In the middle of the night one night, Vivian came storming into my room with a bucket. Suddenly, the lights were on and my senses were reactivated, all converging into the singular, heart-pounding experience of feeling like I’d missed my bus stop. 

 

“Look at this,” she said, and dropped the bucket in the gap between my legs. “Go on. Look at it.”

 

She was in her wetsuit, goggles strapped to her forehead, barefoot with a more-crazed-than-usual look in her eyes.  

 

“Vivian?” I said. “What time is it?”

 

“It’s 3:30,” she said. “Just c'mon. Look in the bucket.”

 

I told her I’d do it — but only on the condition that sometime in the near future, she’d commit to a discussion about setting some firm boundaries around sleeping hours. She considered my proposal, and then nodded.

 

“Yes, that’s fair.”

 

Something told me I’d probably want to be wearing pants when I saw whatever it was that was in the bucket. And, I’d never been righter about anything in my life. The moment she lifted the lid, I yipped and fell back, crashing hard into my dresser/mirror combination set. 

 

“Right?” Vivian said, and then again with more emphasis. “Right?”

 

“Vivian,” I gasped. “That’s a human head.”

 

“Exactly,” she said. “Now tell me what you notice about it.” 

 

The bucket was filled to the brim with water, through which I could see the face of a teenage girl with bright, emerald green eyes, and dark hair blooming in weightless tendrils. Her neck was severed in a clean line, just where her shoulders should’ve been.

 

“She looks alive,” I said. 

 

“Doesn’t she, though?” Vivian said, dreamily. “Perfectly preserved in every way, like not five minutes have passed in over five hundred years.”

 

I allowed that statement to hang in the air.

 

“Yep,” she said, making more of an effort to key me in. “Five hundred seven years, four months and ten days since the night she was murdered, I have found the long missing head of Haia Mahl, Queen Of The Nine Islands.” 

 

“Sweetie,” I said. “I think we need to call the police.”

 

“Huh?” she said. “Sweetie, no! No one can know about this! Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

 

I told her that I had, but that I had no idea what she was talking about. That the girl who’s head it was’s family was probably looking for her, and that even though I was sure they’d be sad she was dead, they’d still probably find some comfort in having her head back. 

 

“I already checked online,” Vivian said. “Not just for the islands, but for the whole country. No one fitting her description has gone missing any time in the last decade. And, here—”

 

She reached into her purse and pulled out a picture book called “Child Queen.”

 

“This old book of mine tells the whole story. Basically, after centuries of brutal warfare, all of The Nine Islands were united under the rule of the youngest queen in history, famous for her eyes that seemed to glow. She ruled for three years, until the foreign boats came. The foreign sailors acted like friends at first, but it was just their way of tricking her. Long story short, they killed her in her sleep and threw her body into the volcano."

​

She turned the pages, showing me the increasingly grim pictures as she went.

​

"But it doesn’t end there. Because, see? Upon hearing the prophecy of an old taro farmer, the captain of the foreigners, Malandro Ricardo, ordered his men to keep her head separate from the rest of her body. So they sealed it in an urn and dropped it into the ocean. The fear was that if they burned it, the smoke would release her consciousness into the sky and she’d become a god, cursing the bloodlines of her murderers for a thousand generations.”

 

“Milandro Ricardo?” I said. “You mean like the Ricardo Sugar Corporation? The mega-company that owns ninety percent of the real estate on the island, including my apartment complex?”

 

“Now you're getting it,” Vivian said. “The line is totally unbroken. The current CEO is his great great great great granddaughter. Ironically the youngest woman to ever head a fortune 500 company.”

 

The initial shock of being woken up had finally worn off, and I sat on the edge of the bed, next to the bucket, looking into the head’s unnaturally green eyes. Maybe sensing my doubt, Vivian grabbed my shoulder and kissed me with a swift whoosh of tongue.

 

“Sweetie,” she said. “This is important to me. Can I ask that you believe what I’m saying?”

 

It took roughly three seconds for me to realize how big of a jerk I was being, doubting my own girlfriend like that. I said yes, and the very next moment, someone rang my doorbell. Vivian’s head shot round like a startled cat. 

 

“Who would ring your doorbell at this hour?” she whispered.

 

My heart flounced. Of course, my first impulse was to say it was the police, but I quickly remembered what I’d just agreed to do.

 

“What are the odds Ricardo’s people have been keeping an eye on this head for all of these years?” I said. “And that they’re now aware that you have it?”

 

The doorbell rang again, quickly followed by hard knocking and muffled male voices. 

 

“I’d say the odds are extremely low but that somehow that’s exactly what’s happening,” she said. “And it’s a good thing you put your pants on, because we’re about to jump out of your bedroom window.”

​

I helped Vivian secure the lid back onto the bucket, and together we climbed down the vine lattice wall, from second floor down to a narrow walkway between two buildings. 

 

“Don’t worry,” Vivian said, squeezing through a row of humming air conditioning units. “Maddie is waiting in the car. We were planning on going tonight anyway.”  

 

“Going?” I said.

 

“To the volcano, of course,” she said, and flipped around to face me, bright with purpose. “Tonight is the night Haia Mahl becomes a god!”

 

When we got to the front gate, no one was there. The whole street was eerily quiet except for the softly puttering engine of Vivian’s official scuba van. Maddie, her best friend and sometimes sidekick, was sitting behind the steering wheel reading French comics. She said she’d been there the whole time, and that she hadn’t seen anyone else go up to my apartment.

 

We drove for over an hour into the rainforest, winding upward along the slopes of the great black mountain. 

 

“It’s a blue moon tonight,” Maddie said, leaning forward over the dashboard, looking up through the scrolling canopy. 

 

The sky was a deep shade of indigo, making the basalt fields and banana leaves seem to glow. The pavement turned to gravel, and then the road came to a dead end, lit yellow by flashing barricades. Vivian handed out industrial strength flashlights, and led us along a footpath, cradling the urn under one arm.

 

“We’re not supposed to be here,” she said. “So if you see any cops, just say we’re looking for Maddie's lost ferret.”

 

We walked for another hour, until the sky began to lighten in the east. The volcano rose ahead of us, its slopes emerging from the darkness one ridge at a time, until we could see a faint orange glow at the bottom of a sheer slope. There were no birds or insects, and everything smelled like burnt matches.

 

“This is it,” Vivian said. “This is where the fuckfaces threw her body in.” 

 

“Look,” Maddie said, and pointed to a distant ridge on the far side of the crater.   

 

There were figures there, the silhouetted shapes of seven or so men against the pink sunrise, all wearing frocks and top hats. 

​

"Who are they? Ricardo's men?"

 

“I don't know," I said. "But they're watching us."

 

“So let them watch,” Vivian said, and tossed the urn out over the ledge.  

 

It toppled down the slope, skipping from one terrace to the next, then igniting into bright flames as it came to the magma’s edge. The molten earth seemed to reach for it, expanding outward and pulling it in, like a mother cradling a baby. I grasped Vivian’s hand in mine, and we watched together as the solid metal turned to rising smoke and emerald green vapor.   

​

"Thank you," she said, squeezing my hand.

​

"My liege," I said, squeezing hers back. 

​

Across the way, one of the men in top hats shot a signal flare into the sky, bursting into silver glitter and crackling like a far off machine gun. He and the others stood still for a while longer, and then sank silently behind the horizon. I never found out for sure who rang my doorbell that night, but I’m pretty sure it was them.