All it takes is a moment. One moment where a body reaches out to another and meets. They reach and reach, and finally pull to one another, and—bam.
Shay followed the pull and slipped between the morning and the evening, in a space where time holds its breath and all possibilities collide.
Stepped right out of another time, quick as a gasp.
He stumbles out of the river and onto the shore. I can taste his thoughts as he sits nearby: maybe he is dreaming, or has amnesia and is waking up in another place. All of them, untruths. Sputtering, wet with tears and silty water, he shakes his many bright layers dry and stares at the rolling hills washed in morning light, wondering where the skyscrapers went. I want so much to reach out and explain everything, about the thousand years of change, about how he found his way through time, but I am as invisible as air to him.
The curve and dip of my distant mountains tell him the truth as well as I could, though. The key-edge ridges lay in exactly the place they did when he stared outside his 17th-story window. The ridges hold the exact same trees, the peaks circle with the exact same mist, the birds flock to the exact same spots. His breath catches in his throat. Some truth settles, stirs his heart. I feel it beating.
This sweet creature is at once so home and so lost.
Shay calls out. Only loud enough that the birds nearby and mycelium underfoot can hear him. A deep, breathy croak that melts into my soundscape. His fast heartbeat, his quiet voice, his awe belongs here, now.
He looks closer, at the two suns hanging overhead, at my purple hills covered in foamy blades of moss. Crushes a few blades between his fingers. Trembles.
He brushes off his hand and traces the end of a curl between two fingers. The other hand grasps a small wooden box filled with ashes to his chest. His eyes dart back and forth, trying so hard to process. When his eye follows my familiar ridges, the same ones he’d lived his childhood in, his mind reaches a conclusion before his body. He couldn’t be anywhere else.
A thousand towns from these bipeds have risen and fallen in my time, but this Amarton stayed around longer than most. I remember the way they strained up and up, tall small-rock and shiny-sand buildings that tried to reach my dearlove the Sun.
A band on his wrist blinks a bright light. A date beams up at him. When he looks, he squints, then his eyebrows raise. It clicks. The understanding reaches him. With some, knowing needs to filter down and be absorbed, like nutrients to a moss. If it didn’t, it would wear at them until they withered. Little husks carried away on my dearlove the Wind.
Shay’s memories flood me, a whip-crash: Mother’s dry hands peeling like birch bark, the croak of her coughing up pieces of herself, the weary smile that only left when her body was cold. Sorrow, in great waves.
I wish I could reach him in a way he’d understand. To tell him that she is still alive, and yet long dead. And neither matters, not really. What matters is the flood-memories which stitch the now-and-then together across time’s divide.
Instead, my grass gathers soft under his hands and my riverbed beckons release. And like all bipeds, he sees differently. He stares up and away into a not-here place. He does not see me reaching.
Instead, he rises in a fit of terror. He shuffles his feet back and forth, beating down my soft grass, and runs at Sky. The splash of my river does not bother him. Fear creates a tether from Shay to another time. My future self and the outstretched hand reach and reach towards one another, finally pull to one another.
Shay slips between the morning and evening, and finds solid ground deep in the future.
A red sky swirls with flame from twin suns. Underfoot, all ash. Rows of crumbled adobe buildings smatter my hills, fill up my dry river. Overhead, a sign blinks neon green in knots of script Shay can’t read. It looks eerily like his grandmother’s sleepy handwriting. When Shay squints, the sign looks like it says “sheereen.” It is exactly where he knows the hospital should be.
He stands there, staring out at the charred world. The rows and rows of ruined buildings. The swirls of smoke ash carried high on Wind to glitter in Sun. After a long while he brings the small box to his forehead and lets out a ragged sigh that turns into sobs. Tears stream and make a grey mud at his feet. The slop of the mud does not tell him if this is real or a coma or—
He gasps, head shooting up. His dark eyes light up, a vague hope made big.
The box finds a home in the pocket of his loose pants. He shakes out his hands and begins bouncing from one foot to the other.
First, he strikes. When the pain doesn’t rocket him from the charred town, they pinch the tender flesh of his elbow-crook until he screams. When that doesn’t work, he runs up to the nearest building and climbs over the rubble, looking for clues. He finds ash, piles of twisted metal, and the tender buds of kudzu vine peeking through it all. Dark green sprigs well nourished by those who came before. The beginnings of the next phase.
He remembers gathering kudzu flowers and leaves in big cloth totes. He made a game of picking the most with his sister as Mother snickered and watched for snakes. After the long hike out, they found a large, flat rock on a high place and eat peanut-butter-nana sandwiches. Mai, a few years younger than him, managed to spread the peanut butter everywhere. Mother joked that every darn thing on that mountainside was waiting for them to leave so they could feast on the peanut butter and breadcrumbs. Mai stuck out her tongue and launched down the path, cackling. It was a long trek back to the car, and a long next Sunday washing piles of flowers and leaves to make jelly. An afternoon filled with sticky kisses and sun tea.
In the middle of the ashes of a house they’d never shared, a half a million years away from those afternoons, Shay begins to gasp. His breath catches in his throat and his heartbeat fills his ears. The realization hits harder than any funeral. Shay is suspended in the amber of that realization, body weightless, though what he carries makes him buckle. I’ve seen bipeds steer any number of directions from here—mania, gratitude, release.
Instead, he sinks into anger. He takes the flat of his fists and hits the wall again, again, again. Though it’s charred through and through, it must hurt. His skin rips but that doesn’t stop him. He screams and strikes until the wall begins to crumble in its own sad cloud.
Anger creates a tether from Shay to another time. The future reaches far, far back, and the past reaches far, far forward, until they meet.
At once, the world smells familiar—a tang of machinery and waves of asphalt. Buildings reach up and up to Sky where they gather sunlight but do not drink it. Concrete stitches it all together. He knows this version of me, all ornamented in bipeds’ jewels. It’s so heavy on me that it’s hard to breathe. He sighs deep, before someone across the road makes him gasp.
Mother, every cell in him cries, every neuron rings out. Shay can pick out her purple wool peacoat, plume of black curls, and rosey-musk perfume a mile away. I wish he could see his love as I can, greater than time.
Now, she is not half a million years away. She is just across the street, entering the hospital at—
Shay looks down at his watch because he knows what the curls piled up on her head mean. December 2019. It must have been her first chemo treatment, months before she lost her toes to gangrene. Shay does not feel himself run into traffic, but he finds himself breathing heavy on the other side of the street anyway, entering the building anyway, yelling out anyway:
“Stop, wait!”
Two others in the marble lobby stare at Shay, concerned. His Mother turns into the elevator. A ding echoes, whisking his Mother away. Shay knows the story from there.
Something gathers in him. Even from under feet and asphalt, I can tell every muscle tenses. He wants to run, or scream, or strike. It balls in him, but when he clenches his fists the edges of the box cut into his hand. A memory burbles: Mother smacks his hand when he goes to run after a snake and she immediately apologies—and brings a little smile to his face. It is like she reaches out with her rosey-musk to keep him safe, even now.
His body stills. The bipeds’ curiosity fades and they turn back to their lives. The busy world becomes a hum in the background. Stillness creates a tether from Shay to another time. The future and the past reach and reach towards one another, finally pull to one another.
Shay slips between the morning and evening, and finds solid ground at my water’s edge in the middle of my poppy-bloom. Before he can buckle, he lets his feet take him to a place where Wind has settled and Sun is bright.
He spreads the ashes on my next hill and weeps. When he is emptied and I have given all his tears to the worms, he sits a long time at the edge of my river. When Wind scrapes against him, cold and in a rush to spread pollen, he leans into the feeling and closes his eyes. In his mind’s eye, he flies so far above that I am a blur. He wonders what life is going to be for him now that he is alone, truly alone.
Hearing that hurts. It is a sorrowful thought. And untrue. I am here—as well as so many others.
After all of it is gone, even little communities of bipeds with their sun-drinking houses dotting the distant hills, they still exist in their place in time. And even in this moment in time, with the field of blooming poppies and still river, their flurry of life isn’t gone. They remain, through me. Through the echo of microbes their decay left. If only he listened, Shay would hear the same symphony I do.
After long hours staring at nothing beside his Mother, Shay’s expression finally softens. His shoulders drop. A chorus of crickets moves him to stand after so many hours spent still. In less than a minute, he stands at my river’s edge. He watches soot swirl, the foam gather on rocks, the lizards sun themselves. He takes off his shoes and clothes. A pile of leather and bright linen waits at the water’s edge as he wades out.
He releases himself to the tide and the world slows. Water pushes and pulls across his body. Soon his breath matches the ebb and flow. He lets himself be carried. Lets all of the weight of himself go. From the middle of the river, he can’t see the water’s edge. It seems like the murky water reaches on and on, reflecting Sky forever. There could be no other biped alive in the world.
He listens to the pitter-splash of lizards jumping into water, the whistle of Wind through high grass, the chatter of my current. And then beneath them all, the echo of something familiar. Finally heard. With hearing me, his sorrow slips away.
Cold release burbles up in him. The riverbed rises to meet him. And with that, time dissolves into a slip of twilight sky.
I reach out, not so far this time, to meet him. In a shaky breath, Shay is where he belongs.
Time unfolds itself, a strand shimmering in the place where the morning and evening meet. There, all possibilities collide. The star-spotted night and the rosey-musk dawn roll on forever, connected by the key-shaped strand—from my first mountain peak crashing into existence to Shay’s fleshbody murmuring with the whispers of fungi alongside his Mother. A thousand civilizations rise and fall, only blips between long stretches of other animals’ chatter-cries. Shared memory pools in my ridges. Life goes on and on, forever.
We drift along the river of time, together infinite.
| Jess Lewis is a trans non-binary and pansexual writer, designer, and organizer who hails from the hollers of Western North Carolina. They currently live in the deep South, where they explore futures of liberation and how to get there. When they’re not imagining weird queer cli-fi utopias, designing future tech, or facilitating capacity-building workshops, they’re organizing programming with their local queer community and The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird. Their work has appeared in a range of publications, including Solarpunk Magazine and HyphenPunk. You can visit their website at www.quarefutures.com and follow them on Instagram @quarefutures. |  |