There was nothing particularly dramatic about this evening, at least in any typical sense. Children were playing in a small smoking area, erected three days prior. Pak Junowo was approaching the glass doors in his white-walled and well-lit sitting room, before locking the doors and retreating back into the depths of his house. And violet, green, and ripe-blue lights of an aquarium reflected off the inside of the slats of window glass in the Dayaji house sitting rooms.

The largest of koi fish in the aquarium darted from the water's ceiling down into the pebbles at the aquarium's bottom. Two days ago scientists confirmed that a large fish, called an opah, was in-fact warm-blooded. The fish was known to live in the deep oceans around the world. It was also now known to circulate blood, slightly warmer than the ocean water around itself, throughout its body by mechanism of a pumping heart.

The children ran, with enthusiastic volume, down a narrow alley between the Dayaji home and the neighboring home, on the down-hill side. The light was now out in Pak Junowo's sitting room. The largest koi thought, as its mouth breached the water's ceiling, 'why do I not have a name?' Then its momentum gave way to another force, and the full of its body sank back into the water. An evening call-to-prayer had begun to play over loud speakers at a large, green masjid up the hill from the Dayaji home.

Sporadic traffic rumbled up the hill, but other sounds faded. A trickle of water cascading in the aquarium, to aerate the water, filled the Dayaji sitting room. Eight faces from three generations, in a photo above the Dayaji guest-room door, looked faithfully, duly forward. The smoking area, facing the Dayaji sitting room from across the street, stood, erected in readily-available, durable, five-inch diameter bamboo, empty. And hundreds of thousands of beating hearts sailed through the oceans.

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The ordering of the Desa Cycle was crafted using sequences generated by Random.Org

disclaimer: This work does not reflect the United States Peace Corps, the United States government, nor the government of Indonesia.