Glass and Gardens

by Sarena Ulibarri

  “That’s what Miss Lasagna said.”

  Alex trudged downstairs, and set a cup of meal worms in the truck. Baby Chocochip was so hungry that she dunked her whole head into the worms. But then all of the chicks and chickens disappeared with Mr. Hank, who drove them away. Mom cradled Alex. Although she sobbed on the outside, on the inside Alex birthed a heart-sized thumping welt of anger.

  ***

  At midnight, Alex shoved her anger through her feet, and pedaled as fast as she could with Miss Lasagna strapped to her handlebars. She turned to Chuckles’ house. She tapped a window pane. Chuckles, surrounded by his dolls and half-asleep, said, “Huh?”

  “Can I borrow your bike and wagon?”

  “Okay, but wait for me.”

  Alex rode the bike and wagon to the city farming facilities. Chuckles wobbled on Alex’s rusty bike. Alex prowled along the main barn, a wide metal building with big exhaust fans and waste processing units, community vegetable gardens, a greenhouse, water tanks, and a butchery. They crept through a gap between a door and its chain. Inside, except for a handful of warming lights at chicken pens, the main barn was dark and still. Chickens clucked. Alex found her flock. She counted the chickens and charted them from memory: Skeezy, Frumpy Bob, Mrs. Chocochip, and Maisie. She stuffed them all into the bike wagon’s cage, even Baby Chocochip.

  She pedaled into the center of the road. Chuckles rode after her while Miss Lasagna’s eyes recorded the ride. Something big and clunky hurtled down the hill.

  “Pull over!” yelled Chuckles.

  But Alex pedaled harder. A truck’s headlights cut through the darkness, slicing down Dead Man’s Hill.

  Chuckles squealed. Alex lost balance. The bike’s wagon torqued and twisted, slamming into the road. The cage burst open and Frumpy Bob and Maisie bolted into the air. Their wings shone in the light like stained-glass angels. The truck veered and clipped the wagon’s back corner. Mr. Hank yelled and counter-steered. Blood splattered across Alex’s face and arms. The truck slammed onto its side, smashing into the city farm’s storage tanks. Water pounded the road and pooled into a wide pond of mud, spinning feathers, two smashed bicycles, a ruined wagon, and Chuckles, limp and red-headed. Alex clawed at the cold, germ-ridden mud.

  ***

  In the morning, Alex sat upright in her hospital bed, while a doctor checked her pupils and forehead. She wiped a spot of chicken blood off of Alex’s ear. “Just a minor concussion. You’re a lucky young lady.”

  “Chuckles?”

  Dad said, “Broken arm. He’s in surgery right now.”

  Alex stared away from her parents, to an empty patch of wall scrubbed raw by antiseptic soaps. She said, “Miss Lasagna?”

  Mom said, “Her hair’s more frayed than ever. Perhaps you can repair her.”

  “Maisie?” asked Alex, “Mrs. Chocochip?”

  Mom hugged her. “Frumpy Bob and Maisie didn’t make it. You could say they saved your life, by startling Mr. Hank into steering away from you.”

  Circled by the darkness of exhaustion, Dad’s eyes sank into his skull. He said, “We’re glad you’re okay. But there are consequences for your actions.”

  “I just wanted to get my friends back.”

  “You snuck out. You could’ve been killed, or Chuckles…he’s only nine and Mr. Hank’s banged up bad. And the city farm…”

  Mom and Dad took Alex into Mr. Hank’s room. Covered with wires and plastic tubing, he swelled like a Blockie. He murmured.

  “I believe,” said Dad, “that you owe Mr. Hank an apology.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alex.

  “Not enough,” said her Dad.

  Monitors next to Mr. Hank beeped and tiny screens brightened against a background aroma of triclosan, triclocarban, and chloroxylenol—old-fashioned antibacterial soaps. Alex said, “I never meant for anyone to get hurt. I thought it would just all work out. I’m sorry.”

  “Look kid, maybe I should’ve had the truck on autopilot,” said Mr. Hank. A flash of anger crossed Dad’s face.

  Mom flexed the muscles of her forearms. “The city’s got to repair the community farm facility and Mr. Hank can’t do that right now. Since you caused some of this problem, what do you think you can do to help resolve this situation?”

  “I should help at the city farm?”

  “Yes,” said Mom.

  Alex stiffened her posture. “I’ll reassign my schoolwork as service to the city farm.”

  Mr. Hank’s face spasmed. “Fix the water or the whole system fails.”

  He wheezed. The skin along the back of his hands bunched up underneath adhesive tape that held intravenous tubing in place. Alex felt the same, full of blips, bruises, and taped-together wrinkles. Her willpower deflated into a memory-picture of dark mud cut open by the bright wings of Frumpy Bob.

  ***

  A handful of protesters lined Center Street near the city farm when Dad delivered Alex and left her under the guard of Elaine Hollis, a long-time city employee who had bio-active tattoos on her forearm that synced with the farm’s computers. A backhoe surrounded the barn’s north corner where contractors puzzled over how to rebuild the water filtration and containment units. Elaine showed Alex the basic systems.

  “Where are your Blockies?” asked Alex.

  “We don’t do planimals. They’d need newer systems, which we can’t afford unless we get a much bigger budget or greater efficiencies.”

  She assigned Alex to feed, clean, monitor, and account for all of the chickens held in various pens and coops, about thirty household’s worth of birds, including the last of Alex’s friends. Skeezy and Betsy-Boopsie and Picasso shied away from her touch, and too many others were gone. Their loss was her fault. She inspected the remaining chicks, and marked each one’s health by feathering, size, and beak color. She set Miss Lasagna into their cage and two chicks sat on the doll’s battery-warmed lap, paying no mind to her loose eyeball.

  That night Alex couldn’t sleep. Her heart thumped and her anger thickened. How could she be so stupid? The chickens deserved better. She drew maps of all of the farm’s systems, cycle after cycle chained together across the chickens, water inputs and drainage, solar power panels, and vegetable gardens. She worked until exhausted, sleeping on the floor surrounded by her drawings.

  ***

  The flock of protesters expanded overnight.

  Inside the farm, Alex found two of her chickens dead. She took them to Elaine, who tested their blood.

  Elaine slumped into a chair and reviewed her tattoo’s readouts across her forearm. “It’s the illness. We can’t save them all. We have to cull them.”

  “What caused the infection?”

  “Water-borne variant of avian flu H5N12, damned epidemic. We haven’t had enough clean water. And some of yours…they were in puddles of mud… maybe they got contaminated… If the tanks and filters hadn’t been ruined. We have to test them all.”

  They coaxed chickens into walking on bioreactive paper. Their footprints turned the paper bright orange, a warning sign. Elaine said, “I’m sorry, Alex, but testing shows the cull has to include all of your family’s chickens.”

  Alex bit her tongue.

  “And Alex, I want you to be in charge of informing the other families. This is your fault, after all.”

  “It is not my fault that viruses exist.”

  “No, but it’s your fault that Mr. Hank crashed and ran into the water. The broken filters catalyzed this infection.”

  Alex flexed her fists until her fingernails ground into the flesh of her palms in the same painful way that bad memories cut into her brain.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Alex, “Farming always means tough decisions.” She passed a series of drawings to Elaine, and a memory chip. “I wasn’t fast enough with this. But it’s better now than never, right?”

  Elaine swiped the memory chip over her tattoos, which revealed preliminary diagrams and equations along her forearm. She threw the diagrams up to a large wallscreen, then tracked the sys
tems and pored over the designs. Her eyes widened, and she tapped furiously along her arm. “Kid, you did this?”

  Alex nodded and felt the pain in her hands. “New efficiencies. You said it was that or a bigger budget. And I have no money. So I trimmed out the unnecessary parts. If we reset the solar panels, and turn compost bins into a bug farms, then we could maybe even put in a bunch of Blockies for people who can’t have their own home farms.”

  “We’re in for a rough few days, but this is wild,” said Elaine, scanning the screen. “Just really wild…”

  ***

  The next day, inside the barn in a quiet corner and away from crowds of protestors, Elaine and Alex gathered sick chickens. Skeezy’s unsteady heartbeat pulsed her soft feathers. Alex sucked back her sniffles. “I’m sorry, but you have an illness. I know you don’t get the logic that we must sacrifice some to save the flock. I apologize for my part in this. I wish I’d known you for much more time.”

  Alex wiped back her tears and forced herself to concentrate. She injected Skeezy with an anesthetic, and then a poison. The hen wheezed and dropped into lifelessness in her arms. Alex did the same with the others, and apologized to each. She and Elaine threw all of the dead into the furnace to disinfect them and recycle their bodies into electrical power for other parts the facility. At the shock of killing her old friends, Alex grew sullen. In the butchery sink, she washed her hands and wiped her eyes, a stiff-lipped, bitter farm-girl with a permanent scowl. Her sadness frightened her, and she buried it deeper into the recycling furnace of her lungs.

  ***

  Alex supervised when Mom killed the first planimal. She disconnected the wires pinned to Doc’s wing buds. His mouth puckered, and then opened wide. Mom squirted an intensive saline solution into him and after about a minute Doc let out a little wheeze. But he had no brain and no pain.

  They wrapped Doc in a big towel and Alex struggled to help lift his thirty pounds of dead weight onto the kitchen table. Mom made the first slice, bisecting Doc from mouth to cloaca across a series of tiny organs, dark red plant-meat filled with fluids that oozed onto the table top. Alex severed the organs and pulled out their fibers. The meat squeaked. She dropped the organs into a bowl, where they slimed and slithered, wet and ruddy. The faint scent of geosmin rose up from the meat, the dirt’s perfume-proof that Doc came from their farmlands.

  Alex sliced each half into thirds. She shaved these into one-inch slabs of meat. Seventy-two slabs in all, enough planimal protein for at least that many servings of dinners. It wasn’t hard to imagine the wealth if she won the contest: five Blockies per year would feed them well if they ate planimal meat almost every day. They dunked the slabs in cold water and vacuum-sealed them into biodegradable freezer bags.

  “It’s a lot easier than the chickens,” said Alex. “No feathers.”

  “And less work to raise them. And cheaper. And fewer germs,” said Mom, whose hands were covered in the grease of planimal meat.

  A wave of relief passed through Alex’s abdomen. She said, “It’s nicer to chickens not to kill a chicken when you can grow a Blockie. Chickens think. Chickens know things. Blockies are part plant, have no significant brain, and feel little to no pain. We should farm more Blockies.”

  “A fine moral calculus,” said Mom.

  Alex held the packages of planimal meat. “If everybody knew…”

  ***

  Mr. Hank leaned on a pair of crutches and adjusted the cybernetic exoskeleton that braced his injured legs. His voice fluttered, gravelly and weak. “Elaine’s been showing me your plans.”

  Alex stared down to the dirt along the floor. “I killed my friends and Chuckles hates me and no one gets it.”

  Mr. Hank wiped his brow and said, “I know the feeling.”

  Beyond the farm’s main doors, a large group of protesters camped in an empty pasture. Someone threw red paint and chicken feathers on one of the city trucks. Alex shivered. Mr. Hank got a call from Miss Lancy. He turned to Alex and said, “They got to the Lancy’s Eco-Pod, infected it with a fast-acting fungus. It’s sabotage. Lost the chickens and then the pod… their Blockies too… the Lancy’s are ruined. Going to be a rough winter, I’m afraid.”

  Alex asked, “Who would do such a thing?”

  “She suspects counter-protesters, or protesters trying to make things even worse for all of us.”

  “I can’t tell who’s good or bad anymore,” said Alex.

  “You can figure it out,” said Mr. Hank.

  Alex slouched. “No, I can’t.”

  Some people were pro-Blockies. There were anti-Blockies, a pro-Natural clique. Some ate meat, some ate only egg and dairy, some were vegan, some gorged on nuts, some gorged on anything. And there were almost-anythings, people who ate everything except the Blockies, not because of ethics but because they said they tasted bad. And there were open-source farming plans versus seed licensing, patented plant hybrids versus the free plant movement. And decentralized individual farms versus localized city farms, versus centralized factory farms, and every degree of difference among them. And huge vertical hydroponic farms in the cities, powered by solar cells and windmills. And still not quite enough food or distribution to feed the entire planet.

  Alex said, “Everyone’s busted into factions.”

  Mr. Hank said, “See? You care. You’re a good one. The good ones do what they can to help us all.”

  “Why won’t they help each other?”

  Protesters blocked the road to the city farm. Dueling sides yelled across the road at each other.

  Alex marched out to the middle of them. She hollered at them. “But this is my fault. You have to let me help fix the problems. All the creatures need water and feed. They’ll die if we don’t help them.”

  Someone yelled, “They’re dead already.”

  The blockade refused to let anyone pass. Their sweat filled the air with a tense mixture of salted anxiety, and sulfurous hints of rage. They chanted “No designer meats!” and “Planimals must die!” versus “Planimals protect us” versus “City Farms are our right” versus “My taxes, my choice!” versus “Home-farm Independence” versus “Nobody Takes My Chickens!” decorated with pictures of Alex and Maisie. “Planimals are Vegan” versus “Unnatural Fake Meats = Disease.”

  The crowds closed in on each other. Someone shoved Alex. She fell and bashed into someone else. Fistfights broke out. Mr. Hank winged a crutch at the protesters. Cops arrived.

  ***

  Alex sat in the living room. She crammed her hands along the sofa’s cushions.

  Dad said, “I don’t know what’s gotten into you. First the theft. Now a street fight. And cops? This isn’t like you.”

  Alex turned on the wallscreens and focused them on daily newsfeeds. They spat about droughts in the West, stranded food crates at seaports, acres of bioengineered soy that contracted a lethal bacteria, more reports of the new bird flu, and agribusiness protests nationwide.

  Dad scowled. “There’s no easy way out of these tensions for any of us.”

  “Yes there is,” said Alex. “Grow safe food. Give it to people. And then do it again. Grow. Give. Repeat.”

  “Is that what’s fueling you? Idealism?”

  “Dad, no.”

  “A dream of Utopia? Everyone happy on the old home-farm?”

  “Dad, no. It’s no fantasy. I killed them all. I killed our chickens. It was my fault.”

  “It was your responsibility, not your fault. You didn’t invent viruses. You weren’t manually driving the truck instead of letting it drive itself. But responding to the accident, and recognizing the infection, that’s the responsibility.”

  “You treat me like I’m some adult.”

  “In a way, you are. You do think in advance of your years.”

  “I’m just eleven.”

  “That’s true.”

  The wallscreen’s debates surged over home farming operations versus Eco-Pod ownership versus leasing, to jobs to factory farms to shipping costs to individua
ls’ rights versus environmental realities to grandiose assertions that home-based farms provided distributed sets of systems which could be called a necessary national defense. Every report was good, and bad, mixing confounding confusions. But Alex’s muddied thoughts melted away during footage from a huge rally in Chicago when the outspoken head of the Blockie Technologies, Dr. Nancy Corvalier, shook her fists. “We’re a non-profit. And that’s why Blockie Technologies is committed to keeping all of our ideas freely available worldwide.” People cheered. “We know we can’t all afford everything. We’re not the rich ones who can buy their way out of trouble. We have to use our wits.”

  Alex knew how that felt. Her family never was among the well-to-do.

  Corvalier said, “We urge everyone to set aside our differences.”

  That’s what I said, thought Alex, grow, give, repeat.

  “We strive for the higher purpose of finding the best ways to feed the world. If together enough of us can achieve seventy-five percent feedback cycle efficiency ratings for our Blockies, then we could feed the entire planet with healthy planimal meals every day. Imagine a world without hunger and you imagine a better humanity.”

  Corvalier’s idealism fueled Alex’s focus. She wrote at a fevered pace in her notes and sketches, scattering them throughout the room.

  ***

  The Torvalds had a nice house but an ugly, unkempt garden. Mr. Torvald sniffed at Alex.

  “Due to a city-wide epidemic some of us lost our chickens at the city facility. Your chickens got infected and had to be killed before the other chickens got infected. Reparations and food credits can be acquired by application through the City Bursar. I’m sorry.”

  Torvald said, “Oh good grief.” He turned away. “Marge, they sent that angry kid to tell us she killed our chickens!”

  From the distance Marge said, “Well tell that punk we don’t want her stinking science smarts!”

  Alex said, “But if instead of chickens you used… Planimals can help us all. If you grow them right, everyone eats.”

  “No one wants that crap,” said Torvald. He slammed the door.

  The next house had a flat porch and a scruffy dog in the window. The Kuang home. Alex knocked. A teen answered.