by Ivana Skye
“That was sappy,” I responded.
Well, gosh, I’m sorry I’m being such a good friend-
I took a breath in, a little suddenly, a little scared. Because I’d been told sarcastic sorrys before. More than a few times. ‘Sor-ry, I’m just trying to help you.’ She said it when I was crying and there was dappled light in the forest and apparently any amount of yelling was appropriate if it got me to walk faster-
Fuck. Sorry for real, Zel said, realizing what had happened.
“Fuck triggers,” I muttered, not even remembering to accept their apology. I was more than a little out of it, and in the space of just a few seconds too.
Fuck the one who caused you to have them.
“Yay, abuse,” I said. I was apparently in an intense sarcastic muttering mood.
You know I’d punch her for you if I had fists, right?
“Yup,” I said. “You’ve told me before.”
Good. Because I would. Like, I’m not gonna complain about being a lake, I’m pretty cool with it, I get to hang out all day and feel waves on my surface and talk to people like you-
“Zel, does anyone else actually pray to you?”
Oh shush, they said, and I had my answer. Besides, I’m honored to be your friend. So. Anyway, what was I saying?
“Not having fists.”
Yeah. Well. That. I’d punch her.
I chuckled a little. “I wanna punch her too.” And I looked at the ocean, and nodded sagely. Very sagely. “Do you have any more serious—or, uh, not serious works too I guess—stuff to say, or should I cut this off so I can scream again without screaming in your ears?”
I don’t have ears.
I rolled my eyes. “That’s an overplayed joke.”
I don’t care.
I laughed. “Well, talk later?”
Absolutely. I’m always here. Contact me whenever. Byeeee.
I smiled and cut off the connection with a few claps. That had always been my method, for whatever reason.
With that, I looked down and scanned the rocks on the beach. Some hung out in big groups in less sandy patches. Some others were others stuck in sand, making their own shoreline patterns just below where the tide would hit them. There were white ones that weren’t really rocks, but coral. Grey ones, black ones, patterned ones; I had names for some of these, but not all.
I picked up a not-quite-black rock. I held it in my hands and almost growled, trying to remember the specifics of what Zel had just accidentally made me think of. My mind wanted to turn me away from the past, to make me believe everything was always fine. But I wanted to think about this, and I wanted to get angry, and I wanted to vent it out of my system.
So I let myself feel it, the way I was alone in the forest even though I was with someone. That day, it was hiking that she thought I needed to do better, in order to … in order to … even remembering it, I lost the logic she’d tried to feed me. In order to be better? In order to be good enough? Other days it was baking, writing, speaking up in class. There was dappled light. Dappled light.
I gritted my teeth, pressed my hand against the rock, let the moment build up in me with a breath, and—
“GYAAAAAAAAAAR!” I screamed, throwing the rock as far as I could.
Ka-sploosh, it went, and I felt a little better.
Sometime later—I wasn’t always even slightly on top of keeping track of time, and that was especially true on days without school—I started making it back home.
Only problem with that was, home was toward the mountains, which also meant toward the forest, and I had just been thinking about bad things that happened in a forest. So I was a little shaky while walking, and lip-bitey, and trying to keep my eyes toward the ground to avoid seeing trees.
Yes, it was that bad. I was an outright mess.
So, mostly, I was trying very hard to distract myself. It was going okay. I looked at some cool rocks, and some flower petals, because we were getting in the season for those to be on the ground. But there weren’t that many petals. Mostly, there were pointy rocks. I was alright with pointy rocks.
Looking up, I tried to catch some glimpses of the sky while avoiding noticing trees, too. I was empyrean, for Vitalities’ sake—my declared gender was specifically in alignment with the sky. Not that I was ever entirely sure that I was really that empyrean deep down: was my gender actually cool sky stuff? Who knew? Either way, it seemed to fit me better than either of the other actually interesting genders, the land gender called tellurian or the wind gender called aeolian. And it was definitely better than those two really boring and vague genders of male and female. Seriously, what did those two even mean?
Well, I knew one thing they didn’t mean: trees. With just-growing leaves. Making certain parts of the ground lighting all dappled-y and stuff.
I took in a kinda sharp breath; I felt a little sick. I’d been trying to deal with my feelings on my own for hours, probably, but I figured that it was maybe time to try contacting Zel again. They’d said a thousand times over that it was okay for me to do so, so I didn’t need to worry about it. “Zel,” I said, knowing that name as them, them as their name, those two things as synonymous. “I’m having a bad day.” As if that wasn’t obvious.
Cijaya, I heard them say deep in me, but then-
The sound of running, and my five-year-old cousin right in front of me. They lived in the same house as me, but I didn’t think I’d quite walked all the way there yet. Had I? I blinked, and it turned out there was a familiarity to the patterns of grass and rock and bushes. I wasn’t all the way back yet, but I was close.
And then, another person running: my aunt, looking out of breath. “Orange,” she said, half shouting.
I twitched, attentive at the sudden saying of my nickname, the only name for me that just about anyone knew or used. “Mm?”
She pointed where my cousin had run off, and where it looked like their twin was also playing. It took me at least a few seconds to process what might be the issue with two five-year-olds running quickly around the woods, but at the same time, I figured they probably wouldn’t be able to hurt themselves too badly. So what was the problem?
My aunt said something while I was thinking, and I blinked, kind of certain I heard the word help, but not too certain about any of the other words. I was just starting to process the rest of the sentence when she said it again: “help me out here.”
Oh. Right. That would even be an obvious thing for her to say, too.
But I looked at the sky and the angle of sunlight was slanted and I remembered that I’d said I was going to make dinner tonight, so shouldn’t I do that soon? “I was heading back to make din-“ I started to say.
“They’ve already licked a slug today,” my aunt said, probably exasperated. “Stop them, Orange.”
Okay, my own childhood adventures were enough to tell me that, yeah, licking slugs could go badly. So I nodded and said “sure,” and looked at the two kids. I started running toward them, my aunt somewhere behind.
Of course, they ran directly away, right in front of where I was walking. I would probably need strategy to do this, I realized. Which was hard to think of while I was spending so much mental effort trying not to trip on rocks, which I always found to be not the easiest while running.
Try approaching from the left, something that vibrated the bright parts of me said, and I realized my connection with Zel was still open.
“Thanks,” I muttered, resolving to try.
So I started running a slightly different direction, while the kids just kept going the same direction they were already going and, hm. It turned out Zel’s idea was pretty good. I veered back right, hoping to cut them off, but I was getting really tired of running, and one of the kids—Senni—would be in grabbing distance if I jumped, so maybe…
Well, a rock caught on my foot and I vaulted forward, body parallel to the ground. I slammed down, my skin already stinging with the contact and maybe planning to bleed. But my arm had been pointed forward
, and my hand had done a grabbing motion, and well—somehow, luckily, I had Senni’s arm in my hand.
“Please stop,” I said, my voice muffled a little by the ground before I bothered looking up to actually be understandable. “See, if you run around really fast you can hurt yourself, like I just did. And I have twelve years of experience on you.”
“But, cuz,” Senni said, whining, “we just wanted to have fun…”
“Yeah, I know, but there’s a whole bunch of rocks out here, and we’ve got a fallow area in our garden. If you go back home, you could probably dig around and find worms.”
Senni’s eyes lit up at that, and their twin Malil walked over with that same expression. I would have fistpumped, if I wasn’t in such an awkward position. I blinked and let go of Senni’s arm, and the two were already gone, running off back home. Fast enough to hurt themselves, still, but at least they might be playing while sitting soon. It was the best I could do.
I just hoped that my aunt thought the same.
I sat up, preparing for admonition, and my aunt walked up to me and said: “Thanks.”
“Really?” I asked. “I mean, they’re still running, so … aren’t you going to say I did it wrong?”
She shrugged. “At least they’re going home. And I mean, I know I did some kind of wild things at their age, and I never got that badly hurt … it’s just harder when I’m their parent, you know? I worry. But they’ll be safer back there, and if we’re lucky, maybe their tongues will even stop being numb before it’s time to eat some of your food.”
Numb? I wondered at that for a second, before remembering that they’d supposedly licked a slug. Right. Slugs do that.
I nodded and started walking back home, figuring that I should probably make a more solid plan for this food I was going to make. And maybe get the blood off my knee. That would be good.
I wasn’t having the most focused day, I reflected while sitting on the roof, dinner already an hour past. I’d been halfway through dinner by the time I remembered to disconnect my connection with Zel: they hadn’t really been saying anything, so I’d actually forgotten the connection was there.
I sighed, the two moons both out and lighting the panes of the rooftop nicely. If I was this bad today, I’d probably be much worse tomorrow, when I had to actually go to school. There was only one month left, but that didn’t make me feel better.
I met her in school, after all.
“Orange,” my father said, and I almost jumped before realizing that he was just standing below me.
He was only one of my fathers, actually. I had two, both using that boring male gender. But he was the one I called father; the other was dad. My father was by far the more informal and fun-loving of the two; I started calling him the more formal term as a sarcastic move when I was younger, and it just stuck.
Kind of like how my nickname of Orange stuck.
But I was zoning out on the roof, and I was pretty sure my father’d just said something. “What?” I asked.
“I was just asking if you were okay, or wanted to talk, or something,” he said.
Why was everyone asking me that today?
“Like about Sā,” he continued, and I didn’t hear the rest of what he said because her name made me feel sick. Much worse, it also made me feel a longing, like I wanted to be with her, and like I’d failed her. Somehow.
I blinked away tears and ended up hugging my knees.
“Or is it not a talking kind of day?” My father asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. I said that a lot. “It’s nice on the roof.”
“Weren’t you trying to stop your cousins from doing dangerous things just earlier?” he asked, playfully. At least I hoped it was playful. I hoped he wasn’t accusing me.
I shrugged. I couldn’t think of any words that would actually respond to what he said, so instead I said: “You know I’m probably going to leave this place, right?”
He smiled, and nodded. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I know. Probably even as soon as school ends?”
“Probably,” I agreed.
He kept smiling, not trying to get me to stay, not trying to get me to stay. “It’s a time-honored tradition to do a post-adolescence adventure, you know.”
“Aren’t I still technically in adolescence—”
“Either way,” my father said, shrugging. “I might have recommended it to you myself, if you had no idea what you wanted to do after school. If things had been different.”
I hugged my knees tighter. “Yeah.”
And if things had been different, maybe I’d have told a single one of my relatives my actual name.
3
Nena
seeds of grain floating down a river
I crested a hill some forty miles away from Ta Ralis, and in the sunlight I smiled. Here, at the top of the hill overlooking a valley, and on its north-facing slopes, there was something I hadn’t seen for months: grass that wasn’t buried under snow.
So this was what traveling north at the beginning of spring was like. I’d never departed at quite this time before, and I found that I liked it.
I focused on the liking of it as much as I could and so I walked down the hill with excitement in my steps. I walked toward direct sunlight and towards heat.
I should have expected that a small stream would cross the path at the bottom of the valley. But instead I almost ran into it; I’d been going down the hill a little faster than might be recommended. I laughed at myself, and began analyzing the best stones to hop across to continue.
None of the stones in the stream were all that close to each other, and so this was a challenge. That made me smile.
I was just about to cross when it occurred to me that my water bottles were nearly empty and that this was a stream, and that I should probably filter some more water. I quickly noticed where the water was fastest and deepest, easiest to filter from. It sparkled in the sun there, perhaps a foot away from the pebbles of the bank. I leaned down and took off my back, and began rummaging in it for my filter.
And suddenly I heard that sound people sometimes make when they press their tongue against the top of their mouth and release. A form of tsk. And so I turned around, and I saw someone. They were tall, their skin light as most clays, their hair tied up in a low-maintenance puff. And they had ice-green eyes, a rarity.
But while I noticed those things, I mostly noticed that they were there, walking, shrugging as they did, existing. A person. I hadn’t seen one this close for a few days, and I was getting antsy.
“Hey,” I said without a thought. “Where are you from?”
The person blinked and moved their head in a strange way. Did I surprise them? Or was it something else? I had no way of telling.
“Well,” they said, literally showing their teeth. “Immassa.”
I continued with my attempt at conversation as if they did not sound quite likely annoyed. I’d found over time that ignoring tone and subtext got me a lot farther than trying desperately to hear and account for it, and inevitably hearing annoyance and disappointment in places they were never actually meant. “Hm,” I said. “I’ve actually never heard of that town.”
They sighed, deep and long and through their teeth. “‘Course you haven’t,” they said. “But fine, I’ll bite too—where are you from?”
“Ta Ral-“
“Oh, fuck you,” they said, crossing the line from subtext to text in less than a second. “Immasa’s barely a few days north of your city, but of course you can’t even be bothered to…” they shook their head and made a sigh that might have been a growl.
“Uh,” I said, with a very explanatory raise of my eyebrows.
“No one, no one,” they said in a sing-song voice to what I suspected might have been an actual tune, “has ever, ever heard of Immasa. I live in an afterthought, I’m an afterthought.” They smiled at this, but even I knew that smile was sarcastic and full of venom.
“Guess you like your town…” I said, unable to think of a
ny other words.
“Oh, fuck no,” they said. “Immasa? It sucks. I’m just tired and annoyed and frustrated of being an afterthought.”
I was getting the impression that they liked that word.
“‘Kay,” I said.
“‘Kay? That’s all you have to say?”
I shrugged. “Well, I mean, I have no objection to you being annoyed. Did you expect me to?”
They narrowed their eyes. I wasn’t sure what that meant. “The fuck,” they said, which elucidated nothing at all.
“I’m honestly not trying to be a bitch,” I said, “but could you answer my question? I have no clue what you’re thinking or trying to convey to me.”
They sighed again, crouching down, and only then did I realize they too had a water filter in their hand, here for the same purpose as me. “Dunno how to,” they said. “Question caught me off guard.”
“You don’t know your own expectations,” I said.
They raised an eyebrow—just the one. “Sounds like you’re insulting me.”
That was not what I meant. “It was just a statement. I’m trying to navigate this conversation.”
“So am I,” they said, their tone nearly the exact same as it had been. But, again, I chose to read nothing into their tone.
“Shall we start over?” I asked, hoping for playfulness on the shall, hoping not to sound too old-fashioned … as would be stereotypical for a Ta Ralisite, I realized too late.
“Shall,” they said, chuckling, responding exactly as I had started to fear. “What a word.”
“Fuck it,” I said, “we can continue like this too.” I looked over at them once again, watching the actions of their hands and the filter they were holding in the river, and almost shook my head. “Move that filter into the faster moving water,” I said. “It’ll go quicker that way.”