The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  He knew time moved differently for her, but still it shocked him how much she resembled his dreams of her—how little she had aged. He straightened his posture and pushed out his chest, a show of bravado that was undercut when he introduced himself and stumbled over the simple syllables of his own name. Still, the offworlder smiled at him, the light caught on the curve of her soft lips, and his chest cracked open. Everything he had been holding in for the last fifteen years came tumbling onto the ground by her feet. A tangled mess of want.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Her name was Nia Imani. She told him it was an old name from back when Earth was whole, but when he asked her if it was her mother or her father who gave her the name, she smiled and spoke instead about her work.

  He already knew the basic nature of her travel. The governor covered the subject with every tired welcome speech he gave in the fields. But still he listened with rapt attention as she described the sensations her body experienced when her ship departed from this reality and folded into another. She told him it was called Pocket Space. The place where time moved differently. He imagined what she asked him to imagine: a black ocean, with currents and eddies and rapids that stretched the seconds into hours into years. Some currents stretched time infinitely, and other currents not more than moments. But always, there was an imbalance of time. “We can travel long distances this way,” she said, “but every time we return, things are different. The route we’re taking now, we arrive on the Assiduous Current and leave on the Diffident. These currents have a specific time differential. It takes me eight months to bring your harvest to its destination and to return here for the next shipment, but for you—”

  “Fifteen years,” he finished, knowing the number well, having walked slowly through each of them. “And what is it like, when you go home and your friends are older but you are not?”

  “Sometimes sad,” she said, then, smiling, “but sometimes good.” She told him she was hired by the Umbai Company for six shipment cycles; this was her second.

  “So you will be back four more times.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Just four.” Then, “Are you sure we haven’t met before?” and he assured her that yes, they most definitely had not, afraid that the truth would catch him; that the spell of the night would shatter and she would pat him on the head like the little boy he was and say good night. But she pressed no further, and instead asked him about the nature of his work. He puffed out his chest again. “I’m the best on my field, fifth fastest in this village.” He told her about the moisture seasons, when the barren fields were covered in a thin layer of white mist, the best time to replant the stalks, and how the roots fed on the wetness in the air and the sugar in the rutted dirt. “We harvest the seeds when the sky sucks up the moisture. A day of work will turn your hands purple.” He showed her his palm, the mauve patina that stained it, and when she glided a finger across his hand, he shivered.

  “You’re proud of your work,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I am,” he said, which wasn’t always true. Most days he found the work mundane, sometimes tedious, never exceptional; but tonight, as she listened to his every word, the work seemed important; bigger than himself. He spoke until there were no more words to say, the topic exhausted, but the air between them still violent with energy. Her hand lay next to his trembling fingers on the bench. He swallowed.

  “You are very beautiful,” he said.

  The words fell out of his mouth like rocks.

  But she picked them up anyway, one at a time, and she told him that he was beautiful too, and there, in her eyes, he saw the same want. He followed her through the dancers, past the long tables where people ate, past Sado and the other single men who drank and comforted one another and who bit their lips in jealousy as he and the offworlder walked away from the party together. Past Jhige, who held his gaze for only a moment before turning back to her husband, twining her arm around his thick waist tightly.

  They walked down the shadowed road, his feet drunk and stumbling on the ruts in the dirt, while Nia strode beside him, straight-backed and poised, eyeing him from the side with a beguiling smile. He wanted to stop, to take a moment to memorize her against the backdrop of his town, but she slipped her hand down the front of his breeches, gripping his erection, and pulled him down the slight hill, behind a large rock, where she ground him into the earth with her hips, her hands pressed firm against his chest, forcing him to stay right there, his hands cupping her breasts, her waist, anything to keep him anchored to this dream, until it was over, and they lay together on the grass, naked and spent. She lay her head on his chest, a hand on his navel, her weight pinning him to the ground in a way that he liked. Both of them adrift on this moment. From a place of utter satisfaction, he began to hum a song. The song reserved for the end of a long day. When she asked him what it was he hummed, he told her about the song of homecoming. “It’s what we sing on our way back from the fields when the work is done,” he said. His fingers stroked the grain of her scalp. “The song of bargaining. Take my day, but give me the night.”

  “It’s pretty,” she said with a sigh. “Sing it again.”

  And he did, looping the song onto itself like a string around his finger, a rope that hugged their bodies together, until she fell asleep. And as she slept, he listened to the night. The crackle of bugs. The breeze that whistled through the fields and lifted up into the sky. Her breath. The incoherent mumble of her dreams.

  And he knew what it was he wanted.

  He nudged her shoulder till she stirred.

  “Can I come with you?” he asked.

  Her eyes opened just enough to see the haze of him.

  “Where?” she asked.

  His heart galloped. “Anywhere.”

  She blinked once, and shut her eyes.

  “Maybe,” she murmured. She turned away, and pressed her back against his chest. “We’ll speak in the morning.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Kaeda listened to her snore in loud, rumbling breaths, but this too he loved. They weren’t just dreams, he thought with pride. And soon, he drifted off as well, with his hand on her hip, where it was warm.

  He woke to laughter.

  It was midday. The sun was hot on his naked body. Two farmers, both men he knew, kicked his feet and told him it wasn’t healthy sleeping outside with no clothes on. “You’ll get bugs up your crack,” they said. More laughter. Blearily he looked around. She was gone, the only proof of her the depression in the grass beside him. He yanked on his pants and sprinted toward the fields—“Bugs!” the farmers cackled—and arrived just in time to see the last of the ships lift off. The crowd of villagers that had come to see the departure waved goodbye at this last ship as it faded to a prick of light in the sky, before disappearing. The children shouted “Goodbye!” in chorus, as Kaeda’s hands dropped to his sides, his heart unspooling beneath him. He didn’t see his mother approach, not until she knocked his bare shoulder with a baffled expression. “Where is your shirt?” she asked. “Go put on your shirt, you stupid child!” And the other families chuckled as she pushed him out of the fields, back to the village, while he stumbled forth, knuckling his wet eyes.

  * * *

  —

  He disappeared into his work. Two thumbs choked the dhuba seeds out of the stalk’s throat. A machete cracked against the spine of the stalk; the beam bent at an angle; body weight took it the rest of the way. One hundred kilos of dhuba seeds spilled into five containers, the containers wheeled back to town, half the number placed in cold stasis, the other half sent to the mill, where callused fists ground the jellied seeds for hours into fine paste in a vaulted room filled with the sound of wet smacking and volleys of dirty jokes. The broken stalks were shaved of their sharp ends and painted red, bound together, and used to build houses for new families, of which there were more every year.

 
Jhige gave birth to twins. Kaeda was there, wetting the towels, studying the devotion of her husband, Yotto, who bowed penitent by her bed, whispering, “Soon, soon, soon,” to her, shouting, “Now! Now! Now!” The babies came eventually. Healthy girls, seven pounds, each a proud owner of their mother’s sharp nose. Kaeda congratulated the new parents, and as they cooed over the next generation, he stepped outside the doctor’s hut and rang the bell to signal the success of the new birth. The toll was heard throughout the village. Candles were lit by dark windows. He glanced into the hut at Jhige and Yotto, and he sighed. Every week it seemed another friend was sprouting children of their own. The town spread down the hill, the houses spilling into the valley below. And every week, an old one dying, making way for the new.

  Kaeda’s father died one year after Nia left. It was a drunken accident. A friend had given him a playful shove, and he, in a stupor, lost his balance and snapped his neck on the edge of a wooden table. The man who killed him walked out of town that same night, overcome with guilt. He never returned. He was presumed dead when the next moisture season arrived, and with it the jawed beasts that stalked the surrounding hills and woods. “Good,” Kaeda’s mother said when she heard the news of the man’s disappearance, and that was all she had to say on the matter. She returned to the dhuba stalks with her machete and curled lip, for there was still more work to be done. Stoic around the other villagers, she thanked them for their kind words, but refused to entertain their nostalgia, or their prayers. It was only after the fieldwork was done, and she was home, just her and her son, when she let loose her sorrow. She shouted, and she wept in Kaeda’s arms, and filled that house with such mourning there was no room for her son’s own grief, which he let harden like sediment on the bottom of his heart as he attended to his mother’s tears. He curled into himself under his blanket at night, and retreated into memory. His father’s warm shoulder the day they went to see the ships. A finger pointing up at the stars. He found his own places to cry. Places only Jhige was privy to, for they had begun to sleep together again.

  * * *

  —

  The affair began a month after his father’s death. Jhige had switched assignments with a friend, and for the first time in years worked alongside Kaeda in the fields. “To make sure you don’t fall behind on your quota,” she said when he asked her why she had switched, and though he tsked and told her he didn’t need a caretaker, already he felt better. They worked in quiet, and with time, they began to reminisce about the games they had played as children.

  “You convinced everyone that the night smelled sour because the moons were made of kiri fruit,” she said.

  “You knew the truth,” he said.

  “It didn’t matter.” She wiped the sweat off her chest and chuckled. “They preferred the lie.” She picked up her bowl of seeds, then let out a long sigh, the weight of their history pressing all the air out of her lungs. “It was lonely, growing up around you.”

  “You were my only friend.”

  He said this more to himself. A quiet realization.

  “That,” she said, “I will never believe.”

  But she smiled anyway.

  It was inevitable: days later, before they parted ways on the road back home, she grabbed his arm, and told him a time and a location, without saying what for, she did not need to. He was there, and he was ready. The fumbling of their youth was gone, now the measured movements of adults who knew the dance, and where the hands and feet must go. His hands fell through the bristled curls of her black hair and they made love on a bed of rumpled clothes. The moons were red that night. He told her the moons were red because they were burned by the heat of the sun, and she laughed, and shoved his bare shoulder, and whispered into his salty skin, “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  Three seasons of love passed.

  Jhige’s husband found out about the affair, whispered in his ear by a friend who had seen the two lovers one night in the millhouse. Yotto gave her a choice, and when she chose Kaeda, he marched to his challenger’s house, pounded on the door, and no sooner was it opened than he threw Kaeda to the dirt, where they wrestled each other bloody until his mother stormed out of the house with a machete gripped in her right hand. The light from inside threw her broad body into harsh relief. She held the blade against Yotto’s veined neck. “Let him up,” she said. When the two men were on their feet once more, she lowered her blade. She told Yotto he was allowed one good hit, and no more, and before Kaeda had a chance to protest, a fist knocked him back on the ground with a spout of blood, and the husband walked away, throwing the rage off his shaking shoulders. Kaeda’s mother stood over him and dropped the machete by his feet. “Fool,” she said, and knelt, and with her sleeve rubbed the blood off his chin.

  She brought him inside. Fed him.

  “I loved your father,” she said from across the table, her arms crossed over her chest. “But he died an idiot’s death. I never forgave him for that. Promise me you won’t make the same mistake, or your spirit will never be welcome in this house.”

  Quietly, he said, “I promise.”

  She gripped his hand.

  And that was the end of it.

  A month later, another house was built in the valley, where Kaeda and Jhige lived with her two daughters. From his old home, Kaeda moved his clothes, some furniture his mother insisted that he take with him, the glass jar of finger bones—he felt too guilty to leave them behind—and one wooden flute, which he told Jhige was a gift from an offworlder he had once met. He was thankful when she didn’t pry further into its history. The instrument was kept out of sight, in one of the drawers of his bureau, and taken out when he was alone and feeling melancholy—but even then, it was never for long. He never played it.

  For all their childhood, Yana and Elby would live in two homes, one at the bottom of the hill, and one near the top, never understanding the polite tension between their three parents when their father came to collect them on his free days, not until they were older. They got along with Kaeda. He couldn’t have children—some bodies just can’t, the doctor had said—but he treated them like they were his own. He never hit them or raised his voice, and he made them laugh with his silly faces. This excused the times he was distant; the nights they’d hear his footsteps wander throughout the house; the frantic pace of them, as if there were something he’d forgotten to do, but he couldn’t remember what it was, or where.

  When he was thirty-seven, the twelve green lines boomed across the red sky once more. He was there, in the crowd with the rest of the welcoming committee, as the violent gusts of wind heralded the ships’ arrival. Jhige’s girls, now eight years old, ran in circles around their mother while the offworlders emerged from the bellies of their ships. “Just look at the governor,” Jhige said, nodding at their leader, who bowed before the offworlders as though they were gods. “He is the first to greet them, yet he almost never walks the fields, he never visits the homes; he is oblivious. Look at how low he bows. Like he is made of jelly.” When she got no response, she turned to Kaeda. “What is it?” She touched his hand, breaking his gaze. “Where are you?” she asked, in a whisper.

  He smiled too wide.

  “I am here,” he said.

  It was easy enough to get away that night, for the girls never took long to tire and needed to be brought home early. Kaeda threw an arm around Sado’s shoulders, drinking and laughing with his friends, playing the part of the reveler who was having too much fun to go home. When Jhige came to collect him, he told her the party was just beginning, and he considered himself a brilliant strategist when she relented and suggested that he stay, while she brought the girls back by herself. After he was certain she was gone, he excused himself from Sado’s company under the guise of fetching more drink, and lost himself in the crowd. He crossed the bonfire plaza to the entrance of the alley. On the bench, Nia sat, watching him approach, studying him calmly, her face un
marked by time. She wore light-red clothes that fell over her body, as though she had washed herself under a melting moon. She was, as ever, beautiful. His stomach boiled just looking at her.

  “You never said goodbye,” he said.

  Her eyebrow lifted, and her second voice said, “You’re a handsome sleeper. Would’ve been a shame to wake you up.” The second voice had by then lost its magic—he knew the truth of her technology. She shrugged, and her beaded necklace clinked against itself. “It didn’t seem necessary, considering I’d see you again so soon.”

  “I’ve spent the last fifteen years hating you.”

  Her smile fell, her expression hardened. “Keep your hate,” she said. “We spent one night together. Just one.” She made a gesture with her hand he didn’t understand, then looked away, into the fire. He saw something in her face he never thought he’d see. Exhaustion. “I’m not a god,” she said. “I’m not here to answer your prayers.”

  He sat down beside her. The anger was there, but quieted.

  “Why do you sit alone?” he asked.

  “I like parties,” she said, “but I don’t like crowds.”

  He nodded, but he didn’t understand.

  “Do I look different?” he asked.

  “There are mirrors for that,” she snapped.

  He sucked his teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “The journey here was hard.” She rubbed her face, making valleys of her skin. “I said I was sorry.”

  “Fine,” he said, too proud to say it was okay.

  “I’m tired, Kaeda. I leave in twenty hours. I need to have a good time. Please make this easy for me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To spend the night with you.”