Radiance

The Nutcake Festival was the boy’s favourite thing in the world—after his parents, callowhales, and chasing cassowaries until they squawked indignantly and told him he was wicked, wicked! in Mandarin, a language the birds had learned like parrots when the first humans arrived in the Land of Milk and Desire, on account of those first humans being Chinese. (The creatures have stubbornly refused to learn any of the other languages humans enjoy speaking, such as English and Turkish, Anchises’s personal tongues, but at least it all had the enviable result that little children spoke passable Mandarin, albeit with a cassowary’s clipped accent.)

At the conclusion of the Nutcake Festival of Adonis, each of the villagers chose their own glittery, painted egg and a large brown cacao-nut, still in its shell, from a great copper basket at the centre of town. Now, one of the nuts was not really a nut, but an empty shell containing a pretty little ring the same weight as a nut. Whoever drew this shell got to make a wish that was sure to come true, and also got to take home a sweetloaf and a barrel of black beer. The year Anchises was six, he chose the shell with the ring in it, and, holding up the copper ring (too big for even his fattest finger) for all to see, he quite solemnly wished that his parents should love him forever and live forever, too—which is really two wishes, but the villagers let it pass, because that is a very endearing thing to ask.

Anchises did not know yet that his wishes could not come true, that any wish he spoke out loud would echo among the stars and find no home there. And since forever is a long, long time, he did not discover this curse until long after that Nutcake Festival when the salt-sweet sea wind was so full of seal song and good promises.

And in the meantime, he kept on wishing.

The next thing that Anchises wished for was to be just like all the other children in the Land of Milk and Desire. Many children wish for something like that—not to stand out or be strange among others, lest one be left alone and abandoned when everyone else has gone home to rosy windows, to full arms and plates. Anchises wished this because other boys in his class liked to make fun of him for being dark skinned and for drawing callowhales in the margins of his books, their delicate fronds flowing all around the paragraphs in precise, complicated patterns like small labyrinths, the swollen gas bladders that bore the all-important callowmilk hanging off the corners of his lessons on the settlement of the Land of Milk and Desire by the Four Founding Nations. But as soon as the wish left Anchises’s mouth, it began the work of not coming true.

He grew tall first of all the boys in his class, sitting in his desk uncomfortably like a carrot ripened too soon. And he began to grow very beautiful, with high, broad cheekbones and brooding, dark eyes, with shining hair that fell just so, no matter how hard he tried to leave it messy and uncombed. Soon the parents of the other children began to talk of him leaving the Land of Milk and Desire for some other, more civilized, more cosmopolitan, less out-of-the-way place, such as the Country of Seeing and Being Seen or the Land of Wild Rancheros, or even Home (which was not really the home of anyone Anchises knew—in fact, most of the bakers and divers and packers and dairymen he said hello to every day had never seen the place they called Home, which was really the fertile, faraway, foreign world where their grandparents and great-grandparents had been born). Surely a boy with his face could become famous if only he were living someplace where folk appreciated more refined things than milk and desire. But Anchises wished to stay in Adonis by the shores of the Qadesh forever, to be a diver like his mother and father, and to one day bring children of his own to the Nutcake Festival.