums.
“Yesterday, the woman?” he asked.
“Gone like a duppie?” the old woman
asked and chuckled.
“Please,” he said.

“Peong,” she said under her breath.

She tapped her hand against her
chest, pointed the pomegranate at
him and smiled. “Your heart peong,”
she said.
“If you see her, tell her Cameron
was here.”
She nodded. He ran off to the
cantina. He peered through a
broke-open shutter. The tables
were empty. The stale smell of
beer wafted through the window.

His stomach began to knot. His head
felt light. He started to feel sick
inside. Man, pull yourself together.
He asked a fat old man who rented
rooms by the day. The bald landlord
swatted at sparrow-sized
mosquitoes while he shook his head.
He hadn’t seen her.
Cameron jogged past a young boy
fishing along the beach. The boy
watched him pass, squinting in the
sun to reveal a missing front tooth
before turning back toward the bay