I was still too numb to be embarrassed about my intrusion into their little bubble of mirth. Luckily, they didn’t seem to mind.
“Look at this,” Bhavi said, pointing at what I now realized was an old-timey sort of paper calendar hanging on the inside of the locker’s door.
That’s what they were so excited about?
“I’ve got it on my comms tablet, too!” Mary added with excitement. She shoved the screen in my face.
On her small screen, I didn’t see the calendar in its entirety, with all the little squares for the days. I only saw the image above, the centre of it stretching to take up the whole screen.
Abs. Lots of abs. Golden abs.
Literally. They looked like they’d been carved from metal.
“Is that a sculpture?” I asked, peering closer, wondering at the art form.
For some reason, this made both of them dissolve into snorting laughter.
“He sure looks like one,” Mary said wistfully, turning the screen back to her own eyes and sighing.
“You could run off and marry him, you know,” Bhavi said teasingly. “You’re not already taken, like me!”
“No way!” Mary cried, her cheeks red. “Besides, this one is Cherry’s!”
The name Cherry really did sound familiar. There weren’t many women named after rare Terratribe II fruit around here.
Perhaps sensing the direction of my thoughts, Bhavi pointed to a small rectangle at the bottom left corner of the paper on the door. “That’s Cherry right there. She used to be in my zone. Now she’s off riding alien horses…And her alien cowboy! Ha!”
More snorts and giggles broke out around me as I leaned towards the paper calendar once more. The small rectangle depicted a young woman I really did think I recognized, witha pale complexion and long brown hair. She was giving an affectionate sideways hug to a massive, shirtless male beside her. He, I realized, was the owner of the golden abs.
He wasn’t human.
“Where is she?” I breathed. She looked so damn happy.
“Some ranching outpost planet,” Bhavi said. “Zabria Prinar One, it’s called. Apparently, all these alien cowboys want human brides. And they’re getting them!” Bhavi flipped a few pages, showing me more of the small rectangles at the bottoms of some of the pages, and more human women embracing these big alien men. Another white woman with pink hair beside an orange male. A Black woman with a dark blue man. A freckled redhead and a pink guy. A woman with medium brown skin and long black hair beside a male tinged emerald green.
The women were all smiling.Every single one of them.
Bhavi released the pages, and the calendar fell open to the original page it had displayed, the one with the tiny Cherry at the bottom. For the first time, I took in the large image at the top of the calendar in its entirety.
There were the abs again, but less zoomed-in this time. They were a part of the torso of the golden-skinned male. He was seated astride a saddle atop a large four-legged creature with curving horns. The wide brim of his hat – which very much reminded me of an Old-Earth cowboy hat – shaded much of his face, but his body, with its impressive musculature and obvious strength, was on full display. His hands held the reins in a relaxed grip that indicated he was totally at ease on his mount, and the dusty, worn leather of his boots showed a life of real work. This wasn’t some model. This was an actual farmer or rancher of some sort.
I let my gaze move beyond the man astride the not-horse. Rolling hills of yellow-green grass were lit up by softly dazzling sunlight. Beyond the fields were what looked to be mountains,such a stunning rose-gold shade that they seemed more like jewellery – a glittering decoration – than a part of any natural landscape.
And above all of it was the biggest, bluest sky I’d ever seen. Even within the confines of the small paper calendar on the narrow strip of metal that was the locker door, it was so wide and clear that it took my breath away. I looked at that sky, that sun, all that blue and gold, and my heart hurt. There was no other way to describe it, this sensation of pure longing that tightened in my chest.
“Cherry lives there?” I asked, my voice so quiet I barely heard it in my own ears.
“She sure does.” Mary pointed at a tiny structure in the background – a little yellow house. “Pretty sure she lives there. I think that’s his place.Theirplace.” Mary lifted the hanging part of the calendar and let the pages flip beneath her fingers, giving me a fluttering slideshow of more images like the first, with more men posing in various spots out in nature or on farms.
I barely noticed the men, in all honesty. I was entirely swallowed up by that sky. That light. The gentle roll of the hills and the awesome spike of the mountains.
I wanted to paint it.
I wanted togo thereand paint it.
“It’s some kind of awareness campaign, I think,” Mary said, releasing the pages so that the calendar once again displayed Cherry with the big, golden man. “There’s some fine print about it being a penal colony.”
“Uh huh,” I said, barely registering the words or caring. Penal colony? That was the prettiest damn penal colony I’d ever seen.
