Honey moon

by Shivani Sivagurunathan

On the night Mauna Loh-Dakshinamoorthi fell flat on her face on crab-infested sand, the moon shone its brightest in decades. Online sources said it was a Super Honey Moon. Everyone in Mauna’s life and neighbourhood was excited. The last time the moon pierced trees and faces with that kind of pungent light, Mauna hadn’t even been born; it would take another twenty years for her parents to meet, fall in love, fall out of love, and create her as a means to fall back in love which, unfortunately, never happened.

She fell, not in love, but purely out of a natural imbalance generated by a lack of fluids in her ears as well as an inability to keep her emotions flowing and floating peacefully inside her body. Just before she fell, she looked at the moon and screamed. Her scream woke up several species of fish, two stray dogs who’d been waiting exactly for this type of excitement, and her Auntie Samantha who was miles away but who’d had a bond with her niece since birth and therefore jolted out of her daydream a few seconds after Mauna screamed. Auntie Samantha had been stirring a peach yellow cake batter for her niece’s thirty-first birthday and she’d been remembering the morning Mauna had been born, the one and only child of her one and only sister. Moments after Mauna screamed, Auntie Samantha looked outside her kitchen window and was shocked out of her body. The moon was as big as a mid-Autumn paper lantern, as yellow as the light in her warm and cosy kitchen. The moon was so big as if it was moving towards the earth, specifically her kitchen. Then fear filled her heart, her hands began to shake, the ladle in her hand fell into the peach yellow cake batter and in her attempt to rescue it, her trembling hand sloppily gripped the handle of the ladle and pushed the entire bowl off the kitchen counter and onto the floor. Batter splattered on the terracotta brown tiles she mopped ten minutes before starting on the cake she wanted to delight her one and only niece with.

As she gazed at the splashes, dots and dashes of batter on the floor, Mauna was eating bits of salty, grainy sand, her eyes closed, her face jammed into the sand, tears forcing themselves onto her cheeks, the ground, the crabs, the little shells poking into her flesh. No matter what thoughts Mauna stuffed into her head, she couldn’t push herself up and off the beach. She knew how ridiculous she looked, probably even scary and dangerous, especially to lovers and children, people who have earned the right to be soft and beautiful for this world. Mauna gave up that right when she abandoned her home, her life, her chance at a good existence to come to this spot of the universe: a dark, isolated beach close to midnight all because her birthday was approaching and she realised she’d been fooling herself for thirty one years. She wanted to thank the moon for shining but it looked too frightening for simple dialogue or prayer and it was really much better to be lying facedown in the direction of the underworld.

She could have waited until her birthday was over to do what she was doing, lying flat on her face on the beach at midnight, embarrassing her entire family with her antics and dramatics, failing her one and only husband, her one and only mother, her one and only father. She couldn’t bear it. Everything she’d become was false, that’s why she left home, but who would understand her and could she expect to be understood?

Around her, crabs, surface fishes, night birds, ant colonies, tiny burping, leaping frogs listened intently. Truthfully, they and their ancestors had been listening to her for decades as she moaned all the way up the road in her bedroom. Mauna didn’t know this of course but somewhere low, deep and subtle within her, she resonated with her audience and finally came down to the beach where they lived out of pure unconscious encouragement and camaraderie.

On the other side of the beach, five miles away, Auntie Samantha was still staring at the spilled cake batter on her kitchen floor, wondering why she didn’t have the will to get the mop and start wiping up the mess she created. Her husband was asleep upstairs, the cat too was snoring away in its corner outside the kitchen. She was full of an unexplainable resentment, sadness, fear. Her heart pounded so loudly she thought she might wake up the cat. It was the first time in her life since her children left home—over twenty years ago—that she’d felt this thing swirling around in her chest like a menacing electric light. She didn’t know how else to name it. That’s what it resembled to her. A menacing electric light. She wanted to howl at someone, anyone, she didn’t know who, but a strange urgency began to build in the centre of her torso to call out to the one person on this planet who would hear her wail and understand it. What was going on? She had been so happy, making the cake for Mauna, daydreaming about the morning of her niece’s birth when the doctors said the child might die from umbilical cord strangulation, the poor thing had gone pea blue, but suddenly she started breathing again, miraculously, perfectly. Then as she added vanilla essence to the cake mixture, Auntie Samantha had been excited for her niece who’d lived this long and in a nice little house down the road with a husband everyone thought was nice and a nice job and a nice enough car and although they hadn’t yet been blessed with children, that day would come, Mauna was still young.

But after the cake batter bowl broke on the floor, and the moon outside the window glared at her like an otherworldly stalker, Auntie Samantha started to doubt everything, especially now that the menacing electric light permeated her. She had never felt so lonely.

The loneliness she felt met the loneliness gushing through her niece’s shivering body and as Mauna spoke into the sand about how she had to walk out of her life because it wasn’t working anymore, the two lonelinesses hovered in the sky and brought Auntie Samantha closer to her kitchen window. She gazed out, facing the moon directly even though she was scared of it. Mauna too lifted her head, spat sand out of her mouth and looked at the moon. It petrified her. It seemed as though it would drop onto her at any moment. She hated it so much, hated that such a thing as a moon even existed and that she had to live her life under such conditions. What was so wrong with her? With the life she’d created with a husband, money in the bank, a holiday booked for Cambodia next month? What kind of special fool went to the beach late at night to scream and fall flat onto the sand?

She didn’t like her job. She felt her soul was getting darker and darker the more she taught little children how to lead good, moral lives.

She didn’t like how her husband lived pretty much permanently inside the digital geographies of his laptop and his mobile phone. She was pretty sure he had curated a safe, alternative existence there to protect himself from her. He smiled, bought groceries, spring cleaned the house with her once a month, had a good fulltime job, saved money for their future. All was well. But they were afraid of each other, deep, deep down, they were afraid which was why they preferred to walk through malls than to stare into each other’s eyes and they quietly, cleverly avoided confrontation by talking about which part of the house needed repairing, and what colour dishcloths they should buy to match the living room curtains. As Mauna glared at the moon, the thing she feared most on this night, she saw her fear glaring back at her and although she didn’t know what the contents of her fear were, she didn’t look away from the moon which was the same moon Auntie Samantha was gazing at with trepidation, wondering too if it would suddenly come alive, scoop her out of her lovely little kitchen and transport her to a cold and lonely alien land. She had always imagined her life was pleasant, something charming and to be proud of. She had nothing to complain about so what was this terrible ache in her chest and why was she being pulled deeper into the ugly yellow moon?

Auntie and niece shuddered.

The giant yellow moon seemed new and grotesque to them. The more they looked at it, the more they felt the bigness of the thing they didn’t have in their lives. It was a huge hole, an emptiness they couldn’t name or understand. They peered deeper. Tears started to fall on the batter-splattered terracotta brown kitchen tiles, and on the crab-infested sand. The tears from Auntie Samantha’s house travelled across roads, alleys, mud tracks, drains and formed a channel when they reached her niece’s tears; their tears merged as a river and flowed into the sea.

The moon shone brighter. It seemed to have grown bigger.

Mauna didn’t know what to do. She felt like the most abandoned person to have been born. The crabs and the fishes and the frogs listened but said nothing. Her auntie, five miles away, also didn’t know what to do. She was mainly shocked to be feeling like her life had been a sham, that she could be standing in her own kitchen and be filled with fear just because she was staring stupidly at the freak moon.

It was the simplest, highest moment of fear that brought auntie and niece at a single, concentrated point in the centre of the moon and into each other’s minds. Mauna thought of her auntie, and Auntie Samantha thought of her niece, and each was tempted for a second or two to pick up their phones and say hello but it was past midnight and neither wanted to disturb the other but the more they saw each other in their minds, the stronger the tears poured from them and the menacing electric light just became an electric light and the moon just became the moon and their selves just became their selves and they forgot about the surrounding world and all that was left was a feeling that one thing supported another thing and even the sense that everything had gone wrong in life was supported by the sense that recognising it was the start of making friends with horrible things like the Super Honey Moon that appear once in a while to shake a person out of a honey moon that was never meant to prolong itself and grow monstrous.

Mauna reached for her phone and typed a message to her Auntie Samantha: look outside your window NOW. You’ll never see anything like this ever again. One and only.

Mauna ran and ran, and when she reached Auntie Samantha’s house, she clicked the ‘send’ button, but it didn’t matter because her auntie was already waiting for her at the doorstep.

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Shivani Sivagurunathan is a Malaysian author. Her first novel, Yalpanam, was published by Penguin Southeast Asia in September 2021.

Her poetry collection, Being Born (Maya Press) and her book of fiction, What Has Happened to Harry Pillai?: Two Novellas (Clarity Publishing) came out in 2022.

Her poetry collection, Long Distance (Maya Press) is out in the last quarter of 2025.