After the Apocalypse

A very small boy, wary with being so small and having few resources on which to depend licked his stubby fingers furtively, though he looked temporarily satisfied after finding ripe vanilla fruit up a deer path he’d only just discovered. He looked perhaps five, though he was in fact older, malnutrition and the inevitable shyness of the little cared for having done their part in the stunting of yet another child.

But Gemi was still a special, a unique child not of this place, out of joint with his locality. His tattered sarong might have been yet more flimsy and worn had he not been shifted to this place by events massive and consequential. Sunsets over Lake Champlain in North America, half a world away, had been impacted by Gemi’s story and his sarong was newer than he otherwise would have had the right to expect.

He had no thought for these matters, not at the moment. His traps; set up to catch the small birds, the leaf lorikeets and paradise flycatchers of the woods, had failed him again. The bitter sweetness of the vanilla flesh soothed his inner churning, but it would not give any lasting comfort for his hunger. Still, he could hope that his sister- who was not a sister- had found better pickings thieving at the market. Gemi burped an oddly full burp. He began to walk back downhill toward the village, careful to remember the important way signs so that he could find his way back to the grove, trees laden and full of ripe vanilla fruit.

Sometimes he wished he was one of the People of the Woods, the Orang Utan with their long, hairy orange arms who could swing among the treetops and had much easier access to the ripe and ready fruit up among the flying foxes and the gibbons. Though they lived not far from where he had been born, he’d never seen one, or at least he didn’t recall seeing one. Maybe before memories grew he’d spied one from his swaddle, swinging her way along behind the deep brown, luminescent and thoughtful eyes Cahya had described to him when he’d asked her what the Orang Utan were like. She’d seen them a few times back home in Sumatra, but those ones had been almost super-pets, extended members attached to human families. The true wild people of the woods were long wiped out in south Sumatra even in 1885. One would have to journey far to the north away from the crowds of the Sunda Strait, to Jambi and beyond before one could hope to see the Orang Utan in their natural world.

Still, these creatures from another place now far to his west held a strong grip on both Gemi and Cahya as talismans of a lost life, as much a part of their past as the scent of coffee and the sound of gamelin. These other things could still be found in Nusa Tenggara, here on Flores Island, but for the transplanted children the local versions held an artificial taint. Like the haphazard public performances of the wayang kulit under the ancient banyan tree that ruled the village square, it was all someone else’s world.

Gemi trumped down a muddy path, the monsoons trickling to an end in the kind of torrential trickle reserved only for monsoons. Humidity blanketed and clung to everything. Even little Gemi had managed to grow a very thin layer of perspiration. Rounding a corner by an old hovel above the village, he came across his sister- who was not a sister- on her way uphill through the filtering fronds to find him. Cahya said nothing but thrust her small hand under his nose, offering him a jambos fruit she had pilfered from the one-eyed stupid lady. He took it greedily but remembered to thank her. Her welcome was a playful cuff to the ear. “Did you get any birds, Little Monster?” she asked affectionately, hopefully.

“Nothing again, my love, but they are there. I can hear them calling in the bushes,” Gemi hid his shame for not mentioning to her his discovery of the apparently wild, unknown vanilla vines.

“The Crone needs us to help her shut up the stall soon; did you forget it’s her stock-up day tomorrow, Dum-dum?” Once a month the ancient woman who took them in travelled to the nearby coastal town to restock her market stall with bangles, beads, feathers and cloths from all over Asia. She’d previously paid a surly man to watch over her stall on the one day a month she couldn’t be there herself, but four months ago she had decided that Cahya was old enough to begin earning her keep watching over the shop on stock day. Home was a tarp of old sailcloth strung up behind the little stall; bed, a rattan mat on the ground and toilet was made in the cool, flowing river.

Gemi flushed again, he’d forgotten that he and Cahya had important duties this evening and all day tomorrow. The Crone had no expectations of him, partially because he was so small still and partially because he was just a boy; a subspecies with which she seemed to have no idea what to do, but he felt a heavy responsibility, an attachment to his big sister- who was not a sister. While the Crone allowed him a place to rest, it was gangly, brown-armed Cahya who made sure he always got food. She had saved his life and she kept him alive now that they were safely ashore in Flores. Occasionally, Gemi and Cahya went hungry, the Crone was poor; however, the children usually managed to unearth, or steal, something to eat every day.

Once, in his hunger and childish ignorance, Gemi had snatched a deadly Green Tree snake from an overhanging branch and snapped its neck, swinging the long, narrow body as he brought it home for supper. They lived dangerously on the western edge of a small island among the teeming Indonesian Archipelago under the presumptive governance of Dutch masters- white people, of all things- whom they never saw and who might just as well be the mythical Prince Arjuna and his Princess Srikandi as far as they were concerned …or at least the prince’s wise servant Semar, beloved of Gemi for his darker skin and small stature.

“Dunderhead beware the root you’re about to trip over,” and like a golem attending its Rabbi, Gemi abided Cahya in tripping over the root. This was a routine they had played often. The distraction caused by the little boy falling over the banyan root allowed Cahya the chance to nab another two jambos from the one-eyed stupid lady’s fruit stall.

Please continue reading the story with "After the Apocalypse" (2)

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