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Right to Grow

a love story

By NenePublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 9 min read
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“Ooh, this is so cool!” Zora’s voice echoes from ahead of them, bouncing off of the concrete walls of the abandoned structure they’ve found.

“Use the radiation detector before you touch anything!” Maya yells after her, and then: “Are you wearing your mask? I can hear you way too clearly for someone wearing a mask!”

Zora’s answering laugh is muffled; she must have put her gas mask back on.

Maya’s left with Sowad, their unfortunate stray, a teenage kid they found bleeding out in the bush three days ago. Zora had insisted they keep him, overruling Maya’s pragmatism: they have limited supplies, and the kid is badly injured; he’s a hindrance at best, a liability at worst.

Sowad looks at Maya and slowly fingerspells for Maya’s benefit; she doesn’t know much beyond the sign alphabet, unlike Zora, the polyglot. W-E S-T-A-Y, He signs. He starts to spell HERE, but Maya has gotten the gist.

She grunts, rubbing the left side of her chest. She has no intention of them staying here long term, but as usual she has checked the tracker light on her watch dutifully and covertly all day with no luck. They won’t come at night, she doesn’t think: the rich come when they please, and she’s pretty sure that’s during business hours. And when they do come, Maya’s going to make damn sure that Zora, at least, is out and aboveground in plain sight. But tonight she’s dead on her feet, and Sowad looks like Death’s brown cousin.

She nods her fist: Yes. She makes one finger to indicate one night, and he nods in acquiescence.

“Look what I found!”

Zora is bouncing back into view, signing her words to Sowad, the plants on her back bouncing with her. Her gas mask is slung uselessly around her neck. She’s waving a little gold chain with a multi-colored heart on it, but her eyes immediately zero in on Maya’s hand, which is still rubbing the spot where her left breast used to be.

“Is it bothering you?” Zora asks, looking concerned. “Let’s get settled for the night and then I can crack some aloe on it; Lola’s got a juicy leaf. We oughta do breast exams, anyway, it’s been a while since we last—”

“No,” Maya says, perhaps a little too harshly, dropping her hand from her chest. Rubbing the scars on her chest has become a bit of a habit. She is suddenly glad she wasn’t rubbing her right breast, the one that’s ostensibly fine.

Zora’s face draws in a bit.

Once upon a time, breast exams in the fading sunlight had been something precious. It had started as a necessary evil, convenient, since they were two women traveling together, but it had grown into something soft and secret and special. Hands that were at first methodical were allowed to wander, bold and rough, followed tentatively by mouths and then tongues on skin, so much skin, salty and damp with sweat and earth, as they explored each other slowly, patiently. And gradually that sweet and gentle curiosity had become something warm and solid and familiar, until they’d known each other’s bodies like they knew their own—better, actually, since it was Zora who found the lump on Maya’s left breast, before Maya even noticed it.

It has been a long time since breast exams were something she looked forward to.

“You’re right,” Maya continues, pushing past Zora, who is holding their pothos plant, “Kali,” tightly to her chest, the heart-shaped locket clutched in one hand. Their tulsi plant and Lola, the aloe, are slung over her back, the onions tucked away at the bottom of her pack. “I haven’t checked you in a while. I’ll do that tonight, but we should save the aloe. And I can check myself.”

Zora follows her, silent for a few moments, and finally says, quietly, “You know that I still find you attractive, right?”

Maya barks out a harsh laugh, because she’s lathered in dung and smells like onions. She has one breast and a dozen scars and her body hair is thick and coarse and her brown skin is rough and dry and peeling. Maybe she was attractive once, but she’s certainly not now.

Zora’s different, Zora with her plants and flowers and sunshine smile. At Maya’s insistence, her body is also painted with cow dung and onion juice to protect against radiation. But she’s got a bounce in her step and a glow in her eyes and that little dimple on her cheek. Her dark skin is soft, her body hair downy. She’s got two perfect breasts and two space buns keeping her fuzzy black hair out of her face. Zora’s whole, healthy, beautiful. Zora can make it.

“Maya—” Zora tries.

“Are you hungry?” Maya says abruptly, addressing Sowad. She cups her hand and moves it down her chest in a sharp motion: Hungry, then points to Sowad.

He lifts his eyebrows at her. Sowad is thin and lanky and scruffy, with a long brown nose, intelligent eyes, and high cheekbones that have not yet stubbled. In another life she imagines him clever and animated, surrounded by a circle of friends, his cheeks puffing out with laughter. He may not have heard their conversation, but he’s picked up on the energy. He gives her a wry smile and then lifts a fist, nods it once, Yes.

...

Later, Maya’s seated on a lead-lined blanket by herself, watching their water boil over a shoddily constructed fire. A somewhat patched-up Sowad is sitting half-propped up next to Zora on the other lead blanket. They’re signing rapidly to each other in the flickering firelight.

Finally, Zora turns to her: “He needs water.”

“It’ll be ready in a minute,” Maya says, not looking up. The water’s all boiled up and she’s applied a cold pack to coax it back to liquid. “Wait for it to distill.”

Zora nods and then gets up to go relieve herself.

The boy shuffles across the fire, and Maya raises her eyes to him. He’s chewing on basil leaves.

“What,” she says half-heartedly, and then she attempts to fingerspell it.

He flicks a hand forward off his chin: Thank you.

“Thank Zora,” Maya huffs, then attempts to translate by repeating his Thank you gesture and pointing to where Zora had exited.

The kid studies her for a second, and then copies her motion, pointing in the direction Zora had gone. Then he fists his hands and crosses his arms over his chest. Love, Maya remembers. Then he points to her.

“Zora loves me?” Maya translates. She looks back at the fire. “Yeah, I love her too,” she says quietly. “Oh,” she points to herself, hugs her arms to her chest, and points to the absent Zora. “Uh, too?” She asks, holding up two fingers. “Er, scratch that. How about Also?” She fingerspells it.

He smiles at her and nods.

“Hey,” Zora is back. She’s got the stupid locket wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet.

“Did you at least check the radiation score on that thing,” Maya says half-heartedly, gesturing to it.

Zora ignores her, but there is something soft in her eyes, indicating that she’s witnessed Maya’s fumbling attempts at communication. “I was wondering...What do you think about getting married?”

Maya looks at her, thrown by the non-sequitur. “That tax partnership people used to do?” She asks. She fingerspells the word T-A-X to Sowad with a cringe, knowing it probably means nothing to him. “Based on the amount of tax things our ancestors did, you’d think they would’ve managed to spend some public money on not killing our planet.”

“I was thinking more of the union of two souls, ‘til death do us a part sort of thing,” Zora says with a smile. The shadow of her dimple is long across her chin, and her eyes are shining.

Maya swallows. “There’s no government to register with,” she reminds Zora. “And we know we love each other. There’s no need.”

“C’mon, don’t you wanna be my partner, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, ‘til death do us part?”

“Why do you keep saying that?” Maya laughs, though something twinges in her at the words sickness and health, “What have you been reading?” She’s suddenly hyper-aware of her right breast, hidden under her shirt, of the new lump she found, weeks ago. The lump Zora hasn’t seen yet.

“That’s what they would say!” Zora laughs back, soft. “In their vows.” She’s signing rapidly, keeping Sowad informed, though Maya has given up after half-heartedly trying to spell government. “You know, people like us used to not be able to get married.”

“Why do you want to then?”

“Because we can,” Zora says. “People like us fought to be able to live openly, to have the same rights.” She indicates the heart pendant on her wrist. “That’s what this is about. We could be a family. You, me, and Sowad, living here in this little cave.”

Maya sobers. “We’re not living here, Zora,” she says.

Zora looks at her. “I know you’re holding out hope that one of the ships will come back and get us, but I’m not sure…” Her eyes trail to Maya’s missing left breast, flick to Sowad’s bad leg, and Maya realizes that Zora’s known all along that she’s been traveling with the condemned, has been playing along with Maya’s gentle fiction that they’ll all be rescued and spirited away on a spacecraft where the rich have been operating an isolated society.

“You’re right,” Maya tells her softly. “They won’t take us, me and Sowad. But they’ll take you. They'll have to. They'll be inbred soon and they’ll need new genes. And you’re healthy.”

Zora bites her lip, looking guilty, and then lifts her shirt. There, on her hip, is a mole, one Maya hasn’t seen before. The edges are ragged, uneven. Maya’s heart drops. She knows what it is.

Maya puts her fingers on the mole, an ugly little island in the ocean of soft black skin.

“Let’s get married,” Zora repeats, tugging on Maya's hand. Her face is soft, warm in the firelight, but her eyebrows are drawn tight and Maya sees something desperate in her eyes.

All Maya can do is nod, her throat tight. She leans in to kiss her girlfriend, tries a watery smile. “Alright.”

It feels like a surrender, and it is, but it's not so bad. They've surrendered that bootless, wild hope for something solid and tender: the right to grow sick and ugly and old together, to die with the earth.

Maya looks up from where Zora has buried herself in her arms, and sees Sowad across the fire, his brown eyes solemn. She crooks a finger to beckon him over.

As he drags himself over, she hooks an arm around his left shoulder and pulls him into the hug. Zora reaches out blindly and tugs at Sowad's other arm and they squeeze each other tightly.

In the firelight, stinking of onions and muck, they're a family.

Empowerment
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About the Creator

Nene

I never recovered from the Merlin finale.

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