The Planet Paradis
Ahana Hori was possibly the most boring man on the planet of Paradis, and that was why Fenton dated him.
There was no fighting, no supernatural abilities, ghosts, exploding people, maleficent and sudden fires, or talking, decapitated heads that had sex jokes.
They met at a bookstore, the bookstore Ahana worked at, and it was a nice thing, to be able to have something in common, to spend time together, and have it feel so natural because a relationship wasn’t work, it just happened.
They started as friends, and then awkwardly holding hands, soon awkwardly kissing and they never said they were dating because they didn’t need to.
It was a special ability, an innate talent to be boring, or average if you lived in Atlaan, the capital of Paradis. The city split into two sprawled over an immense island, the land where the Naki, the people of the land lived, and the bottom, the depths of the sparkling ocean where the Kana, the people of the sea lived, in their own undersea portion of Atlaan.
Ahana Hori woke up early, to the eternal sunset that was always on Atlaan, the planet spinning around two small and dying stars, hot enough to keep the entire planet tropical from their combined heat but not too hot for sudden death.
Everything about Ahana was average, from the tips of his fingers to his toes.
He was a Kina, a child of the people of the land and sea, able to traverse both, and the only indication of it was his skin had a slight red tint to it and that he needed plenty of water. There were small, hard-to-notice gills on the sides of his torso, and when he smiled, his little pointy teeth showed, perfect for tearing into his vegetarian burritos.
Nothing was special about that either, as he blended in with the melting pot that was Atlaan.
One morning, he rolled out of bed, onto the floor, his clean, meticulous floor, and groggily got ready for the day.
He was going to a wedding.
Not his own, as he and his boyfriend had not been dating long enough, and Ahana wondered if it meant they were serious since they were going to a wedding together, and that it meant he had to start saving money for a ring, but he did not make a lot of money, in his small flat. It was in the bad part of town, near gang territory and the shipping factories where people disappeared and reappeared downstream several days later.
Ahana put on a blue vest, and a white shirt with dress pants and polished white shoes that Fenton had helped him pick out, because he had never been to a wedding for Earthians, and apparently there were many different religions and many different ways to have a wedding even if it was the same religion.
Fenton explained to him that this religion was something about a man coming back to life, and Ahana believed that it was dark magic, and made no sense that anyone would ever worship such a thing.
Fenton told him that those who believed in their religion would say the same about his religion.
So Ahana Hori, the most average man in all of Atlaan was picked up by his boyfriend in his black car, and he gave him a quick peck on the cheek. The entire ride there Ahana was so invested in the ridiculous tales Fenton would tell him about his home, all his coworkers, and even his school because it seemed so ridiculous that anyone would live in such a way.
“Why can they go off to war but cannot drink alcohol,” Ahana asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t make the rules,” Fenton groaned. “This place is weird too.”
“No, your people don’t believe in the same god… ridiculous…”
“Out of all things, why are you still so stuck on that,” Fenton asked, as he pulled up into the wedding hall parking lot.
He took his time parking, careful not to scrape any of the fancy cars, as many of the guests came from money, and his car, even though it looked nice, was old, just well maintained, and did not even have a hyper-way feature to travel by air.
After a tense seven minutes of Ahana being his looking eyes, helping the new driver to park, they stepped out into the humid tropical air, and quickly walked inside the wedding hall, eager for the sweet embrace of air conditioning.
Ahana expected a much more extravagant wedding by the way Fenton described the sort of people he worked and went to school with, the way they bought things without looking at the price tags or throwing away things because it was not the right shade of purple, or the clothing tag was not in the place that they liked.
They were both dressed modestly compared to the other guests, Fenton with his pastel blue dress shirt and tie, with black pants matching Ahana’s blue vest with a white shirt. They entered the lobby, where they signed in to get their little name tags, so the guests would all get to know each other, but there was a bit of a hold-up.
Fenton’s name tag was easily found and given to him.
Ahana’s was not.
“There are fifteen Ahana Hori’s on the guest list, sir,” the impatient front desk attendant said. “Can I have your middle name?”
“Tenu.”
“There are three people with that name.”
“Does it matter?”
So Ahana Tenu Hori, the John Charles Smith of Paradis, possibly wearing someone else’s name tag was disgruntled, and Fenton told him, what is a rose by any other name, and it cheered him up a little, and they made cute little literary jokes and flirted while eating appetizers in the ballroom, a meet and greet for the guests before the ceremony began.
The wedding was a quiet affair, not quiet in sound because the guests were everything but, yet the decorations were quiet, with the standard white-purple-hints of gold wedding colors on the chairs, tables, and stage.
The food was the best, five-star chefs were hired to cook it. The entire time while Fenton ate and caught up with old friends, he found it ironic that his boyfriend thought his home planet strange while on Paradis they ate fish, half of the people in the town were sentient fish as well.
Ahana was positive that Fenton was exaggerating the stories of his co-workers, but the more people that streamed in from the Defense Program, the stranger it all became, reality warped like a funhouse mirror. He started to wonder if he was the weird one, as Fenton himself started to act bizarre as well, and he then remembered something strange Fenton had told him.
“For some reason, the more of us there are in one space, the weirder it becomes.”
Ahana warily eyed the other guests and Fenton encouraged him to go make friends, but he didn’t want to, because he saw a man with feline ears and a tail arguing with another man who accidentally grew a few inches when he sneezed and tore his shirt wide open, his fancy gold buttons clattering onto the wooden floor.
“Ahana, I want you to like my friends and I want them to like you too,” Fenton said.
Ahana was a fish, and he went into the sea of sharks to mingle.
Fenton introduced him to his teammates, who seemed to be the least crazy out of most of the guests at the beginning of the entire service until more people arrived later on. A glowing pink-haired woman who shone and attracted people like flies to a bug zapper tried to tell him her life’s story, and he was compelled to listen to her fabricated lies, her beauty somehow terrifying to gaze upon.
The other pink-haired woman was friendly until more guests arrived, and then she became sour once a pale, flame-haired man arrived. She announced that it wouldn’t be a real wedding without a death, of course.
Ahana could not keep up with their gossip and drama. He was the side character in the 4,000th season of Days of Our Lives, still going on strong after hundreds of years, the descendants of the actors themselves playing the roles, because life was a stage, people its actors.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” Ahana mumbled, and he took a long gulp of his fizzy alcoholic drink before skittering off.
He left the ballroom, the insanity reaching its apex once almost everyone had arrived at the wedding hall, and their air was thick, not hot, but something was in the air, and he felt trapped in the shark tank. All the sharks were holding out their flippers, their business cards out, swimming around, with their little power color red and blue ties, making sure to shake their hands firmly to show who’s in charge, their eyes rarely leaving each other’s gazes like the predators they were.
Ahana didn’t need to pee, but he paced the halls with seashell-patterned wallpaper, now empty, needing to figure out how to tell his boyfriend that he did not want to stay any longer and that he should possibly seek out different employment options or else Fenton would become a shark as well.
Ahana sat in a lonely chair in the corner of an empty hallway as everyone was in the ballroom, music playing, waiting for the wedding, and Ahana wondered what kind of wedding hosted the party before the ceremony. It was designed this way so there would be less fighting after the wedding. The party exhausted the guests’ energy from the arguing and gossiping.
Ahana Hori, the most average man in the world, blended into furniture as he played on his phone, and the main stars of the play didn’t think he was worth their time to even hide their shame as their sins were on full display.
The flame-haired man walked out of the ballroom and stood patiently in the lobby, checking his phone, waiting for someone to arrive, and he did, the groom, his hair slicked back, in his black tuxedo and fine cologne.
Ahana felt like he was being unfaithful as his eyes lingered.
He could see them, talking together from down the hallway, speaking about something salacious in the empty lobby, the attendant has gone as well, and no one in the building even pretended to do anything right any longer.
Ahana went back to his phone, trying to come up with a good excuse to not go back to the party.
“You can’t call me anymore,” the flame-haired man said. “You’re getting married.”
Ahana sunk lower into the chair and wanted to literally disappear into the patterned seashell wallpaper, alternating pink and blue shells, and he held his breath because he couldn’t disappear. His skin started to dry out from being so tense, he needed water, but he dared not move, because his death might be soon approaching, judging by the quick-to-anger guests in the ballroom.
“Don’t say that,” the groom replied. “We just started to get along. You talk as if we’re having an affair, Ace.”
“It feels like we are, Levi. Every time we hang out it doesn’t feel like we’re friends. I'm trying to move on. I even started seeing someone new.”
“Is this because of the guy, Ace? That tall guy with the piercings!?”
“I told you that as a secret! I was just lonely,” Ace replied. “ We’re just friends now.”
Ahana pretended to text someone on his phone, but he wasn’t doing a good job at it, because he never paused to wait for a message, he just kept tapping the screen while glancing upward, listening to the conversation.
At first, he was embarrassed but now he was curious about the Shakespearean affair, and this must be the end of the play, on the wedding day when they would run away together, and the bride would be stood up but find her true love as well. The audience would clap, but none of that would happen, because it was not a play, it was just a very large building filled with many horrible and rich people drunk on alcohol and high on whatever they snuck inside with their purses.
“I don’t want you talking to him,” Levi said. “It makes me angry.”
“This is why I don’t feel like we’re friends,” Ace replied. “You say things like this.”
“We haven’t done anything.”
“I know. We haven’t.”
“Nothing will happen, because we have done nothing,” Levi whispered. “Stop acting like this.”
Ace sighed and rolled up his sleeves and tried to say something, but he just kept stalling by fumbling, next by putting his hands in his pockets and then playing with his metallic bracelet.
“I’ll see you next month when I return,” Levi said.
“You shouldn’t be with me, but you shouldn’t lie to her,” Ace replied, ignoring his statement. “I feel sorry for Mary Jane.”
“It’s not like we have a choice. If I tell her she won’t remember, and maybe one day I won’t either.”
Fear was in his voice, and Ahana knew that this was no normal wedding.
It must have been cursed by their black magic.
“So she changed her mind, it's fine,” Ace replied. “She’s just pretending to forget to make it easier on you.”
“No. She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t remember anything, and I’m going to be next. I did something horrible again.”
Ace took his hands out of his pockets and rubbed Levi’s arms and tried to cheer him up, and they consoled each other, little whispers, a few glances, and playing at holding each other’s hands.
"I know it's wrong but I want to keep this feeling," Ace said.
"What feeling?"
"Not being friends."
Ahana sneezed.
He was no longer invisible.
Ace blinked, and Ahana was startled as Ace disappeared into thin air, leaving the groom in the lobby.
The groom’s eyes turned a dark blue, the light bulbs in the lobby flashed on and off, the pressure in the room dropped, thunder crashed in the parking lot, setting off several car alarms, and Ahana started to scream, the angry man denied once more of something he could not buy or threaten.
Ahana screamed louder, and Levi started to calm down.
Not because of the screaming, he heard screams daily, a few of them caused by him, but because the static was ruining his hair, and he left to have it touched up, leaving a petrified fish-man in the lobby holding back tears.
Ahana texted Fenton that he wanted to go home, but he told him that they should at least stay for the ceremony.
They did, and it was the shortest ceremony of Ahana’s life.
The ceremony was held outside in the rose garden, under the hot sun, bearing down, like the weight of other’s sins on Ahana’s chest, and he was sweating, fearing for his life that some maladjusted walking car battery would kill him because he had caught him being unfaithful.
Ahana sat in the row behind the groom’s family next to Fenton, which was many rows, all seventy-something of them, Levi’s immediate family, yet he could still see the face of the man that almost fried him alive.
The bride was pretty, tiny and a little thing, in her delicate dress, with a little yellow bob, the groom twice her size, and Ahana’s face became hot at the idea of their copulation, a giraffe trying to mate with a deer, a Great Dane with a Chihuahua, it was impossible, the circle would not fit into the square peg.
Ahana couldn’t breathe, his face hotter and hotter, and he couldn’t breathe or see or feel, the world spinning, and then he fainted.
Ahana Hori forgot to drink water during the entire ordeal, the stress piling on to him, the alcoholic drinks inside his body, and the outdoor heat a final blow to his system.
A loud and dramatic gasp came from the audience as he fell out of his chair. Fenton started to cry, and Amy wanted to collapse as well, worried that she had unknowingly cursed a man to die because she was angry.
The paramedics came, they took him away, and it was a simple matter of dehydration, and they were sent on their way home.
The wedding continued as planned without Fenton and Ahana, the vows exchanged along with the rings, the tears of joy from the mother of the groom, relieved that she might have a chance at having a grandchild, and the entire garden was alive, the sharks swimming around in a feeding frenzy, the cheers erupting as the Great Dane and Chihuahua kissed.
Ahana was at Fenton’s small studio apartment, tiny and cramped, the bed pulled out of the wall and pushed down to make room, and he laid on it, relaxing in the smell of his partner.
“I didn’t do that on purpose just to leave,” Ahana said, his voice muffled into the black sheets.
“I know dear, I can read minds.”
Ahana got up and looked at him and then asked, “Did you hear my thoughts during the procession?”
“Yes… I am so sorry… I should have listened to you...I didn’t know it was because of that from your text.”
Fenton had long known about the very bad decisions Ace was making, but to him, it was the same as all the other secrets he heard in everyone else’s heads, and he threw them out like the way he threw out his trash, twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, meditating for twenty minutes.
Fenton held Ahana’s hand gently and tried to find a way to make it up to him, dragging him to a wedding that he seemed apprehensive about, where he knew no one, and he fainted in front of a crowd of people, all because he didn’t want to disappoint his boyfriend.
“You want to stay the night,” Fenton asked.
Ahana blinked rapidly and nodded slowly, and tried not to seem too excited, but he knew that Fenton already knew so there was no use pretending.
They had sex for the first time and Ahana tried not to get ahead of himself, which became more difficult the longer they were together, because even though he had met all of Fenton’s friends and hated all his friends, he still wanted to make it work, because it was not work to be around the man he loved.
Fenton broke up with him three months later.
Ahana Hori was not a main character.
How could a main character ever date a side character, especially the most average and boring man to ever exist in all of Paradis?
