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I'm going to post a short that's actually a kind of continuity bit from my Aolon story. It's characters I haven't gotten to yet, and a part that won't fit in the narrative, but it's so much fun I want to have it somewhere people can read it if they like my other stuff.
Warning: blatant usage of the "language" to be contextually understood from other parts.
For starters though: the priest/judges of this culture have traditionally had a certain cut of hair, longer than most men. This guy takes it to the Nth degree as a showing-off point. This point in history a rediscovery of culture after a repressive government is thrown down has shaped what rebels look like.
Shaim at Large
The world, it would seem, turned and watched the street-sledder whirl by, in a flurry of long limbs and hair as lengthy. He was old enough to be on a bike, not pedalling by on a board. Did it with a flair of rare grace, though.
Shaim didn't have truly fair hair. The strands of it catching light as the flew out behind him made the illusion pretty strong. He could see the one girl eying him, and knew she would remember him as having fair-streaked hair, when it was just streaky brown and black. He was thrilled to fool the pretty ones. Not that he cared about them—not the ones in their state uniforms and butchered hair. Anyhow, he wasn't Marrin enough. But he liked to seem it.
He caught up with the trolley at a stop, and kicked his board still to leap on.
“Boy, I'm not giving you a lower rate, you can't just climb on here and think—”
“I know, I know. I'll pay the base fare, all I want is to get to the university. Here,” he fingered in his vest-pocket, threw his fare right in the funnel-top, “that's the full toa.”
He twisted in place, crossing his feet in a qahlon-dance sort of posture to look over the crowd. He didn't go back toward the seats. His sweep of the passengers was that of a scout, or a restaurant manager. He had no shame.
One met his eye with equal arrogance. It was a girl in folk-dress, and conscious of the dare it was, even if the Republic had repealed their heavier punishments against the Folk Element. He rubbed his finger along the inside of his vest-pocket, gesturing, with a fellow-like smile, his solidarity with her statement. She curled her expression back, as if avoiding contact and turned her eyes out the window.
That bothered him. Obviously. He twisted back, untwining his legs, and letting the hand not holding his street-board fall slack. He shook his hair back off his shoulder, only to roll his eyes at himself, conscious of the last-stand effort to catch interest that represented. It was too subtle to be missed. He began singing to the trolley-riders instead, as it jerked on it's course, let on.
“Come with me to the spring...
Walk with me up the city streets.
Talk with me as we go
Share with me these few moments:
Sweet one, how I wish to be with you
I wait for time to talk together
Dear girl, I long to speak with you
There is nothing I hope for better...”
“Be quiet, you howling qahlzoor,” came the girl's disgusted voice, “go show off somewhere you're not offending.”
Shaim turned with the widest, unbelieving grin to stare at her, and then give a most expansive pucker of his lips as if exchanging looks with the old mahani* across from him. The mahani herself was a bit taken aback, probably about both rude youngsters.
“Univerrrrsity,” intoned the bus-driver, clearly glad to be rid of whatever drama Shaim carried with him that was causing trouble.
He trotted down the little stair, but stopped as he walked back along the trolleyside by the girl's window. He jumped up on a trim-bit to say, with cheery laughter in his voice,
“It's too bad you like me so much less than I like you. But I won't let that make me ruder than I already am. Have this.”
He had planned to give Moan the little braid-tie, it was such a beautiful thing he'd bought it immediately on seeing it; but she didn't know, and now wouldn't. The girl started back, but her eyes widened, and Shaim noted with satisfaction she was using some brightly colored but very plain yarn to tie hers.
“If you don't mind, boy?” called the irritated trolley-man, but Shaim was already rolling away as fast as any cyclist, secure on a seat.
He took special care to keep his posture easy but straight, until he came upon his mates from roila class, and stopped off with them. They didn't like him to be too perfect. He knew it was irritating up close, so he obliged.
“Sha-im,” his mother greeted him with the usual correct pronunciation of his names' syllables, and none of the consciousness of meaning for glamor. “You need to brush your hair.”
“I know,” he said, agreeable. She liked to pick up every imperfection in his hair, since the dare was he couldn't take care of it like a girl would. She had very little other proof to go on. Shaim was meticulously vain. “I've been city-sweeping with it. It'll need a dense lather, too—pha?”
“Fresh out. Would you fetch me some, and some jarred viali-sweet? None of the canned nasties.”
“Sure, after I've done my hair.”
She rolled her eyes, to Shaim's triumph, and fetched out some steamed topha left from morning.
Shaim was brushing his hair with the vigor one needed to straighten out hair down to one's mid-thigh, when his father called and offered to pick up groceries. He always did—it was a little family ritual. Usually Shaim had already gone. This time, Shaim's timing prevailed, and he found it opportune to tell his mother, while she was already cranky, that he wasn't staying for dinner.
“Who's going to feed you?”
“Moan's having a little circle. Don't worry, I'm almost full already. Love you,” he kissed her cheek, dutifully sweet as the only son and child, and just as will-strong as had to be, “leave you, anyway. Tell dad I'm getting top-forms in calculations.”
With that truce-piece, he tied his hair out of his face and went screaming-fast through the boroughs out to Moan's place. Her husband was fiddling in the garden-boxes, never one for keeping in company all the time, and so he was distracted by laughing at his remarks (provoked by his ritual-like untying of his hair) was he went in the front.
That's why he frowned, instead of having some suave response ready, to see the self-same girl from the trolley, hair in his gift-tie—sitting dhath-sure as you please with Moan on the coupler couch.
“Shaim! Here you are, and early. You're making a liar out of me, I was just telling these two new friends about you, and your grand entrances.”
Shaim gave the obligatory laugh, and swept a qiffa's salute while marking the young man lumped with the new girl. It was almost certain they were a couple. He felt sorry for her, and him, both at the same time—but no time for more than that, because Moan was waiting.
“I am escaping a grocery-run, not reforming. Don't worry, Moan,” he kissed her forehead like a good, superior qiffa “I will never change from the little rogue you love so dearly. Could I bear to disappoint you?”
“Oh, I have no hopes for you to be disappointed by a reform,” Moan said, unconcerned, patting the new girl's hand. “But if you must be a rogue, be consistent, so I can continue working around it.”
“I'm getting excellent grades, I'm sorry to say. Consistency is damned.”
“That's as must be,” she said, as if sighing, but really waving him with great amusement toward the viali-spreads and Mar-crackers.
“I hope you will give me the names of your new friends. The girl particularly, I could find use to know the name of.”
He grinned up from his scouting at the snacks, to meet the firing eyes of the young man.
“This is Laomin, who I met in my new class, and Ishal.”
“Laomin—” he pretended to interrupt himself, “oh, Moan, I ended up not giving you that hair tie on her braid because it suited her so much better. But as I was saying, it is nice to make your acquaintance, Laomin. Tell us about Ishal.”
Moan gave him a leery eye, as if asking why he must so thoroughly discomfit her guests. He just smiled behind the thumb he was licking free of sauce.
“Ishal has always been my best friend,” she said calmly. “We worked together for the Vithadhin all the years we were in lower levels. Now I'm going to university, he's working in the mechanists', we want to start being part of the change again. I invited him with Moan's permission.”
Feeling his smile glitter, Shaim asked Ishal,
“You tell me about Laomin, now.”
“I'd rather not.”
“Very well. I'll tell you, then. Laomin is a very pretty girl with a strong disdain for men with long hair who sing in trolleys. Unfortunately, it's not a very attractive thing, to go around telling off singers in public. The old mahali don't know what to do with her.”
Shaim was interrupted by the arrival of Aomo, with little Hael slung on her hip, chatty as zaastreams with the events of the week politically, and deprivation of seeing Moan for the last five days. He was relieved. He was feeling nasty as well as overdramatic. That spelled trouble, if he didn't catch himself in time. Sometimes even hiir trouble.
But he found himself cornered by some girls from school who thought him fascinating and so nice and had to entertain them. He enjoyed it completely while it was happening, but was less than happy about it when his friend Romon arrived. They spent the rest of the evening in snide tandem, making the young women embarrassed and hysterical with laughter, which Shaim was quite conscious was being watched distantly by Laomin and Ishal. Ishal seemed to be more engrossed in the talk between Anthae and Moan's husband, but Laomin's skeptical attention was on them. Shaim, under pressure, went on more and more sparkling, hirras infusing his every statement with a sharpness of meaning it didn't deserve.
And he began to suspect Laomin knew what he was about. So he did what man like him always did. He snuck outside to try and calm his spirits down—he was very bad at this, but star-gazing helped.
Unfortunately, Laomin followed him.
“You should leave those girls alone,” she said.
He was delighted she wanted to take it up with him, despite the fact that she'd sabotaged her own purpose by it.
“They're teasing us right back. And outnumber us by about four.”
“You know I don't mean teasing. Is it fair to use your hirras to be attractive?”
“Do you have hirras that runs wild at all?”
She paused.
“No. I am not hirrin.”
“Well you must pity us little sots, sometimes we don't want to do it, but it does itself. I have renounced being manly beauty, unequalled wit, and spectacular eel-diver so many times in my life, and yet...here I am.”
She laughed softly, unable to hide it. Shaim was shocked. Usually he felt hirras in his words. There hadn't seemed to be any that time, but she was laughing.
“You arrogant, pitiable, fool. How are you so perfectly arrogant, all the time?”
“Oh, that's just a inborn skill. But we must not make Ishal jealous, sweet. Time for you to trot along inside.”
“Ishal? What?”
“You don't know he'll be jealous? Intriguing. I don't mind if you don't.”
“You think he'll be jealous?”
“If only you'd seen his look earlier—oh, speaking of that lovely little chat, I lied.”
“About what?”
“Your lack of shock grieves me...well. I'll bear up under the disappointment fairly well. I lied about you. I said you were pretty when I knew perfectly well you were extremely beautiful.”
Laomin coughed and turned away.
“The greatest trouble with being such as me is no one takes your most serious thoughts seriously.”
“I bleed for you, Shaim. I'm just not as gifted as you are at responding to compliments, maybe.”
She went inside.
Shaim knew then that she'd really been laughing at his words, without hirras. He had won. But she hadn't lost.
Funny, that. He braided his silly hair up and tied it with his wrist-band before returning to the house.
