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 Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 10:04 am
Ghost of Corporate Future
Rodgeys was over a couple nights a week now, and she guessed she could call him her boyfriend. This, to Ranza, felt sort of weird, because she had never really had something she could call a relationship before. There had, of course, been repeat offenders, but there was no connection there, no conversation. Just sex.
Not to mention, she'd first met Rodgeys when she was disguised as a boy and he was in a position of authority, so it still felt a bit odd. But she did like him, she assured herself. Not to mention he was better and nicer and cleaner than anyone else she was ever going to get. She didn't like to think like this, didn't like to think like she was "settling" for Rodgeys, but for now it worked just fine, and she was tired of all the s**t she'd been doing.
She liked thinking about this while she worked on re-rigging the sails. The ropes on the mast when she'd bought the boat all had dry rot, and with Rodgey's help she finally had the gear and the man power (no pun intended) to fix it.
She was not really paying attention to what was going on. Out of the corner of the eye she could see an older sea-captain type strolling down the dock, but she was not all that concerned about it.
"Heads up," called Rodgeys. He was up on the crossbeam, dropping a canvas down. Ranza caught the leading edge and secured it.
"Looks good," she called up. "Toss me that rope."
He did. She secured it. "Hey, Ranza?" called Rodgeys, a note of discontent in his voice.
"Hey, what?" she asked. Rodgeys was already sliding down the mast, his eyes fixed on something on the other side of the deck.
"I think something's wrong with Val," he said.
"What?" asked Ranza as he seized her wrist and pulled her towards the bow. Sure enough, something was wrong with Val. The little monkey lay on the deck, dramatically spazzing, his mouth hanging open. Ranza kneeled beside him and peered into his mouth. "It doesn't look like he ate anything," she said.
"I think he's glowing," said Rodgeys.
"No way," said Ranza, narrowing her eyes. ********, he was glowing. She scanned the dock, looking for the older sailor, but couldn't see him anymore.
The glowing grew brighter, and then faded, and left no doubt that Exi had definitely been here.
"Holy s**t," said Ranza.
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Posted: Sun Jul 04, 2010 2:18 pm
It was initially strange to remember being a monkey but to not be one any more. The initial shock of his suddenly-clumsy limbs, his new size, and the strange suspicion Ranza regarded him with threw Val for a loop. But then he acclimated. He was good at acclimating, had a strong inner ear for balance and a think-fast monkey-keen wit.
It had briefly occurred to him that he wasn't just the monkey any more, he was something else, too, but then the toddler-mind took over and told him not to worry about it. When he'd been an animal it hadn't mattered to him that the world was so much bigger than he was, but now there was so much he didn't understand and it bothered him on some deep, intrinsic level.
He wanted to know why Ranza was never affectionate to him any more, why she held him at a distance and usually only spoke to him to tell him how to do something. Sometimes, late at night, he could curl up in her lap and she would forget herself for a moment and wrap her arms around him and they would sit there for a while, like mother and child ought to be, before she carried him off to bed and tucked him in. If she were feeling especially maternal that night she might give him a kiss on the forehead.
Val loved nights like those, but also hated them, because in the morning it would once again just be Ranza, and sometimes Oliver-or-Rodgeys, and Val, and they weren't a family. Not really.
He heard them talking up on deck most nights after he'd been put to bed, their quiet conversations too faint to understand. But they always sounded sad somehow, like two people who wanted to be together but couldn't. (He wasn't sure where that thought came from. In the daytime Ranza and Rodgeys seemed fine.)
Sometimes he heard her crying, long after he ought to have been asleep.
Boats were strange places to be at night. The gulls and the waves and the harbor bells were his lullaby, and in the day he knew nothing but ships, but at night;
Valeri dreamed of stars.
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Posted: Mon May 23, 2011 7:29 pm
Blue Lips
They set sail on a summer day, the wind whipping at the sails and the sun warm on their tanned faces. Ranza tamped down her hat over her dreadlocks and took the wheel, smiling as the salt spray coated her face and she watched Valeri scamper back and forth from bow to stern, watching dolphins that jumping in and out of their wake as they headed out into deeper water.
"Don't fall in," she called to the monkey child, who clung to the low rail with one hand and his tail while he reached down towards the water.
"I'm not gonna!" he yelled back. Val was all daredevil stunts and too-long legs this week, not a tall child but one unaccustomed to being older and the new proportions that came with it. Meanwhile Ranza had curved and swelled in all the right places. Even as a teenager she'd retained some awkward, gangly remnant of her childhood: now she was properly voluptuous, and it wasn't as if Rodgeys was complaining.
He was fishing off the stern, trawling the wake for the big fish that sometimes swam there. Later he would grill the day's catch on deck, and they'd fall asleep under a sky impossibly big and studded with stars while, up in the rigging, Valeri sat awake for hours and dreampt of spaceflight.
It was one of those odd, quiet hours of the night - later than late, too soon to be early - when she felt Rodgeys stirring next to her. They were careful in repositioning their limbs, negotiating with whispers whose arm had fallen asleep under whose neck and what should be done about it. When it was all settled, they curled around each other and watched the sky.
After a while, Rodgeys pointed out Val's dark form perched on a crossbeam, his limbs clutching the ropes like he'd been woven there.
"I wish he'd come down," whispered Ranza lowly.
As if he'd heard her, Val stirred from his position and climbed nimbly to a higher perch.
"That boy..." murmured Rodgeys sleepily.
"Would he have been..." Ranza studied the stars, wondering what Val was looking for. Rodgeys gave her a nudge to finish the thought. "Would he have been better off with parents?" she asked.
Rodgeys let out a single quiet laugh and pulled her closer to him. He pressed a line of kisses across her collar bone, and Ranza had to wonder where he was going with this. "You hadn't noticed?" he asked, looking into her eyes. "We are his parents."
It was the thought Ranza had spent a year avoiding.
It was totally true.
She stared up at the monkey in the rigging, his eyes trained skywards at some distant world.
Rodgeys kissed her ear and whispered, "The spirit came from space, the body came from earth, the spirit only dreams of returning to the stars," and she couldn't tell if it was poetry or the story of Val or both. "Grown in the bosom of the sea and the wind, three lost souls drifting on the tides, somehow brought together and forged like some elaborate bit of sea glass..."
His breath was warm against her skin. She rolled onto her side, to face him. "Aye," she whispered, "You're talking about us now?"
But Rodgeys had already drifted back to sleep. Ranza rolled her eyes and shifted back onto her back.
He was infuriating.
She loved him.
In the rigging, Valeri watched the sky spin, memorizing the dance of satellites and stars and dreaming of one day finding himself among them.
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