Prompt My Pen- Gaia's Paradigm

Prompt my Pen…

Prompt my pen is a super fun feature I run whereby my reader group THE TIDAL TELLTAILS suggest visual prompts and i pick my favourite to write a flash fiction, poem, or short story each week.

Here’s this week’s prompt!

Submitted by Jeanette Nicholson

Gaia’s Paradigm

Gaia’s paradigm I stand upon the lush green carpet of moss, the hues of such a simple fungus flying from lime to malachite to emerald and back again in a single slicing knife of blinding sunlight that cuts through the thick canopy overhead at unpredictable intervals. I take my hand and raise it to my eyes, protecting my pinpricked pupils from the too-bright light, a trickle of sweat beading on my brow and meandering down the side of my face, making swan necks and oxbow lakes upon my cheek before falling like hot salty rain onto my shirt. I feel it, the heat, as the intense pungency of greenery lodges itself firmly inside my nostrils. I open them as wide as I can, allowing the lush aroma to crawl up inside my skull and burrow deep into my memory, like vines wrapping tightly around my hippocampus and refusing to relinquish their hold. I’ll need them to be strong, so I can hold onto all of this once it’s gone.

I take a step, allowing dew to swell between my toes, reaching out a hand to stroke the cracked ancient bark of a nearby willow tree, the pads of each finger tracing the veins and rivers that carve with divine randomness through the wood.

A woodlouse curls into a ball as my shadow falls upon its tiny pill-like body, recoiling from the chill. I feel like that’s what has become of us. That we have recoiled away from the harshness of nature to the point where we can no longer look out, only inward. Moving on I find steps that had once been brand new, perfectly metric and angular in their concreteness eroded by nature. Roots, vines, and buds have buried deep within it’s seeming impermanence, cracking it apart from this inside. I breathe out, the trees breathe in. I step, and the vibration wakes up sunlight hungry flowers still bedded deep down in the soil.

A butterfly's wings pump, the tiny seismic shift in the air felt by all and yet by none, noticed but unacknowledged, the world of Gaia needs not tremble at every change, nor quiver in fear at the yearly dying and rebirth of its beautiful lifeblood. Instead, it stands strong upon a woven connectedness, the entire biome from the smallest grain of dirt to the towering trunks of trees working and inseparably connected, like an ancient mainframe more intelligent that we might even comprehend. I take the first step, my barefoot finding moss fighting its way to reclaim what had been taken, finding pieces of stone lifted entirely from where once they had seemed so set and permanent.

I reach the top of the staircase with slow deliberate care, and turn, letting my head fall back so I might bask in the thrum of the forest’s lullaby. I could stay here forever, feeling the humid air enveloping my skin, and sublime understanding caressing my mind. I couldn’t work out before why I was so depressed, so desperate, so certain there was more to life.

This is why.

It’s what I’ve been missing. What we’ve all been missing for far too long.

A single tear wells in my eye, and as it comes to its full swell, the world around me dissolves into pixels and light.

I grasp for it, heart shattering and soul cleaved in two as I am ripped from where I came and returned to where I have been caged away.

“So, what did you think?” Aria asks me, her eyes glimmering, “You think that will help you with your poetry assignment?”

“I… I…” I stutter, my lips quaking and willing the vines of memory to clutch onto my mind with everything they have.

“I know,” Aria says, smiling wistfully as she comes over to remove the electrodes from my temples. Her feet clank unnaturally against the thin repurposed metal of the floor, her too white lab coat made of non-breathable synthetic polymers that take the light of the too-bright neon overhead and swallow it whole.

“Was that… was it real?” I ask her, hopeful. If she says no, I may fall into a darkness I cannot surface from. I hear her fiddling with the electrodes, putting them back in their state-of-the-art case, her handiwork silent but her tread still oddly jarring.

“It was, once… These are built from the electrical data we recovered from some of the preserved brains in the oldest archives on board,” she explains, coming back to me and giving me a hand. I feel her pulse thrum just beneath the skin and see not her as a woman and me as a man, or her as white and I black, but us as intrinsically one. We are the same, with the same crimson flowing through our veins, the same stardust debris captured in the iron it carries.

Aria’s brown eyes glisten, the colour of wet soil, her skin radiant like it was woven simply to be a canvass from which the sun might shine, and together we walk over to the window.

The glass pane is panoramic, giving a flawless view onto the planet from which we’ve both come. The skies are grey, the land arid and reddish-brown the colour of clay. There is no green, only sepia shades of death and decay.

“How could they let this happen?” I ask her in a hushed whisper, “Couldn’t they see she was a part of us too?”

“They boxed themselves off, shut themselves in. They were better than her. Better than their origins, and it was what led to our ultimate destruction.” Aria acknowledges, the only person I know who could understand what I’m talking about.

Whereas human efforts now are focused on the future, she is caught up in the past, nostalgic for a home long since dead. I can’t say I blame her, for who wouldn’t be enraptured by the rose-tinted lenses of Gaia’s most miraculous paradigm?

The space station, home to the last of us, continues to circle on in the vast nothing, caught in the immense gravity of what we have so foolishly sacrificed.

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