Hoki Moko's museum of things that float

The old Corporal sank back into his favourite chair. It was nothing
more than a wind bent "u" in a coconut palm but he fitted there like a
bum in a bucket. Hoki Moko, all eighty-two years of him was about ready
to give up on this life. The plucky little Japanese after sixty years
of defending his island was worn out. He was tired and bending under
the big, blue skies of his Pacific theatre.

His uniform had disintegrated in nineteen sixty-four. He lost a fair
chunk of his mind in seventy-two and gave up on masturbating in the
eighties. His gun was a corroded impotence, a celibate rifle. The
albatross and gannets had been safe for quite a while. Playing hide the
puffer fish with giant clams and tickling sea cucumbers was no fun any
more. A mild scurvy dogged him always and he struggled without his
right big toe and having only two teeth that had not worn down to the
gum. He ran on empty and had nothing left for his Emperor. He could no
longer soldier on.

Hoki was incredibly alone apart from the chocolate faced folk from over
fifty miles away. They came by boat once in a while to check on him and
had written him into their legends. They left him shell fish and shark
so as to please and appease the yellow man with the fire stick. From a
safe distance the boat people would call to him but could not convey
the simplest of messages.

In all that time they had never got close enough to meet each other
such was the mutual fear factored into their lives. The Islanders had
no way of explaining they weren't American spies . Hoki had no way of
knowing any different. This was the sum of Hoki's social life. It went
particularly shit shaped in nineteen fifty-three after he sank an
outrigger with a grenade. Shrapnel can drive a wedge between strangers
and friends you just haven't met yet.

Fire sticks, exploding coconuts.

But it wasn't the Polynesians that he worried about. Nor was it the
rising water levels or distinct downturn in parrot fish numbers. Day
in, night out he fret over who would take care of the "Things that
float museum" when his rising sun finally set. Who would curate?

The museum was made entirely from found materials. The shambled shanty
had become chock a block with maritime debris, the detritus of the sea.
Hoki combed, gleaned and preened it all from the tiny atoll's shores.
It was a ramshackle homage to flotsam and jetsam .It gave form and
shape to a life surrounded by a lack of parameter and good hygiene
ethics.

Wooden and plastic crates. Drift net dotted with death. The beaches
lumbered with all sorts of wood. A gas bottle. A sealed trunk full of
parachutes. Pumice from the Solomon Islands and a forty-four gallon
drum full of Tupperware. All of this and much more found a home in the
museum that Hoki built.

Everything had its pride of place. The old soldier had a system whereby
everything was displayed according to smell. A bloated Dugong of course
needed to be near a window. A clump of seaweed did not. Stuff that had
no scent was categorised by texture; rough to smooth. Driftwood and
plastic one end of the scale, brain coral and barnacled bobbing bits of
boats etc. the other.

Inside amongst the coral and the garbage was Hoki's shrine of
remembrance. Here his family, jaundiced by the sepia of time stared out
from the crumbling card of three photos.. The twin boys, Suki and
Choko. His wife Wun in all her nubility and Domo the dribbling bitser
mutt. All mounted inside the jaws of a reef shark.

For one hour every day Hoki would kneel before them and strain to
recall picnics in the Koi gardens in Hiroshima. The twins wowing people
with their moon faced, wide eyed appeal. His lady rinsing the starch
off some rice, completely naked humming something through her teeth. At
the end of the ceremony he would offer up a prayer and clap with just
one hand in true Zen fashion. It made a sound like no tomorrow.

"When your heart breaks in tiny increments sorrow sneaks up on you
through the long grass" or so said Mump, the fifth century philosopher
Hoki adhered to most.

Hoki had his own wise cracks. "When a man can no longer notice what
truly stinks in this world he will not smell the rot set into his soul"
That little gem after he'd wrestled a two week old tuna into the
museum. He knew pretty much that he had hollowed and was spiralling. It
was a downward trend. When all you care about is three cubic tons of
crud the sea has spat at you it's about time for the big ask and just
maybe the big sleep?

The twins and his wife had been vaporised by Enola Gay but Hoki wasn't
to know. They never grew old and died in his mind set. No-one did. Only
himself. Him and a domesticated stingray he called Miki Moko that hung
around his lagoon for twenty seven years. It was a sad day when he went
belly up and Hoki paid him the highest honour by not putting him into
his rancid house of floaters.

The life and death decisions Hoki had in front of him were of the
heaviest consequence. He mulled and mused for near on a month about
Samurai honour and dishonour and where he'd fit into the museum as a
dead thing. Between the freshly found Whale Shark pup and the month old
dolphin? He had smelt dead men before and smell-wise that's where he
would slot in just nicely.

Hoki would spend a day in lamentable meditation, whining and dining on
deep spirited retrospect. He would say goodbye to himself and then
snuggle up amongst all that was putrid in the appropriate section of
the museum. Once settled he would simply will himself to die, he would
switch himself off.

But as is want and typical when dealing with the laws of Sod a decision
from a higher source had been made for him. His near future was deemed
watery and grave by the powers that be all and end all. Eight hundred
miles away in Rabaul a volcano flipped it's lid and sent a wall of
water surging towards Hoki's part of the world. Hoki was sat in his
favourite chair when the horizon began to froth with Tsunami written
all over it.

As the thing got closer he marvelled at the amount of interesting stuff
it carried along. He had a fair idea that sifting through it afterwards
was not going to happen, a great shame. Hoki shut his eyes and recalled
something Mump had said on his death bed. "Life is mysterious, death is
a cinch". A powerful wetness swept across him with surficidal magnitude
and Hoki held his breath.

TO BE CONTINUED....