“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by Claudia Befu and Julie Gabrielli, and supported with advice from scientists Jonathan Tonkin and Rebecca Hooper. The story below was written for this project. You can find all the stories listed in this Top In Fiction Disruption, with thanks to publisher Erica Drayton.
This Will Happen Again
by Annie Hendrix
When death comes:
In the soft black pools of your eyes
I will see my reflection, spinning.
Where land meets the sea, there is life. Microbes, nematodes, and clams gather on the shallow coastal shelf. Salt water and light undulate. In the morning calm, I listen. Terrestrial animals often visit. Most are insects, many are birds, one is an animal like a gigantic hermit crab with a face like an axolotl.
The hermit whistles as he wades, waist-deep. “Good morning, love,” he says, and I remember that my name is love. A pipe and nozzle emerge from his shell and he inserts the tip into the glistening pool, through the loose warm sand, and into me. I can only see:
flow/ deep sea magma/ flowering/ smells like rain/ emitting the season’s wetness/ damp earth/ the plants are all drinking/ starlight
The hermit retracts his device and takes a piece of me into his shell. Inside, there are minerals arranged in unique patterns. Geometric luminescent pools. He places me in a basin of salt water. “That will do,” his voice is doubled and out of phase. I am both in the hermit’s enclosure and beneath low tide. Outside, birds claw clam from shell. Inside, the hermit eyes my multicolored layers.
I marvel at how his soft, pink body hasn’t yet been sucked clean from its armor. Does he ever leave his shell? Would he survive? Can he feel the raindrops on his eyes? Does he feel pain? Does he breathe? Does he photosynthesize like me? If I could speak I might say “Don’t be afraid to live, hermit, and don’t be afraid to die.”
A flock of gulls scatter. Against the mist, a constellation of equidistant lights hang in silence above the sea. Ultrasonic frequencies emitted by the aircraft vibrate saltwater and shell, tank and armor, and I am aware of how much of me is exposed on the coastal shelf. “There, there, love,” the hermit coos as we jog through the saltgrass to the line of ficus at the edge of the jungle. Light drenches the beach. Engines sputter. I hear only:
explosion of sound/ glowing red/ suffocation/ devours my eyes/ feel the calm/ shape of my own tapping heart/ breaking
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