This is a story of 3022...

3022
In Flux

She treads over gossamer nets of dried dragonfly wings, feathers, blackened leaves and tree ash. Over wobbly plates of grey earth, over the deep fissures in the riverbed, over long necks of deadwood and fragments of exoskeletons.

It wasn’t so long ago that she’d swam here, immersed herself in the weight of the brackish water that streamed into the sea. Ribbons of saltmarsh had curled around the deep mudflats, engulfed by sedges and bullrushes, gulls snatching fish from beak to beak. Not long ago at all. She peers across the vast expanse of desert that dips beneath her.

There’s nothing but a cabin bag under her arm and the gift—a tree frog or a luna moth, she can’t remember—that her mother knitted for her unborn child. Either way, the yarn has unfurled into a green, shapeless skein. She clings to it, binding the memories tightly. Anything can be stitched back together.

A band of solemn strangers lurks around the diminished shoreline, waiting. Some have been sitting here for days, camping out on the gravelly earth to haggle for a seat, with parched throats and sunburnt lips and grubby nails. She runs her finger along every sharp edge of the paper ticket in her pocket.

The guards are brusque, matter-of-fact. Through the gate they take her passport, briefly frisk her, tear up her ticket and jostle her onto the flight.

Cogs grind against cogs, metal against smoke against earth against fire against earth. Something snaps and the cabin jolts. They panic, it settles, and they breathe again. The cord from the machine to the Earth has been cut, and as they pull away, she trusts her choice is the right one.

Looking out over the blanket of yellowed grass, she tastes butter on hot toast and feels the pale tissue of skin on her grandfather’s hands, the crescent moons of his fingernails. She cradles the messy yarn to her belly. Not long now.

The shuttle surges as Earth retreats. Moving, not moving, there’s no sense of motion up here. The dark sky is flecked with blinding light that tugs in all directions, fracturing and dispersing. Prisms of colour cocoon her, wash over her.

She is so very small. A neutron, a subatomic particle now dwarfed into the dazzling helix of a violet sea snail, passing through broken glass and streetlights, smashed robins’ eggs and glacé cherries, honey and hot icy stars, freezing and melting, always expanding, always in flux. Closing her eyes, she dissolves into her childhood kaleidoscope.

*
A group of kids gather under the double moon, waves licking the mossy rock-pools. Under a clear sky, the Milky Way spreads itself across the horizon. They connect the starry dots, shaping animals and inventing stories. They’ve all heard the myth that their ancestors came from up there, from a planet called Earth, but they know it’s just a myth. The story goes that the inhabitants drilled so many holes in the ground that the world split at the seams, that it dried up and flattened like a big old tractor tyre. It’s too ridiculous to comprehend.

One of the boys inhales a lungful of cool sea air and lies back against the sand as a flock of starlings pass by. His skin tingles at the unspoken unison of their murmuration, how they swell and sigh beneath the backdrop of the violet constellation. He can’t see that far, but behind the birds, deep into that kaleidoscope, there’s a cloud of opal stars suspended like frozen drops of milk. One droplet peels itself away from the cluster, and desperate to be useful, melts and drips down like hot butter, like cold, fresh water. At incalculable speeds, it sinks into one of Earth’s ravines, feeling its way through a tangled warren of fissures, trickling under the riverbed, illuminating dark corridors, changing colour as it ripples and the yarn unspools, softening the cracks, stitching old wounds with green shoots.

Written by REBECCA SHAHOULD for Johan Famaey