Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

After clearing up the remains of the abandoned breakfast – Kerilas and Lotan have gone, presumably to whatever jobs they’re doing – I go out shopping again; or that’s what I tell myself. I’m not really in the mood to buy anything and I want to stay clear of the Neri ship, so I end up wandering along the quayside all the way to the harbour mouth to sit on the low, wide wall and look at the sea.

In fact, I’m distracted by the boys and girls playing on the rocky shore just beyond the harbour. I can’t see any adults keeping an eye on them. Naked and bronzed, the children clamber around the boulders and shale and rock pools with utter self-assurance, each absorbed in whatever fluidly-imagined game or scenario they’re playing at any given moment, or distracted by something found in a pool, or a pattern in a rock, or a new shell. One of the girls is a Neri, I think; from this distance distinguished only by her long cloud-grey hair, like my own, incongruous on a child’s form.

I think they must be mostly marketeer children, arrived with Market and taking the opportunity to run around where there’s space to do so, and to re-establish friendships usually separated by the water between the ships at sea and the longer, slower relationships with those left in port, that might only meet for a few days twice or three times a year. It’s all familiar to me, as if, years ago, Taniel must have been like that Neri girl running half-wild with the human children on a landfall. But I remember, the human children Taniel would have played with would be geriatrically old now, those that were still alive.