Blooms From the Ashes

It was the rare sighting of a poppy that caught Harper’s eye and held her transfixed for a moment.  The vibrant orange struck her as incongruous with all of the ashen browns and grays of her daily tableau.  At once, she had been transported to the trip she had taken, some ten years prior, in tow to her older sister and parents, down to see the Antelope Valley poppy preserve in full bloom during their spring break.  The sheer number of blossoms had been dizzying and left her utterly speechless in wonder, though she was known for being a quite precocious and verbal 10 yr old.  All of their family photos taken from that day were truly marvelous.  In fact, for weeks after the trip, she tried yet failed to create any kind of resemblance of that ultra-orange sea, inside her sketchbooks.  Finally, she gave up doing so, and was soon on to other endeavors, so that the once-burned image later escaped her.  Actually, it had been years since she dared thought of anything quite so delectable.  It immediately brought tears to her eyes, and so she just stood there, with a knot in her throat that she tried hard to swallow, feeling as though her knees might buckle under the weight of this memory upon her.

She did need to keep moving, since it was nearing sunset and she still hadn’t made it back to her shelter for the night.  This had indeed been a decent day of scavenging, having acquired a few essential tools from a nearly intact barn about five miles east of her camp, and a partial solar panel that might come in handy.  It was on that odd patch of unscorched earth where she saw the poppy blooming, at the rear corner of the building, and she wondered how it survived, since it had been too many months since the last rain fell.  The barn sat perched next to an almost entirely dried up creek bed, whose content would’ve been undrinkable anyway, from all the fallen soot and toxic ash choking it.  However, inside the barn, near that rear wall, was a 100 gallon drum with a small amount of what appeared to be usable water inside, and what appeared to be a pinhole leak that trailed toward the wall where the poppy had sprouted.  One mystery solved, Harper shrugged at the squandering of all that good water to bring the poppy to life, just so that she might lay her eyes upon that singular beauty.  She decided to take it as a gift and not to overthink it.  

What was left in the barrel was enough to fill up her canteens and she stashed those back in her pack.  She considered for a moment staying the night, because it would be a long way back, but she had no way of knowing what she would find when she returned to her campsite. She had lain a fish out in salt under a glass bowl, which she did not want to risk being stolen by any hungry souls who might find it, so she began the long trek back.  

On the way, she thought a lot about Jade, and her silly antics any time their parents had decided to get them out to look at the scenery.  Jade always had a way of making everything feel whimsical and more interesting, telling enchanted stories about trees they encountered, or having her pose in ridiculous ways to make the pictures more fun.  Harper had adored her sister more than anything in the world, and she wished now that she still had a picture of the two of them together, that just one image remained from the tens of thousands they took.  She wondered if she would ever find a way to retrieve them from the “Cloud”, or if the Cloud even existed at all anymore.  She assumed it did somewhere, on some satellite, floating many miles above her head.  Even if her old cell phone had totally stopped working, and even if the power grid had been shut down permanently, due to the massive failures and the endless months of fire, she knew the whole world couldn’t have lost touch with technology.  Although, when she was still able to be informed of such things, there were reports of massive fires on six continents, and that horrible storms and flooding had devastated a lot of other places.  It seemed as though the weather was trying actively to kill them all.  She figured that the wealthiest people had fled the doomed west, and took their Cloud with them, and that now they were living somewhere in their luxury bunkers.  She imagined them playing hers and everyone else's memories on endless repeat; the stock footage of the many lives and livelihoods that were lost, now functioning as entertainment for them, while they hid themselves away from the dying and burning world. 

 She knew too that there were refugee towns, where people from the burned out places had evacuated to.  Once gathered together, she figured they had devised some sort of power for everyone, perhaps started to rebuild something.  It seemed as though being with others might offer more food and safety.  She was curious about how people were getting on there and, a few times, she waited until dark, then went to check them out, saw them lit up from afar.  But from her vantage point, she heard too many horrible sounds wafting through the night, of gunshots and human wailing, and unknown suffering too, so that she was always too paralised from fear of the survivors to ever venture into the town itself, deciding it was safer to try to continue on her own for now.  

After everything, she thought it would be her and Jade in tandem making their way north, having wanted to find a boat left behind on the coast, or a vehicle that still ran, and that they would go far enough away to escape the torched and desolate landscapes and find a nice little village somewhere, in Canada or Alaska, to make a new home together.  They were alive after all, and there must be many others like them, they agreed.  It seemed to them that the “good” people would find ways to go on and make a community, and that life could come to resemble normal again.  

But then, of course, Jade had had that seizure... likely toxin induced, from all the fumes and smoke, and her fit had led her heart to stop.  Then that mischievous, hopeful light behind her eyes had gone out forever.  The ground there was so impenetrably parched that Harper had simply not been strong enough to dig up a proper hole for burial, so she left her sister under a pile of stones with her name carved onto a broken piece of fencepost.  She knew that she wouldn’t be back there again, but she wanted to commemorate her sister properly anyway.  They had never got the chance to do so with their parents, as after their failed evacuation attempt, there had been nothing left of them at all but the acrid ash upon the air and under their fingernails.  Now it was only Harper left, and her memories, and her fears.  She was heading carefully northward, alone, in the hope of finding a new normal.  

The thing was, Harper didn’t have the spirit her sister did.  She was seldom filled with joy or whimsy.  In fact, she was very prone to doubt and despair.  Often, as she lay trying to fall asleep, the dread would start to build and she would begin to question her very reason for perservering.  But each morning, she would wake from her fitful sleep and panicked dreams,  deep down still feeling a sense of relief.  Exhausted and terrified tho she may be, she was grateful to have awoken yet again.  Mostly though, she was just very, very lonely.  

The camp that she returned to now, she had built along the coast, out of some blackened metal sheets and tarp fragments that she scavenged.  The fish she caught some days before.  Since she had been lucky enough to find a box of salt in a partially charred old gas station, she decided to preserve it.  She looked forward to staring out at the vast ocean, with a mouth full of leathery salted fish, to change the taste in her mouth from the bitter ashy dust that  commandeered her senses.  It was with that thought in mind, that she came the last quarter mile with a slightly improved gait, wistful and propelled on by the pangs in her belly.  

She stopped short at the sight of something very odd however.  Appearing as if to await her arrival patiently, as though he were expecting her, was a disheveled medium sized golden dog.  He sat upright, alert to her presence, just at the edge of her structure, without being entirely under it, and he began to slowly wag his tail.  Though he didn’t make a move toward her, he seemed to be waiting for Harper to approach him, which she did with some real caution.  Her wariness of strangers extended to this dog too. 

“Hi guy…”, she said tentatively. “Where did you come from, eh?”  (And did you eat my dinner?, she thought, rather than said aloud.)  He continued to wag and cocked his head.  He had a playful and expectant look in his eyes.

Deliberately, she walked inside the little lean-to and unloaded her belongings, and checked the glass bowl that was left overturned, with her precious dinner below.  Strange, she thought, that this dog would come here, probably very hungry and alone, but wouldn’t touch her meal and rather waited diligently for her to return.  She thought she heard him growl, but soon realized that the grumbling was coming from his belly.  As he seemed to be at ease, she sat down next to him, and took note of the badly worn collar around his neck.  Gently, she reached toward him, speaking in sweet little murmurs of “ok now”, and “good boy”, until her hand was upon his fur.  Immediately, he leaned in towards her and began to lick her face.  The sweetness of this flooded her with a long lost joy.  She casually felt for a tag on his collar.  The tag was completely black with soot and dirt, but she rubbed it clean enough to make out the letters “pop..”.  She decided to stop there and to take this as another gift. 

“Ok Poppy”, she said brightly, “are you interested in a delicious salted fish?” 

He didn’t stop wagging his tail till long after his belly was full.  

They fell asleep intertwined, as she and Jade had done, in the back seat of their parents' sedan, on so many road trips, in another world.   

That night was the first one, since everything, that Harper slept soundly.  A smile teasing at her lips, and she nodded off with an unmistakable feeling of optimism that there might be something to hope for yet.