RELEASE DATE: 01 December 2021
She waits alone on the dark park bench, missing the family who no longer call. She waits for the tiny pollinators who fill the park each night—if not her life’s triumph, then at least something she feels rightly proud of.
If only she had someone left to share her wisdom with.
A quiet science fiction story about the future of humanity—and family.
Bs By Bioluminescent Light
She sat alone on a slatted park bench while the cool night air washed over the exposed skin on her hands, her face. For a moment, she closed her eyes and raised her chin toward it, savouring the freshness, the lingering, indistinct sweetness that the fruit trees gave off after sundown when they’d been baking in the heat all day long. She opened her eyes again, rested her gaze on the slight sliver of twilight, teal and dying blue just glimpsed between the high-rises to the east. The stars above were getting their twinkle on now, and in a moment, the trees that filled the large city park would be too.
She busied herself in the meantime trying to spot constellations around the towering dark forms of the city buildings. Soon the buildings would be glowing, too, but for a while longer, city-sanctioned dark reigned.
There to the west was the Ship, a constellation of five large stars forming the body of a spaceship, with two smaller ones indicating the ship’s fins.
Directly above… She smiled. Earth was looking mighty fine tonight. She shifted her tongue, running it along the slight ridgeline around her gum where just weeks ago the dentist had sutured in new teeth. The old set had done nearly nine decades for her. They’d had a good run.
Ah! There! The first of the trees that scattered the park began to glow—the great, spreading branches of the oaks always seemed to light up first, leaves encased a soft, gentle azure.
She shifted her weight on the slatted bench, easing the pain in her bad hip. Sitting in the cooling night was never the best for it, and it was the reason she only sat outside for duskfall weekly now rather than daily—but she wasn’t ready to relinquish her miracles just yet.
It didn’t help that she had no one to relinquish them to.
The glow of the oaks brightened in the dark, enough that she could indistinctly see fallen leaves and a small twig or two littering the grass below.
A sudden movement across the park drew her eye: a small figure, barely more than a silhouette in the dark where the trees’ bioluminescence had not kicked in yet—a child.
She watched silently as the child meandered across the park toward her, sometimes darting hither and thither, sometimes stopping for long moments to investigate something of interest.
Reminded her of a hummingdrone, or a B.
That made her smile again.
The row of interplanted apple and plum trees bordering the southern boundary of the park behind her came on; the apple immediately above her waved soft golden leaves that shushed in a sudden lifting of the breeze.
She inhaled deeply, full to the brim with sweet air that seemed to strip the heaviness from her body, even as the cooling temperature stiffened her joints. She flexed her fingers, stretching them out against the niggling pains, rubbed rhythmically at her knuckles.
The child was closer now, eight, twelve metres away and standing close to the trio of birches whose already ghostly trunks were also beginning to join the night-time glow. A girl, her hair—light enough to catch some of the birches’ silver glow—pulled back into scruffy, tangled pigtails.
Her lips twitched. She remembered still coming home with hair like that, the way her mother had tugged and combed and teased the knots away, threatening all the while to shave her fair hair clean off like her brother. Her granddaughter must be about this age by now, though it was hard to say, since Kathy hadn’t kept in touch.
“What are you doing?” the girl said.
“I’m waiting for something,” she replied, then glanced around the empty park, some parts still wreathed in shadows, some gently illuminated by the gradually lightening trees. “Where are your parents?”
The girl shrugged. “Home. I runned away.”