[Kzyxtalk] short fiction

[John Sakowicz]

AN APOCALYPTIC TALE: XOCHIQUETZAL 


I met her in Raja Ampat, the world's last diving paradise.


She said her name was Xochiquetzal, and the very next words out of her mouth totally surprised me: "Sexwork. Spiritwork. Traumawork. Whatever way you need me, I will try to help you. It may not be easy, and we may both feel the pain, but it's what I do."


How could I say no?


But pain was not what I had in mind. 


I was on a wild hunt for beauty. And Xochiquetzal was beautiful. Young and beautiful. 


A hippie goddess.


And so we slipped into our scuba gear and spent the next few years exploring the Four Kings, an archipelago comprising over 1,500 small islands, cays, and shoals surrounding the four main islands of Misool, Salawati, Batanta, and Waigeo, and the smaller island of Kofiau.


The Raja Ampat archipelago straddles the Equator and forms part of Coral Triangle which contains the richest marine biodiversity on earth.


The name of Raja Ampat comes from local mythology that tells of a woman who finds seven eggs. Four of the seven eggs hatch and become kings who occupy four of Raja Ampat's biggest islands whilst the other three become a ghost, a woman, and a stone.


Raja means king, and Ampat means four.


We lived on my boat. It was a small parlari, an older type of pinisi.  


The parlari was motorized and had single mechanized rudder behind its propeller. It was built maybe 80 or 90 years ago by the Konjo tribe, a sub-ethnic group of Bugis-Makassar who are mostly residents at the Bulukumba regency of South Sulawesi within the Indonesian archipelago. UNESCO designated pinisi and parlari boat-building art as Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity at the 12th Session of the Unique Cultural Heritage Committee on Dec 7, 2017. 


The parlari certainly wasn't big enough for inter-insular transportation or cargo purposes, so I guess it was used for fishing back when it was built. 


The parlari was our little home.


Our home.


Xochiquetzal and I watched the sunrise every morning from our parlari. We watched the sunset every night. We watched moonrises. We looked for shooting stars and the occasional meteor shower. 


We took breathtaking dives every day. In Raja Ampat, there are 1,508 fish species, 537 coral species, and 699 mollusk species; the variety of marine life is staggering.


It was a good life.


Xochiquetzal and I were pagans together...pagans and heathens and polytheists. 


We did drugs together. MDMA and LSD, mostly, and psilocybin when we could get it.


We did detox cleansing, meditation, yoga, fasting, chanting, drumming. 


And had a lot of tantric sex.


We were naked a lot. We dressed up in beads and feathers. And face paint.


Our palari had a name...Medicine Lodge.


Medicine Lodge because of the vast number of experiences with occult and magical practices that it held. Spirits lived with us on our boat, too. We were never lonely.


We had a good life, Xochiquetzal and me. We even had pet names for each other's genitalia. I called Xochiquetzal's vagina, Solar Cross Temple. She called my penis, Star King.


And so we lived in Raja Ampat, the world's last diving paradise, until global warming killed us all.


-- John Sakowicz

 
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