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Remember that fic about that book no one's ever heard of? Well, here it is. Er. Once reading the introduction though, it's perfectly understandable, and you could even take it as original fiction. I'm not quite sure why I wrote this in English. Especially considering the book is Spanish. Maybe because I'm too lazy to translate and no one would read it in English? Maybe.
Title: And the Blue Sky Above Them
Word Count: 4300
Fandom: Los Bonsáis Gigantes by Lucía Baquedano
Summary: Life in the real world is not as easy for Abril and David as they would've expected. Still, they're free, and that's what matters.
Author Notes: I've been obsessed about this book since I was a child, and the ending is so open that I always wanted to know just what happened afterwards. Then this idea attacked me and wouldn't let go. So this is basically my way of coming to terms with the story, and creating my own 'canon' about it. I dunno, I kinda like it.
Lumamijú is an island that got torn away from the mainland after an explosion six generations ago. The island has flourished away from the world, and the government, the all-mighty Council, has told the population that they’re the last remaining humans on earth, and that the ocean is contaminated, not allowing them to go out and try finding what’s left of the world. Abril is a young woman that, just like the rest of the people in Lumamijú, has never questioned the authorities, and believes that a system that tells children what they should work on as they grow up, who they should marry and where they should live is just what they need. Until she has a strange vision of trees and a blue sky, something that hasn’t existed in Lumamijú in years because they’re not needed anymore. She’s afraid, at first, and believes bonsais (the sole plant still existing in the island) are going to take over the world – she tries destroying a few, which mark here as somewhat insane and gives her unwanted attention.
She meets David, who believes something is deeply wrong with how things are run, and together they find a batch of books (something forbidden in the island) that speak of a world in which freedom exist. Abril and David are matched to be married by the computer that runs everyone’s lives, and she refuses because she wants David to be with her because he wants to, not because they’re told to do so. They keep on reading the books in secret, until David confesses that he’s found out the sea isn’t contaminated after all, and he plans on swimming out of the island. After some angst on her part, Abril asks him to go along, since she can’t stand the oppressive atmosphere anymore. The book closes with the two of them swimming away, almost passing out from sheer exhaustion when they finally see a boat nearby.
Okay, so that was two paragraphs. Whatever.
And the Blue Sky Above Them
Abril floats for a moment, eyes closed because she still can’t look into the sun she’s dreamed about for months, and forgets about the way her limbs feel heavy and the pain on her hands and the thirst that is eating at his insides, and for a moment, there’s only David, and the endless blue sky.
Then they’re being ushered into the fishing boat, and she can only drink a few sips of water before she’s slipping into unconsciousness, her name called by a scared-sounding David ringing in her ears.
She wakes up two days letter to the endless sway of the boat over the ocean, and to the sight of David sleeping on a chair next to her. She grabs his hand and goes back to sleep.
She dreams of birds, and when she wakes up again, they’re still there, seagulls flying over the boat, and she can’t smile wide enough.
----
Only one person in the boat speaks their language. They’ve never had a name for it, it’s always been that, ‘the language’, and everyone spoke the same, so there was no reason to call it something else. Their accent is not the same, and they pronounce words differently, decades of isolation made sure of that, but Alfonso assures them that what they’re speaking is called Spanish. He translates in a fast tongue to the rest of the crew, who are as mystified with them as Abril and David are with these hardened, simple men, so different from anyone they’ve ever seen.
Alfonso explains that this is a French ship, and Abril can vaguely remember about a geography book telling what France is, what Spain is. Europe, and she can’t hold her tongue and asks how is it that it’s not destroyed. Everyone looks confused for a moment, and she asks about the Great War, the name the Council had given it.
“You mean World War III, kid? The big-bang, so to speak? That was ages ago, girly, things get better. People get better.”
So the world didn’t end six generations ago, and even though they already suspected it, it’s still hard to fathom.
“Can you imagine? Such a big world, and only a step away from us,” says David to her that night, while laying on their bunks in the darkness. The captain wanted to give them separate cabins, but they refused. Everything’s too alien, too strange, and they’re clinging to each other in search for a little bit of familiarity. “Maybe-- maybe all that stuff we read about still exists – maybe there are still trees and large cities, and, what was their name? Leopards.”
“It seems almost unbelievable, doesn’t it?” Abril says, and she realizes that she’s frightened, frightened that maybe nothing at all will be there, and that once they get to land, they will only find more bonsais and grey skies. It makes chills go down her spine.
They spend most of the journey together, looking into the ocean and imagining what they will find once they get off the ship.
The first time she sees land, she can’t repress a gasp of surprise, and when he takes her hand, she can feel him shaking.
----
They’re driven to Paris the moment they get off the boat. They’re news, suddenly, these castaways, these lost children, and their faces are everywhere. They don’t say much about where they came from, just that they’re lost and that they hardly remember a thing and everyone assumes they’re Spanish and a little weird and leave it at that.
They spend weeks wide-eyed – the first mosquito bite, the first dog barking at them, the first purely ornamental flower Abril is offered – everything is new. The city on itself isn’t all that different from Lumamijú, only grander and older than they have ever seen. It’s the people that are different. There’s too many of them, every one of them with a million choices at their disposal.
It’s overwhelming, at first, having the entire world looking at them while all they want is get drunk on the blue sky and the trees moving with the morning breeze outside their window. They’re offered political asylum, whatever that is, and a little money to start their new lives.
They take jobs. David works as a librarian because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with the job he was preordained to do for all of his life, even if Abril knows he truly loves designing. She catches him drawing when he thinks she’s not looking. He comes back home every night blown away by the books he gets to read, touch, handle during the day, by the new things he learns everyday. He tells her about it at nights, before going to bed, eyes bright and wild hand gestures, and she’s just as intrigued about his words as she is about the way he looks so utterly alive while saying them.
It’s harder for her, because this government doesn’t care to provide a job for every single person, and no one’s willing to hire an inexperienced girl with no references, no matter if she does wonders with a camera on hand and has a knack for publicity. She waits tables, at first, and surprisingly, she likes it enough. It gives her an opportunity to watch people, to listen to their conversations and learn a bit about their lives.
Not speaking the language makes it difficult, but they’re both smart, they were bred to be so in Lumamijú, and after five months they can already follow conversations with ease. Technology developed differently in their island and in the mainland, but the human mind is only so inventive, and after a short while they find themselves being able to use any electronic with the best of them. After all, their culture was one devoted to learning, and they’re actually ahead of their times in some things, and behind in some others.
They get a dingy, little flat in the city at first, with only one window looking out to the street. It’s on the fourth floor, and Abril dreams about a house with trees on the back, so they move to southern France after three months, close to the ocean because like it or not, they feel disoriented if they can’t hear the waves crashing against the bay.
They don’t have enough money to get a house, even less one with a backyard, but Abril plants a tree in the little park across the street and vows to watch it grow.
----
David sneaks into her bed one night, and they lie there in silence for a long while until he finally speaks.
“Do you miss your parents?”
“No,” Abril says, and she knows enough about this world now to know that she should, that it would be the natural thing.
“Me neither,” he says, and she finally turns around to look at him. He’s staring at the ceiling, jaw clenched tight.
“I’m glad we got out,” she says, quietly, and he visibly relaxes. “We were never meant to be there.”
He nods, and they eventually go to sleep.
When she wakes up in the morning, only their feet are touching, and his hands are curled around her pillow. She smiles. It feels like home.
----
She gets obsessed with cinema. She’s always liked audiovisual media, but all of the movies they had in Lumamijú were didactic, all of them with a strict purpose. In here, movies are manily supposed to be entertainment. They’re lies, too, all lies, and it takes her a while before she can distinguish fact from fiction, make-believe from reality.
She goes to the cinema downtown three nights a week after her shift, and seats alone and laughs or cries or marvels at the scenes on the screen. Movies give her the same sense of wonder books hold over her. She buys an old, cheap camera and starts making mini movies of her own. She sends one to a local contest, and wins the second place.
They celebrate jumping on her bed, drunk on excitement and the white wine served at the award ceremony. Abril’s wearing a flower-patterned sundress and her hair down and she feels free as she jumps, as she becomes airborne for a second. She throws the prize money up in the air, and the bills rain over them, and they laugh and jump and when he pulls her closer and kisses her swiftly, it feels completely natural.
They laugh until it hurts, and in that moment, there’s only the two of them and no computer to tell them whether or not they can love each other.
She goes to sleep with David’s face on her neck and her hand inside his shirt, multicolor bills all over the bed, covering them both.
----
Almost seven months since swimming in search of a broader world and she discovers the entertainment of kids her age. The bars are so different to the ones back in Lumamijú, and everything is loud, excessive. She comes home every night smelling like stale alcohol and cigarette smoke.
David doesn’t share her newfound interest in debauchery, but rather he stays up all night long reading. She loves the books as well, can’t touch the cover of one without getting a pleasure jolt in her belly, but they’re here now, and she’d very much prefer to experience it than read about it.
She doesn’t come back home one day, goes away for the day with her new friends, the ones she met a few nights ago. She stays drunk for twenty-seven hours, until she gets a tap on the shoulder and stops dancing to look around and find David looking at her, pale and terrified. Abril smiles, drags him towards her and instructs him to dance. He pushes her away, suddenly furious.
“So this is what you’ve been doing?” he yells. “I’ve been looking for you all day long.”
“I just wanted to have fun,” she says, and regrets the words immediately.
He closes his eyes, rubs the bridge of his nose. “You know what, do whatever you want.”
He walks away, and she watches until he’s out of the door, all while silent and unmoving in between the dancing crowd, the twisting bodies that glisten with sweat. Then, she gets another drink, and another, and tries to forget the way David looked scared out of his mind.
It doesn’t work.
----
She goes to the beach the next morning, shaking inside her thick white sweater. She sits on a large rock by the water, knees close to her body. Her hair is pinned up, but a few strands get tossed around by the wind; they get in her eyes and make her blink.
David still swims everyday, usually at dusk, but also whenever he’s feeling especially frustrated. Abril has barely swum since they got here – she mainly stares at the sea, but is too afraid to swim too far from the coast.
She only has to wait twenty minutes before she can see David approaching the coast, his dark hair easy to notice against the morning fog. He’s startled when he sees her, but he already has the water up to his ankles, so he can’t really turn around and ignore her. He looks up at the sky for a moment, breathing hard and getting his wet hair out of his face, and then he walks over and sits next to her.
They stay like that, in silence, for some time.
“I had a feeling I’d find you here,” finally says Abril, looking at the place where the ocean becomes one with the horizon just so she won’t have to look at his face.
“Yeah, well, you know me too well,” he says. When she finally turns around to see him, he’s looking away as well, and he’s got drops of water trapped in his dark eyelashes.
She leans on him, rests her head on his shoulder. He’s still wet, and soon she is as well, but she doesn’t move, just lets her clothes seep the moisture off his skin.
“I’m sorry. I really am,” she whispers, and she can hardly be heard over the crashing waves.
“This has to stop,” he says, voice still tight, but his fingers are playing with her thumb already, always a good sign.
“I know. I will.”
He nods, and they stay quiet for a long time, until they’re both shivering with cold. This time, she’s the one that kisses him, almost like a promise. He tastes like salt. She grabs his wrists to pull him closer, and she can feel his pulse, erratic and too fast.
It matches hers.
----
Two weeks later, David comes back from his monthly visit to the UN embassy winded and wide-eyed.
The UN keeps close tabs on them, asks for copies of their paychecks and runs tests on them every few months. Even now, they’re still not convinced David and Abril shouldn’t just be kept in quarantine.
“I saw a man from the Council,” David says the minute he goes in the door, as Abril is reading and cooking at the same time. She blinks, and puts her book down.
“What do you mean?”
“This man from Lumamijú’s Council, I saw him today.”
She drops the wooden spoon she’s holding. “Are you sure?”
“Completely – he was a friend of my father’s, we were introduced once.”
She tries cleaning the mess the spoon left on the floor so her shaking hands won’t be so noticeable.
“But he could – he could have escaped, like us,” she says.
“He was shaking people’s hands, Abril, he’s definitely in the know.” He turns off the stove, and they sit together on the kitchen floor, shoulder to shoulder.
“So not only did they know about the ocean not being contaminated, they also knew about the rest of the world still being there,” he says, sounding furious.
“But why would they do that? Why keep us in the dark? They’re supposed to look after us, not deceive us.” She doesn’t manage to keep the hurt off her voice.
“Power? Money? It’s all any government cares about.”
“They’re going to make us go back, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
They stay there for a long time.
----
In the morning, and emissary from the UN knocks on their door to tell them they’re being deported back to Lumamijú.
----
Twenty minutes later and David is already packing in his room, throwing things haphazardly into a small suitcase. Abril stares at him from the doorway, arms closed. He stops when he finally realizes she’s not packing as well.
“We’ve got to go,” he says, avoiding her eyes.
“So what, we’re just going to be running forever?”
He stops for a moment, finally turns around to look at her. “If we have to, yes.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Don’t you see? It’s the only way we can be free, and you know it!”
Abril bites her lip, runs her hands over her face and throws herself into the little, threadbare sofa next to his bed, curls herself into a tight ball. “I’ve always hated this. The hiding and the lying and the running like we’ve done something wrong,” she says, looking at the wall as she bites her thumb nail. When she finally looks at him, she says, “but I can’t go back to Lumamijú.”
He nods, and holds out his hand. She takes it, and then he helps her get up and they continue packing, together, in silence.
----
They take a train to Avignon, then another to Narbonne where they buy a ticket to Spain and speak loudly and argue across the room and make sure that everyone sees them, recognizes them. Then they track back, get on board of a cargo train that goes in the opposite direction. They travel like that for a while, boarding trains at random with no set course, no ultimate course other than not be discovered.
They huddle together to sleep at nights, sharing their sole blanket and body heat and sleepy, incoherent conversation in whispers. The train movement lulls them to sleep. Abril wakes up to David’s breathing tickling the back of her neck, and then she rolls over to press her icy cold nose to his skin to wake him up. It becomes routine; running, always running.
It’s almost spring, and the fields are endless, so green it almost hurts her eyes, and her heart beats faster every time the wind moves the tall grass back and forth, so different from home. There are mountains, sometimes, so far and tall that they make her afraid, a bit.
They stick to the country, go into little towns in search for supplies. They won’t go near a city if they can’t avoid it, but if they can’t, they’ll sleep at train stations, close together under benches, always tense.
It’s in one of those nights that they fuck in the darkness, out of fear and uncertainty and exhaustion. They’re cold, so cold, and he presses closer until he has his face buried in her neck and his cold fingers are inside her shirt, and then she’s gasping and reaching back for him, and from then it’s just blood rushing under their skins as she turns around and gets a leg between his thighs and as he moves over her and kisses her, desperate. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t last much, but neither of them cares as they come down from it, panting into each other’s mouths.
Abril had known all about it, it is basic biology after all, but she never expected it to be quite like this. Back home, it had always been called a civic duty. It’s just a chemical reaction, is what she tries to tell herself, as he presses their foreheads together and she wishes she could look into his blue eyes. It’s nothing but chemistry, but she knows she’s lying to herself.
If this is what she left home for, then she doesn’t regret it.
----
They hardly have any money, only whatever little cash they’d saved from their jobs and that hadn’t been spent recklessly in books or movie theatre tickets.
They know how to survive, though, know they proper ways to cultivate and sow and fish with the most proficiency, their education makes it so.
They move from small town to small town selling new and better ways to tend to the land to farmers, and taking food and a roof in exchange.
It’s not the life either of them would’ve chosen, but after the first couple of months, they realize they actually like it. There’s always something new to explore, to see, and there’s complete freedom to do and want and be what they wish.
It’s early August when a heat wave finds them in an empty rest stop, trying to hitch a ride. There’s a bathroom, three concrete picnic tables and nothing else for miles. There’s something eerie about the way everything looks abandoned, about the way the grass is dry and yellow and there’s red dust flying everywhere – it’s almost like a desert. The heat is oppressing. They’re down to their thinnest clothes, and they’re still sweating.
David sits on top of one of the tables, feet up in the seat and eyes closed, head tilted up to the sun. He looks peaceful, in that moment, care-less and free and it makes Abril’s heart beat faster. She straddles him on the table, knees on either sides of his hips; tilts her head to the left and kisses him before he’s even had time to open his eyes. They’ve never talked about this thing between them, not really, and David pulls back a bit, peers at her face before kissing her back.
He tries to get his arms around her, but he has to put them back on the table behind him when he almost looses his balance. She laughs against his mouth, and pushes him until he’s lying flat on the concrete. She feels almost dizzy with heat, like she’s about to burst, and when he touches all of the knobs of her spine, one by one in procession, she can’t help but moan against his neck.
When they finally come down from it, sweaty and dirty and breathless, they stay there for a while, still entangled together, just to take it in, even if they’re still half naked and just meters away from the road.
He kisses her softly, and his voice sounds sleepy when he says “I’m glad you came with me.”
Half an hour later, a truck drives by, and a man in the passenger seat whistles at them. Abril blushes as she struggles to put her shirt back on, but in months to come, just the memory of David’s hands on her thighs makes her heady, almost as if she was running a fever, so she doesn’t regret it.
----
Four months into their journey, they almost settle down. They stay three weeks in this town, small enough to shelter them from the authorities, large enough to not stand out. They get jobs, pay rent for a sad excuse for a flat and get a couch. It’s not idyllic, but it is pleasant enough, and there are large trees moving with the breeze everywhere, still a delight in Abril’s eyes even if she’s seen it a million times by now.
She’s on her way to work when a public phone starts ringing three steps behind her. The town’s market is on the next street, and she can already smell food and herbs and hear people advertising their merchandise. She looks around, but there’s no one else, only a black cat staring at her. The wall behind it is old, like the rest of the town, and the paint is peeling away, showing patches of an earlier color beneath it. She walks on, but the ringing continues, and she turns around after a few minutes of hesitation. When she finally picks up the phone, her hands are shaking.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, Abril,” says the voice on the other side of the line, elderly and polite, completely in control. “Your parents do miss you, you know.”
“Leave us alone,” she manages to say before hanging up. The cat meows.
An hour later they’re already out of town, and they don’t look back.
----
The get caught in October. The interrogation room they’re put in is small and dark and smells funny. There’s only one light, and it makes them look haggard and green on the mirror across them.
When the man that has chased them for months enters the room, she cringes because she recognizes him as well from her vacations in Visado with her mother. 7th level: government. She can’t remember his name. At his right, David tenses, grips his chair and knuckles go white.
The man is wearing a suit, and he looks weird in continental dress instead of the typical work overalls worn in Lumamijú, the ones she’d seen him wearing the last time she and her mother had bumped into him.
He smiles as he sits down. “It’s good to see you, kids,” he says as he puts his hands on the table, fingers intertwined. “Now we can get you back to your families and go in our merry way, shall we?”
“We’re not leaving,” Abril says, not feeling as brave as her words would imply.
“Yes, well, you don’t exactly have a choice, young lady.”
“Don’t patronize us,” says David, practically shaking with indignation. “We’re not children.”
“You’ve been playing a glorified game of hide and go seek for a year and a half, son, of course you’re children.”
He goes on a tirade about irresponsibility and rebellion and how it hurts their perfectly modeled community. She and David try their best to ignore him.
“Why,” Abril cuts him off after a while in a tiny voice. “Why keep it a secret?”
“Because we can’t risk our perfect society to be contaminated with this nonsense of free choice, that’s why,” the man says, and goes on explaining the never ending qualities of the system.
Abril grasps David’s hands and writes lies with her index finger on his palm.
----
It’s only after hours of listening to the man’s speech that Abril realizes he’s afraid. He’s a good speaker, just like everyone in high positions in Lumamijú, and it would be almost convincing if he wasn’t a bit off. He’s trying to hard.
He leaves them alone for a few hours, hoping to intimidate them, and they talk in whispers, decide on the next step.
When the man comes back into the room, they threaten to tell the media all about Lumamijú.
The man yells and kicks furniture and asks loudly who on earth would believe them, but there’s no denying he’s tangibly terrified.
“Lumamijú flourishes on secrets and deceit,” David says, calm and composed, and she’s never been prouder of him. “Let us go, and your secret is safe.”
They’re kept in separate cells for three days, so the suits won’t look weak in their resolve, and then they’re released and told that if the media ever finds out about their island they will be charged with treason.
Even then, when they walk out of the door, hand in hand, towards the Parisian morning, it feels like they had the last laugh.
----
They go back to the coast, get a new flat with large windows and white curtains and only one bedroom. They kiss on the doorway in celebration, keep on doing it, heavy breathing and stolen whispers, until she’s lying flat on the kitchen table, toes curling over the edge, David above her, around her, inside her. She doesn’t wash up, afterwards, and she still smells like him hours later.
She goes back to the little park across the street of their old flat, to check on her tree. It’s grown. It’s twice as tall as she is, heavy with bright orange leaves that are ready to fall. It moves with the breeze, softly, and it feels like a dream come true.
Title: And the Blue Sky Above Them
Word Count: 4300
Fandom: Los Bonsáis Gigantes by Lucía Baquedano
Summary: Life in the real world is not as easy for Abril and David as they would've expected. Still, they're free, and that's what matters.
Author Notes: I've been obsessed about this book since I was a child, and the ending is so open that I always wanted to know just what happened afterwards. Then this idea attacked me and wouldn't let go. So this is basically my way of coming to terms with the story, and creating my own 'canon' about it. I dunno, I kinda like it.
Lumamijú is an island that got torn away from the mainland after an explosion six generations ago. The island has flourished away from the world, and the government, the all-mighty Council, has told the population that they’re the last remaining humans on earth, and that the ocean is contaminated, not allowing them to go out and try finding what’s left of the world. Abril is a young woman that, just like the rest of the people in Lumamijú, has never questioned the authorities, and believes that a system that tells children what they should work on as they grow up, who they should marry and where they should live is just what they need. Until she has a strange vision of trees and a blue sky, something that hasn’t existed in Lumamijú in years because they’re not needed anymore. She’s afraid, at first, and believes bonsais (the sole plant still existing in the island) are going to take over the world – she tries destroying a few, which mark here as somewhat insane and gives her unwanted attention.
She meets David, who believes something is deeply wrong with how things are run, and together they find a batch of books (something forbidden in the island) that speak of a world in which freedom exist. Abril and David are matched to be married by the computer that runs everyone’s lives, and she refuses because she wants David to be with her because he wants to, not because they’re told to do so. They keep on reading the books in secret, until David confesses that he’s found out the sea isn’t contaminated after all, and he plans on swimming out of the island. After some angst on her part, Abril asks him to go along, since she can’t stand the oppressive atmosphere anymore. The book closes with the two of them swimming away, almost passing out from sheer exhaustion when they finally see a boat nearby.
Okay, so that was two paragraphs. Whatever.
And the Blue Sky Above Them
Abril floats for a moment, eyes closed because she still can’t look into the sun she’s dreamed about for months, and forgets about the way her limbs feel heavy and the pain on her hands and the thirst that is eating at his insides, and for a moment, there’s only David, and the endless blue sky.
Then they’re being ushered into the fishing boat, and she can only drink a few sips of water before she’s slipping into unconsciousness, her name called by a scared-sounding David ringing in her ears.
She wakes up two days letter to the endless sway of the boat over the ocean, and to the sight of David sleeping on a chair next to her. She grabs his hand and goes back to sleep.
She dreams of birds, and when she wakes up again, they’re still there, seagulls flying over the boat, and she can’t smile wide enough.
----
Only one person in the boat speaks their language. They’ve never had a name for it, it’s always been that, ‘the language’, and everyone spoke the same, so there was no reason to call it something else. Their accent is not the same, and they pronounce words differently, decades of isolation made sure of that, but Alfonso assures them that what they’re speaking is called Spanish. He translates in a fast tongue to the rest of the crew, who are as mystified with them as Abril and David are with these hardened, simple men, so different from anyone they’ve ever seen.
Alfonso explains that this is a French ship, and Abril can vaguely remember about a geography book telling what France is, what Spain is. Europe, and she can’t hold her tongue and asks how is it that it’s not destroyed. Everyone looks confused for a moment, and she asks about the Great War, the name the Council had given it.
“You mean World War III, kid? The big-bang, so to speak? That was ages ago, girly, things get better. People get better.”
So the world didn’t end six generations ago, and even though they already suspected it, it’s still hard to fathom.
“Can you imagine? Such a big world, and only a step away from us,” says David to her that night, while laying on their bunks in the darkness. The captain wanted to give them separate cabins, but they refused. Everything’s too alien, too strange, and they’re clinging to each other in search for a little bit of familiarity. “Maybe-- maybe all that stuff we read about still exists – maybe there are still trees and large cities, and, what was their name? Leopards.”
“It seems almost unbelievable, doesn’t it?” Abril says, and she realizes that she’s frightened, frightened that maybe nothing at all will be there, and that once they get to land, they will only find more bonsais and grey skies. It makes chills go down her spine.
They spend most of the journey together, looking into the ocean and imagining what they will find once they get off the ship.
The first time she sees land, she can’t repress a gasp of surprise, and when he takes her hand, she can feel him shaking.
----
They’re driven to Paris the moment they get off the boat. They’re news, suddenly, these castaways, these lost children, and their faces are everywhere. They don’t say much about where they came from, just that they’re lost and that they hardly remember a thing and everyone assumes they’re Spanish and a little weird and leave it at that.
They spend weeks wide-eyed – the first mosquito bite, the first dog barking at them, the first purely ornamental flower Abril is offered – everything is new. The city on itself isn’t all that different from Lumamijú, only grander and older than they have ever seen. It’s the people that are different. There’s too many of them, every one of them with a million choices at their disposal.
It’s overwhelming, at first, having the entire world looking at them while all they want is get drunk on the blue sky and the trees moving with the morning breeze outside their window. They’re offered political asylum, whatever that is, and a little money to start their new lives.
They take jobs. David works as a librarian because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with the job he was preordained to do for all of his life, even if Abril knows he truly loves designing. She catches him drawing when he thinks she’s not looking. He comes back home every night blown away by the books he gets to read, touch, handle during the day, by the new things he learns everyday. He tells her about it at nights, before going to bed, eyes bright and wild hand gestures, and she’s just as intrigued about his words as she is about the way he looks so utterly alive while saying them.
It’s harder for her, because this government doesn’t care to provide a job for every single person, and no one’s willing to hire an inexperienced girl with no references, no matter if she does wonders with a camera on hand and has a knack for publicity. She waits tables, at first, and surprisingly, she likes it enough. It gives her an opportunity to watch people, to listen to their conversations and learn a bit about their lives.
Not speaking the language makes it difficult, but they’re both smart, they were bred to be so in Lumamijú, and after five months they can already follow conversations with ease. Technology developed differently in their island and in the mainland, but the human mind is only so inventive, and after a short while they find themselves being able to use any electronic with the best of them. After all, their culture was one devoted to learning, and they’re actually ahead of their times in some things, and behind in some others.
They get a dingy, little flat in the city at first, with only one window looking out to the street. It’s on the fourth floor, and Abril dreams about a house with trees on the back, so they move to southern France after three months, close to the ocean because like it or not, they feel disoriented if they can’t hear the waves crashing against the bay.
They don’t have enough money to get a house, even less one with a backyard, but Abril plants a tree in the little park across the street and vows to watch it grow.
----
David sneaks into her bed one night, and they lie there in silence for a long while until he finally speaks.
“Do you miss your parents?”
“No,” Abril says, and she knows enough about this world now to know that she should, that it would be the natural thing.
“Me neither,” he says, and she finally turns around to look at him. He’s staring at the ceiling, jaw clenched tight.
“I’m glad we got out,” she says, quietly, and he visibly relaxes. “We were never meant to be there.”
He nods, and they eventually go to sleep.
When she wakes up in the morning, only their feet are touching, and his hands are curled around her pillow. She smiles. It feels like home.
----
She gets obsessed with cinema. She’s always liked audiovisual media, but all of the movies they had in Lumamijú were didactic, all of them with a strict purpose. In here, movies are manily supposed to be entertainment. They’re lies, too, all lies, and it takes her a while before she can distinguish fact from fiction, make-believe from reality.
She goes to the cinema downtown three nights a week after her shift, and seats alone and laughs or cries or marvels at the scenes on the screen. Movies give her the same sense of wonder books hold over her. She buys an old, cheap camera and starts making mini movies of her own. She sends one to a local contest, and wins the second place.
They celebrate jumping on her bed, drunk on excitement and the white wine served at the award ceremony. Abril’s wearing a flower-patterned sundress and her hair down and she feels free as she jumps, as she becomes airborne for a second. She throws the prize money up in the air, and the bills rain over them, and they laugh and jump and when he pulls her closer and kisses her swiftly, it feels completely natural.
They laugh until it hurts, and in that moment, there’s only the two of them and no computer to tell them whether or not they can love each other.
She goes to sleep with David’s face on her neck and her hand inside his shirt, multicolor bills all over the bed, covering them both.
----
Almost seven months since swimming in search of a broader world and she discovers the entertainment of kids her age. The bars are so different to the ones back in Lumamijú, and everything is loud, excessive. She comes home every night smelling like stale alcohol and cigarette smoke.
David doesn’t share her newfound interest in debauchery, but rather he stays up all night long reading. She loves the books as well, can’t touch the cover of one without getting a pleasure jolt in her belly, but they’re here now, and she’d very much prefer to experience it than read about it.
She doesn’t come back home one day, goes away for the day with her new friends, the ones she met a few nights ago. She stays drunk for twenty-seven hours, until she gets a tap on the shoulder and stops dancing to look around and find David looking at her, pale and terrified. Abril smiles, drags him towards her and instructs him to dance. He pushes her away, suddenly furious.
“So this is what you’ve been doing?” he yells. “I’ve been looking for you all day long.”
“I just wanted to have fun,” she says, and regrets the words immediately.
He closes his eyes, rubs the bridge of his nose. “You know what, do whatever you want.”
He walks away, and she watches until he’s out of the door, all while silent and unmoving in between the dancing crowd, the twisting bodies that glisten with sweat. Then, she gets another drink, and another, and tries to forget the way David looked scared out of his mind.
It doesn’t work.
----
She goes to the beach the next morning, shaking inside her thick white sweater. She sits on a large rock by the water, knees close to her body. Her hair is pinned up, but a few strands get tossed around by the wind; they get in her eyes and make her blink.
David still swims everyday, usually at dusk, but also whenever he’s feeling especially frustrated. Abril has barely swum since they got here – she mainly stares at the sea, but is too afraid to swim too far from the coast.
She only has to wait twenty minutes before she can see David approaching the coast, his dark hair easy to notice against the morning fog. He’s startled when he sees her, but he already has the water up to his ankles, so he can’t really turn around and ignore her. He looks up at the sky for a moment, breathing hard and getting his wet hair out of his face, and then he walks over and sits next to her.
They stay like that, in silence, for some time.
“I had a feeling I’d find you here,” finally says Abril, looking at the place where the ocean becomes one with the horizon just so she won’t have to look at his face.
“Yeah, well, you know me too well,” he says. When she finally turns around to see him, he’s looking away as well, and he’s got drops of water trapped in his dark eyelashes.
She leans on him, rests her head on his shoulder. He’s still wet, and soon she is as well, but she doesn’t move, just lets her clothes seep the moisture off his skin.
“I’m sorry. I really am,” she whispers, and she can hardly be heard over the crashing waves.
“This has to stop,” he says, voice still tight, but his fingers are playing with her thumb already, always a good sign.
“I know. I will.”
He nods, and they stay quiet for a long time, until they’re both shivering with cold. This time, she’s the one that kisses him, almost like a promise. He tastes like salt. She grabs his wrists to pull him closer, and she can feel his pulse, erratic and too fast.
It matches hers.
----
Two weeks later, David comes back from his monthly visit to the UN embassy winded and wide-eyed.
The UN keeps close tabs on them, asks for copies of their paychecks and runs tests on them every few months. Even now, they’re still not convinced David and Abril shouldn’t just be kept in quarantine.
“I saw a man from the Council,” David says the minute he goes in the door, as Abril is reading and cooking at the same time. She blinks, and puts her book down.
“What do you mean?”
“This man from Lumamijú’s Council, I saw him today.”
She drops the wooden spoon she’s holding. “Are you sure?”
“Completely – he was a friend of my father’s, we were introduced once.”
She tries cleaning the mess the spoon left on the floor so her shaking hands won’t be so noticeable.
“But he could – he could have escaped, like us,” she says.
“He was shaking people’s hands, Abril, he’s definitely in the know.” He turns off the stove, and they sit together on the kitchen floor, shoulder to shoulder.
“So not only did they know about the ocean not being contaminated, they also knew about the rest of the world still being there,” he says, sounding furious.
“But why would they do that? Why keep us in the dark? They’re supposed to look after us, not deceive us.” She doesn’t manage to keep the hurt off her voice.
“Power? Money? It’s all any government cares about.”
“They’re going to make us go back, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
They stay there for a long time.
----
In the morning, and emissary from the UN knocks on their door to tell them they’re being deported back to Lumamijú.
----
Twenty minutes later and David is already packing in his room, throwing things haphazardly into a small suitcase. Abril stares at him from the doorway, arms closed. He stops when he finally realizes she’s not packing as well.
“We’ve got to go,” he says, avoiding her eyes.
“So what, we’re just going to be running forever?”
He stops for a moment, finally turns around to look at her. “If we have to, yes.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Don’t you see? It’s the only way we can be free, and you know it!”
Abril bites her lip, runs her hands over her face and throws herself into the little, threadbare sofa next to his bed, curls herself into a tight ball. “I’ve always hated this. The hiding and the lying and the running like we’ve done something wrong,” she says, looking at the wall as she bites her thumb nail. When she finally looks at him, she says, “but I can’t go back to Lumamijú.”
He nods, and holds out his hand. She takes it, and then he helps her get up and they continue packing, together, in silence.
----
They take a train to Avignon, then another to Narbonne where they buy a ticket to Spain and speak loudly and argue across the room and make sure that everyone sees them, recognizes them. Then they track back, get on board of a cargo train that goes in the opposite direction. They travel like that for a while, boarding trains at random with no set course, no ultimate course other than not be discovered.
They huddle together to sleep at nights, sharing their sole blanket and body heat and sleepy, incoherent conversation in whispers. The train movement lulls them to sleep. Abril wakes up to David’s breathing tickling the back of her neck, and then she rolls over to press her icy cold nose to his skin to wake him up. It becomes routine; running, always running.
It’s almost spring, and the fields are endless, so green it almost hurts her eyes, and her heart beats faster every time the wind moves the tall grass back and forth, so different from home. There are mountains, sometimes, so far and tall that they make her afraid, a bit.
They stick to the country, go into little towns in search for supplies. They won’t go near a city if they can’t avoid it, but if they can’t, they’ll sleep at train stations, close together under benches, always tense.
It’s in one of those nights that they fuck in the darkness, out of fear and uncertainty and exhaustion. They’re cold, so cold, and he presses closer until he has his face buried in her neck and his cold fingers are inside her shirt, and then she’s gasping and reaching back for him, and from then it’s just blood rushing under their skins as she turns around and gets a leg between his thighs and as he moves over her and kisses her, desperate. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t last much, but neither of them cares as they come down from it, panting into each other’s mouths.
Abril had known all about it, it is basic biology after all, but she never expected it to be quite like this. Back home, it had always been called a civic duty. It’s just a chemical reaction, is what she tries to tell herself, as he presses their foreheads together and she wishes she could look into his blue eyes. It’s nothing but chemistry, but she knows she’s lying to herself.
If this is what she left home for, then she doesn’t regret it.
----
They hardly have any money, only whatever little cash they’d saved from their jobs and that hadn’t been spent recklessly in books or movie theatre tickets.
They know how to survive, though, know they proper ways to cultivate and sow and fish with the most proficiency, their education makes it so.
They move from small town to small town selling new and better ways to tend to the land to farmers, and taking food and a roof in exchange.
It’s not the life either of them would’ve chosen, but after the first couple of months, they realize they actually like it. There’s always something new to explore, to see, and there’s complete freedom to do and want and be what they wish.
It’s early August when a heat wave finds them in an empty rest stop, trying to hitch a ride. There’s a bathroom, three concrete picnic tables and nothing else for miles. There’s something eerie about the way everything looks abandoned, about the way the grass is dry and yellow and there’s red dust flying everywhere – it’s almost like a desert. The heat is oppressing. They’re down to their thinnest clothes, and they’re still sweating.
David sits on top of one of the tables, feet up in the seat and eyes closed, head tilted up to the sun. He looks peaceful, in that moment, care-less and free and it makes Abril’s heart beat faster. She straddles him on the table, knees on either sides of his hips; tilts her head to the left and kisses him before he’s even had time to open his eyes. They’ve never talked about this thing between them, not really, and David pulls back a bit, peers at her face before kissing her back.
He tries to get his arms around her, but he has to put them back on the table behind him when he almost looses his balance. She laughs against his mouth, and pushes him until he’s lying flat on the concrete. She feels almost dizzy with heat, like she’s about to burst, and when he touches all of the knobs of her spine, one by one in procession, she can’t help but moan against his neck.
When they finally come down from it, sweaty and dirty and breathless, they stay there for a while, still entangled together, just to take it in, even if they’re still half naked and just meters away from the road.
He kisses her softly, and his voice sounds sleepy when he says “I’m glad you came with me.”
Half an hour later, a truck drives by, and a man in the passenger seat whistles at them. Abril blushes as she struggles to put her shirt back on, but in months to come, just the memory of David’s hands on her thighs makes her heady, almost as if she was running a fever, so she doesn’t regret it.
----
Four months into their journey, they almost settle down. They stay three weeks in this town, small enough to shelter them from the authorities, large enough to not stand out. They get jobs, pay rent for a sad excuse for a flat and get a couch. It’s not idyllic, but it is pleasant enough, and there are large trees moving with the breeze everywhere, still a delight in Abril’s eyes even if she’s seen it a million times by now.
She’s on her way to work when a public phone starts ringing three steps behind her. The town’s market is on the next street, and she can already smell food and herbs and hear people advertising their merchandise. She looks around, but there’s no one else, only a black cat staring at her. The wall behind it is old, like the rest of the town, and the paint is peeling away, showing patches of an earlier color beneath it. She walks on, but the ringing continues, and she turns around after a few minutes of hesitation. When she finally picks up the phone, her hands are shaking.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, Abril,” says the voice on the other side of the line, elderly and polite, completely in control. “Your parents do miss you, you know.”
“Leave us alone,” she manages to say before hanging up. The cat meows.
An hour later they’re already out of town, and they don’t look back.
----
The get caught in October. The interrogation room they’re put in is small and dark and smells funny. There’s only one light, and it makes them look haggard and green on the mirror across them.
When the man that has chased them for months enters the room, she cringes because she recognizes him as well from her vacations in Visado with her mother. 7th level: government. She can’t remember his name. At his right, David tenses, grips his chair and knuckles go white.
The man is wearing a suit, and he looks weird in continental dress instead of the typical work overalls worn in Lumamijú, the ones she’d seen him wearing the last time she and her mother had bumped into him.
He smiles as he sits down. “It’s good to see you, kids,” he says as he puts his hands on the table, fingers intertwined. “Now we can get you back to your families and go in our merry way, shall we?”
“We’re not leaving,” Abril says, not feeling as brave as her words would imply.
“Yes, well, you don’t exactly have a choice, young lady.”
“Don’t patronize us,” says David, practically shaking with indignation. “We’re not children.”
“You’ve been playing a glorified game of hide and go seek for a year and a half, son, of course you’re children.”
He goes on a tirade about irresponsibility and rebellion and how it hurts their perfectly modeled community. She and David try their best to ignore him.
“Why,” Abril cuts him off after a while in a tiny voice. “Why keep it a secret?”
“Because we can’t risk our perfect society to be contaminated with this nonsense of free choice, that’s why,” the man says, and goes on explaining the never ending qualities of the system.
Abril grasps David’s hands and writes lies with her index finger on his palm.
----
It’s only after hours of listening to the man’s speech that Abril realizes he’s afraid. He’s a good speaker, just like everyone in high positions in Lumamijú, and it would be almost convincing if he wasn’t a bit off. He’s trying to hard.
He leaves them alone for a few hours, hoping to intimidate them, and they talk in whispers, decide on the next step.
When the man comes back into the room, they threaten to tell the media all about Lumamijú.
The man yells and kicks furniture and asks loudly who on earth would believe them, but there’s no denying he’s tangibly terrified.
“Lumamijú flourishes on secrets and deceit,” David says, calm and composed, and she’s never been prouder of him. “Let us go, and your secret is safe.”
They’re kept in separate cells for three days, so the suits won’t look weak in their resolve, and then they’re released and told that if the media ever finds out about their island they will be charged with treason.
Even then, when they walk out of the door, hand in hand, towards the Parisian morning, it feels like they had the last laugh.
----
They go back to the coast, get a new flat with large windows and white curtains and only one bedroom. They kiss on the doorway in celebration, keep on doing it, heavy breathing and stolen whispers, until she’s lying flat on the kitchen table, toes curling over the edge, David above her, around her, inside her. She doesn’t wash up, afterwards, and she still smells like him hours later.
She goes back to the little park across the street of their old flat, to check on her tree. It’s grown. It’s twice as tall as she is, heavy with bright orange leaves that are ready to fall. It moves with the breeze, softly, and it feels like a dream come true.
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