A letter came from the Guard Corps about their missing personnel about a Centi Cycle after the incident. That’s the average time it took for the five largest moons to circle over the volcano rim one hundred times. It is a challenging thing to calculate, my works deals in part with its calculations, but it is never accurate, nor is a Cycle really even well defined or reliable, but it constitutes a day in a way. During that season the cycles were known to have been remarkably shorter than they were during autumn.
As the days past I became comfortable with Shai. More than comfortable. I was enchanted by her and awaited our meetings. When I spoke with her I did not think of the incident with the guard until I de-facto dismissed it as a distant dream. In my room, in my crevice, things were safe. We were hidden from the world.
We sat on the rug in the middle of the floor. “You know I love this rug right? You know?” Shai said, moving her fingers softly along the rug’s intricate design. “Iv’e truly never seen anything like it!”
“I know,”I blushed. “You say it every day. You know, it was my mother who gave it to me.”
“No I did not know that, you never said so. You know this looks like a Persian rug, do you know what that is?”
My breath caught in my lungs. Persia I’ve heard that word before.
“When Earthen explorers came here centuries ago,” Shai started ranting, negligent or unaware of my sudden epiphany. “They brought wondrous gifts such as Persian rugs and fabulous stories of what they symbolized and how they obtained them. They came here as "friendly visitors" with a millennium's worth of experience in intrinsic and interplanetary invasive behavior. Earthens have an overwhelming need to dominate, always remember that. They have had times of peace, in one place or another at one time or another, but they have never been a wholly peaceful people. War and invasion have always been part of their nature, and they excelled at it in their own land and abroad, and they were very brutal. But here they did it quite differently… They managed to gracefully seethe into the Quivo mindset and way of life without anyone realizing. Quivoans, naive as we were, were ecstatic about the coming together of two peoples from far away planets.”
”My mother mentioned Persia once.” I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.
“Did she?” Shai asked inquisitively.
“She called this rug ‘Geyb’. I distinctly remembered the moment when she told me. Her eyes were green,” like yours I thought, “Round, and full of life, with eyelashes as long as a Princess’s. She said she had the eyes of a true Persian, and that I was lucky not to have them, that I was protected.” I held my knees to my chest. My toes rubbed the Geyb as Shai had done with her hands. “But I always wondered what that meant, ‘Persian’”.
“I can tell you about it later.” Shai deflected. “There was something I wanted to say, what was it?” She clutched her chin with her index finger and thumb and turned her head diagonally. “Oh yes! We hosted Earthen colonies for centuries in the upper-mid crevices, and in the research facilities, don’t forget that last one.” Shai waved her fingers. I nodded my head mh-mm. “Quivoens like to forget that one.” She continued, “What happened in those facilities, my God, it was a venture, a joint Quivo-Human venture, and when I say Quivo-Human, I mean literally Quivo-Human…”
“What the hell do you mean? Where are these facilities?”
“Oh, with some luck, I’ll show you.” She smiled.
I waited a few minutes and then asked, “So what were they doing in those facilities?”
Shai’s turned pensive. “They did weird things down there… experiments… some think they succeeded, some don’t… it happened a long time ago you know, nobody really knows.”
Thai put her hand on my forearm, I did not expect it, but it felt warm and good, her confident green eyes looked into mine, “You know, Persia was an empire on Earth.”
I froze. What does that mean? I was afraid to ask her.
“Is your mother a human?”
Is my mother human? Is mother fucking human?? My chest heaved. “What do you mean?” I gritted my teeth.
Shai’s eyes were steady and stern. Like the eyes of a cat - cold and confident. My mother’s young face flashed before my eyes. I loved her deeply.
And in the second that I wondered whether my mother had hidden something from me my entire life a barrage of fists tumbled down on my door.
“Honey, honey!” It was my father. He knocked violently and ceaselessly. Why is he here now?
“Open! Open!” He screeched. The layered flesh covering the inside of the door bulged with each blow.
“Leh!” His fist was up when I opened the door, preparing to hammer down another knocker. He stopped just before hitting my face.
Yosef never had an excess gram of fat. His large rectangular glasses were like a TV commentator’s. I used to stare at him when he was alone in his study through a hole in the small tunnel leading from my room. He would hide his brooding face between thin fingers. Sometimes he would sit and stare at the materials on his desk for hours, often times at one small item, picking it up and looking at the light it emitted from different directions. His eyebrows had been burnt from years of work with bright and radioactive objects, hence the TV glasses. His nose was long and crooked towards the floor so no one could ever see his giant nostrils, but with his face tilted upwards in front of me I had a clear view of the giant, gaping, hairy holes.
He was manic.
“Leh!” The veins in his twitchy eye bulged. “This letter!… It’s from the Guard!” He waved a piece of silver paper up in the air.
He noticed Shai and stopped midair. I kept her hidden until then. “When you leave,” I said to her on the morning of the incident with the Guard, “Can you come in and out through the outside? Through the windows?” She agreed and never stepped foot in the rest of the other crevices on our premise.
“Hello.” Father said to her. In vain he attempted to seem cooler than his temper. It was in vain. His chest heaved with heavy breaths and his face was red and sweaty.
“Leh… This letter… ” He whispered. “A headless body… a Royal Guard… In my house! Oh, Leh, what have you done?” He grabbed my shoulders. He palpitated frantically. I thought he was going to fall into me. “Your mother is ill-“
“I know…” I gritted my teeth again, it was a fact I’d kept hidden from Shai.
“I haven’t shown this to her… I didn’t tell her, God no… her poor heart can’t take it… bless her soul,” he whimpered, “She needs to rest,… In her state… It’s no good, no good!” He fumbled across his jacket for his pipe and took a while to light it with shaking hands. “Yesterday she made a scene at the hospital, the doctor increased her prescription. She refused, you know your mother, ‘Let me die,’ she said, ‘Let me out.’ I was so embarrassed! She needs to listen to the doctors, but she won’t listen!” He puffed on his pipe as if it was an asthma inhaler. “On the way home she spoke of you. ‘It’s all for my girl,’ she said, ‘She was beautiful at the wedding,’ your sister’s wedding. She loves you! I am terrified. Terrified!”
He shook me by the shoulders, his eyes bulged in my face, his teeth reeked from tobacco, his glasses hung by a thread off of his crooked nose, and there was a streak of blood on the side of his temple. “Dad,” I whispered as he shook me, “What is that… Is that… did I…” My heart was beating menacingly. He looked so shaken up, it was all too much for him, and more so for me. I barely kept myself from collapsing on the spot.
But I had to see that letter.
Then, like an angel, or a demon, for in retrospect she was a demon, Shai called out. “Hey!” She went to Father’s side and when he looked at her I used the opportunity and snatched the letter from his hand.
She kept him occupied with simple questions, like ‘Who are the Guards?’, and ‘Why was the letter silver? Have you noticed your glasses are crooked? Gee, they are splendid, it’s too bad they are crooked. I know a guy though, if you want, and I can help you with that bandage,.’ The way she charmed him was no less astonishing than it was creepy. She calmed his spirits in a minute. I was unaware at the time that she had the same effect on me.
I looked at the silver letter. It took my brain a minute to register what I was seeing. When I saw it my vision turned dark.
WANTED FOR THE MURDER OF LIEUTENANT HARRIS
And there was a picture of my face.
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