TEO



Teo had never known his father to cry, so the warm drops on his arm made him stay very still. His thoughts moved faster than he’d ever known. Teo’s life, which had been lived in a bamboo hut by the sea on a small sandy island, would never again be the same.
His older sister Turia had arrived back from school and explained why their island was getting smaller; why the sea was rising. Why they had to leave before the summer storms. Any small cyclone would surely drown them all.
Sailing their way along the coast in the family’s large twin-hulled dugout had been good, and bad. The sunset was as beautiful as ever but for the first time their home was silhouetted. The storm that had blown them ashore amongst the waves and the fallen trees scared young Teo until the family had moved to higher ground between the beach and the wetlands beyond. And that is where they were camped, hunched around a cooking fire beneath a sky that threatened rain.
Mother and father had never seen cars, except for pictures torn from magazines. They knew they could carry loads and travel very fast, ‘but how did they change the world with their smoke?” It didn’t make any sense to Teo either. “If it is true that they are killing the world with these things, then why don’t they just throw them away?” his father had asked.
They ate fish and taro around the bright fire and still they talked about it until his sister was repeating herself again. She’d been to school, she’d learned the ways of the new world. She knew the concepts were too complex for an old man who took his food from the sea and went back into the earth when his time was gone. “Why can’t they just take what they need? Who isn’t happy with food and shelter for their family? Tell me again about the factories you know so much about. Why can’t people be happy with what was given to them by God? Be happy without killing the world?”
The fire made his face seem red as betel. And so did Turia’s when she lifted it from staring at the coals. “It just doesn’t happen like that father!” she snapped. “Things like that just don’t happen!”
Father’s tears had fallen when she’d said that. They fell onto Teo’s arm where he was warmed by the fire. He could feel his father’s body shaking. In anger? From pain? Or shame that his daughter who had gone from them for so long to learn the new ways could do nothing to save their world?
At first light Teo lifted himself from the sleeping mat beside the smoldering ashes. With his lap-lap pulled around his shoulders he walked to a small dune where he could see his father repairing their outrigger to continue the journey. Teo looked across the sea to a storm spilling itself in the distance, erasing the line between sea and sky.
A long slow swell rolled in from the south.
Closer to shore a coconut floated, and aboard the nut was a sooty tern, sitting still, digesting and resting. Its flocking friends still wheeled and shrieked about a school of sardines in mid-distance.
The ocean didn’t look much bigger to Teo, but he could see the trees fallen and drowned along the coastline beyond where his father was working.
“Teo! Come and hold this rope! Hurry, please.”
Before Teo moved to help him though, he saw in the mid-distance a flying fish lift from the lazy swell to ride the subtle pressure wave across it face.
With wings flickering spasmatically, and silver, with droplets of seawater still leaving its tail, the airborne fish flew directly toward the resting tern and bowled it into the sea.
“But things like that don’t happen,” thought Teo, “hey, they just don’t happen.”