The story of The Luna Laguna
The Luna Laguna is where the lake stops being a lake. The water opens out and slows down and shallows over pale sand, and it does the one thing no water further up ever managed: it goes warm. Everything above here came off cold mountain rock. This is the first warm water anybody meets, and warm water is a different kind of sleepy altogether. It is also the most colourful water in the world — pale aquamarine over the sand at the edge, deepening through turquoise, going calm dark blue where it opens out towards the sea — and the colour of the water is the whole of the place. Not the rocks. Not the reeds. The water. The name arrived the way the good ones do, which is to say it was already there. Iguana Nirvana lives in the laguna, and nirvana was the sleepy word all along, and it rhymes with both halves. Luna is the moon in the water: the Sleepy Lights are seen here first as a reflection, before anybody thinks to look up. But the middle of the laguna is only where the iguana floats. The place itself lives along the edge — the margin, the shallows, the line where water becomes land, with a pale crust of salt drying on the stones. The salt is why the near edge is theirs: Flamingo to Sleep stand in the ankle-shallow water there, asleep on one leg, dusty rose running into violet along the line of them, because saline water is what a flamingo needs and they were here before anybody thought to put them here. An ease of Sleepatees drifts a little further out in the warm shallows, breathing out of time with one another. Further along again, entirely on his own, the Still Heron stands and does not move. None of them takes the slightest notice of any of the others, and that is the arrangement.
Stories from The Luna Laguna
Nothing from here has been published yet. The Luna Laguna is still being filmed — the honest kind of gap, like the route’s “resident owed”.