“There are some nice things about being in the human form.” Freja smiles and pulls him close again, lightly touching his naked back. They look up at the digital timer above the screens.
“We haven’t got long now, dearest, we had better choose who is going to be the next saviour.”
In the centre of the screens they see a dark headed girl, with a huge grin spreading across her face as she pulls a blackened toy fire engine out of the twisted ruins of a burnt house and holds it like a treasure.
“Hope,” Freja says. “That is what they need. Humans get it from such small things, the return of something they thought was lost, a sunny day after excess rain, rain after excess sun, a new bud, a light in the darkness. Let’s make that girl the next saviour. She even has a good name, Evangeline! It means bearer of good news.”
Dion and Freja turn to a platinum pedestal beside them and place their hands on a large crystal ball nestled on top. The rainbow light inside arcs to the touch of their fingers. They push it down until it clicks into place and then slowly turn it until a sparkling shaft of light descends directly down onto the girl, who stares up at it, mesmerised. All the screens focus now on the girl, her beautiful face drinking in the powerful nectar they are sending down.
“Come on, Dionysus, we have half an hour more until it is complete, let’s go to bed and enjoy these bodies while we still have them. Our work is nearly done!”
ON EARTH, EVANGELINE’S father looks down, placing a new battery in the remote control of his drone. He calls out to her, “I’ve fixed it. We can finally get footage of this mess for the insurance company.” It is only when the drone flies into the beam of light and remains fixed there that he sees where Evangeline is. Both he and the girl are entranced as the beam of light is diverted by the drone and disperses into millions of tiny sparkles that are caught in the wind and land sparking like diamonds in the soil.
“That must be what the Northern lights look like,” he says. “Wow, Eva there really must be a God!” He places his arm around his daughter.
“Everything is going to be Ok,” he says.
DIONYSUS AND FREJA return to lift the crystal ball back out of the cradle. The screens are now showing something curious. Behind the girl and her father, small green shoots are springing up out of the blackened earth.
“What the—” Dion exclaims. “Looks like something has gone amiss. How did that happen?”
He presses the replay button and watches the sacred light beam being dispersed by the drone.
“Now the ‘Humans on Earth Experiment’ is taking an interesting turn. We have created a new species of tree that is growing fast. A tree that has sentience and intelligence. An Avatar tree. They will call it the Avatree and it will eventually seed all over the world and act as lungs for the planet. A tree that should be able to outsmart and resist human attempts to control it. It should shelter and feed both humans and animals.”
“Dion, that is so exciting! Let’s not wait so long for our return next time.”
They hold hands, smiling at the growing forest of Avatrees on the screens until the timer approaches zero.
“Goodbye for now, Earth!”
The screens power off and the two bodies wink out of existence into swirls of rainbow light that join and vanish into the clouds.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JO has only recently taken up creative writing, in an effort to nurture the long overlooked right side of her brain.
She is a member of a small creative writing group in Woolgoolga NSW and hopes to write more as she transitions into retirement.
Mourning is Broken by Philip Barker
“OH, FUCK’S SAKE, LOOK at this. Here they go!”
One cop leaned out the open patrol car window, watching the scene in front of him in the lights, slack-jawed. The other ambled toward the chaos.
The man was slicked with sweat and blood, writhing in the gravel beside the road. The woman looked even worse. He’d tripped with the effort of dragging her by the hair but still found her face again and again with a booted kick. Half-screams tore from him, as he thrashed.
She was silent.
“Mate, off her, or you know what’s coming!”
He turned towards the cop, arms wide, a clump of hair in his hand dripping black wet. Then the Taser snickered and he fell forward into the dust.
“I reckon he’s dragged her almost a bloody ‘kay. Keen little bugger. She must have burnt the chops again.”
“Call the ambos, Mate?”
“Nah, they’ll live.”
Their bodies bumped and swayed in the back of the van.
THERE HE WAS AGAIN. The old bloke.
“He’s just sitting under the big tree across the road. Silly old prick. Look!”
She joined him on the creaky porch, gazing out across the dust, the wire-twisted and dry-bone wide brown.
Sunset poured beauty across her face and he loved her hard. It hurt.
“He’s harmless. I said ‘G’day’ before, but he didn’t answer.”
“Well he’s not your Mob, that’s for sure. How did he get out here? Doesn’t look like he drove his BMW.”
“Doesn’t look like he has pants!”
They laughed, eyes kissing. He touched her hair. He wanted this silky moment to go on forever.
“Hey, where’d he go? You see him?” Her black eyes were narrowed and still.
HE TRIED TO OPEN HIS eyes. He was on fire. He called her name.
“Wakey, wakey, Punchy.” Water poured into his face.
“You did a number on her this time, mate. They took her off to town this morning. She’s not going to walk the same. You piece of shit.”
He grunted at the boot in the face.
“How’s that feel?”
It felt like truth.
“Hopefully you’ll get bashed every day, where you’re going.”
The old man watched the van take the man down the beating track, heard the children on the porch ask when he was coming back.
“Can we eat at your house, Nan?”
WIDE BLUE SUDDENLY unfolded above him. It was silent. A breeze brushed. He could hear their voices, far enough away.
Why the door was open, why the van had stopped, why the cuffs had fallen, did not matter. It did not matter because it had happened.
He sat up. His bare feet found the earth. He filled his lungs with life and began to walk to where the sky met the land.
He tracked under the sun.
Each step pulled heavy from the sand.
The shouting and lights behind soon dimmed with distance but the horizon in front would come no closer.
Dark brought the cool, and a cold black cloud drilling down to his bones. Creatures chittered, crawled and slithered along his skin, and talked of how he would soon be their home.
Morning was broken. He looked up through the blue above to the terrible black of beyond. Each time he fell, he watched the tiny world of a stone or a speck of dust—like a god—until he rose again.
Which plants gave water?
The prickly sticks and the brown grass peeping from rocks had no answer.
Water flowed from his mind; splashing crystal cool over his lips and tongue and shoulders.
He tore branch and root, sucked the grit.
Time began to tell.
As the hours marched, a tall army stood to attention. He inspected them as he passed in slow, silent inspection, each with eyes on the other.
They bounced away, as one.
A liquid snake crossed his path. He began to follow the writing it left behind, drawing him ever deeper into the land.
It began to fold around him.
He cried out in the terrible voice of the truly lost.
He cried out for her.
He cried out for the boy he was, at how he’d come to be.
He cried out for his shame, the man he could never be.
When, at last, when there was no-where else to look but at himself, he finally fell silent.
Then fell.<
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THE SONG IN THE AIR around him is of her voice, a familiar ancient music he never understood.
His still heart feels warm.
The old man stands on a shimmering line that stretches, vibrating, from behind to beyond. It lights everything.
The song lifts him aloft—suddenly, gratefully; gaping like a fish fresh above the pain of body and torture of thought.
The old man spins songs along the lines. Stories come from his body in living, leaping chants.
Memory and place are one, each a part of the other, bound like rock. He has never seen . . . But now it is all around him.
The old man sings ancient scales of belief and life and love. Animals and spirits, where we come from, where we go, who we are.
The songs flew the choir of lines, alive, to be heard again. They show him the world for the first time through his own real eyes.
He drinks of a tiny shoot, shot green as the old man smiles like a painting, black and still.
He had laughed at her.
“If I ever get stuck out there, I’ll sing and know what to do. I’d sing. You’d die, Whitefulla.”
She had laughed at him. She is here now, too. And he knows why.
She laughs and dances as the voices of millions swell triumphant around her.
Her shining hair flows across the valleys of her forever body.
She shows him all the holes; the holes in the ground where they dug like a fever, the holes in him where shame lived because of being a man. The holes that now must be filled.
He was a man who asked for the mask, like all men. But—like all men—with it, he could not see.
The time of men here is gone, he agrees. It has been enough.
“Everything changes now,” she says and takes his hand.
Where he was is gone far and long behind.
Flaming floods drowned and burned as the people watched and waited.
Serpents and birds rejoiced again as the lines reached to touch the sacred places.
He no longer had to be a man, because he was not a man. He was free.
The orange sun climbed a black sky above a blood-red land.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: PHIL Barker is the author of The Revolution of Man, an exploration of positive masculinity. He is also a public speaker and regular columnist on masculinity, gender and passionate campaigner to free men from the constraints of “man box” masculinity.
https://speakingout.com.au/speaker/phil-barker/
The EverLasts by Eleanor Whitworth
SOME DAYS YOU WAKE up tired. Tired of trying to survive. This morning, another dust storm howls. The whipping grains pile up in the corner of the aluminium window frame. Casper rouses. I lean over and kiss his back between his shoulder blades. He turns and smiles. His teeth are too prominent. His skin too sallow. His illness only gets worse.
I get up and go to the corner of the room to check our little patch of earth. Kneeling, I bring my face close, hoping to spy some change, some movement, some indication of life.
Nothing.
Not yet, I remind myself. It’s a slow process, rebuilding the earth’s ecosystems. I pour half a glass of water each for me and Casper then sprinkle a whole glass over the dirt.
“I’m seeing Great-Aunt Rita today,” I say.
“Don’t let her sap your soul!” he says with a wry smile before wincing with pain.
IN THE TRANSITION ROOM on the ground floor of our apartment block, the storm-needle is far over in the red. I open my locker and pull out my gear. Casper’s is scrunched up at the back, unused for over a month now. My coverall is clammy and rough. At least the gloves have a satisfying worn-in fit. I step into the exit vestibule and curl my right hand around the rope. Pushing the heavy plastic door aside, my fingers tighten as I follow the rope out into the squalling wind. I inch along, following the rope to where it merges with the mainline, joining the shuffle to the shuttle point. The wind pushes me about. But it’s my breath, loud in the mask, that is the soundtrack to my walk.
Once I reach the shuttle, I pull off the mask. Dust falls from my suit to the floor. It’s crowded and hot. I swing from the handhold and think about my Great-Aunt, about how the world came to be as it is now.
A NURSE IN WORLD WAR Two, Rita had met her love, a high-ranking officer, in an army hospital. He was rich, very rich, it turned out. They married, though his family disapproved. A year after armistice, he was killed in a car accident. Devastated, I guess it’s no surprise that she joined the EverLasts five years later. Back then, the rest of society knew little about how the EverLasts came about. It was only later, after things got really bad, that the story of how a well-connected doctor travelling with a group of soldiers found himself in the caves of a remote Pacific island—the name still a secret today; about how he had noticed the small, delicate plants clinging to the cave walls; how he had plucked a flower and on impulse sucked the sweet nectar; about how, the next morning, his infected cut was better and his body younger.
Returning to the cave after the war, he’d harvested most of the plants. Coveting them, he’d tested the nectar on select patients. The results were good. So good, he’d earned patronage. Quiet patronage. Quiet money. The most dangerous kind.
His patrons began buying pieces of land and constructing the EverLast domes, special habitats to keep the plants alive—for even with all that money, they were not able, ever, to reproduce them. As time went on, the most loyal and well-off patrons, like my Great-Aunt, moved into the EverLasts. At the same time, outside, various plant and animal species were beginning to collapse. Slowly at first, so no one took it seriously. As it grew worse, instead of taking coordinated action, people fought about the reasons. The EverLasts, they just kept going about their business.
The shuttle arrives at my stop. I’m the only person to get off. I change to another shuttle. This one is a long ride, outside the city, out to what used to be the forest. At the next stop, the platform is covered, the air is conditioned. A windowed corridor leads to the EverLast, the huge dome like a lovely, ripe mushroom cap.
THE FIRST AND LAST time that I’d come here, I’d felt special as I walked toward the EverLast. With each step, dreams of escape whirled in my head; dreams of being carefree, dreams of having plentiful food. The automatic keeper had directed me into a scanning and decontamination room. I was re-clothed in soft garments, then ushered into a huge open space filled with a sweet smell; sickly, enticing, intoxicating. The room was lavish, the last time I’d seen so much colour was in the depths of childhood, back when you could play in a park.
“Darling,” a woman had gotten off a chair, nodding to her companion. As she’d approached, it was like looking into a warped mirror. I couldn’t help but know who she was: Great-Aunt Rita, now 104 years old, but looking the same age as me. I’d seen my mother in her cheekbones and eyes. I’d seen myself. I’d seen the child I would never have. It was in that moment that my rage galvanised. I could tell Rita was trying to ignore my gaunt face, a flash of doubt crossing her face. She’d continued anyway, “You’ll never guess! I’ve won the lottery!”
I didn’t say anything.
“We know it’s getting hard out there. I’m so sorry, pet. Just dreadful. We’ve been talking and decided that we can stretch to have five more people come and join us here! We’re quite progressive at this EverLast, you know. A bit renegade.” She’d actually winked. “We drew straws for who could choose a family member. I got a long straw! And, I choose you!” Her smile was too wide.
“No,” I’d said.
“What?”
“You have no idea.”
“We know that it’s bad.” She’d tried that smile again.
“Most of the world is dead. And you lot with your nectar, your fancy plants that suck the nutrients from the soil and colonize the bacteria that recycle nutrients for other plants. You’ve taken everything. And now, the soil is infected because it is so depleted. Nothing grows. Even the crops from the greenhouse farms are collapsing. But the worst of it is
that you know. You are wilful. And what do you do? You dare to invite me into your selfish nest of plenty.” I’d turned and left.
Straight after that, I’d joined the resistance. That’s where I met Casper. We were given a cup-full of precious, uninfected soil. Our job was to try and grow the building blocks of an ecosystem. We were given a teaspoon of dried plant matter every month or so, and occasionally some grains of soil that had healthy microbes. After the first year, we were able to share a teaspoon of our soil. And another teaspoon each year after that. The resistance kept the soil-building a secret so that the EverLasts couldn’t confiscate this one small, healthy thing we had managed to create. We had heard rumours that the crash was finally affecting them as well.
Maybe that’s why Great-Aunt Rita had called me again. The open space I stand in is still lavish, but something has changed. I can’t tell what, exactly. And there Rita is again, also somehow different.
“I’m glad you came,” she says. “Let’s walk.” She indicates to a corridor.
“I hope this won’t take long. A friend of mine is unwell,” I say.
Stories of Hope Page 29