emptiness
At first they didn’t say much with their mouths or hands. But their bodies yelled out—their faces furrowed, their shoulders hunched, their legs shook. Both of them were focused on their own body and didn’t watch or listen to the other in attempt to connect, but by way of defence. Strangers have said more words to each other in less time, though with less communicated in more time, but at least with an attempt to connect, in time. Ravno’s fingers pinched the skin on his chin and pulled on it and let it go. His fingers worked their way up his jaw almost to where his black lobes suspended as cherry leaves.
‘Mister said today that there used to be way more people around than there are now,’ he said.
They spoke in parables when they both came together and didn’t know what to say first. He could’ve said, ‘I feel confused about our attempt to control the population of our islands. What do you think about it?’ with more appropriate transparency. But he continued, ‘And they had ways to control their population, though lots of people didn’t bother.’
‘Did they burn a symbol of iniquity into the flesh of the people that didn’t bother, and into their babies’ flesh?’
Keba’s voice was hot and unapologetic. She could’ve said, ‘I don’t feel our batsu omhaals are the best way to control the population. In fact they horrify me,’ and come closer to a connection with him than she did with the sting of her accusatory tone. She did sense the undesired effect it had in his defeated slouch, undesired yet satisfying, and for a short instance considered a softer approach.
The source of light had almost disappeared but still flung remnants through their insulate skies. Ravno pinched his chin a bit more—and swallowed. And unfolded his legs and brushed the red dirt off the side of his shins.
‘K, I guess at that point when there are so many people you wouldn’t even need the noh or any other signs because the people would be all around you and you wouldn’t really have a choice because what room would be left for the new ones?’ Ravno said.
He raised his brows like a mirror of the porter’s flying hands and his brain-hinge defined above his eyes like the morning ocean’s horizon.
He added, ‘I don’t understand how they just kept going and going like that, adding to an uncontrollable population.’
Keba said, ‘I could see us doing the same without some education about it. Don’t we just keep going with our own routine and keep to ourselves? If we do something wrong or are uncertain about a choice we make, don’t we feel pressure to emphasize the best parts and bury the worst? And we just keep doing what we think is best.’
Ravno took the liberty to attempt some transparency. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean if we actually talk about the stuff we struggle with, then other people who struggle with those same things will find support through us,’ Keba said, ‘or be fortunate enough to avoid them before they reach the same point. Like how people struggling to care for their children feel pressure to show that nothing is wrong and then other people who shouldn’t have any children are disillusioned into thinking they should.’ She paused but still breathed as if talking in streams. ‘Or what if I told you about how my parents ran away with their third child and abandoned my saudara and me? Maybe then you’d be more sensitive to how I feel about the batsu omhaals.’
Even if he could switch with her at that moment it wasn’t necessary to feel her anguish as it poured down her face and between her fingers. One third of him recognized the need to hold her and have it pour over his shoulder, but two thirds left him to hug only his knees and wonder why he hesitated.
After she steadied her breath, she described to him how she used to have a second name: Karan. So her short name used to be Keba, not K. Her mat and ottsa forced her and her saudara to drop the Karan and create for themselves a different circumstance. Her parents pulled away into a pale and cloudless evening sky, leaving her as K.
Oh, K, please care for your saudara, her mat had been thinking in her conscious thoughts. Under those thoughts, safely tucked from her conscious cognition, her mind had added, And come find us when you can.
5/ mati
Ravno’s descent quickens
Two nights after Ravno’s uncomfortable dream with awful vibrations, Helena told him she was expecting twins. This, he knew, would bring her family over the limit of two children. Ravno also knew the batsu omhaal would crush the tender core of his saudari; the glaring noh would sit beneath her once-happy curls. The Kawani’s proclamation would echo forever round her once-peaceful mind. But Ravno heard the news with a detached disinterest. He was unable to show sympathy, though he knew he ought to, like when he wasn’t able to touch Keba as she dissolved in the cadaverous dusk. Beside Helena, Sebastian sat as an oak among oaks—still, silent, defined yet invisible.
Leaving Sebastian and Helena and her heavy heart and hatch, Ravno headed to the east-side beach to see something remarkable. He hoped to make something remarkable happen, but at the very least to see it. The primed sun and sand waited expectantly. A tarn cut blue and dove into the sea. Ravno’s feet toyed absently in the rough coast soil, but it hardly distracted his mind. He waited for the remarkable nothing. Tears piled up as his eyes hovered where Keba had stood there on the beach four months ago. He bit the inside of his lip and drew and released a sharp breath. He had created the rift between Keba and himself. This difficulty was far harder to accept than if caused by another. His own actions were possibly what held him back from the ability to switch at all. He wondered if he had even made up the experience, though there were legitimate proofs that he had switched. But makian, why doesn’t it just leave me alone? he thought. Maybe it has and now I’m done with it and just like everybody else.
Though Ravno presumed he probably could still switch, a taste like burning milk simmered in the bottom of his throat and kept him from exploring it past the thought stage. It was an invisible suffocation; he wanted to switch but he could not. He wanted the situation with Keba to happen one way, but because of his own actions it happened a different way. He could not do much about it now. Ravno felt there should be some action he could take, but that particular thought brought him back to thinking about what he wanted in the first place, and he got the burning milk taste again in the bottom of his throat. He stood on the beach in the evening sun, outwardly apathetic as Keba had said.
Out with the old, in with the new
At a point in time, yesterday becomes today. Mr. Sunshine held this and other concepts carefully between his large hands and flung them high in the air, in the center of the seven, and let them land haphazardly, like birdseed, and allotted recklessly among their minds.
‘Despite their advanced technology and knowledge that enabled them to plant and harvest good, pure foods,’ Mr. Sunshine said, ‘they still added unneeded chemicals and preservatives to their diet. They sustained comical infrastructure for living spaces and food sourcing—all again in the name of the most Holy Profit. They had much to learn but it was too late in the end. People got larger and things got hotter. The solar storms stripped their simul-suns; the seas and volcanoes vanquished their over-valued dirt. They took to the caves and thus the time of the Ada Era began when our species was beaten down to focus on only one thing: survival.’
The porter raked his eyes over their faces. He noted Ravno’s face held less color but more contrast than usual. He continued.
‘Before the period of survival they had viewed their world as infinite, their spirits as infinite, yet tangible life as extremely finite between birth and death. We are the opposite: the world is finite, our spirits are finite, yet our lives are infinite as we tread the red earth.’
Mr. Sunshine paused.
Yolotli hesitated, then asked, ‘Don’t… we also… begin through conception and die through death?’
‘Hardly. Yes, we do, Yolo, but it’s how we react to that span in comparison, and to the impact we leave behind, that differs. The beginning of life, for the ancients, was through the birth canal. Then the middle
, with fear, and necessary frameworks to rectify death. Then it was the end in their distraught finality, when they died. Whereas we start as mere stars in our mat’s womb and never really end, as our life continues everywhere we’ve walked. When we die and are consumed by the birds don’t our footsteps still remain?’
Hardly, Ravno thought. Our footsteps dissolve in the weather and our pieces are spread with the flight of the crows.
How Keba and Ravno reunite
That evening the full moon and an empty heart filled the insulate Wawasen sky like a predictable lovers’ ballad. Oh heart, canst thou find it within thee to merely repeat yonder moon’s reflected light, as to brighten darkest valleys of love’s abstraction? Cosmic brilliance laughed in reply, Hark! Dost thou conceive mine light be held so greedily? And though reflected light of moon’s face showed Ravno his muse, thereupon the ballad, Ravno’s heart yet sulked, layered with a despondent lacquer.
After the historia forum, when the porter mentioned the ancients’ retreat to the caves, Ravno disembarked from a slow moving boto. He got off where the Olive Fork meets the Sunberry canal and, after a stop at the lavvy hill, spent a moment at the east beach. Rather than step foot on the sand and tide-wet rocks he merely glanced at it with the