Written with my Thursday night group with the prompts: face, United States, queen, xerox, tundra, nectarine, hail, cat, vermin, isolation
Jenna stretches out in a small patch of sunlight between her trailer and the snow plow. It’s her first summer on the tundra and she’s still getting used to the 3 AM daylight. Her poor tabby cat is restless too, still loyally tracking the vermin that have emerged just about everywhere after the deep frost has melted into mud in April. Now that the solstice is less than a week away, it’s much better. Dandelions are sprouting and strawberries are turning pinkish in the raised gardens Jenna has fashioned out of oil drums. She bites into a nectarine Bob has brought in on the last flight from Fairbanks. Mmmm—juicy! It drips down her wrist. She licks her fingers.
Life in these United States has devolved into a spitting contest between guys in red hats with guns and tech bros lobbing fire crackers out of the back of Tesla trucks. Jenna feels safer up here, though she isn’t sleeping well. First it was dark all the time, and now it’s constant light. So disorienting. The weather is wonky too. A pretty spring day might suddenly be inundated with hail the size of melon balls—the kind her mother used to scoop from the honey dews for Sunday brunch and late afternoon tea dances. Tea dances. Jeez. Is anybody anywhere dancing to jazz quartets anymore? Her parents idea of civilization has always struck her as sedate; how funny that she often thinks back on it all with such nostalgic longing.
The horizon spreads above her like a dark line. There might be forty minutes of night soon. She grits her teeth and stares at her paperback copy of the Mists of Avalon. She’s itching to check the time, but she wants to distract herself. Bob will get here when he gets here. Introvert that she is, she likes the isolation, she really does, but sometimes company is nice. Another voice in her ear, another face, another pair of hands and legs. Turns out she likes Bob more than she thought she would, and that’s a blessing. Oh, she has no interest in re-populating the Earth. Bob sometimes speaks of AI as if they might procreate something made of cellophane and paperclips, a xerox copy of each of them—two robots to care for them in their old age. Jenna is very sure this is a bad idea, but she likes the way Bob laughs when he talks about it.
She picks up her novel again. To Jenna, this book might be the blueprint: a matriarchy, a colony of queens. But certainly it’s too late even for that. The care of the planet will fall to some other species now. Dolphins perhaps. Crows. Or Bees. Yes, let’s leave it to the Bees.
Photo by Marc Eggert on Unsplash
