I Know the End Draws Near

CW: death, mental illness, climate disaster

Every night I lay awake thinking about new disasters in a faraway land - heatwaves, cold snaps, floods, droughts, wars, plagues, famine, death, wildfires - and every day my chest tightens and my breath shortens as I wait for the disasters to reach me. I can’t explain that last part. I really can’t, but I know deep in the pit of my stomach that something in the world has shifted and will break. I don’t know when it will happen but I can’t help but feel it will be far sooner than I can anticipate. How do you plan for something like that? How can I live with this? I don’t know. 

Granny Smith tells me it’s just my nerves, just like she tells Mama. Reddy and Goldy tell me I’m too soft. That I bruise too easily. Doc McIntosh simply tells me that I need to lose weight and exercise more, when he’s not hiding from me and his patients at his secret fishing spot, I mean. Maybe they’re all right. Maybe they’re all wrong. It doesn’t make any difference to me, though. It’s not like knowing that I’m anxious or sensitive or fat lulls me gently to sleep or wards the fear away. All it does is make me feel like a bad apple that’s spoiling the bunch.

Not to say that Granny Smith or the twins or Doc or any of the folks of Orchard Grove treat me poorly. They’re all real nice to Mama as well. That’s because, in Orchard Grove, we all look out for each other because we’re all we have. We all pitch in to make our mushy elders comfortable until they transition to seeds and to keep the ancestor trees healthy as they provide us with shade and sustenance, as well as more little ‘uns. Some of us, like me and Mama, are not as big a help given our spells, but I try to pitch in however I can. 

Most days I can’t help at all because I feel like I’m suffocating and on those days I hang out with Busy. I sit in the shade of the trees that haven’t gotten the message that it’s getting pretty late into autumn. I close my eyes to focus on the cool breeze that cuts through the unseasonal heat as I pet Busy’s yellow and black fur as she sleeps, careful not to brush off the pollen clung to her butt like golden pixie dust. Busy likes to lay her head on my lap as I give her scritches on the black fluff between her antennae. We call her Busy mostly as a joke, but she admittedly gets more done than I do even on her most lazy days where her wings don’t buzz for more than ten minutes tops. I try not to think of how her tiny cousins have poofed into thin air all over the faraway world that’s so very far yet still too close from here.

Other days, after I get some help in at the daycare or the schoolhouse, I go and play by the creek with Bailey and Jonathan so the vastness of our combined fantasy of sail boats and mermaids scares the smaller, sadder thoughts out of my head. The fantasy shrinks every day, though, as I bring freak hurricanes and stealth bombers into our flights of fancy. The boats are blown to pieces by torpedoes and the marooned sailors become refugees cut off from their homelands. I made Bailey cry the other day when the mermaids choked to death on oil from a burst pipeline. Granny Smith laughed and said I reminded her of my mama and her “overactive imagination”.

“Opal, girl, you need to put those thoughts to bed. Ain’t no navies or pipelines in Orchard Grove.” Granny Smith’s smile was warm and her skin reminded me of emerald fields glistening in the midafternoon sun. “So quit worrying so much. You and your mama always make up reasons to worry.”

Words. Nothing words that left me guilt-ridden rather than comforted. The more folks compared me to Mama, the less I would share. Except there is so much to share that one stopped leak in my head will just give way to another. I try to talk around it as much as I can, but my mama is what less accepting bushels would call a “village idiot”. She’s neither ignorant nor slow, she just said things that made no sense to folks and they would rather laugh it off than listen. I never laughed.

On the nights where my thoughts are so intense - usually the nights where I see nothing but fire as smoke burns my nostrils - I get out of bed and wander Forebearwood just along the rim of the village. I listen out over the rustling fall leaves for any crying babes who need to be picked before they’re yanked from their bough to the hard ground below by that crooked Old Man Gravity. There are fewer piles of colorful leaves to cushion the poor littles’ falls nowadays. My neighbor Jonagold says that the ancestors’ confusion is nothing to lose sleep over, not that I sleep anyway. What Jonagold wouldn’t notice, or at least wouldn’t mention, is that there were fewer newborns ripening this year than ever before. Maybe the disasters had reached me. This thought shook me to my core so strongly I almost fainted right there in front of Jonagold.

On a dark, windy night, I go out after my thoughts bring images of death and war. Of the assassination of a leader of a land far away planned by folks even further away so they and their friends can abuse the land and the folks on it. Those same folks then watch the leader’s folks, desperate to escape their war-torn land, sink into the sea and they refuse to save even the children. Even the babes. 

I go out and I see my mama as I walk the dirt path to Forebearwood. She faces away from me, standing motionless in the dark and staring at the forest as her butt-length brown hair blows in the wind. I can just make out the vibrant reds and yellows of the mottled skin of her neck in the darkness, glimpsed through winding thatches of tangled hair. I walk up beside her and she doesn’t react. I grab her hand and rub the back of it with my thumb, squeezing every now and then to get a response. We stand hand-in-hand for what seems like hours. I close my eyes and listen for wailing as the wind attempts to drown out all sound. I don’t hear even the faintest cry.

“Rotting,” Mama says. I nearly jump out of my skin. I still hold her hand tight.

“I see them all rotting,” she continues. “Bloating out and bursting with maggots. Every one of them.”

“The trees?” I ask. A sudden thought hits me so I ask it differently, almost whispering: “The babes?”

Mama looks down at me and gives me a look like I’m an alien she can’t make sense of. 

“No no. Look harder. To the faraway lands,” she says. I shiver. She sees them, too? 

“Those lands are rotting. They rot from inside out and from outside in and the folks out there suffer as the flies and their maggots feast on the putrid flesh of their land. Oceans boil. Skies blight. Orchards burn. Folks starve. They are starved. Can you imagine starvation, Opal? I can’t. We have everything we could ever need thanks to the ancestors. Whatever starvation is, it looks painful. It’s not fair to them folks. It’s not fair to anyone.”

I try to take in her words, but she squeezes my hand so tight my fingers feel like they’re gonna snap like twigs. 

“Mama, you’re hurting me.”

“Where will we be when it all reaches Orchard Grove? Has it already reached us? I think about the heat and the trees and the bees and the babes a lot.”

“I think about them a lot, too,” I say. I think back to my conversation with Jonagold and I almost feel like puking again. “What do we do?”

“It’s a beautiful night, Opal,” she says, like she didn’t hear my question. “Look at the moon!” She points in the general direction of where the moon should be. I squint hard, but can’t see nothin’ through the trees. I don’t doubt the moon’s there, though. 

“It’s the same world. The faraway folks and their lands. The bushel and Orchard Grove. It’s the exact same one. I don’t think them folks are so far away neither. We’re practically kin. None of us fall far from the tree. There’s beauty in that, I think. We’re all in it together.”

I notice Mama’s whole body relax like whatever she’s holding in was now all out in the air at the mercy of the wind. The air between us even feels crisper than before. Her grip softens. I look up at her face and I think I see a faint smile.

“I think I hear crying,” she says. (I hear nothing.) “I’ll be right back. Gonna go pick some ripe ‘uns ‘fore they fall and get hurt. They shouldn’t feel hurt. Not that early. I picked you ‘fore you fell and I feel good about that and I hope you do, too. I’m sorry I did it, though. I think you’re sick with what I’m sick with, baby, and that won’t do you any favors as the faraway world draws near.”

My eyes well up as I struggle not to cry. “Don’t say that, Mama.”

She becomes silent for a time and then lets go of my hand, gently stroking it with her thumb as she releases it from her grip.

“I definitely hear crying,” she said. “I’m gonna go check it out.”

“I can come with you, Mama,” I pleaded. Tears stream down my cheeks. There’s a sense of something coming to an end, but I’m not sure what.

“That’s alright, baby.” She turns to me, stoops down, and kisses my forehead. “I’ll see you soon.”

Mama then struts off into the darkness of Forebearwood. Her hair and dress blow in the wind. The dark makes her look small somehow. Her path is straight and true, though. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing. Strength and weakness were two sides of the same coin for my mama. She was strong in her weakest moments and weak in her strongest. This is Granny Smith talking in my head now, not me. For me, Mama was the strongest person I know, especially now that I know she’s gone through what I’ve gone through for as long as she has. Dread folds over me like a blanket and it quiets the roar of the distant fires that usually keep me awake, so I sleep that night.

The next day is the Equinox Festival. I awake to Fuji hocking his candy and hand-crafted toys. The other kids and I run out to greet him. He gives us all honey candy, but he runs out quickly because the worker bees in one of his hives up and disappeared last winter. Fuji says the bees are having more trouble foraging and that’s taken its toll. As he talks, I think of Busy’s tiny faraway cousins and pesticidal fumes fill my breath so I leave before he even gives me a toy. I think he shouts something after me but I can’t hear him over the hiss of chemical sprayers.

I sit in the shade behind a house. As my lungs struggle to find the clean air of the village only to find smog, which is at least more familiar than the poison, I hear Paula Red calling for help. Later, from what I gather from the adults’ chatter, I learn that Paula Red went picking this morning and heard a babe crying. She found the babe swaddled in Mama’s rust-red headscarf. When she didn’t find my mama near the babe or back at the village, she took Braeburn and Shizuka to the far side of the forest to look for her. Mama was found sprawled at the bottom of the ravine on the far edge of Forebearwood as Old Man Gravity must’ve dragged her there. Paula Red ran back while Shizuka and Braeburn stayed behind to go down and get her body.

All my thoughts stop and the world goes quiet as my senses go dark. Even the smell of burning dinosaur slurry leaves my nostrils. Orchard Grove is getting so small nowadays that when one in the bushel dies, it feels like the whole bushel is dying with it. With Mama dead, all of us might as well be, too.

The bushel chief, Rome, holds a service later that afternoon. Everyone in the village is there. Even Doc, who was called back to check if Mama was really gone. They tell me and the other kids it was an accident. I believe them because it was so dark and windy. No reason to believe otherwise, really. Too much to think on as is.

“The bushel is getting so small nowadays. When one of us dies, it feels like all of us died with them.” Damn, I thought I came up with that. It’s been a while since the last funeral. “We all knew Ambrosia. We all loved her for all her quirks. We’ll all miss her dearly. Doc and I will make sure her seeds are planted in Forebearwood….”

As he keeps on, I ask myself if Mama would want her seeds planted. I’m not sure I’d want mine to be. What if my littles think these thoughts? I don’t want them thinking of the droning flies who would raze the forest and even the whole village if it meant more rot for their needless feasting. I’m lost in my head when I notice Rome is staring at me. In fact, the whole bushel is.

“Huh?” I ask.

“That’s alright, Opal, I know you’re feeling a lot right now,” says Rome sheepishly, like he rudely woke me up from a nap. “I just asked if you’d like to say something on your mama, is all.”

“Ok,” I say, but I have no idea what to say because… what is there to say?

 I walk in front of the others anyway. I try to make myself as small as possible. As small as one of my toy boats. But when I get to the front and look at all the others, my mouth starts going before my brain has time to check the words for blemishes:

“Not much to say on Mama. I loved her more than anything and I don’t know if I accept she’s gone… but she would want y’all to hear what I have to say. Mama and I got something. Dunno if it was given to us as a gift or put on us like a curse, but we see things you can’t. Smell things you can’t. Hear things you can’t. Know things you can’t. Mama didn’t know how to get y’all up to speed - she may have given up before she even picked me from a branch - but she knew how to get to me. And I think she knew I could get y’all to listen. 

“Things are happening far away, but not far enough. It may already be here, given the heat. We don’t have any control over what’s going on, but we got each other. Our bushel’s smaller than ever before and that means we gotta work twice as hard to care for each other and the ancestors and the little ‘uns. I don’t know how. I’ve thought so much on the future that I never thought on what’s here now. We’re here now. We gotta be adaptable. We gotta give folks even more grace than we gave my mama. Because I think my mama and I are only the first. The littles we pick will just get softer and more bruised over the years. But that don’t mean they’re getting rotten. I’ve seen rotten. It just means we gotta be gentle. Real gentle. I don’t know what I’m saying now. I’m scared and I hope you see that my fear is real because it is. And what I fear gets more real every day as the seasons get more screwy and the bees disappear. I hope you see that….”

I trail off as my mouth runs out of things to say. There’s a silence– a great wall of it between me and the bushel. I look out into the crowd. I can’t get a read on most folks as they look at me like I’m an orange. I imagine them taking this in for just the funeral, but then going right back to ignoring me like before. The mushier folks like Jonagold, Rome, and Granny Smith, however, look me over, trying to polish me in their minds until they can see my shine. The young ‘uns, too, are giving me a second bite as they absorb my words. I helped Ginger Gold give them lessons at the schoolhouse, so maybe they see this as another lesson. Maybe some of them even know more than I think they know. I was wrong about Mama, after all. 

Little Cameo, whose little red face stood out more than the rest, raises her hand high, standing on her tippy toes. She must’ve been doing it for a while.

“Yes, Cammy?” I say.

“Y’all smell smoke?” she asks. 

I take a deep breath through my nose, mostly to stifle oncoming tears. I smell nothing.

“I do,” says Granny Smith, to my surprise. A few others nod as well.

We all turn our heads and look up, down, and all around. None of us see anything, but all I can think of is what we would even do if there was.