Twist of Night

It was a sickly wind and it banged its chaos down the clapboard alleys, slamming loose panels of corrugated iron against the sides of the huts in a rhythm that seemed to break up and dissipate as it neared the mists of the river.
The fishermen looked up at the clouds in the dying light and pursed their bottom lips. A silent, hirsute crowd they made; looking knowledgeable, feeling lost, trying to fathom the oncoming evening, trying to gauge the tricks that had been played on the tides and the weather in the recent weeks.
The moon had been disappeared; the high and low tides had swapped places as result; the water, unrefreshed, had grown brackish and dead. The moon was back now, but their faith, their trust in the elements, was not.
They rolled their eyes, spat out tobacco-flavoured gobbets of sputum onto the dead soil and gazed around them. Nobody was ready to take the risk and head upriver yet. The sun sank and the dusk rose with the moon.
The wind turned and streaked away from them, carrying what lingered of their scent across the hillock and through the clearing to where he crouched and laid more sticks and then set light to the paper underneath. The sticks caught light and transferred the flame to the pile of dead branches above them, like a sort of incendiary relay race. He blew slowly at the flames then straightened up and waved his arms, fanning the smoke, the jerky stick-shadows of his limbs giving him the outline of some epileptic scarecrow. The smoke twisted upwards, the particles of soot and ash seemingly locking into each other and starting to solidify as they spiralled ever higher towards the full moon, thickening into a complete tree-trunk of smoke, until it grasped at the bright face of the moon and clung on and held it fast, squeezing the light out of it. He fuelled the fire with more branches, waving his arms some more, though it was now almost completely unnecessary. The wind swirled around and buffeted the smoke, twisting its coils yet tighter until the whole plume vanished from sight as the moon was faded away and the darkness clamped in, dried-out and unforgiving. The nocturnal hiss of the animals of the woods ripped into segments then peeled away to a total silence. Silently, in the dark, he continued to feed the fire. Silently, in the dark, he felt that he was feeding the fire with himself, with his essence, making the necessary sacrifice to silence the threat, to dampen the power of the full moon. The moon had been taken away but had then come back. Someone had stolen it but had then returned it. Not good enough. Not good enough. Something had had to be done. No messing. No half-measures.
The wind, now solid as bone, no longer carried a scent, from them to him or him to them.
The fishermen stayed silent in the sudden dark. They knew who it was. They knew he was too tricky to tackle. They knew he was wilier and more dangerous than a field full of goats. They lit their cigarettes and chose not to comment. They stayed put in the dark and the quiet. The only things visible were the glowing points of light from the tips of their cigarettes and the only things audible the mutinous growls of their nicotine-stained throats. The river current started to exert its power again over the emasculated tide and small waves started to slap once more against the bank. Slap. Slap. Slap.
They groped a gin bottle around to each other in the dark and took solitary sips before passing it on. Time felt held fast, eclipsed, trapped like the face of the moon in a claw of smoke.
But then, the sun scowled over the horizon. He looked up, then kicked the embers aside from each other. Pissed on them. The burnt branches hissed. The smoke fizzed up then started to shrink back. Started to relinquish its assailant’s hold. The light of the victim moon began to reappear; reduced, diffused, muted. The smoke fell back to earth in solid broken bundles. He ducked to avoid them. Sheltered beneath a tree. They scorched their dents into the soil. Thud. Thud. Thud.
The disempowered tide first regained and then reasserted its strength and started to push against the current. Cross-hair speckles disfigured the surface of the river. The fishermen looked at each other, yawned, almost simultaneously, and threw away their cigarette butts.
The river water was slapping against their boots now, the dead soil oozing to dead mud.
The wind settled, blew gradual and steady now, carrying wisps of old smoke in their direction.
Together, they pushed their half-beached boats into the river and clambered aboard, hours late, but better that than never.
Behind the wind, hidden by the hillock, the wrong side of the clearing, a solitary figure marked an X on the ground with a blackened branch of compacted smoke, dispersed the remains of the fire with a few perfunctory kicks, and stole away, dusting his hands. Until next month. Until next month.