OsakanOne
Retired Member
♫ Dan Deacon - "Snookered" (Bromst)
Many years ago...
“SuSu~…?”
She couldn’t tell if she could feel the hit coming. For a while now, something had seemed off about the walls and the very nature of the room — and her skin had been growing warmer and warmer. She’d been sat skin to skin in a lap now for about half an hour, incessantly whining that whatever she’d been expecting had been a massive disappointment and that it wasn’t worth the trouble it could get him into despite the fact they both wanted it. Instead, she fingered her new pigtails, uncertain whether or not they were something she liked.
It was a very big lap. A very warm lap. Her small legs didn’t even meet the floor, dangling like short drapes between the legs of the lap’s owner. She wrinkled and scrunched her toe as if she were making a face.
Far above her, thick tree-trunk like arms loomed through the darkness from equally large shoulders. Large hands tickled over a keyboard, over its thick circular keys of varying height and position like scales of armour on what she’d later learn many decades from now with some shining glee in her eyes that foreigners would have a more concrete word for this thing: a ‘typewriter’.
But that was all to come.
The chitting sound of the keys (not to be confused with shitting, a joke at this point she still thought was funny) made her heart feel warm and heavy, swelling with a kind of place that she could never ever place. And it robbed her of thought.
“‘still don’ feel anythin’. ‘cept that I feel kinda funny, y’know?”
A hearty though brief chuckle sounded above, its sound making her head tingle and eyes fall half-lidded with almost-not-there-at-all reassurance as she shifted her weight in this mighty lap like it were a throne.
“S’alright.”, S’alright”
Carefully her gaze rose up into what now felt like a place clouds should be.
“Its alright” a low deep heavy voice came with a breathy chuckle. It made her head tingle and her eyes fall half-lidded with reassurance as she shifted in that mighty lap - this person a throne.
Her anxieties were just washed away.
Carefully, she peered upward. Shaggy black hair. Stubble. Shadows beneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, that he’d seen things no L’manel ever should. And yet that bubbled calm repose.
The man was clouds, she thought to herself, trying to place how she felt about him. Clouds and sky and a hot sun on the beach. Playing in the water, throwing the ball just slowly enough so she could catch it. No pity. No condescension. This was a person who had only the best for her and her future in mind. A person she spent most of her life with now.
A natural routine, of course. Not orthodox, like her mother though.
Wake up. Puppets. Belly laugh. Breakfast. Grilled duqao and aselaua wraps or crunchy sweet kruo in elra juice. Her mouth watered just thinking about it, the way they sat infront of the radio with square bowls together listening to the daily news or the inflow of stories it would tell. He had a theory watching the box would rot your brain so she wasn’t allowed anywhere near one. After this, they’d go into his lab. Really, it was just a storage-room but he’d put up shelves around the ceiling a big net to put things in, making room for whatever instrument he’d built. There, he’d play and record, tune and tweak, sample and compute. And there she’d spend the entire day with him, pestering him with questions. Then he’d go shopping with her, to pick up ingredients for when mother got home. She’d often complain about how awful things were and coddle him. And during this time, She felt very jealous, that she’d have him all to herself for the rest of the night. It wasn’t fair. He was mine, she thought. You don’t do anything around here anyway! You don’t even clean or listen to him!
Of course, that particular part of her routine was yet to come. Right now, he was computing - fingers drumming on a spongy clacky mass of plastics and clay to produce characters on the screen. They moved alongside others, some further and some closer to them, seemingly hanging in the air behind the clear pane of glass. With the lights out as they were, the effect was really something, illuminating just their faces as they sat together.
Here, they almost never spoke.
Recently, he’d been teaching her the things she’d need to know as an adult. Not only what money was for (thus explaining mother’s place in the world) but also his own place as a male and what that meant. How she was expected to behave in proper society, since despite their rather meagre possessions and dwelling, their mother was quite famous but frighteningly frugal with money.
But today, something had been different. She felt a dull ache between her thighs and strange new thoughts she’d started to have. She’d seen him without covering many times and it hadn’t ever really been a problem to her. The two had nothing to hide from one another and it had the added bonus of producing less laundry which was always a plus. And in this summer. To wear anything at all with the world warming as it was seemed almost unthinkable.
“Can you feel it yet?” that heavy slow voice came.
The world wasn’t spinning but the world wasn’t still either. The walls took on a new quality. It took her a moment to realise not that they were breathing but her perception of herself was expanding and contracting, like a balloon or a beating heart - something she’d spy out from beneath those half-lidded eyes.
And then. Like a rocket taking flight; something she pestered to see that one day a month when the shiny silvery tube chased by blinding light and clouds would plunge into the blue sky and up above into the curved inky blackness that threatened to swallow it whole - she felt it.
Her ears rang as her back delicately arched - skin almost without pores tightening and warming as she let out a sound unfitting of her.
“Y…Yeah…”
The light from the curved pane of glass seemed to envelop her now. She was only supposed to be learning their meanings in social learning where she met with others those few days a week but already, she could feel intuitively the structure of the thing he was building inside the computer. In her mind, it was like a big plant that started from the top and worked its way down from the sky toward them: leaves like fractal feathers disappearing at one point and appearing elsewhere inside it as it transmuted what travelled through it like the cars in the street - as she’d seen it from Uao tower on her birthday with him.
He’d been only a novice when the two met for the first time in what little memory she had but because she’d always taken an interest, he stuck with it. There weren’t many jobs to go around so he made these things for other people, things that got things done. Apparently lots of other people were trying to do this so the amount of money he’d be paid wasn’t very much and it always made her very sad.
She hated money though. Him and her mother always fought over it. Always shouted about it. He’d bring up that they needed somewhere better to raise her and her mother would explode, saying it all had to be buried away so it could grow. This always made Aiesu see money as being like a weed, strangling people from the inside out and so she’d always hated it.
There had been talk of moving her into studies of some sort. She’d often heard them debating when she’d already crawled into the bed-pit. That she’d have to go away so she could learn about this Goddess people always spoke about and find her place in the world. This ‘Goddess’ had always been a very alien concept to her: If it was so smart and important, why did the boy she used to play with have to go away? Go away was what they called it. But she knew they meant that he was dead and didn’t like how they tried to hide words from her.
The one time she’d said she didn’t really care about the goddess, her mother became very angry. Like money, it was another topic that made them fight. After last night’s bickering, he spent the night with her instead of her mother. And they did something they’d never done before. It hurt at first. And it hurt all the way to the end. But from about what she fathomed was the middle, it started to feel really good. Like nothing that had ever been in her life before.
It was like butterflies in her belly, stirring her like hot porridge. Or running and running and running as far as you could as fast as you could until your skin was all wet and your vision shook just couldn’t stand up anymore and you had to lay down and look at the sky until your breathing didn’t hurt anymore.
It was the best feeling in the world.
And that’s what they’d done, earlier today - but they hadn’t been running - both laid next to eachother - watching the ceiling in the dark not even an hour ago - taking it in turns to try to say something interesting or funny, only to laugh at how stupid it all sounded and just be glad they had eachother. Having eachother was enough.
But even that was going to go away, wasn’t it?
Something felt different. She doubled over, covering her belly with crossed arms - wincing slowly.
“Aiesu?”
“I’mokayi’mokayi’mokay…” it all came at once followed by a long oozing breath that she could have sworn she could grab and pull back into her like some great beast.
“Nn.. Haa.. Wheeee…”
“Yeah, its pretty nice isn’t it?”
She could feel his body stirring against the small of her back as it had earlier today.
“Nn… Radial.”
“Huh?”
She pointed.
“Sixty three’s gonna overshoot a whole bunch n’ stuff. Its why the initializer’s throwing range. You want a radial feed, since its a lagrange function. You’re gonna make the geometry all wobbly again like last time.”
There was a silence of bewilderment between them. She’d never corrected him like this before and he almost didn’t believe her. But even so, she could hear him back-pedalling on the inputs to bring the cursor to the variable.
They both sat and watched the compiler loaded, the tube beneath their small table clicking. Their eyes settled on a small list of tests the post-compiler ran, verifying inputs against outputs. What was once red now came back green.
“Yay!”
“Huh… You’ve got a knack for programming, haven’t you?” he said, ruffling her hair.
She beamed. Whenever he said a nice thing, it always felt good. But this time, it felt really good. Like the best thing she’d ever felt. That could of course be what they’d both taken. They didn’t have many days left together now. She’d always seen him down something before he worked on the computer and the way he always seemed more relaxed, soothed and sometimes giddy or giggly. And how he always said the right things.
Aiesu wanted to know how to say the right things.
A tone sounded and the two soon became quiet, Aiesu glancing up at him; and him down at her.
Without missing a beat, she hopped out of his lap and padded bare-foot across the laminate flooring of the hall. Something caught her attention as she stopped mid-way, looking long and deep into it.
A mirror. Such a curious thing.
You couldn’t ever look at a mirror, only into it.
And that’s what she did: She into it.
And it back at her.
Her hands motioned carefully. She’d seen herself like this many times, but she’d never been so aware of herself like this. Small hands moved along her hips and then her belly, feeling beneath the button almost expecting some sort of heaviness. The thoughts of earlier tickled through her mind and then some strange nostalgia, of the stories he’d told her of her mother and how she looked before she was born, a sense of envy tickling through her.
Slowly, her gaze snapped back up, a sense of shame tickling through her as the door rang again. She leant closer to the mirror now and into it - tanned dark skin with its obvious lines of white where clothes normally rested staring back - dark muddy blue eyes staring back beneath thick long black hair that she platted every day, hanging behind each shoulder — and then straight her thick until her collar-bones.
Her pupils seemed so huge. Like moons. She licked her lips, contemplating kissing the mirror before the door rang again.
She recognised the figure on the other side of the drapes instantly as her mother and slowly climbed up onto a stool to unbolt the door. Lock, latch, latch, lock, key chai-
She heard something. A gurgling wet gasp for air in the other room and something sinking to the ground. It made her blood run cold despite the firey warmth of what was pumping through her veins enveloping her so sweetly. Without another thought, she hopped off the stool, running toward the study to help him.
A flash of imagery followed of the processing hours. Bent over naked his body, rocking him back and forth trying to wake him up while her mother’s fists pounded on the door and screamed from outside, demanding to unlock the door so she could help him or call an ambulance.
And she was too stupefied by what she was feeling to even realise her mother was even knocking.
Aiesu’s almost bleached eyes slowly opened, cerise burning suns against that painful looking ivory staring up at the silhouette hanging above her - rim-lit like an eclipsing moon by the ceiling light. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck as she inhaled sharply, enough to make her head pound.
Am I dead?
An unintelligible Lorath word tickled through the silhouette’s ears before it became sense.
Her hands were numb. Why were they numb?
”Papa?”
Many years ago...
“SuSu~…?”
She couldn’t tell if she could feel the hit coming. For a while now, something had seemed off about the walls and the very nature of the room — and her skin had been growing warmer and warmer. She’d been sat skin to skin in a lap now for about half an hour, incessantly whining that whatever she’d been expecting had been a massive disappointment and that it wasn’t worth the trouble it could get him into despite the fact they both wanted it. Instead, she fingered her new pigtails, uncertain whether or not they were something she liked.
It was a very big lap. A very warm lap. Her small legs didn’t even meet the floor, dangling like short drapes between the legs of the lap’s owner. She wrinkled and scrunched her toe as if she were making a face.
Far above her, thick tree-trunk like arms loomed through the darkness from equally large shoulders. Large hands tickled over a keyboard, over its thick circular keys of varying height and position like scales of armour on what she’d later learn many decades from now with some shining glee in her eyes that foreigners would have a more concrete word for this thing: a ‘typewriter’.
But that was all to come.
The chitting sound of the keys (not to be confused with shitting, a joke at this point she still thought was funny) made her heart feel warm and heavy, swelling with a kind of place that she could never ever place. And it robbed her of thought.
“‘still don’ feel anythin’. ‘cept that I feel kinda funny, y’know?”
A hearty though brief chuckle sounded above, its sound making her head tingle and eyes fall half-lidded with almost-not-there-at-all reassurance as she shifted her weight in this mighty lap like it were a throne.
“S’alright.”, S’alright”
Carefully her gaze rose up into what now felt like a place clouds should be.
“Its alright” a low deep heavy voice came with a breathy chuckle. It made her head tingle and her eyes fall half-lidded with reassurance as she shifted in that mighty lap - this person a throne.
Her anxieties were just washed away.
Carefully, she peered upward. Shaggy black hair. Stubble. Shadows beneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, that he’d seen things no L’manel ever should. And yet that bubbled calm repose.
The man was clouds, she thought to herself, trying to place how she felt about him. Clouds and sky and a hot sun on the beach. Playing in the water, throwing the ball just slowly enough so she could catch it. No pity. No condescension. This was a person who had only the best for her and her future in mind. A person she spent most of her life with now.
A natural routine, of course. Not orthodox, like her mother though.
Wake up. Puppets. Belly laugh. Breakfast. Grilled duqao and aselaua wraps or crunchy sweet kruo in elra juice. Her mouth watered just thinking about it, the way they sat infront of the radio with square bowls together listening to the daily news or the inflow of stories it would tell. He had a theory watching the box would rot your brain so she wasn’t allowed anywhere near one. After this, they’d go into his lab. Really, it was just a storage-room but he’d put up shelves around the ceiling a big net to put things in, making room for whatever instrument he’d built. There, he’d play and record, tune and tweak, sample and compute. And there she’d spend the entire day with him, pestering him with questions. Then he’d go shopping with her, to pick up ingredients for when mother got home. She’d often complain about how awful things were and coddle him. And during this time, She felt very jealous, that she’d have him all to herself for the rest of the night. It wasn’t fair. He was mine, she thought. You don’t do anything around here anyway! You don’t even clean or listen to him!
Of course, that particular part of her routine was yet to come. Right now, he was computing - fingers drumming on a spongy clacky mass of plastics and clay to produce characters on the screen. They moved alongside others, some further and some closer to them, seemingly hanging in the air behind the clear pane of glass. With the lights out as they were, the effect was really something, illuminating just their faces as they sat together.
Here, they almost never spoke.
Recently, he’d been teaching her the things she’d need to know as an adult. Not only what money was for (thus explaining mother’s place in the world) but also his own place as a male and what that meant. How she was expected to behave in proper society, since despite their rather meagre possessions and dwelling, their mother was quite famous but frighteningly frugal with money.
But today, something had been different. She felt a dull ache between her thighs and strange new thoughts she’d started to have. She’d seen him without covering many times and it hadn’t ever really been a problem to her. The two had nothing to hide from one another and it had the added bonus of producing less laundry which was always a plus. And in this summer. To wear anything at all with the world warming as it was seemed almost unthinkable.
“Can you feel it yet?” that heavy slow voice came.
The world wasn’t spinning but the world wasn’t still either. The walls took on a new quality. It took her a moment to realise not that they were breathing but her perception of herself was expanding and contracting, like a balloon or a beating heart - something she’d spy out from beneath those half-lidded eyes.
And then. Like a rocket taking flight; something she pestered to see that one day a month when the shiny silvery tube chased by blinding light and clouds would plunge into the blue sky and up above into the curved inky blackness that threatened to swallow it whole - she felt it.
Her ears rang as her back delicately arched - skin almost without pores tightening and warming as she let out a sound unfitting of her.
“Y…Yeah…”
The light from the curved pane of glass seemed to envelop her now. She was only supposed to be learning their meanings in social learning where she met with others those few days a week but already, she could feel intuitively the structure of the thing he was building inside the computer. In her mind, it was like a big plant that started from the top and worked its way down from the sky toward them: leaves like fractal feathers disappearing at one point and appearing elsewhere inside it as it transmuted what travelled through it like the cars in the street - as she’d seen it from Uao tower on her birthday with him.
He’d been only a novice when the two met for the first time in what little memory she had but because she’d always taken an interest, he stuck with it. There weren’t many jobs to go around so he made these things for other people, things that got things done. Apparently lots of other people were trying to do this so the amount of money he’d be paid wasn’t very much and it always made her very sad.
She hated money though. Him and her mother always fought over it. Always shouted about it. He’d bring up that they needed somewhere better to raise her and her mother would explode, saying it all had to be buried away so it could grow. This always made Aiesu see money as being like a weed, strangling people from the inside out and so she’d always hated it.
There had been talk of moving her into studies of some sort. She’d often heard them debating when she’d already crawled into the bed-pit. That she’d have to go away so she could learn about this Goddess people always spoke about and find her place in the world. This ‘Goddess’ had always been a very alien concept to her: If it was so smart and important, why did the boy she used to play with have to go away? Go away was what they called it. But she knew they meant that he was dead and didn’t like how they tried to hide words from her.
The one time she’d said she didn’t really care about the goddess, her mother became very angry. Like money, it was another topic that made them fight. After last night’s bickering, he spent the night with her instead of her mother. And they did something they’d never done before. It hurt at first. And it hurt all the way to the end. But from about what she fathomed was the middle, it started to feel really good. Like nothing that had ever been in her life before.
It was like butterflies in her belly, stirring her like hot porridge. Or running and running and running as far as you could as fast as you could until your skin was all wet and your vision shook just couldn’t stand up anymore and you had to lay down and look at the sky until your breathing didn’t hurt anymore.
It was the best feeling in the world.
And that’s what they’d done, earlier today - but they hadn’t been running - both laid next to eachother - watching the ceiling in the dark not even an hour ago - taking it in turns to try to say something interesting or funny, only to laugh at how stupid it all sounded and just be glad they had eachother. Having eachother was enough.
But even that was going to go away, wasn’t it?
Something felt different. She doubled over, covering her belly with crossed arms - wincing slowly.
“Aiesu?”
“I’mokayi’mokayi’mokay…” it all came at once followed by a long oozing breath that she could have sworn she could grab and pull back into her like some great beast.
“Nn.. Haa.. Wheeee…”
“Yeah, its pretty nice isn’t it?”
She could feel his body stirring against the small of her back as it had earlier today.
“Nn… Radial.”
“Huh?”
She pointed.
“Sixty three’s gonna overshoot a whole bunch n’ stuff. Its why the initializer’s throwing range. You want a radial feed, since its a lagrange function. You’re gonna make the geometry all wobbly again like last time.”
There was a silence of bewilderment between them. She’d never corrected him like this before and he almost didn’t believe her. But even so, she could hear him back-pedalling on the inputs to bring the cursor to the variable.
They both sat and watched the compiler loaded, the tube beneath their small table clicking. Their eyes settled on a small list of tests the post-compiler ran, verifying inputs against outputs. What was once red now came back green.
“Yay!”
“Huh… You’ve got a knack for programming, haven’t you?” he said, ruffling her hair.
She beamed. Whenever he said a nice thing, it always felt good. But this time, it felt really good. Like the best thing she’d ever felt. That could of course be what they’d both taken. They didn’t have many days left together now. She’d always seen him down something before he worked on the computer and the way he always seemed more relaxed, soothed and sometimes giddy or giggly. And how he always said the right things.
Aiesu wanted to know how to say the right things.
A tone sounded and the two soon became quiet, Aiesu glancing up at him; and him down at her.
Without missing a beat, she hopped out of his lap and padded bare-foot across the laminate flooring of the hall. Something caught her attention as she stopped mid-way, looking long and deep into it.
A mirror. Such a curious thing.
You couldn’t ever look at a mirror, only into it.
And that’s what she did: She into it.
And it back at her.
Her hands motioned carefully. She’d seen herself like this many times, but she’d never been so aware of herself like this. Small hands moved along her hips and then her belly, feeling beneath the button almost expecting some sort of heaviness. The thoughts of earlier tickled through her mind and then some strange nostalgia, of the stories he’d told her of her mother and how she looked before she was born, a sense of envy tickling through her.
Slowly, her gaze snapped back up, a sense of shame tickling through her as the door rang again. She leant closer to the mirror now and into it - tanned dark skin with its obvious lines of white where clothes normally rested staring back - dark muddy blue eyes staring back beneath thick long black hair that she platted every day, hanging behind each shoulder — and then straight her thick until her collar-bones.
Her pupils seemed so huge. Like moons. She licked her lips, contemplating kissing the mirror before the door rang again.
She recognised the figure on the other side of the drapes instantly as her mother and slowly climbed up onto a stool to unbolt the door. Lock, latch, latch, lock, key chai-
She heard something. A gurgling wet gasp for air in the other room and something sinking to the ground. It made her blood run cold despite the firey warmth of what was pumping through her veins enveloping her so sweetly. Without another thought, she hopped off the stool, running toward the study to help him.
A flash of imagery followed of the processing hours. Bent over naked his body, rocking him back and forth trying to wake him up while her mother’s fists pounded on the door and screamed from outside, demanding to unlock the door so she could help him or call an ambulance.
And she was too stupefied by what she was feeling to even realise her mother was even knocking.
Aiesu’s almost bleached eyes slowly opened, cerise burning suns against that painful looking ivory staring up at the silhouette hanging above her - rim-lit like an eclipsing moon by the ceiling light. A bead of sweat trickled down her neck as she inhaled sharply, enough to make her head pound.
Am I dead?
An unintelligible Lorath word tickled through the silhouette’s ears before it became sense.
Her hands were numb. Why were they numb?
”Papa?”
