Otto and That Other Guy

I waited two days to write this down somewhere, and I’m doing it here, now, because though I may not be thinking *entirely coherently*, I’ve already waited this long to make record of a dream that was more beautiful and vivid and is most definitely going to be the basis of the novel that I will actually finish and if I wait any longer or do it anywhere else, it’s going to disappear into an abyss of dirty dishes and cat fur.

On a boat, mostly a sailboat, lived two boys.  Otto and Eric. (Camillo?)  White sun was all they knew: it bleached the wood, it warmed their skin, it dried damp linen.  The sky was blue, the water was blue, sparkling, and they knew each other.

People were told they were brothers, but the men and the women laughed at that.  “You look so different, a sunny almond and a dark raisin, you are like the day and the night.  Maybe your mother wasn’t very honest,” they would say with a wink and a gut laugh.  The boys would watch the women clutch their throats, the men’s belly’s jiggle, enjoying a joke they didn’t yet understand.

Life was bare feet, scampering around barrel-chested men pulling sails, their mother and other women with soft voices feeding them bits of vegetables and oily, delicious fishes, and of course, Anna.  Eric was in love with Anna.  But so was Otto (along with anyone else who laid eyes on her).  She was the queen of the water, dark eyes as big as the sea at night, slim wrists, a smile that was hard to find.  I think they both knew she was Eric’s.