HOZ 5

More character development with some conflict resolution

Ryan laid in his bed and stared at his ceiling. He felt icky. He knew he was right. But he still felt icky. Shoky was the one that betrayed her own species. She wouldn’t see reason. He wondered how he agreed to this charade in the first place. But remembering how Nalie looked at him made him feel uncomfortable. He turned in his bed, hoping the new position would spawn new thoughts. Nalie’s sniffling and moans prevented that, however.

He tried ignoring them. He thought of his parents. He thought of the awful name they’d given him. He hated his name, Ryan. He’d been born at the start of human craze in Zenon. Zenonites didn’t know as much about humans back then. They had just been discovered and probes were currently perusing its lands trying to figure out whether Zenon should send them a welcome basket or not. One probe had just sent back information regarding European languages and names when Ryan’s then pregnant mother saw the surname ‘O’Ryan’ and thought, “That’s a nice name.”

Ryan had been a year old already when the Galactic Debates determined humans to be dangerous animals that were to be avoided. Slowly, fear of the human race grew. By the time Ryan was old enough for his first year of General Education- as zenonites called grade school- the other children went so far as to avoid him because of his name. “What if he’s a human in disguise?” they would whisper to each other. Often, they would run away from wherever Ryan went.

Being a bit of an outcast made Ryan lonely, of course. But it got worse was when he grew older and his classmates became braver, turning their childish fears into cruel mockery. “Hey Ryan, still trying to figure out how to make a superconductor work at room temperature?” they would joke. Anger was added to his isolation.

“Why couldn’t you give me a normal name? Like Nikau or Tangaro?” Ryan would ask his parents.

“I thought Ryan was a nice name,” his mother would reply. “It’s different, special, unique.” His father would grunt in agreement from the living room.

“I hate it!” he’d then run to his room and mope about his life. He remembered lying in his bed, crying, wishing someone would come hug him but no one ever did. Luckily, his parents eventually had a talk with the school and his teacher explained to his classmates that he didn’t like being made fun of his human name. His classmates- meaning their jabs simply as jokes- immediately apologized to him and stopped making fun of him. They asked him to join all their get-togethers but Ryan usually declined. He never really liked most people after the ordeal. Well, no, it wasn’t that he didn’t like them. He just didn’t really feel particularly… connected to them. The initial social rejection made him bitter towards any interaction at all. At the same time, he wanted so desperately to assimilate. It was very conflicting, both not fully trusting his counterparts but never wanting to feel rejected either. His relationships with others became fake and shallow, bore out of necessity rather than a love of companionship. The weight of  the loneliness he often tried to simply accept started feeling heavier as it did when he was young.

Nalie’s wails paired so nicely with Ryan’s memories of his depressing childhood, he began to think the sound was only in his mind. They became the background noise of his own thoughts. But then the cries grew more panicked and louder but at the same time, muffled, as if Nalie was trying to hide the sound in her pillow. The sound left Ryan’s mind and struck his heart with a suddenness that broke his meditation. He felt something trickle down his cheek as well as a tightness in his chest and stomach. He tried to breathe and swallow but something made it feel constricted. It was just before Ryan started to feel numb that Nalie’s vocal mourning began to quiet once more into subtle snivels. Ryan sighed.

He felt himself get out of bed and walk towards Nalie’s room.

He cracked open her door. Nalie lay on her bed, motionless, sniffing in an irregular rhythm. Ryan quietly shuffled in towards her.

“Don’t zenonites know how to knock?” Nalie’s hardened voice replied.

The sound of her voice snapped Ryan’s brain back on, causing him to pause a few feet from her bed.

“Did you want something or are you just going to stand there and listen to me cry?”

Ryan closed his eyes as he let the words fall out of his mouth without any approval from his brain. “I’m sorry I upset you earlier… with the fighting. We don’t usually... We’ve just been very... It’s been hard.” He opened his eyes as his mind suddenly tried to regain control and scrambled to try forming some coherent explanation.

“I haven’t seen my family in 4 years,” Nalie stated plainly.

Ryan looked around room. “It’s not a competition.”

Nalie sat up. “You know what my last memory of my parents is?”

Ryan stared at her dumbfounded. “What?”

“They were arguing,” Nalie looked at Ryan. “About some court case and money, I don’t even know.” She paused to stare at the wall in front of her. “Last time I saw one of my brothers, we were fighting, too. Because he wouldn’t let me play his stupid video game. If I had known that was going to be the last time I ever saw him… I might not have considered breaking his Transformer doll.”

Ryan couldn’t help but chuckle. He noticed Nalie crack a small smile, too. But their smiles soon faded into the somber moment. Nalie turned to look at Ryan, her face as sad and serious as Eeyore. “Shoky’s a real nice person,” she told him like he didn’t already know. “You shouldn’t be fighting with her so much. She could just be gone one day and you ain’t even got a chance to say goodbye.” Nalie turned her head away from him for a moment.

Ryan felt compelled to sit next to her and wrap his arm around her. So he did. Nalie twitched at the unexpected move. But she allowed it to happen and eventually put her head on his shoulder. Soon, she couldn’t help but to fall into him completely and let herself go.

“I know you don’t believe me,” Nalie told him after some quiet sobs. “But I really do just wanna go home. This place is cool and all but I can’t stand the isolation. I don’t belong here. I miss my family, I miss my friends, I miss my home, I miss 24 hour days, I miss getting to run around a farm and not being cooped up in a little room…”

“Ok, ok,” Ryan tried to say in a soothing voice. “We’ll get you home. I give you my word, we will get you home.”

“Shoky says it’s gonna take at least another 4 years to get back. I’m gonna be, like, 16 by the time I get there,” Nalie choked. “What if my family ain’t even there by the time I get back? What if they moved? What if they all dead cause of that stupid tornado? I dunno know where any of my other family members live. I wouldn’t know the first place to start looking.”

“We’ll find them,” Ryan assured her.

Nalie sighed, “Maybe we will.”

After a quiet moment, Ryan asked her, “You wanna hear about how me and Shoky met?” trying to distract from the sadness in the room.

Nalie sniffed. “Sure.”

Ryan gazed at the wall in front of him, visualizing the memory. “I had just passed my pilot exams,” he said. “I was celebrating with my colleagues at the college except social occasions kind of bore me. So I slowly snuck out of the room. I went outside into this garden area and found this hill with a tall tree on it. I felt like laying down under it so I did. I really like the quiet, watching the sky, the branches on the tree move with the wind. Anyways, I was just relaxing when I heard this voice say to me, ‘Cold night tonight.’

“It came from just behind me, where the tree was. I looked and saw no one. But then I looked up and saw the silhouette of a gunon hanging in the branches. And I was like, ‘Uh, yea...’ And this gunon said to me, ‘You should look at the sky from up here.’ And she came down a bit and grabbed my wrists and helped me up. I didn’t really want to climb the tree but she insisted. She led me to the highest, sturdiest branch there was which allowed us to look at the sky from just above the tree. And she was right. It was somehow better to look at the sky from up there. It felt like we were high above the ground and the whole of the universe was surrounding us. I was instantly amazed and I turned to tell the gunon just that but I hadn’t gotten a good look at her until now. So when I did, I was surprised to find this beautiful… beautiful gunon looking at the stars with me. She looked almost the same as she does now: long black hair, tall, dark green skin, huge eyes and bright smile. She eventually noticed me gawking at her and asked me what I was gawking at. I told her nothing, just the stars were really beautiful was all. She laughed and said her name was Shoky. I said I was Ryan and her eyes widened and she said she had always wanted a human name. But her parents were so conservative. It was... the first time anyone had reacted positively to my name. I told her I wished I had a zenonite name and she called me lame. I felt so oddly at ease with her, like she was another outcast and nothing was strange with her. We talked for a good chunk of the night. I told her so many things I’d never discussed with anyone else. I never felt so connected to anyone before. She was different yet she spoke to some part of me I had buried deep inside myself... I ended up actually giving her my number and she called me the very next day asking about a date…”

“And the rest is history,” Nalie concluded.

“Yea…” Ryan sighed.

Nalie paused before asking, “What’s a gunon?”

“It’s what we call female zenonites,” replied Ryan. “Like, man and woman, cow and bull, peahen and peacock, non and gunon.”

“Oh,” Nalie responded shortly. There was a peaceful silence before she asked, “Do you think we can make it back to Earth alright?”

Ryan had to push down his naturally worrisome doubts in order to casually respond, “Oh yea. There’s no way they’ll catch on to us.”

Nalie nodded. “Cool.”

Ryan, however, wondered who ‘they’ were. Perhaps Nalie wasn’t a spy but then where did she come from? The Zenon Government couldn’t have actually kidnapped her, could they have? He wondered…

“Hey Nalie,” Ryan found himself say.

“Yea?”

“What kind of… tests did the… the people who kidnapped you do?” Maybe that could help solve the mystery.

Nalie shifted in his arms. “They had me drink different kinds of water. They took blood samples, scanned my stomach with a bunch of different stuff. Sometimes, they’d put me to sleep and I’d wake up and my crotch would feel funny.”

Ryan scrunched his eyebrows.“Weird.”

“Yea,” Nalie agreed. “I tried asking them a bunch of times what they were doing. They’d never tell me but they were weirdly nice about it. They’d say that they needed to learn some things but they’d give me breaks whenever I was getting particularly squeamish. They let me watch all my favorite shows during the tests. That was one upside to being cooped up all that time.” Nalie sat up a little straighter. “When I wasn’t getting tested and was just sitting in my room, they let me watch whatever shows I wanted on this TV. They even had these awesome video games. Sometimes, they’d only put learning stuff on the TV. I usually just started drawing or playing with my toys whenever they put that junk on.”

Ryan nodded. “No idea what they could have been testing you for?”

Nalie looked at him quizzically. “I ain’t no doctor. I don’t know muffin.”

Ryan returned Nalie’s look back at her for at least 2 different reasons. “Well, ok.” He got up. “I was just wondering. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

Nalie shuffled under the blankets. Ryan turned to leave before Nalie called him back, “Ryan…”

“Yea?” He turned around.

Nalie fumbled for the right words and swallowed her pride to say, “Could you read me story?”

Ryan cocked his head at her. “Aren’t you a little old for bedtime stories?”

Nalie’s face squirmed and reddened. “It’s what my mama used to do. She really liked books.”

Ryan’s shoulders shrank at the guilt trip. With a heavy sigh, he walked over to the bookcase in the room and grabbed the most colorful looking one. He sat in the chair across from Nalie and began to read, “There was once a kindly old Mophet who used his regenerative powers generously and wisely for the benefits of humans-”

“What’s a Mophet?”

“Ancient alien species known for their knowledge and ability to heal things. Now shush,” Ryan responded. “Rather than reveal the true source of his power, he pretended that his antidotes sprang ready-made from the little basin he called his lucky cooking pot…”

Author's Note

This one actually feels a little stiff and I feel like more could be done to further and realistically resolve Ryan's distrust of Nalie in a natural and satisfying way so any suggestions on how to do that would be much appreciated.