I dreamt of better worlds

“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by Claudia Befu and Julie Gabrielli, and supported with brilliant advice from scientists Jonathan Tonkin and rebecca hooper. The story you’re about to read is from this project. You can find all the stories as a special Top In Fiction Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher Erica Drayton.

In the hazy light of the polluted sunrise, I dug my left hand into the soil because the right one had been taken when I was a child. The soil was soft and black and full of worms. Scooping up a fistful, I raised it to my face and inhaled. Rich. That was the only word for it. Unlike any soil I’d ever encountered. Like it came from some other world. A world of vibrant, verdant life instead of this baked dry ruin we were born to.

Crow’s question echoed in my head but I wasn’t ready to answer. I spent the night working the soil to keep from answering, to keep from thinking about all those children and all that need. I had nothing worth passing on but the burdens of the past.

Staring out into the desert, I held the soil in my hand. Tasted it. Said a tiny prayer to Our Lady of Coyotes.

Laughter. I opened my eyes, laughing too. Shook out my hand and let the dirt fall. Sheireen and Yacinta approached holding hands. I was often struck by their love in those days of renewal and experimentation, when every discovery filled us with hope. It had been my experience that coupling diminished what was beautiful about love and intimacy, but Yacinta and Sheireen shined brighter together than they ever had apart. It was as if they held each other up, made one another sturdier, more substantial. Even their ideas seemed brighter, more novel, and adventurous.

Yacinta said, “How’s it taste?” Her smile so wide it spilled into Sheireen’s face.

“Like dirt.”

Sheireen threw her head back and laughed and Yacinta shook hers, muttered something I didn’t hear. I stood, tried to wipe the dirt from my hand and knees, then used my shirt to wipe the sweat from my face. The fat swollen sun hovered against the horizon. Newly risen, but already the heat was becoming unbearable. “My grandmother once told my mother that the soil used to taste fresh.”

Sheireen’s smile and wide eyes urged me on. I said, “She remembered.” I shrugged, like it meant nothing to me. Like the gone away world of our grandparents was little more than a cautionary fairytale about human hubris and greed and spite and violence. “She died a long time ago. My mother was just a girl.”

Emotion swept through suddenly and I turned back to the desert that had swallowed the land to keep from showing them my tears, but they heard it in my voice. “My mother told me after her mother died, she used to eat dirt constantly. Her foster mothers had to slap the dirt from her hands continually. She said it always tasted acidic.” I smiled to keep the tears back.

Yacinta’s hand landed on my shoulder. Hot and small, the sweat already forming where skin touched skin. “You okay?”

We stared out at the desert. The new soil pressed right against the edge, like two colors meeting but not mixing. One black and one a brownish grey. But the grey surrounded. The grey was everywhere, consuming everything. Except for this soil which had stretched past the first line of trees we had planted a decade ago to stop the desert. A lifetime ago. The only trees for miles and miles. Soon, we’d plant another line here in this new soil.

I thought of my own childhood and all the pain and trauma passed on to me by those old women who wanted to help. “Do you remember your grandmothers?”

Yacinta and Sheireen were so young. Their grandmothers may have been younger than me. Sheireen cleared her throat. “Yacinta was…”

Only then did I remember. So many orphans after so much war and chaos and catastrophe. The heat and humidity killed so many every year. Plague, drought, and floods took more. An endless flow of motherless children. Orphans that I could not teach, no matter what Crow said. Regretting my question, I tried to take it back by speaking over Sheireen. “It doesn’t matter.” Wiping my eyes dry, I turned back to them but didn’t look at their faces. Afraid of what emotions my foolish question brought to the surface. The past was the past and the past was all dead.

Only the future held life. Hope.

I looked past them to the Lorax trees so close at hand. Huge fungal trees breaking the constant wind rolling over the desert and transforming the soil. The yellow trunks of the Lorax trees were thicker than I was tall but stood only twice my height. Their wide orange caps shading the bushes that now grew beside and between them. Tiny spots of color touched the bushes. Berries. They were yellow and tart and slightly poisonous, but they tasted so good many considered it worth the bellyache.

Crow’s work, the Lorax trees. Her mycological magic transubstantiating the earth. Renewing the soil, filtering the water and irrigating the land. Their roots dug deep into and through the muscle and bone of the earth and they all tied together as one single organism. Their roots entwined with the city’s roots as well. A great beast sheltering us, feeding us, and terraforming the poisoned earth.

Past them, the massive Herzog trees swayed gently. Some different kind of magic I’d never understand. Trees with flexible metal. Some say they’re made of fungi too, like everything else, but I never knew. The Herzog trees loomed like giants over the landscape glowing dimly in the dawnlight, sucking carbon out of the air. Their expansive, gauzy wings reminded me of roach wings. Beautiful and translucent and full of the wind.

Beneath them, the ruins of the old world and all of us working to make a new one out of this rubble.

“Come on.” Sheireen took my hand and Yacinta placed one on my lower back and we left the desert’s edge, went back into town before the heat became unbearable.

As usual, I had been the last still out working. Most turned in well before dawn to be with their families or lovers or to argue over politics or pray.

I had only my ghosts. The myriad dead I housed inside me.

The city glowed faintly in the halflight of the coming day. A thin layer of bioluminescent algae coated the ruins and the new structures blooming from the wreckage of the gone away world. A city made of fungus. Everything in life, from clothes to shelter to food and transportation made from the same fungi Crow dreamt into existence.

All of it interacting, communicating with each other. It bound us back to the earth. Made us part of the soil, the food, the water, and the air. One great fungal community. And all of this because of Crow.

I was already old when first I heard of her conquering the wastes. An army of women spreading spores to revitalize the dying earth. A train of refugees stretching endlessly behind her armies wielding magic and science from long ago.

I remember when I first saw her. Standing tall beneath the San Luis Arc, she promised death or life. In one hand she held a gun. In the other, a flowered mushroom that glowed against the crushing night. It was the first time I’d seen a Lorax tree, though I wouldn’t know that for months. My children and grandchildren already dead, I had given up hope. Like so many, I had given up any belief that life might improve.

Our ancestors must have hated us or themselves to curse humanity so.

But then there was Crow.

Mycological magic. I’m too old to understand such things. I grew up and grew old in a hopeless world of violence and disaster. The earth itself seemed determined to murder us as we cowered from storms, ran from the floods and fires that scarred and drowned the landscape.

Crow showed us a new way.

Yacinta opened the door leading underground and we three descended to the city beneath the ruins. The walls alive with algae functioning as a generator and farm and lightsource covering this underground life. The labyrinths carved into the earth by our ancestors.

None can say their intended original purpose. My grandmother told my mother of vessels in the air. Vessels piercing the skies and disappearing into that vast nothingness. She told my mother that’s where the best of humanity went. They fled the earth to keep from watching it die.

I said goodnight to Yacinta and Sheireen and wandered back to the room I shared with a dozen other old women. They called it a nursery.

I woke to people rushing down the glowing hallways to reach the surface. Disoriented, I blinked at the walls, trying to remember where I was and why. Even after the years at the outpost, trying to regrow earth and humanity from the fringes of habitability, I never grew accustomed to our life underground.

Taking my time, I dressed and followed the crowds out into the coolness of the night air. The stars, so numerous but flickering only faintly against the glow of the ruined city around us. The Herzog trees still swayed, still glowed, but this time in a rich, full purple. Great violet giant sentinels—thirteen of them—standing vigil over our outpost at the desert’s edge.

The night alight with bioluminescence, with the glow of the Herzog trees, the moon. It all made this night, like all nights, into a celebration. A celebration of life and light, of possibility, of hope. Of our shared belief in the future. Crow’s dream of a habitable earth. A thriving earth. And we would thrive with it as shepherds.

Young women sang the visionary songs of Crow’s poets. Others took up the songs, yelling them into the big sky hanging overhead. Then children, dozens of them, ran past me, handfuls of glow swinging through the air. The algae scraped from the ruins and smeared against the bodies as they bounced against the legs and hips of adults as they scampered through the crowd in splotches and streaks of electric greens and purples and pinks.

The crowd danced along with the singing. A simple rhythm of clapping and stomping giving texture to the glowing night. I followed them to the auditorium that was once just an open space within the ruins. The Herzog trees seemed to loom over the auditorium as if they, too, came to listen, to see.

Strange, living in the husks of a civilization that we had no connection to beyond the theoretical. We saw all that our ancestors left behind, but we had become so severed from the past that so much of it meant less than nothing to anyone.

The seas of plastic. The mountains of garbage. A world sucked dry by our ancestors with no thought or consideration for what came next.

There at the center of the auditorium draped in the black feathers of extinct birds stood Crow. Arms folded, jaw set, she stared out at all of us. Between her legs sat a large pot where a small Lorax tree grew. Like me, she had lost pieces of herself. An ear. An eye. Some say she chopped off her own breasts to either cure herself of some illness or to transform herself. It was the ritual that made her Crow.

She had buried who she once was. Her name along with her past. When she rose as the witch of the waste regrowing the earth, replenishing the soil, filtering the water, conquering and uniting cities beneath her banner of a flowering mushroom with black wings, she abandoned her past and became Crow.

She raised her hands. The feathered cloak falling to her shoulders, revealing skin nearly as black as the feathers. Some raised their hands with her as if we all stretched towards the same point in the sky, in the future.

The singing quieted and the dancing ceased and silence rose like a storm enveloping us. Then Crow raised her voice for all to hear. “Sisters!”

We shouted back, “Crow!”

She smiled, her teeth a white so bright they seemed to glow. The vast wings of the Herzog trees hanging limp and glowing purple behind her casting her in a slight silhouette. Her bright eye and teeth mesmerized as the night deepened, darkened, contracted to only her on the stage before us. She raised her voice again to be heard by all. “Five years.” She nodded, held up her hand with all fingers extended. “Five years. That’s how long it took our ancestors to decimate our species. We stand here ten years after planting the first Lorax trees. Seven years after Sister Ayoka rediscovered and redeveloped the Herzog trees.

“Our work is one of generations. Your granddaughter’s granddaughter’s will be dust by the time we push the desert back to the ocean of glass where nothing grows and nothing lives. A dead place. An impossible, uninhabitable place made by our ancestors in a burning instant.” She cast her eye from face to face, nodding. “I have seen the memories of the gone away world. I witnessed the maelstrom that turned the heart of the desert to glass. It incinerated people, plants, and animals—even punching a hole in the very soul of the earth.

“We were born to a cursed world. Born to a cursed species. We inherited the blight of their curses, but we will be better. We will heal this wounded earth.” Her jaw set and her body stilled. “I spit on the graves of our ancestors and our suicidal species. They scorched the earth. They committed genocide against their children. Monsters.” Her voice raw at the word, as if scraped by the horrors of that gone away world that none remembered but Crow.

She cursed our ancestors and cursed their dead gods, the ones they murdered, the ones who could not stop them. As became ritual, she described the history of our calamitous collapse. Where once we were billions preparing to colonize the stars, we were now perhaps millions scavenging in the deserted ruins of their collapsed civilization.

The fury and shame rose in us. A shame for our ancestors, for our species. “We once had brothers and sisters. Other kinds of humans living beside us. But we murdered them all back in the depths of time. Beasts of the land and air and seas once flourished alongside us as cousins. They nurtured us and we, in turn, nurtured them. The land was once covered in greens. In colors bright and vibrant from the leaves and vines of thousands of plants. These, too, were cousins to us. Elder cousins who nurtured and protected us.

“We murdered them all. Our ancestors turned the earth to ash, poisoned the waters and airs. For what?” She shrugged, shook her head. “We will never know, but we will forever carry their shame. And so it is that we hate. We orphans of genocide, who inherited this ruin, grew up in the shadow of so much spite for the future, for life, for the earth itself.

“The earth cannot forgive them and we do not ask for their forgiveness. We make a pact. A promise. We will heal this earth. Our fungal teachers show us the way. We reclaim what our ancestors destroyed.” Squatting, she pulled a knife from her belt and carved slivers from the potted Lorax tree. Looking up, she nodded.

Slowly and one by one, we made our way to her to take a sliver of the mushroom on our tongues.

When all had consumed and returned to their space in the crowd, Crow raised her voice once more. “Sisters!”

“Crow!”

She smiled, laughed. “The night is yours. This life is ours.”

The night expanded then, the wings of the Herzog trees filling with wind and fluttering back into the air as if timed to Crow’s prayer. A howl punctured the air and then the yelping of a thousand voices mimicking the coyote, our only cousin remaining on this bitter earth.

I said another prayer to Our Lady of Coyotes and asked her to bless Crow. To give her a long, long life.

That sliver of mushroom slurred through me, making every bit of me vibrate with life. The glow of the algae, of the Herzog and Lorax trees was like a painting slapped against the skies, the air itself. My body, once small and frail, expanded past its limits. Past my skin. I became warm yellow light bathing everyone and everything around me. I felt their lungs breathing, their heart beating. I was inside them and they inside me. The me I was sloughed away from my ancient body to wander a bit in the bodies of others. The children running and screaming, the young women finding temporary lovers after this ritual, this celebration. I became all of them and they became me and all of us bound to the Lorax trees that sheltered us, fed us, clothed us, and saved us.

On my knees in the rich soil, I stared up into the ocean of stars, the ocean of sand, the vast emptiness of our history. Our history torched by our own hands. We had become an amnesiac species, unaware of the vicious cruelties of our people. In this way, we found the strength to move forward.

Crow was our guide, but she was not alone. Thinking such thoughts, I felt more than saw or heard someone standing beside me. I opened my eyes that I hadn’t realized I close and turned to find Crow. “Crow!” The word barked out of me.

Crow only smiled. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

I swallowed. Turned back to the desert to look where she looked. “No.”

She snorted. “There’s a beauty in death and desolation.” She placed a hand on my shoulder. “Have you considered?”

“My mother believed there was a beauty in all things. She was obsessed with death, with dying. She dreamt of it always. I think because she had seen so much of it. Too much of it. You know what she told me when finally she was dying?”

Crow gave my shoulder a slight squeeze and waited for me to continue.

“She couldn’t see me anymore. She described death as a cloud that had found her. I spoke to her to keep her alive. To keep her with me. It was selfish, I know. Death calls us all and there’s no shame in greeting it like an old friend. But I wasn’t ready for her to die. I had never been ready for anyone to die. I think because of all the suicide attempts. She was nostalgic for death, if you can believe it. Death defined her life and so death seemed the most natural and consistent aspect to her life. She told me once that she wanted a beautiful death.” I turned to Crow, stared into the vacant hole in her head where an eye belonged. “There was nothing beautiful about finding her hanging herself. Having to climb and cut the cord to keep her alive. Nothing beautiful about the times I forced her to vomit up whatever poison she ate or drank. When she finally found death, she told me that she thought she had died a long time ago. She smiled when she said that. It was the last thing she ever said.”

Crow stared back at me, waiting.

I swallowed. “I’m too old, Crow. I hear death calling me. She’s promising to set me free. To let me see my mother again. My only regret is that I won’t see the end of this.”

“None of us will.”

“I grew up believing humanity would die out. We still might.”

“Death is not the end,” Crow said. “Just a different way to begin.” Pressing her other hand to my chest, she said, “The fungus roiling through your stomach teaches us that death is just a phase change. Our time to transubstantiate. The fungi turn the black oceans of oil into clean soil. They pull the poison from the lakes and rivers. If ever there was a god, it’s flowing through our bodies right now.”

“I’m too old, Crow. All I want is to hold on as long as possible. I want to see as much of your vision as my body allows.”

Crow smiled with those wide white teeth. “There’s no shame in dying. Only in giving up.” She clapped my shoulder. “I’ll ask you again tomorrow.”

“Answer will be the same.”

“I’ll ask the day after too. And when you refuse, I’ll ask the next day and the next.”

I shook my head. “Idiot.”

She suppressed her laugh. “They asked for you, you know.”

That struck me, left my jaw hanging.

She cocked her head. “Yacinta’s right. You really don’t know how we see you. The children trust you. Their mothers trust you. Everyone sees you for who you are, except you. It’s not only your memories that I want for the children. It’s your perseverance and determination. Your indefatigable energy,”

“I’m no teacher, Crow. I know nothing about nothing.”

“The best teachers demonstrate their knowledge. They become a model for their convictions.” Crow nodded. “You’ve seen much, but you—you’re tethered to that old world.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“But you remember those who were. You’ve seen more than most. All we ask is that you share what you know. That you show them how to choose life continually, day after day.”

We talked a while longer. Me deflecting and Crow encouraging. When she left, she kissed me on both eyes and the mouth.

“It’s your choice. We won’t force you, but we do need you.”

I stood at the desert’s edge watching Crow walk back towards the city of fungal light, so full of promise and hope. I thought about mushrooms as a god. Death called to me. I heard it. Death called to me and I didn’t think about my own dead, but about the children running and shouting through the night and all the hope I wanted to fill them with.