After the Apocalypse (6)

Gemi had plucked most of the low-lying vanilla fruit from the path side of the orchard so that he’d begun to climb the trees to get at fruit higher up. As it turned out however, the higher fruit was much sparser and nowhere near as tasty. The rest of the grove grew on the other side of a weathered knob which had probably once been a rise of land between hillsides. Gemi was afraid of the far side. He couldn’t exactly explain why he was afraid, though he knew it had something to do with the rise’s resemblance to the place where the inundation had caught him in the before time. He’d been little more than a toddler at the time and his words still failed him in any effort to describe his first home.

He would have nothing to do with the other side of the grove so he contented himself with the fast dwindling pickings where he felt relatively safe. His feeling was so strong that Gemi made Cahya promise to not walk up and over the rise either. He hadn’t noticed the questionable veracity of her promise amid her fulsome praise for his discovery of the vanilla bonanza.

Cahya knew that the other side of the field would offer much better picking. She gradually worked her way to a position behind Gemi out of his immediate line-of-sight and a little further up the slope than his location. She waited for Gemi to lapse into the complete absorption in his task she knew from familiarity with him. In time his sense of purpose and his dominating, demanding stomach fully distracted the little boy. Cahya began to work her way to the top of the knobble of land.

The bump was actually so slight that she didn’t even realize when she passed over it; it only appeared imposing from below and to smaller children. The original farmer himself must have barely noticed the thing. On the other side was an impressive crop of very low hanging ripe fruit and vanilla orchids blossoming in scattered places among the host pole trees. Cahya harvested some of the slimy fruit, licking her thin fingers clean, but then she realized that the grove on this side of the orchard led into a declivity which hid all but the tops of the various host trees on which the vanilla vines were growing. Shooting a quick glance toward Gemi to be sure he was adequately distracted; she allowed her curiosity to lead her toward the lower ground on the far side of the clearing.

The air held the peculiar pungent smell of ripe vanilla seed and there was a musky something else which seemed familiar and yet unfamiliar. A quick burst of adrenaline swept through Cahya’s limbs as she felt both a fear and an excitement rush over her. What was this? A few more steps and she found herself unsure what to feel; what to think.

In front of Cahya were tiny people, miniature women to be precise. There were two of them and one was on her knees poking at an orchid with a stem of razor grass, lost deep in concentration. The other stood beside her with her back to Cahya, seemingly intent on whatever operation the kneeling woman was performing. After an apparently satisfying moment, the standing woman reached up and used a piece of bamboo string to tie the orchid’s vine to a slim branch of its pole tree. What startled Cahya most was that the totally naked woman; pendulous breasts elongated and swaying, had to stand tiptoe and reach up to secure the vine to the branch. When she lowered herself to her heels again the orchid hung at Cahya’s eye level.

An in-rush of sudden breath from Cahya made the standing woman start and the kneeling woman hop to her feet. Both brown figures turned to look up at the skinny little girl, dressed in rags. Their mouths hung open for just long enough for Cahya to be shocked by their features. They both released a guttural, elemental yell before high-stepping quickly and silently into the forest, as if melting into the fronds and undergrowth.

Cahya blinked. She already doubted the wonder of what she had seen. What she’d seen was frighteningly, weirdly familiar yet alien. The two miniature women were totally naked with strangely lengthy forearms which appeared to hold their palms decidedly forward in odd supplication. Their feet were absurdly large for their height; bringing to mind ducks’ feet to the flabbergasted Cahya. However, the truly startling aspect which shook Cahya and burned into her consciousness was the women’s faces.

The little people’s mouths gave an impression of protruding like; yet not like, the lady Orang Utan she had once been lucky enough to see up close. If one were to cut an eighth of the sphere of a small coconut and place it over a toddler’s mouth, she just might create a similar profile. This mouth protrusion gave their lips an illusion of thinness that was after all false in that, on a flattened ‘normal’ face the lips would have been full and lush. The alien quality of the convex mouth was enhanced by the apparent absence on both tiny women of any notion of a chin. Their lower jaws receded back toward their throats with a few even less expected lengthy black chin hairs scattered along the recession. Between two bright and incongruously pale eyes extremely broad, unnaturally flat noses bore nostrils which imitated a permanent threatening rage. Yet Cahya sensed no threat from the poor creatures. In this they reminded her of nothing more than the terrified and falsely aggressive expression Gemi would affect when he felt threatened by something bigger than him.

The two women’s heads were miniature enough to begin with, but the exaggerated slope with which their foreheads receded over their skulls called to mind the monkeys which harassed the fruit stalls in the market. Something in the structure of the little people’s arms and shoulders made them look like they were performing a permanent noncommittal shrug at the universe even as they’d been absorbed in their task among the vanilla orchids. When they’d rushed off, their thick legs and fantastically long feet had required them to lift their knees drastically high, yet for all that, they had swiftly and silently melted into the forest. They had also permanently burned their essence, their existence, into Cahya’s awareness, underlined by the eerie tingle of out of place otherness which remained with Cahya for the rest of her life.

She stood enraptured, frightened, charmed and bewildered. A hoot from the other side of the orchard recalled her to this world and the brother- who was not a brother. What would she tell Gemi of all this? She found him a little disappointed in his meager harvest of fruit. Instantly, she decided to not tell him; at least not yet, about her strange encounter. Cahya reasoned, rightly, that Gemi would want to chase after the miniature adults so that he could see them for himself. This idea seemed both fruitless and wrong to her. She almost instinctively felt a desire to leave the tiny sprites to their mysterious, maybe impossible, forest world. She might tell Gemi someday then again she might not; however, she did know someone she felt she could talk to about the little people.

Please continue reading this story in "After the Apocalypse" (7)

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