In sight of the point where he knew his tea house should be, he peered between his fingers to find his worst fears confirmed.
His teahouse was gone and there in its stead was a fierce, roaring dragon with tangerine-coloured breath. This monster, it seemed, was swallowing his shop whole.
Mohammed Muneer dropped to his knees.
He was too exhausted to holler, too shocked to weep tears.
Praying out to Allah to save the sleeping moon, he was surprised when he heard a voice rising out of the flames.
“Bleedin’ heck!” it bellowed and then: “Bugger me.”
Mohammed Muneer looked up aghast, to see Reggie crouching on top of his roof, moving slowly, defensively, against the copper coloured winds.
“Come down,” he shouted. “Come down, my good friend.”
But Reggie could not hear him, or perhaps he chose not to, for he had his mind on the gold crescent and nothing else would do.
The crescent was spinning wildly, fanned on by the flames but Reggie was determined to save it for his one friend, Mohammed. He knew how much it meant to him, this glimmering rooftop ornament. How every day he would polish it so it gleamed in the sun.
Reggie clamped his hand firmly on the ornament’s base so it broke easily away in the palm of his hand. Then, smiling triumphantly, he waved it high above his head.
The smile did not last long however; nor did his jubilant wave.
The crescent moon was hot.
Viciously so.
It seared the big man’s hand so he yelled from the pain before flinging it skywards. The ornament spun high, slicing the air as it twirled, but gravity dictated that it must eventually descend. Hitting Reggie once on the head and then the small of his back as it tumbled its way back down to the fire. Reggie lost his balance too and tumbled from the roof. Straight after the crescent moon, straight into the fire.
Mohammed Muneer heard a thud and then heard nothing at all, just the sound of white-hot teeth, roaring as they ravaged.
“Reggie,” shouted Mohammed Muneer but he heard no response.
“The moon,” he said again mournfully, his voice lost to the air.
Mohammed Muneer turned his head away, he could not watch any longer. He had seen too much already. He could bear the fire no more.
Crouching amongst the dirt, he buried his head in his hands and wailed.
Suddenly the tea house shuddered violently, shaking the grass and the dirt below Mohammed Muneer’s feet. He stared at the ground, too afraid to look up.
He noticed a great shadow looming across the earth. Creeping towards him, unable to stop. Soon enough, he feared, it would cross over his skin.
He looked up to face it.
What else could he do?
But instead of confronting a fire monster, as he had thought that he might, he was greeted instead by a sight most peculiar.
A sight most spectacular. A sight worth a song.
It was Reggie slowly rising out of the jaws of the fire beast, cast in silhouette by the fierce light behind him. Lifted, somehow, by the seat of his pants, so he hung like a coat hanger up there in the sky.
Mohammed Muneer gazed on in wonder at this great floating man as he hovered above the land, a giant balloon in the breeze. Swooping and soaring in the early evening winds, with a broad, beaming smile and wide, gleeful eyes.
“I can fly,” shouted Reggie, joyfully waving down at Mohammed Muneer. “They said I never would but look at me now.”
Mohammed Muneer said nothing; he just waved back with both arms, wearing an expression both elated and extremely confused.
How could Reggie Macklewaite just have risen from the flames?
The answer soon came to him in the shape of the moon; slowly rising out from behind Reggie—from Reggie’s pants to be exact. Wriggling its way free from where it had been hiding since it woke to find itself falling out from the gold crescent. Tumbling from the ornament’s nook as it struck Reggie’s back, rolling straight into the rear of the man’s rather low-slung pants.
Admittedly, it wasn’t the most elegant place the moon had ever tried to seek refuge but it was moody and dark and strangely reassuring. Here it could hide safely while it properly woke up before starting its steady climb to the great sky above.
And it was a fortunate thing too it had rolled where it had because when Reggie had fallen he had hit smouldering wood unlike the gold crescent which had landed in blue flame.
“I’m a bird,” shouted Reggie again, stretching out his arms, blissfully unaware of the moon in his pants.
Eventually, the moon began to tire. So it could continue its journey into space, it brought Reggie down, dipping him twice more, for it knew how he loved it, and then tenderly depositing him in the fork of a gum tree.
Gliding free, it rose up behind him, drifting higher and higher, a little white pearl against night satin. The moon had saved Reggie as had Reggie the moon, though the big man would never know it.
“Did you see me?” Reggie shouted breathlessly.
“Yes I did,” replied Mohammed Muneer and he said nothing more.
He just gazed at the moon until it disappeared into the heavens, leaving nothing behind but the brightest of lights which shone down on Reggie still sitting in the tree, then down further onto Mohammed Muneer, who understood now that the moon never belonged to him—but gave thanks that he had the good fortune to be the moon-keeper’s friend.
THE TAILOR OF TIME
by Deborah Biancotti
The Tailor of Time sat at his sewing machine, stitching night to day.
He joined the clear cloth of dawn to a full bright afternoon like a circus top. Then he smoothed on a panel of smoky rouge for dusk and finished it off with a thick purple evening. Brushing his hand over the result, he felt a thin echo of satisfaction.
The Tailor worked with a minimum of noise or fuss. He suffered only the occasional grunt or shrug (to indicate ‘this is done’ or ‘bring me cloth’), aimed at the tyros who also worked in his rooms. The tyros were pale, bald children that could pass as the Tailor’s own. They looked like a ramshackle circus, dressed in scraps of cloth that tied at waist or shoulder. They worked at the Tailor’s demand, darning or mending or gathering what needed to be darned, or mended, or gathered.
The Tailor ignored them. He existed in a meditative cocoon, his voice so unused it had all but healed over. His mouth sagged like a pocket, his eyes drooped like the shoulders of an old suit and his whole body slumped like a smock on a hanger.
Only his hands remained steady, darting leanly under the light of his sewing machine and out again before they could be caught by the quick, sharp tooth of the needle. In and out, swift as the very machine itself. In and out.
With the day laid out in cloth before him, the Tailor added a hem, threaded a drawstring through both ends and slung it like a cloak over a bare globe to his right.
Thus dressed, the globe was spun onto tracks like train tracks, where it butted against other globes and sloshed with the weight of water in its guts.
The water served to hold it steady.
Dismissed, the globe and its partners creaked and shuddered, working their way along the tracks circumventing the room. They passed the industrious tyros, the bare stone walls and heavy curtains of the room. They passed towards the arched window in one thick-cut wall, and would have passed out, but here they snagged and pushed back, bubbling against each other.
Coming through the window was a man. He shoved his way into the chain of gowned globes and climbed into the Tailor’s room.