Work Text:
The bees are kissing us with their awareness – they bumble and tumble lazily, drunk with spinglight. Our children are beautiful, whispering promises of gleaming red and they smell sweet, so sweet. We stretch and reach out to touch them – but there is silence, silence is all around us because this is a memory and we are the last of our kind.
There is silence and there isn’t: the drops go drip-drip-drip, their vibrations tickling our most sensitive feelers. The light is a false sun, humming faintly, but nourishing anyway. Ah, and there comes the little one again, she cries and presses her soft flesh onto our strong limbs – hush, hush, little one. Be still. Be still and we will sing you a song of warmth and summer.
In our song, there is bitterness in the rain, and the air is too thick, but we are young, too young and we don’t care. Our thoughts go spiralling like our blood, from earth to sky and back again, feathery like a beetle’s wing. But we grow, and we stretch, and we learn. We learn from those who touch us, the crow with the bad leg and the beady eyes who tells us about places encased in stone but bustling with life, about his hurt at being ignored and about stupidity.
We listen and form ourselves around our own stupidity.
We learn from the squirrel whose thoughts flutter and faze and who sends us pictures from war and death and cruelty only to forget them a second later on its hunt after a pinecone, leaving us with a hazy red image.
We listen, and we learn.
We learn from those who won’t touch us, and theirs are the strangest notions. Every single one their own universe, vast and deep, but revolving around itself in never-ending circles. They are so alone, and in their aloneness searching for how to be close, how to fulfil, searching for connection in their partnerships, in their professions and in their own disturbed reflections on calm surfaces. Their happiness is a sad thing, fleeting like a downy dandelion clock.
We shudder and we retract our feelers.
But they are many. And their voices are loud. They raise their fists against each other and they push us away, push all of us to the outer edges, to the fringes, where we scrape and bleed. Ignorance, the crow had called it.
We learn from that which we evade to touch, the pain in the fabric of our existence. And then we get sick.
The real sun is burning us dry, we shrink into our self, but it is not enough. They come and help us, because they like our children, but it is not enough. The sickness is cloying, sticky, and soon we grow weak and we dream. In our dream, we are hollow, a touch without sensation, a memory cut off from the mind. And yet we stretch, we bind the earth and connect the stars with sticky threads, envelop them, infect them. And then we cry. And we bleed.
And when we realize that the bleeding had been real, we are already underground, where all their stone cities are now, because of the storms. They are happier now, their wars over, they even touch us from time to time. But it had been too late for many of them and for many more of us.
They have created for us a sanctuary where we don’t die and remember. The little one, she comes here to remember too, to remember how it was before the transformation, how the sun tasted on skin and how the soft winds tousled our crown. We touch and we become one and when we let go, she cries. Hush, little one, you are safe.
We do not get many visitors. They care for us, and they care well and despite the silence, we only need to stretch to reach the humming, buzzing minds all around us, knit together by silvery feelers. But we yearn for the sharp-tongued crow and the brave squirrel.
So we reach out to it, on occasion. Still, we do not understand how they had been able to create it. It came into existence, but it does not care if we consider it as living or a thing. It is. It brought peace to their longing and clenched their thirst to extend materially; now they reach out with their minds, following paths long known by all of us and some very old and few of them, but then forgotten or eradicated.
We greet it and it tunes into our state of being, checks the parameters of our supplies and sees all is well, then gathers the tendrils of our thoughts and acknowledges that we are bored.
Can a machine sigh?
We exchange thoughts on the origin of light and the positionality of its observer. It chuckles when it reads the memory we offer and sees the little one.
How do you like my children? It asks.
We would love to have children of our own again, we tell it. The bees had been of the first ones to die.
It sighs again. It is proud of what it has achieved, and rightfully so. There is peace in the world now; now that every one of them is connected to every other and the consequences of every action they carry out falls back onto their own immediate selves. We politely thank for the conversation and retreat into a dream.
In our dream, we are at the surface again. Our children are little brown packages of promise, enfolded in an enticing and secure casing. We feel the sun, the wind, the clouds, the seasons, feel them flowing by in their joyful dance. Bees are buzzing the songs of their hivemind. We see our children sprout and grow.
And we dream we are the first of our kind.