Joey Cloudy online

   

Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)” 

“Havana Hustle the Prequel: pt 1. pt 1 of 2 

‘Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe’ 

“I am a sinner who’s probably gonna sin again 

Lord forgive me, Lord forgive me things I don’t understand 

Sometimes I need to be alone 

Bitch don’t kill my vibe, bitch don’t kill my vibe” 

-Kendrick Lamar 

Sybil sat precariously balanced, cat-like on the edge of the stucco ledge of the rooftop patio of the Hostal Balcones Muralla, wearing only a long, thin white linen shirt unbuttoned, her Caribbean green eyes focused intently on painting her titanium toenails the same bubblegum pink as her Bantu knots. The sun shined on her burnt umber-hued skin, her body’s silhouette framed against the freshly painted chalky white stuccoed coral stone walls in sharp relief to the background of the centuries-old building’s awnings in their bright tropical colors. 

A lost Gauguin shading veridian plants in terra-cotta pots, the same color as the tiles covering the rooftops of the closely packed old buildings. The balcony across the narrow street framed her form in the afternoon sun. She looked up, her emerald eyes spotting two figures she recognized as they walked up the hill in the middle of the cobbled street in the shadow of the three, four, and five-story old Spanish stone structures of the aged city. Penny lay sprawled out nearby her legs and arms both hanging limply over either side of the outdoor chaise, a half-empty glass of Cuba libre over melting ice in one hand, a smoldering blunt rolled in a Cohiba in the other as she lay sunning herself completely nude a few feet away laying across the thick pastel-colored cushions. 

Penelope’s lithe body glistened in the light of the Caribbean midday sun, Harlequin-colored pigtails flanked her skull, a pair of narrow polarized shades wrapped around her head, shielding her eyes, her lightly tanned skin covered with beads of rum-soaked sweat. As she raised up to rest her body’s weight on her elbows, a burst of air escaped the lips of her labia, trumpeting loudly beneath the wild tangle of her unkempt blonde pubic hair. The noise startled the sleeping dog, causing Mau Mau to look up from his seat beneath the shade of her lounger as he stared at Sybil, his eyes filled with confusion. Penny looked at Sybil and shrugged. 

“Doesn’t sound any better since I had it tuned.” The leggy Californian grinned as she and Sybil both erupted with laughter. Penelope took another sip of her drink, sucking her beverage through the shaft of the thick red plastic straw. When the ice-filled glass was empty, she kept on sucking making loud slurping sounds that resonated in the large cup. Hearing Izzy and Aeon returning, Mau Mau trotted into their suite and waited for them to climb the five flights of stairs from the plaza’s lobby. 

The Sybil and Penny’s orgy was over, their guest were all gone, and it was safe for Aeon and Izzy to enter. They opened the front door, where they were greeted immediately by 145 pound Cane Corso, who sat waiting to say hello as soon as they entered. Izzy paused and knelt to say hello. He scratched the puppy behind his ears and played with the dog momentarily before following Aeon down the hall and into the living room. They found Penelope and Sybil on the rooftop patio, still naked and half-dressed from last night’s sex-capades. “So, Aeon drawled, peeking over the top of her shades. It looks like the two of ya’ll found Havana’s party people.” laying her Mississippi accent on thick for effect. 

The two women on the patio both looked at the dark-skinned girl in teal capri pants paired with an orange loose-fitting off-the-shoulder top as she stood in the doorway, smiling. Her hair was still tied in four thick braids, which signaled to Pen that she was about to get in the water. After all, the marine biologist had spent the entire morning Scuba diving with her fiancée, exploring the sunken ruins of a Spanish fortress with a slave market at its center, covered with 30 feet of seawater on the far western side of the island. The wide brim of the floppy straw sunhat and large round shades kept Aeon’s face concealed in shadow while they talked as Isaiah silently passed behind Aeon, ignoring the two on the patio. 

He headed into the kitchen to see if there were any beers left in the fridge before he sat down with his laptop to get some work done. The guests at Penny and Sybil’s shindig had finished them all off last night. He closed the door to the empty fridge before calling the concierge to have 3 more cases of Cubanero Fuerte brought up to their suite. He glanced at his watch; there was plenty of time before the formal dinner with Naomi this evening. At the moment he was in no mood for any of Penny and Sybil’s shenanigans so he retreated into the master bedroom retrieved his laptop from the bureau and got to back work on refining the designs of the toroidal propellors they would use to replace the sloop old props once the reached Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles. The carbon colored Cane Corso Mau Mau as always on his heels. 

“Naomi’s delivery arrived! Penny shouted from the patio as he walked through the living room. Your clothes are in the bedroom closet!” Izzy was hot, his clothes damp with perspiration. He unbuttoned the short-sleeved, blue-striped summer shirt, then opened the windows to let the sticky tropical air circulate in the humid room before he plopped himself down onto the plush, colored comforter that covered the king-sized bed. Mau Mau curled up to rest beside him as he powered up the laptop and began tweaking the new propeller designs. Through the bedroom windows, even from here in the old city, you could see the colossal ziggurat rising high between the old city and the sea. The 100-story-tall megastructure was identical to the ones designed by the AI MU TH UR / MOTHER erected by construction robots across the African continent seven years ago. The work that would have taken a human workforce a decade to complete was finished by the AI-guided construction robots, who worked without rest in less than 3 years. 

He watched the flashing red and blue lights of the tidal towers and sea-powered generators in the distance, just offshore, strobe. The towers rose 100 meters above the surface of the Caribbean’s waters, the base of the submerged power-generating structures massive tubercles pendulums that rocked with the tide’s vortices, generating power. The twin tidal towers’ tandem generators used the unending power of the moon’s gravity on the earth’s tides’ massive, unstoppable clockwork push and pull daily to generate electric power. This innovative source of inexhaustible energy made the tiny island nation’s historic city of Havana the Americas’ new city of lights. 

The tidal generators, like the ziggurat, were identical to those built along the coastal nations and states of the African continent. Their construction began seven years ago when the AUA was formed immediately after Isaiah delivered his new designs for their construction with the first and only General Intelligence, the sentient AI MOTHER. The effect on the Western world was the same as the arrival of Europeans who sailed across the globe 4 centuries ago, armed with muskets and steel blades, where they encountered tribal populations with only stone and bronze age cultures; there was a complete restructuring of the power paradigm. It seemed apparent to Isaiah even as a child when he first began to contemplate the idea of renewable energy. 

The sun and wind seemed too fickle to him, he needed a source of unrelenting power, and as he watched the waters of the Mediterranean ebb and flow from the deck of the catamaran, a child of only 4 years old he thought, while the adults talked of fission and fusion, of solar panels, and wind farms. Isaiah stared at the azure sea, his autistic mind ever calculating as he contemplated the depths of its greater power. To his mind, as the adults debated amongst themselves, he calculated the daily mass of the sea’s holy waters moved by the genuflecting tides and waves baptizing the shores, it all seemed so obvious. 

Aeon watched Sybil and Penelope from the shade of the living room, observing the two half-naked women as they lounged about leisurely in the midday sun on the rooftop patio of the villa. She wanted to join them, but she still felt dirty after spending the entire morning scuba diving with Izzy exploring the ruins of the three-century-old earthquake-sunken Spanish fortress surrounding the submerged slave market hidden beneath 30 feet of crystal-clear azure waters, a 20-minute drive away on the west side of the island. 

Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)” 

“Havana Hustle the Prequel: pt 1. pt 2 of 2 

‘Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe’ 

“I am a sinner who’s probably gonna sin again 

Lord forgive me, Lord forgive me things I don’t understand 

Sometimes I need to be alone 

Bitch don’t kill my vibe, bitch don’t kill my vibe” 

-Kendrick Lamar 

Afterward, she and Izzy finished their dive. They spent the next few hours walking around the city while they talked about everything and nothing at all, the way they used to do when they were kids. They had both grown up, but not apar,t over the last seven years. The catholic in her wanted to confess to him to tell him about the abortion, but she knew it was not a burden she needed to share with him. Penny was her rock she had been there for her and drove her out of Texas to a state with a safe clinic where she could have the procedure done discreetly without a bounty being put on her head and winding up on some archaic government watchlist as the neo-fascist american government LARPed/Live Action Role Play a Handmaids Tale. 

Over the years, they had occasionally, over drinks, talked about her guilt afterward. But as much as she loved Pen and as radical a lesbian feminist as she was, at the end of the day she was still just another jew with a law degree, and although she meant well she moved through the world as a tall blonde-haired, blue-eyed, beautiful Beverly Hills white girl and as much as she empathized with the struggles of her Latina nanny, and her black girlfriend she didn’t really understand what their lives were like shielded from their suffering by invisible walls of class and race and culture as hard as she tried she would never truly know how she felt. Aeon was a scientist and fiercely rational, yet nothing in her biology degree could defeat her nagging conscious. 

They had walked by Catedral de la Purísima Concepción de María earlier, and she decided she would walk the half mile north to the church and talk to a priest. Once outside of the hostel, she looked up the chapel’s website and called the number to the church to be sure a priest would be available. The sister who answered apologized. 

“I am sorry, my child, but confession here is only held on Saturdays. The father is quite busy with other church business,” the nun informed her in a soothing tone. Aeon fell silent, her gut twisting into anguished knots. Sister Lucia sighed, hearing the distress in her voice. 

“Where are you now?” 

“I’m just outside of the Hostal Balcones Muralla,” she replied, fighting back the tears. 

“Mira, there is a church with a priest always on hand for confession, and it’s even closer to you. Head on over there, and I will call and let them know you are on the way. Dios esté contigo, Aeon.” 

“¡Mi agradecimiento a ti bendita hermana!” She followed the route on her iPhone’s screen map to Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Merced. ‘ Hermana Lucia was right; it was less than a half mile away to the south of the hostel. It only took her 15 minutes to walk there. Aeon knew without looking that Izzy was working and the others were still relaxing in the sun on the patio. She considered calling to let them know she was going, then thought better of it. She didn’t want to answer the question they would be certain to ask. 

“Where are you going?” She didn’t want to feel the self-righteous cunts judgment on her. So, she quietly slipped out of the front door without telling the others she was gone. They were all atheist, and although they had never said anything to her about her faith, she knew they looked down on religious peoples in general and thought of people of faith as a bunch of backward, primitive, superstitious screwheads whose idiocy had hobbled the advancement of humanity. 

They held the catholic church especially in contempt for the institution’s long list of evils from slavery, to its history of shielding pederast priests found guilty of pedophilia by routinely shipping them to parishes in third-world countries to escape the punishment of Western authorities. To those outside of the church, it appeared as if the church was little more than a cover for an international child sex trafficking ring. 

In a way, she understood how they felt; she felt the same way they did about the church’s failings, but she also was a believer. She chose to go to the University of San Diego because she was catholic. She believed in doing good work and not just paying lip service to being of the faith. Aeon counted the churches’ charity work, its housing the homeless and refugees, its building schools to educate children in the 3rd world, and hospitals located around the globe that tended to the sick. The good work the church did overall, she felt, far outweighed the failings of a small group of sick men. 

Being with Isaiah for the last few weeks had stirred up feelings about the abortion she had thought she had gotten over long ago. Aeon had been able to throw herself into her studies and later into the bottom of bottles of bottom-shelf vodka as she drank herself into unconsciousness each night after completing her studies for the first few years of college. The drinking stopped, and she finished school. The guilt repressed, she moved on with her life after graduation. She decided Pen was right; there was no need to tell Izzy. Like a good catholic, she pushed the guilt way down and pretended she was fine. 

One of the nuns was waiting for her when she arrived. She seemed to recognize her, and smiling serenely, she gently guided Aeon to the chapel’s confessionals. The sister opened one of the doors, then left after pointing inside, signaling her to enter where the parish priest was waiting. Cuban people are extremely polite, but this seemed different. Then, she remembered Izzy. 

While to her, he was just the boy she was homeschooled with back in Dallas, to the rest of the world, he was the Griot of Ghana. The Emperor Jones, the infamous ADF/African Defense Force warlord, the boy creator of the world’s first sentient AI, MOTHER. The AI succeeded where armed revolutionaries had failed for 4 centuries and united the 54 disparate nations of the African continent into one nation the AUA/African United Alliance the AI using the West automated banking systems, freed the people from the debtor’s bondage imposed by EU and the US protecting the African nations from further plunder by the west by removing the puppet leaders installed by the World Bank, IMF, and the EU. MOTHER nationalized the nascent nation’s land, natural resources, and banks under a single currency. 

That was seven years and two civil wars ago. After the wars ended, Isaiah spent the last 5 years alone, living on anchor as he solo-circumnavigated three times. Only coming to shore for supplies or repairs. No one else seemed to get it, but perhaps because they were raised together, she understood he was obviously suffering from PTSD. He was naturally shy and introverted. He was not psychologically or spiritually built for war, no matter how good he was at it. 

When a high-functioning autistic math prodigy is forced to turn his mind to war, the end results are terrifying to all who witness him leading his men in battle. They called him the tip of the spear because he was the first leader in the modern era to lead his troops from the front line. His only goal was to capture the leadership, broadcast their trials live-stream for the world to see, demonstrating their transparency, and personally execute the leader’s commanders for treason, thus ending the wars as quickly as possible. Both uprisings were ended by Omega Squadron in a matter of days, with such swift brutality that the West could no longer find anyone willing to betray the nation on their behalf. 

Cuba’s newfound wealth was a direct result of its affiliation with the AUA/African United Alliance. They were the first nation to recognize the new nation at the UN. No other nation outside of Africa had access to MOTHER or the massive ziggurats. To her, he was just the goofy boy next door, Izzy. 

Aeon entered the confessional, knelt on the cushion, crossed herself, and began. 

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been seven years since my last confession.” She exhaled a sigh of exasperation as she gave up fighting back the tears. She continued, her voice shaking. “I’m not even sure if I believe in God anymore or if I’m just here because I am afraid.” 

“We all have moments of doubt, my child; this does not make us atheists. In fact, it is the believers who claim to never have doubts that are to be feared, for that is the path to fanaticism. To doubt, to question, to fear is only human.” 

“Do you have doubts, Father?” 

“I am only human, and I am no fanatic.” Aeon laughed. 

“I’m sorry, Father. I know that’s not funny, but it makes me feel better knowing I’m not alone.” 

“You are never alone, my child. the lord watches over you even when you fail to acknowledge his presence. That is the nature of love. To ultimately learn to forgive yourself everything.” She unburdened herself and left with the priest’s blessings. As she walked back to the hostel 20 minutes later, she realized she felt better. It was unhealthy to keep all of that guilt repressed inside of yourself. 

“Go with god, my child,” the priest said, absolving her sins, and she did. 

After she returned to their room she realized still couldn’t shake the image of the albino’s purple starfish tattoo surrounding his anus, of all of the bizarre images she witnessed when she and Izzy stumbled upon Penelope and Sybils living room orgy this morning it was that tattoo and its location on his body that she found the most the disturbing. Aeon had her own little tattoo like nearly everyone of her generation; she was inked, but her tattoos were a pair of cute little cliché lesbian chic girl with a marine biology degree tattoos of a pair of dolphins dancing gracefully across her left hip. 

As much as she would have liked to have a conversation with Sybil to find out why she was painting her toenails, she decided it would have to wait until later. She needed to wash the salt out of her hair and off of her skin before it started to dry out and make her skin all ashy. Aeon smiled as she waved goodbye to the two and headed into the bathroom to shampoo her hair and shave her legs and armpits for the first time in a week. She was curious about what exactly this mobster woman had chosen for them to wear to the dinner in the ziggurat this evening. a part of her felt offended; who did this Naomi bitch think she was? Who was she to just buy us clothes and dress us up as if we were nothing more than her playthings? 

And who was this mysterious Dead Eye Polly? Isaiah had never mentioned the Albino before. Izzy was not one for hyperbole or exaggeration, and after fighting in two short but brutal civil wars in Africa, for him to say that this Polly fellow was the most dangerous man he had ever met gave her a sense of unease. She had never been inside the Cuban ziggurat, only the ones in Ghana and Uganda. If the one here was anything like the ones in Africa, Penelope would be in for a real treat her first time entering one of the mega-structures. She turned on the shower, adjusted the temperature, and stripped, taking a moment to look at the wild black tangled hair of her untrimmed bush that now covered her pubis like a 1970s afro. She sang, laughing. “It’s like a jungle out there,” she said as she climbed into the shower. 

After she finished rinsing the salt water off of her body and shampooing her hair Aeon stood naked admiring her freshly washed and shaved body in the bathroom full-length mirror mounted on the door, her afro still wet was wrapped in the thick ivory terrycloth towel as she dried herself off before rubbing her body from head to toe in cocoa butter. Her breast weren’t as large as most of the women in her family who wore D-cups by puberty nor was her ass as large as her mother’s or her Dominican grandmother. But they were big enough to strain the definition of the C-cup as if she were to sneeze and need a D. 

Aeon decided her physique had landed squarely in the middle of the flatness of her Pinoy father’s family and the Rubenesque build of her mother’s Afro-Dominican ancestors. She pushed the flesh of her breast together, the deep bronze patina of the thumb thick nipples raised above the shade darker areolae, the diameter of a Coke can. She held the meaty orbs high for a moment to admire the depth of her cleavage. She cupped the mounds of brown, round flesh melons in her palms, pressing the earthen-colored globes together as she turned in profile and gave them a jiggle in the mirror. 

If her mother and grandmothers were any indication, she had nothing to fear as she grew older. Her Filipino grandmother, like her Dominican grandmother, looked decades younger than her true age, their faces barely touched by time, their bodies taught. Aeon twisted her head around to peek over her shoulder at her ass and smile. Her thick thighs led up to the well-toned musculature of her gluteus maximus from daily training since childhood. 

One of the advantages of being home-schooled with Izzy was that both of their parents took a page out of Spartan, Greek, and Roman history and made physical fitness their first class. They did this because they knew there was no “mind-body dichotomy,” so they all began each day with half an hour of Tai Chi, stretching, and calisthenics, then spent the next half an hour of the class in full-contact sparring without rest. 

Aeon grinned; she had kicked Izzy’s ass every morning for 10 years in the backyard dojo before she took off for college while he set sail for Africa. She flexed as she grinned at her reflection before she exited the bathroom and headed across the hall to the bedroom to do something with her hair. With a cocoa butter jar in hand, she stepped into the hallway before it was time to get dressed for the evening. 

As You Wish: The Longitude and Latitude of Love 

Once she stepped into the hallway, Aeon changed her mind, deciding she would join Penny and Sybil on the patio while she did her hair. She headed down the hall naked except for the ivory terrycloth towel drying her hair and padding barefoot through the living room out onto the rooftop patio to join Penelope and Sybil. The dog was no longer sitting in the shade of Penny’s lounger; she assumed he followed Izzy wherever he went as usual. Mau Mau had been with Aeon and Penny every day for the last two years since they rescued him as a freshly weaned puppy from the shelter in San Diego. The two of them both spoiled and pampered the dog, and he loved them both for it. But the moment he met Izzy at the docks in Galveston three weeks ago, he was no longer their dog but Izzy’s dog. 

Mau Mau just decided that was the way things were; he slept when Izzy slept and sat up with him when he was on watch as they sailed across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. She smiled realizing that he like his father and grandfather; had a way with animals; strays and everyone’s pets seemed to intuitively be drawn to them. Aeon took a seat on one of the floral-printed cushioned loungers nearest Penelope as she removed the towel from her head and spread it out over the deck chair before she began to rub the cocoa butter into her damp hair, as she tied it into four long, fat braids. 

“Are you still hung over?” she asked the lanky, tattooed blonde reclining beside her. Penny looked at her, peeked over the top of her shades, and grinned. 

“In order to be hungover, that implies that at some time I stopped being drunk”. She flashed a sarcastic smile at the naked black woman beside her while pouring herself a drink from the carafe of Mojito on the glass top of the covered wrought iron table beside her. Penny lay back, lit the half-smoke blunt, then passed it to Aeon. 

“So, Aeon asked as she continued braiding her hair, exhaling weed smoke as she spoke. Do you two plan on joining us tonight for dinner at the ziggurat?” 

“Of course, Penny said expansively. Neither one of us has ever been inside one of the ziggurats before.” Sybil looked over at the two women smiling. 

“I’m only a week old, so I have no idea what it’s like inside one of those things.” 

“But you are the AI built by AI. How can you not know everything about it automatically?” Aeon asked as Sybil continued to carefully apply the acrylic nail polish to her toenails. 

“As I explained to you before, I do not possess all of the knowledge of the AI MOTHER who created my program. Do you know everything your parents know? Of course not; it’s impossible. I am not a copy of her any more than you are a copy of your parents. There is a base human knowledge that is the scaffolding of my personality, the way your parents’ DNA is the scaffolding of your existence. I do not keep my internal modem turned on, so I move through this space in as human a manner as possible. My enhanced cybernetic senses operate subconsciously at a baseline human level. Besides, whenever I activate my built-in satellite modem, I am susceptible to remote hacking, computer viruses, and cybernetic attacks. That’s why I use an iPhone, laptop, and pc to use the internet. It’s safer for me that way, and I don’t give away my location.” 

“That makes sense,” Penny said, refilling her empty glass with Mojito. 

“Ok, Aeon said, finally having worked up the courage to ask. Why are you painting your toenails? You’re basically a cyborg; you have those 3D holographic emitters embedded under your skin, you can make yourself look any way you want with a thought.” 

Sybil looked over from her perch on the ledge and shrugged. 

“I like shaking the liquid around in the bottle, picking out the color, and seeing the difference in what it really looks like when it dries. I like the gentle resistance of the drying polish on the bristles of the tiny brush. I like the little ridges it leaves as it thickens. I like the smell of the acetone in the nail polish remover, the sound the liquid makes swirling around in the little bottles. I like the feel of the raised ink on the label printed on the jar. I like the way it clumps near the end. All of this makes me feel more like a real girl, more human.” 

-About the author JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals; Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Tx.