Switch

jam-jam bat dari ghatato bosgar divasana nu bulaniru ini sesuai dari tame, misschien. Dari candras amaiera fasea kami avasini atton. Cahaya, Yerek.’

  Which meant:

  ‘…you can come to Santulita and join us here instead. Perhaps in the first hours of the fifth days’ waning this month of bulaniru suits you. We’ll be waiting with the last of the moon. Cahaya, Yerek.’

  ‘He’s probably still stuck in shavasana…. Hey, Ravno?’ Aron chuckled as his friend’s eyes shot over with guilt and surprise. And anxiety—or that was just an aftertaste from the switch with Dabi. Ravno recognized that she did seem apprehensive or carried a feeling of doubt.

  Aron looked at Ravno. ‘I was just saying, I’m sure some of the Eleven have had more than one sibling, or had one kid too many themselves and yet no batsu omhaals.’ Aron bent his torso forward. ‘If we can prove and expose it they’d lose credibility and we could avoid the tragedies—at least long enough to come up with an alternative, eh?’ Aron’s weak, if not humorous, conspiratorial tone suddenly exhausted Ravno altogether.

  ‘I need some time to think,’ Ravno said as he got to his feet. Aron turned his focus back to Keba and pursued his thoughts while Ravno walked straight for Dabi, where she stood in the low, rounded corner of the hut.

  ‘What are you reading?’ he blurted out, like coughing in a silent crowd, or one-way kissing.

  Dabi rolled the papyrus sheet shut with deliberation. She smiled as she turned her head and her jungle-weed hair swayed, as if it laughed at him.

  ‘I am curious, my friend Ravno, what is your impression of batsu omhaals? I understand you observed as Zus and her family became permanently marked with the noh. I am sure you have constructed my perspective of all of this, but what is yours?’

  His forehead crease lost its depth as his whole scalp and ears sunk backward. His eyes, large as clay saucers, became less large and lost their usual sympathy. His fingers danced and careened as much as they could, anchored to his hand. He swallowed.

  ‘Well, I’m still thinking about things,’ he said, ‘and don’t necessarily think it’s the best idea, but you have to wonder if there wasn’t anything done would we toss children down volcanoes and start using muh-nee and following time as if there was nothing else to do?’ He later realized that what he meant to say was, ‘People should follow the rules.’ When he realized that, he repeated it to himself again and again, People should follow, people should follow the rules, follow the rules people, should people follow the rules.

  But it wasn’t what he said and so Dabi replied, ‘Ravno, I appreciate your jibana so please do not take offense to my observations. I believe our society certainly has much to learn, as we sterilize innocent kids and are unable to share what is truly on our minds. You are limited in what you see and I encourage you to look at not only what you perceive but what you actually see.’

  Dabi left him. His eyes were fixed on the muddy, bark tangles of curved wall in the corner where she had been standing.

  But people should follow the rules.

  A discussion with Temperance

  When Ravno arrived at Helena and Sebastian’s pack he found Temperance sitting by the entrance on her blue capa. Oddly shaped flowers lay all around her. He saw a white-stemmed one with thick green petals, a vine-like plant with purple-y circles joined by stringy fiber the length of an arm, and a hairy yellow star with black polyps. But the well-used dandelion made him smile.

  ‘Ra! We found new flowers and look at them all. This one’s an eye rope and this one’s a hairy yellow star.’

  ‘Did you name them? Can you eat any of these?’

  ‘No they’re just for looking. You can eat the dandelion, but not this one okay?’

  ‘Ha ha, all right. Where’s Helena, Temper?’

  ‘She’s making love with Seb.’

  As he sat on the dirt beside her gallery, Ravno wondered if he could switch with Sebastian or Helena even though the redwood bark walls stood between where they lay. He wondered how close in proximity he had to be to switch with them. It infringed the boundary with his saudari in this case, so he focused on the flowers.

  ‘May I pet the hairy star?’ Ravno said.

  ‘Ra, it’s a hairy yellow star. It doesn’t like to be pet but you can sing to it.’

  ‘Does it have eyes?’

  ‘Ra, the eye rope has eyes.’

  He laughed and lifted the rope-of-eyes at her beckoning.

  ‘I wonder if I can switch with it?’ he said.

  He meant to say that last bit in his head. But Temperance was lenient of such oversights. Her young, acute mind would follow his lead, of course. Or maybe not.

  ‘How do you switch with it?’ she asked.

  So her mind did follow his lead. She lifted the end that dangled dangerously close to the hairy yellow star.

  ‘It doesn’t like to be pet, remember? Even by other flowers.’

  He looked at her busy hands and her flat brown chest and darkest of dark curls and the plastic amulet that hung along the part in her hair, and he carefully avoided the hairy yellow star.

  ‘What I do,’ he said, ‘is I look through its eyes. Though this one is tricky because it has so many. Which ones should I look through, I only have two?’

  ‘You can look through that one, and that one.’ Her fairy fingers put a spell on the chosen eyes. ‘Can you switch with my eyes?’ As she asked him, her hands instinctively caressed the dandelion. She picked it up, squeezed it, and placed it by her side.

  ‘Okay Temper. You look at a flower and I’ll switch with you and tell you which one you’re looking at and you tell me if I’m right.’

  She transferred her eyes carefully between the dandelion, the white-stemmed flower, Ravno, the eye rope and the hairy yellow star. He could’ve guessed which one she looked at without the full procedure of switching but he savored the feeling of the icy pinch and finding the window, and he found her passion infectious. She was excited for him, far as he could tell, and he wanted to cry for the joy of sharing it with somebody. He loved her even more, if it was possible, and decided one day he’d teach this bottle of sun how to switch. Perhaps he could learn from her what to do with it.

  ‘Do you switch with animals?’ Temperance asked.

  ‘No, not with animals, just people.’ But he had to admit it was a good idea to try.

  ‘Well, what do you see?’

  ‘I see what the other people see,’ Ravno said.

  ‘What do they see?’

  Again he felt the albatross—his cryptic ability to see what other people see. The heaviness draped around his shoulders, despite Temperance’s neutrality and how unnecessary it was to prove anything to her, in her mood.

  ‘They see what’s before them….’ Ravno caught himself, as he knew this was not always the case. ‘They see what they’re looking at: sometimes the sky or their feet on the ground, or sometimes other people.’

  ‘If I was seeing what you see, I’d see me,’ she said.

  His heart lifted from its groveling divot in his chest and his smile widened. ‘Yes you would, you’d see a beautiful little girl asking question after question.’

  ‘Can I try?’

  ‘Ha, well, maybe. Yes, you can try but I’m not so sure you’ll see anything, Temper.’

  ‘I’ll see me.’

  After she tired of pretending that she was seeing through his eyes, she asked him, ‘What does it look like through K’s eyes?’

  Ravno put down the green-petaled plant and paused. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t tried that yet.’

  ‘Really? I’d look through her eyes, Ra.’

  Suddenly, he realized he had. Keba was the first one, on the beaches there in the morning three months ago, when he fell headlong into the honeyed waters that faced Peninnah.

  On the beaches, in the morning, three months prior

  A fan of glowing, finger-like clouds advanced over tangled forests and buildings on the head of Peninnah Island. The giant cloud-fan prodded small waves again
st the neighboring shores of Lurruna where Keba stood, face in the wind and ankles in the biting cold of the Pacific Ocean. Salt clung inside her nostrils and the sea shanty of a morning gust moved across the two east-side beaches. Keba’s second hand plugged her nostrils and lightly blew to clear the air in her head. She wondered how she looked as she stood there in the surf with her hair a tired eagle’s nest.

  A grey crow picked at sand mites and stepped, without grace, across the beach. Its trident tracks mingled with a raccoon paw’s quintet. Their footsteps framed the spot where mussels lay on the beach with their innermost secrets unceremoniously offered to the morning sun, which intensified the sea spice. The crow swayed its feathered shoulders and nodded its crown, then flew from rock to rock to hop and stop on the pile that separated the two beaches. The crow pitched its head to eye a man’s prints that led to the water on the far beach. Keba’s focus shifted from the crow to the man. She looked back over the sea, to the ball of fire that appeared in the east. The sun rose from wrist to palm to dispersing sky fingers in a frenzy of hazy reds and orangey pinks.

  Ravno caught the bird’s eye. Before long, his attention shifted to the woman. He saw the blonde double fishbone bundled at her neck, where the asparagus-green capa slung around her trim shoulders and clasped in the front. He saw the black skirt hang over her legs, which stood in the ocean like his. But he was as naked as an arbutus tree that sat high up the beach and safe from the tide. Ravno’s thumb flicked his forefinger, and his forefinger flicked