Her name was Joanne, and she enjoyed laying out in the apple grass during the summer, and she enjoyed picking the plants as close to the root as possible, and she enjoyed the bugs. Sometimes as she lay in the sunlight, feeling the breeze, she would roll onto her stomach to get an up close look at the bugs.
Spotted black and red, smaller than her pinky nail, it lay on a leaf like a bead of blood. To notify her of its existence, the bead exploded with wings, fluttering from the range of her breathing. So alien, she thought, small noises emitting from the wings, like the sound of a bee hive. She knew better than to get too close to inspect those, though.
One day, during her lounge, she spotted a blue and grey striped feather-crawler. That was her name for them, at least. Their legs looked like feathers, little spindles dangling off of of each of its legs. It stank, but only when she blew on it. It almost looked as if it rattled like a snake, the back-end shifting side to side.
She felt good here, comfortable and cleansed of the grime of the industrial wasteland she lived in. There was a notebook full of small sketches of the creatures she saw. Sometimes when her mother saw it open, she would lean over Joanne's shoulder, brushing her long brown hair away from her daughter's neck.
"What made you think that up?" She would ask.
Joanne was confused, of course, because she didn't 'think that up', she saw it. She drew it from life. After a while, she wondered if her skills were just lacking, leaving her drawings looking all but real. She focused on getting better. Even after that focus, her mother just saw more of the same, only more realistic. Joanne could tell that she was growing worried about these drawings.
No one seemed to venture as far as her, through the broken fences, through dilapidated housing, beyond mildewed french doors. They were afraid of the filth. They were afraid of the mud and clay.
Joanne was fifteen by now, and her childish curiosity was more feverish than ever. She wanted everyone else to experience it. If she couldn't bring anyone out to the fields, she'd bring the fields to them.
It started with one black and yellow, fuzzy and buzzing. No matter what she did, though, they never survived past the third sterilizing portal. Sometimes there was even a brutal rupturing of the carcass as she was re-pressurized.
There was no two-ways about it, she had to find a creature that could survive the trek, maybe something bigger, like the tree walkers.
She wrote in her notebook what she planned:
Step one: had to trap the tree walker.
Step two: had to get it back to base alive.
Step three: prove that life existed outside of sterilization.
No comments:
Post a Comment