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less treed beach side. Benches and stones were arranged as seats in a Wawasen circle. Two children leapt about in the salty ocean like fish in a net. As Dabi stood up and signed to the group, Ravno leaned over to Keba.

  ‘K, can you tell me what she’s saying?’

  She looked at him in surprise but slid closer to quietly interpret what was being signed.

  Dabi’s hands moved solemnly. ‘We’re a small group but we have heart and we are connected to our Mat, the earth on which our feet are planted,’ she signed. ‘We are connected to each other. Each one of you here forms the collective reason why we gather.’

  Both her hands came to rest briefly on her belly and she breathed deeply, in then out, her hands rising then falling. She patiently sought the eyes of every one of them, then resumed.

  ‘If my father was a third child he would have been sterilized, along with his siblings and parents, and I would not have been born. And, thanks to the Eleven’s coarse and bygone approach to human relations, if the father of one of you sitting here was the third child he would have been sterilized and you would not be here either. For that I would be incomplete and this island and this earth would be missing your jibana.’

  Keba wasn’t able to include everything of the monologue, unaccustomed to putting concepts from sign into spoken words. Though, she felt grateful for the concentration; it helped mask some of the heavy cramps of her cycle and her concern about Ravno’s sign language illiteracy. She wondered where he had been all his life. But she did convey most of the points so Ravno understood why they gathered and had a more complete experience of this woman who stood in the circle. Dabi’s arms and face and signing space transformed the commonplace. Her scar just sat there, a dangling string of kelp. Or was it a vein?

  An abrupt southern breeze swept across the beach. The behaved part of Dabi’s hair, which was leeward, held its ground, but her jungle weeds danced about atop her head.

  Dabi continued, ‘And worse, my saudari, even if your father was the first or second child, but had a third sibling, he would still have been sterilized. The Eleven, with their batsu omhaals and deferentectomies, extinguish the potential life held within all the male children. They disrespect the child’s ability to be conscientious in their own family choices. Yes, we do agree with keeping a reasonable cap on the amount of people within our archipelago, in order to foster the greatest health among us all. We also believe that, through education, we can make these wise decisions—two kids has proven over the years to be sustainable.’ Dabi looked around the circle in earnest. ‘But it’s an average: some have two, some three, some none. What if the second child happens to be twins, making it three? What if someone has children in a third or fourth relationship? How do we lay such absolute punishment on such a delicate matter that has such a hazy circumscription? We cannot so strictly define what a family will be until it is. It’s insensitive, unpractical, inhumane, and barbaric—at least the way the Group of Eleven executes it.’

  Ravno wondered if Dabi had any better ideas about how to control the amount of people that were born each year. He reflected that without Keba leaning with her fierce sage hair that sometimes brushed his ocean spray, and her hand like cinnamon that dusted his knee—when it pressed now and again to emphasize a point—he would have slipped away to find his own beach. It was still early and he might catch a raccoon scampering around an ocean rock with mussel breath and tide-soaked breeches and belly. Keba could join him. They could play the surf together…. He tried to concentrate on the words, not the bodies. But the way she mirrored a salient Dabi-point by stressing her hand upon his leg made him think she was more inclined to Dabi’s philosophy than to his own. Keba reinforced this thought when she invited him to join her in three days to witness a batsu omhaal. She wanted him there so he could truly appreciate the Bhavata and its goals by viewing, first hand, the atrocities of public punishment. Ravno had viewed one ceremony long ago when he was just a snapper and too young to remember. He couldn’t refuse another opportunity to connect with her so he said yes and they parted.

  Aron chatted less on the ride home. Ravno looked at him.

  ‘Jasmin and Dabi are together,’ Aron said with a sulk when he sensed the inquiry.

  ‘Oh. So she doesn’t prize you after all. That is definitely unfortunate.’

  Aron looked at Ravno with hurt in his eyes. ‘You think this is funny?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no, it’s just that things seemed to be happening so quickly and you were just saying her name and biting her lip and so suddenly she’s unattainable.’ Ravno squished his lips into a thin line. ‘That is quite unfortunate, I’m not kidding.’ The crease in his forehead affirmed his sincerity, though the ocean spray mocked it. ‘But, the way these things go, it’s life at its best don’t you think?’

  Aron flicked his black frames almost constantly as the navita instructed the grebets to move away from this or that stop, west along Teratas and south down Duat Canal. Aron knew Ravno was right, tap-tap, that if each person gets exactly what he or she wants, life loses its appeal. The two young men sat in silence, each of their minds busy with the woman that could complete their jibana. Each man was stuck in a small pool of fear without the courage to mop it up and be done with it.

  2/ sagra

  Ravno’s experiences continue in the mercato

  Some days before the next historia forum and bulaniru’s full moon, in the late morning when the waxing gibbous wasn’t yet visible floating through Wawasen’s insulate skies, Ravno discovered he could in fact see through women’s eyes too—a note he planned to document in his progress report. The halibut bone lay expectantly, walnut blood dried to its point.

  He was among the tables in the Phoyara mercato, an open food market for those in the city that lacked supplies from their own pack gardens. A few people milled about and he noticed Kar conversing with a friend a few half-moon vegetable tables away. Ravno thought it strange she was not at the garden. As he set aside the red leaf amaranth and kolibri kohlrabi, which sat as proudly purple as his personal purple capa, Ravno gripped the wooden edge of the table with soil-stained hands and focused on Kar. He wasn’t looking at Kar and her friend but his mind was. His eyes fixed on the flat meristems of the kohlrabi on the table; the shoots hunted upward like cherry tree branches. He looked as if he were considering where to place the next vegetables from the trailer. He almost lost control when the feeling of ice spread at the back of his head and covered what seemed to be a larger area at the top of his spine.

  He wanted to watch himself instead—did he shiver or shake or look at all fake? Was there a bluish glaze on his eyes like a skin-shedding snake?

  Ravno emerged from his momentary relapse and found the step up again. He mentally took that step and switched with Kar to see her companion past her signing hands. He could see her friend’s face of concern and his hands of compassion.

  Ravno tried to sign through her, from the few signs he knew. He tried to make her say, My name is Ravno, with the ME and the NAME and the R and the A, like a mimicking game.

  Then Kar, and all her being, punched through Ravno, and all his thoughts, and he physically shook with all her emotion. He felt her anguish. He saw her hands and the way her eye gaze went this way and that, and he saw the characters of her narrative. But he didn’t understand her signs when she angrily protested the decision to brand them, her sweet saudari’s little children, and her jodoh-saudara and his big heart, crushed with his modest family into a statistical knot. Just one more deviant who couldn’t follow the rules. Ravno also didn’t comprehend as she yearned to protect her nephews and questioned the equity of crushing future, blameless lives. Kar envisioned the Ammit with the brand in his hand, behind the two older children—seven and not yet three—perhaps still crying from the sterilization process that very morning. The newborn, in his first weeks of life, dealt the brutal hand of justice through a tilt-shift lens. Ravno couldn’t see the meaning in Kar’s hands and face—he couldn’t see her face at all, in truth—bu
t he experienced it in her emotion. Not as though he read her thoughts, because then he would understand these things she said. He could only read her feelings as he looked through her eyes, tears misting, now flooding, now pouring down her face. He knew she would cry before she started, as her essence punched through his own. Ravno could hardly see the man in front of him, in front of her, through her lakes of despair.

  Again he stood by the kolibri kohlrabi, which was still purple and reaching. His fingers and bloodless knuckles still clutched the table, his feet still firmly set in the earth. Ravno breathed out weightily. His sudden fatigue prevented him from looking up to see Kar from his own eyes as she slowly departed with her friend, his hand on her shoulder. Ravno took the mustard and radishes from the trailer and put them on the table.

  Ravno brought the bicycle back toward Duat. He wove along the road between ash and elm, through the city centre where the great shale platform bides its time, and past the disfigured pacific red cedar. His ramshackle rims rode roughly past resident packs and carved snake trails into the dirt. A few people peppered the path and a feline darted into the underbrush. He towed his bare, black-dusted trailer and thought about the