Days after the festival, Fulong had all the sleepy, boarded-up eeriness of a midwestern farm town when the traveling circus unicycles away. Alighting on the train platform at night, I whistled through the station’s ghostly corridors to fill the air with something other than brine that fogged over my glasses. Not even an agent stood around to punch tickets. The night was for stowaways. Outside, the sober streets had a Sunday night’s hush, the cicadas were mum and the half moon in the sky was — missing?

“But the moon was so big last night in Taipei,” my friend perplexed later as we gathered bamboo and driftwood near the seawall.

It was the galumphing size of the last-seen moon that gave the disappearing act its flourish, on a scale so grand as making the pyramids vanish from behind a scrim.

Huddled around a crisp, orange campfire, whose smoke billowed northwestward out to sea and the shores of Aodi village (澳底), we lay on our backs determined to debunk the slight of hand and searched for the moon among the sky’s swirling clutter.

A picture book of myths, an old seafarer’s map, a farmer’s almanac, a fortuneteller’s crystal ball, loose pages from an unfinished absurdist play and a two-way mirror were all found hidden in the stars, but not the moon.

On such a clear night with the world at summer’s far aphelion, the tideless ocean became a reflecting pool. Rolling over the surface came a lone, dissident wave that unfurled a watery scroll onto shore.

“A speck in the sky,” the ebbing wave whispered, “we are.”

Then the water mirrored over, reticent as before. Only campfire sputters and wisps of the smokey wind sounded.