Sina's Eel Becomes the First Coconut

Sina finds the eel in the pool when she goes to bathe.

It is small at first — a freshwater eel, common enough in the pools near the village, nothing remarkable except that it does not flee from her. She brings it food. It comes to the sound of her voice. She names it and visits it daily and brings it fish and breadfruit and the things an eel eats when it is cared for. It grows.

Over months and then years, it grows beyond the size of any eel she has seen. It grows beyond the size of any eel anyone has seen. It fills the pool. When it moves, the surface of the water heaves. It watches her from the deep water with eyes that have become something other than an eel’s eyes. Sina begins to feel observed rather than greeted.

The eel declares its love.

The declaration terrifies her. Not because love is terrible — because the thing that loves her has grown into something she did not expect to create by feeding it, something that now makes demands of her that she cannot meet. The village elders agree: the eel must be killed before it kills someone.

Sina cannot do it herself. The chiefs organize it. The eel is taken from the pool.

In its dying moments, the eel instructs her. Not in pain — the instruction comes from whatever the eel has become, the divine thing that was always inside the creature she was feeding without knowing it. It tells her: take my head. Bury it in the ground near the house. Water it. Wait.

She does as she is told.

A plant grows. It grows rapidly, with a speed that ordinary plants do not have. It grows into a tree unlike any other tree in the landscape: tall, with a crown like a burst of living fronds, with nuts hanging beneath the crown in their green and brown and white stages. She has never seen this tree before. No one has.

When the first nut falls and she opens it, she finds inside it water — clear and sweet — and white flesh. She drinks the water. She eats the flesh. She understands that the eel’s love, which she could not return in the form he offered it, has been transformed into a form she can accept: sustenance. The eel who loved her has become the food that will feed her and her children and their children and the whole of the Pacific wherever people plant and tend and harvest what grew from his devotion.

She looks at the base of the nut before she drinks from it. Three dark circles there, at the end of the nut — two eyes and a mouth. The eel’s face. He is looking at her from inside the thing he became for her.

The coconut palm spreads across Polynesia. Wherever Polynesians voyaged, they brought coconuts — tucked in the hulls of canoes, planted on new islands as the first agricultural act after landing. Every palm grown from a coconut descended from Tuna’s head carries his face in the nut. Every person who has drunk coconut water in the Pacific is drinking from the eel who loved Sina and found the only way to give her what she needed.

The love story ends in transformation, not in union. The creature who loved her became more useful to her people dead than he could have been alive. This is one kind of love: the kind that survives its own impossibility by changing form, finding a way to keep giving even after the form the giving took is gone.