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 Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 11:40 am
Two Birds
So the monkey became a child. It didn’t make much difference because he could still tie all the same knots, except now he could parrot back Ranza and Rodgey’s curses with frightening accuracy – she had lost her monkey, but had gained the company of a four-year-old boy who could launch <********> and Cocksuckers with the best of them.
Thankfully he had never once tried to call her “mom,” or to dub Rodgeys “dad.” Ranza wasn’t quite certain what she would do if Val attempted that, just that she didn’t want it to happen. He wasn’t her kid; more like a little brother or a crewmate. But there was magic in common between them, both of them cast from the same powers, wrought by the same hands.
It was summer again, gloriously warm, even at night. Val had been put to bed on the bottom bunk, and Ranza and Rodgey had retreated to the upper deck, where they lay entwined, listening to the lapping of the waves and watching the stars spin by above their heads.
He hadn’t officially moved in, but he was there most of the time. It confused Ranza, this gradual closeness, this tightening inside her chest, the need to cling to him but the same desire to push him away. Something foggy in her past urged her to it, a latent feminist impulse that told her she didn’t need a man to be happy. But- but- but-
Her head was resting on his chest. She could feel him breathing.
“Are we a thing?” Ranza asked the night air.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” replied Rodgeys after a long pause. His voice was quiet, restrained. “Do you think we’re… a thing?”
Ranza shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what a thing is, really.”
More silence from Rodgeys. Finally, he asked, “Should we be a thing?”
Ranza hadn’t yet thought of how to answer that. She let the answer hang. Up, down, in, out – the slow rhythm of his breathing, the way the moon reflected off the water, the masts of boats bobbing blackly in front of the sky. He was too good for her, he really was.
“Ranza?” he asked.
The stars had gone blurry.
“I want to,” she choked. His arms were snaked across her torso, holding her against him. She could feel their slight, warm weight where they crossed her arms and her rib cage. She felt his breath where his lips were pressed against her hair-feathers. She couldn’t tell him she felt like she wasn’t allowed to be his.
He will posses you, whispered a frightened voice at the back of her mind. He will posses you until there is nothing left of you but what he chooses to put there. You would surrender your dreams, for a shiny ring and maternity wear? Well behaved women seldom make history.
Ranza struggled to quiet the voice. It wasn’t as if Rodgeys was asking her to marry him, and she was quite certain she would never have children.
He was too good for her, of course.
“I’m glad,” he whispered to her. Ranza managed to smile. He hadn’t said love, she knew he probably wouldn’t say it any time soon, but she felt a selfish twinge of pleasure just to know he felt that way.
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Posted: Mon May 23, 2011 7:28 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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