Quiet Pine Trees

by T. R. Darling

  25 The shop had myriad shadows for sale. An anti-shadow would light her path by night. A sly-shadow watched for enemies. eShadow came with apps.

  26 The kingdom at the edge of the world did not have exports. It was paid by other nations to dispose of things they didn’t want. Ships full of dissidents and documents arrived with the expectation that they would be thrown over the edge. They were not. Soon the kingdom would export secrets.

  27 Storms became cunning, hiding beneath the waves to strike at ships from below, raindrops and lightning flying from the deep into the sky.

  28 Animals dare not wear green fur. They’d risk being accepted by the foliage, hearing its gentle voices, and learning the Forest King’s name.

  29 Hollywood knows that simple movies with bland names and formulaic writing still make money. It’s not their fault. They pay bills with cash, not art. If you want change, buy better entertainment. Burn a dollar to make the stars fight. Rent a theatre for deer to share their poetry.

  30 We finally figured out how to take our possessions with us into death. Scoffing at concerns that they would weigh down their souls, the dying rich surrounded themselves with as many different earthly treasures as possible, ignorant of what currency the next life would honour.

  31 The town built a seawall to keep big waves from breaking on its shores, but somehow it kept bad news from breaking as well. The little port began drifting toward a more hopeful reality. Before it disappeared, its people built a lighthouse, inviting others to escape with them.

  32 Snowmen recruit. It’s a subtle process, initiated by a mere glance of their hollow eyes. Those chosen can feel the love of the passing wind, the protection of trees, and kinship with comets. Few of us are chosen, because few are ready to join ranks against the invasion of summer.

  33 A true birthday candle is difficult to prepare. Tears of loss must be used to water the sable roses, so bees can make the appropriate wax. The wick must be made of string that has been used to tie an empty gift box. Countless wishes must fail before a single one can be granted.

  34 We didn’t know why we started climbing onto rooftops, but it worked. Most of the concerns of modern life got stuck inside the buildings and couldn’t reach us up above. We created a new life up there, one of sunsets, lawn chairs and coolers, while the fickle world rotted below.

  35 Not much lived on the island at the end of the world, its flora and fauna descended from those lucky enough to wash up on its shore as the ocean plunged into space. She built a lighthouse there to guide lost souls to safety, hoping one day to find a new friend on the beach.

  36 It was a night for beginnings. The new moon left the sky dark. She fell asleep next to a low campfire of burning amber, which popped and hissed each time the flames reached a new fragment of trapped history. When she awoke, her map had changed to match the new world around her.

  37 The world of dreams was perfectly logical. It was simply vast, a human empire spanning galaxies, with so many people and wonders that our brief visits always found something familiar. To them we were the ultimate mystery, reality-bending heroes from our own, smaller universe.

  38 The Federal Bureau of Symbols and Glyphs will not disclose how many letters follow ‘Z’. Words containing them are for official use only.

  39 ‘Forbidden numbers hide between the positive and the negative,’ she explained. ‘It’s why the difference between “none” and “one” is so big.’

  40 Well-adjusted adults were expected to care for cuddly toys from childhood. Houses were built with tiny ‘teddy-bear rooms’ for their comfort.

  41 Elves couldn’t pass for human, but once we started building androids, they saw an opportunity to come out of hiding. Their exact, placid movements were easily seen as robotic. They struggled to hide their joy when, at last, we accepted them. The robots, however, were not pleased.

  42 They kept the mad muse in a deep steel vault, a chain on her ankle. Desperate artists paid all they could to have her kiss their fingers.

  43 Nothing he read could match the wild words that burrowed into his mind before he could read, when written symbols could have meant anything.

  44 ‘This isn’t wind,’ he said, letting a bit of sand blow through his fingers and up toward the clouds. ‘Someone has torn a hole in the sky.’

  45 Livid, she let the door crash closed. ‘These bullets aren’t real mountain hearts. They’re just lousy meteorites. Let’s get our money back.’

  46 We were baffled when we found griffins living on an alien planet, unicorns on a forested moon, and dragons in the rings of a gas giant. Mythical creatures dotted the galaxy, their homeworlds forming a line that ended at Earth. Nervously, we followed that line back to its origin.

  47 It was a classic summer scene. A barrel of blue sky had fallen off the back of a truck, and the local kids came out to play in it. They balanced above the cloudless puddle, where they could finally forget about gravity. Soon it would be cleaned up and hauled off to the factories.

  48 The bonfire of pine cones symbolised the end of her youth. The Forest King’s hatchet dropped on both of her shoulders. A wood knight was born.

  49 The others only nursed their share of the void when they went stargazing. She drank it greedily, and was saturated with darkness and stars.

  50 ‘Forbidden dog breeds’ refers to those condemned as heresy by the Universal Kennel Club, the authority on canine, lupine and vulpine life. The night-schnauzer of Australia leaves its home every dusk through means unknown. It returns by morning, smelling of smoke and mischief. The Polynesian water dog is purely aquatic. It uses its three-foot tongue to snare fish, but has been known to beg for food from fishermen. The fatherhound of Ireland is immortal, serving families for generations. When one is slain, a lake bursts from the ground to claim its body. The hooded cult fox was bred in captivity before escaping into the Russian taiga. It instinctively finds and disrupts abominable summonings.

  51 She led him across ebony deserts, singing haunting songs. A mere figment of his dream, she had to be memorable to live again the next night.

  52 The only kind of life extension most people could afford was to move the hourglass of their lives to low-gravity planets so the sands would fall more slowly. Corporations took advantage of this, paying lower wages on smaller planets, claiming the metaphysical benefit as a ‘perk’.

  53 On a whim, she sent a letter to a land she’d imagined as a child. Countless thankful denizens replied, beg-ging her not to forget them again.

  54 He found the world’s edge. The mountainous teeth of a massive gear made up the circumference. So began his search for the interlocking cog.

  55 A different sun rose that morning, and we were different because of it. The yellow glow covered everything like dust. We knew we didn’t have to go to work or school, that tracking down the ice-cream man was more important. We were free beneath that old sun, the one from long ago.

  CHAPTER 8

  Nature

  1 The forest wanted to beg for mercy but knew precious little about us. Pine trees roared like chainsaws, hoping this was the language of man.

  2 He quietly tended his garden, shredding old atlases and maps to make mulch for his compass roses, north arrowroot, and here-be-snapdragons.

  3 Stargazer frogs live on mountaintops and in high-altitude deserts, where the skies are clearest. They subsist mainly on fireflies, but only out of necessity, since the living lights throw off the frogs’ observations of the heavens as they plan their eventual exile from the Earth.

  4 He hooked the wires up to the sparking neon seed. A Tesla tree would return fire against thunderstorms that hurl lightning at his orchard.

  5 The wind grew cold. The leaves turned red. The bark turned red. The soil turned red. The stars turned red. Something was wrong with October.

  6 Deer had philosophers as well, ancient beasts with antlers like forests, who thought deeply on the meaning of hunger and the need for wolves.

  7 ‘These were all index cards just last season,
’ he said proudly, admiring the row of almanacs. ‘They grow up strong on a diet of tree-meat.’

  8 The onyx poinsettia petrifies as it blooms, its jagged flint petals ideal for arrowheads. Scholars kept the plant hidden from hawkish kings.

  9 ‘Leaf’ is an archaic unit of paper, a linguistic throwback to days when the commodity was made from ivory-white leaves of the scribe lotus. It bloomed at night and studied the dark sky. Its nectar made a coveted midnight-black ink with distinctive flecks like stars. The plant’s woody stem even made a workable pen, in a pinch. The lotus is now extinct, destroyed by despots who feared a literate lower class.

  10 Zephyrean pines climbed fog banks, let go of the earth, and took root in clouds. Their pale needles absorbed the light of cities below.

  11 ‘It’s Țepeș Weed,’ he said, eyes narrowed. ‘It only grows to impale someone who’s been tied to the ground. A staple of dark horticulture.’

  12 He planted drops of fire in rows across the fields of sand. When autumn came, he gently gathered his fragile harvest of stained-glass wheat.

  13 Winter never came. After autumn, each new season was more glorious than the last. In February, golden clouds rained down scarlet lightning. By June, the black of space was visible throughout the day. The sun rose red, crossed the spectrum, and set violet. By October, plants lost their physical forms to become columns of twisting, luminous smoke. Their orange ember-seeds traced the wind’s path.

  14 Moths mistake light bulbs for the extinct copper-lily, which grew by concentrating grounded lightning. To this day, hummingbirds still run on sips of nectar taken before the last blossom shorted out.

  15 Deep-lilies pumped magma into the sea, forging new land to colonise. The planet conquered, they saw the moon, and began building mountains.

  16 Those aren’t butterflies in your stomach. They’re heart-moths, drawn to the light and heat of the flaring emotions in your chest. Sunsets are their natural habitat. Find someplace high up at twilight and sigh contentedly. They should fly off westward, chasing the glimmer of dusk.

  17 They said the mushrooms growing on sunless asteroids could cure our addiction to sleep. Each bite conveyed a millennium of silent darkness.

  18 After 5,000 years the twisted pine bore fruit. The indigo skin was streaked with white, tracing how the stars had moved over the centuries. As the fruit ripened, the pine poured the rest of its energy into the iron seeds, transmuting them to gold. At last the tree had value to us.

  19 Hunters sought wood nymphs in autumn, when they grew sluggish. Each one bagged brought a small fortune. There was no other source of vegan meat.

  20 Ashvine grows in dense forests, coiling around shafts of autumn sunlight. It holds them in place through winter, feeding on captive photons.

  21 ‘Growing gears is an art,’ he said over the quiet churning of his garden. ‘Unchecked, the plants will try to form a machine to fight back.’

  22 Moss usually grows on the north side of trees, but not always. North is usually where trees think you need to go, deeper into the dark and simple beauty of the tundra. Other trees point to a wilder path, hoping you’ll return and tell them about distant oceans they’ll never see.

  23 Pollen of the muse tulip stirred a wild urge to carve statues of stone. The flower grew in the rock dust left by the exhausted sculptor.

  24 Only engineered flora was useful enough to bring with us to deep space. The Midas orchid dug into alien worlds to make its gold-dust pollen.

  25 It wasn’t fog. Someone had pulled a thunderstorm from the sky and set it loose on the city. Bolts of lightning gathered in feral packs, sniffing at our power lines and electronics until they found a tree to attack, and pounced with a deafening clap.

  26 Unsatisfied as inconsequential flora, vainglory moss grows on idle daydreamers, sapping them until they achieve the fame of their fantasies.

  27 Summer wasn’t good enough for those at the top. They sipped juice from extinct fruits in frosty glasses. They basked in light from authentic Renaissance sunsets, captured long ago in mirror-boxes. They drained lakes after swimming, so they would be the last to ever enjoy them.

  28 The lumber-trap tree catches unwary animals in its roots and branches. It absorbs their memories to experience the world beyond the forest.

  29 Autumn had never really left. It receded. Even in summer, the clever could find patches of it, swamps of spiced fog around ever-dying trees.

  30 He found a way to monetise the clarity he felt in the forest. Light bulbs with pine resin filaments illuminated minds rather than objects.

  31 The dusk ash tree knew humans were the best way to spread pollen, so they bent the light around themselves to attract us. Saplings could make the sky look orange and red, giving the species its name. Mature trees went further, revealing the starry sky behind the daytime blue.

  32 Weeping truffle was among the rarest fungi. It mimicked the taste of foods you imagined as a child when reading books about faraway places.

  33 Ghost trees grew from clear-cut forests, mimicking the corporeal flora. One spectral twig in a campfire was enough to doom an unwary hiker.

  34 She grew apples in caves, gently spreading starlight on their leaves. The cider was the only way she could forget how much she missed space.

  35 Glaciers are usually created by Hibernian mint. Its natural defence is to reverse entropy, consuming its attackers in a mountain of ice.

  36 A delicate ballet of mirrors, lenses and shades maintained the great Autumn Houses, so she never had to go a day without scarlet treetops.

  37 Parking lots spread, merged, became their own biome. Diesel cheetahs, the apex predators, hunted asphalt hares grazing on cigarette butts.

  38 Plants began coating their seeds in shells hard enough to survive massive explosions and the vacuum of space. They knew something we didn’t.

  39 Gold leaf is so named because of its origin. It was once grown in the fabled Starving Orchard, where copper trees bore silver apples. In fall the leaves would turn to gold and be harvested for lavish decoration. Scrap was needed when the war began, so the orchard was clear-cut.

  40 Common flowers had no idea whether he loved her, or loved her not. She crossed snowy tundra to find the sympathorn, which knew his secrets.

  41 Their eerie song echoed in the clouds between peals of dry thunder from the approaching storm. ‘Sky whales,’ she said, reaching for her lasso.

  42 He kept a few venomous hummingbirds as incentive to lose weight. Human fat had more energy than sugar, but they wouldn’t kill a thin man.

  43 Blue wandersnakes made their nests among inland farms. One bite sent victims seeking the sea and wild shores, leaving the serpent in peace.

  44 The wild copperguide leads humans to abandoned houses. When they shut off the power and steal the wiring, it feasts on the leftover drywall.

  45 By popular vote, cold weather was cancelled. Lavender snow fell on green fields that winter, carried by hot winds. Our breath still hung in the air as sticky-sweet dew. Society had little tolerance for those who longed for the vanishing cold. Soon the old seasons were forgotten.

  46 The deer attacked whenever he left the cabin, but they brought him gifts and food as long as he stayed. He wondered what he was to them.

  47 The darkfisher lives in deep caves, and unlike other cave birds, will not emerge to feed. It survives on the pale fish that swim in subterranean lakes. Like the fish, the bird is eyeless. It finds its prey by calling out in the pitch dark and sensing the fear of the fish below.

  48 Night-bees, striped retroreflector yellow, pollinated the reflections of stars in still pools. Their bitter fruit floated to the surface.

  49 The season snake’s green scales turned gold in fall. They fell off by winter, leaving the beast skeletal until its mud flesh grew in spring.

  50 Clover Code

  Three-leaf: Deer food

  Four-leaf: Good luck

  Five-leaf: Extra coffee

  Six-leaf: You can see hidden stars

  Seven
-leaf: Double luck

  Eight-leaf: The Suffering

  Nine-leaf: Where are you getting these clovers?

  Ten-leaf: You can stop seeing hidden stars

  Eleven-leaf: Immune to telepathy

  Twelve-leaf: Revolution

  51 Time is kept moving by mice, who take turns winding the weights that drive the All-Clock. Cats, seeking eternal rest, hunt the timekeepers.

  52 By night, wooden spiders emerged to spin new needles for the pine trees. Unlucky birds caught in the sap were wrapped up into pine cones.

  53 There was a shadow ecosystem alongside our own, creatures made from knots of wind and wisps of smoke. The grazers swam through fog and fallen leaves, living on pollen and dust. Predators prowled close behind; dust devils we called them, eager to snatch their prey into the sky.