Year of the Soil

Spring.

My son rushed off the solar tractor and into the shoulder-high brown grass. He stumbled over a tussock but kept running until his head was just a blond tassel. He waved. “I feel it, Mom! Just like they said we would! These are our fields.”

I shut down the tractor, then cupped my hand over each tiny light indicating the solar panels were charging. The green glow played across my palm.

The crisp grasses, a seed head capping the top, swayed in the scorching wind. I took a deep breath, tasting nothing good to eat: bitter, burnt, dust, acid. I stepped off the tractor. “Yose, come back! We don’t know what’s out there.” More like a graveyard than fields, the grass was so dead it snapped beneath my boots like glass.

Single green stalks periodically fissured the brown. The burnt-looking plants, All-in-All, were an invasive species grown as bio-fuel, but the genetically modified seeds were too resistant and hardy. Farms tried to replant corn, fighting All-in-All each season. Fields were abandoned, so it spread, destroying pastures, prairies, and crops, only part of the food demise. Most of the population had already switched to a liquid diet at that point.

I climbed up the hot engine hood and scrambled onto the roof, careful to angle my heavy boots between the panels. The cloudless sky stretched so wide it appeared to press against the ground at the horizon. Part of our training included a warning. Be aware of the quiet and the sky. Some go mad, like a lovesickness. Don’t look too long or too close. Don’t fall in love lest we fail.

Below, the grass stretched over the mile squares, and shadows or divots marked the weedy roads. The Gardeners’ weather monitoring predicted days similar to Iowa a hundred years ago: sunny, windy. The tractor’s wagon carried windmill parts and solar cloth for the tent. No generator, not even as a backup.

Dust crisscrossed the ever-stretching fields as my cousins, nephews, aunts-twice-removed all arrived at the land once owned by our shared great-grandparents.

A dead, three-branched tree marked my experimental farm’s westward edge with my cousin’s land. She was one of the Gardeners sent to oversee the project. My shoulders tensed, and I rubbed my neck. I always hated having a kitchen station near the head chef. I had nothing to hide, but I didn’t need eyes watching my hands, as if I wasn’t trustworthy. I’d finished the training; I knew how to live off my land. Rumor said my cousin had been the one to balk at the idea that only farmers with family connections to the land should return. Even so, she took on her duty to convince us to leave our jobs. I was a food creative—tried to make new flavors with a combination of chemistry and greenhouse nutrients only the upper class could afford. I tasted these foods but never ate. Like all the rest, I drank my meals, vitamin concoctions, but I was just old enough to remember family dinners at my grandparents’.

On this land, we would eat what we grew—maybe. My fields were for foraging and replenishing, not mass producing. Other parcels would attempt to feed people, but I would help the bread crackle with flavor.

My son rippled the chest-high invasives. He kept his arms raised as if wading through something distasteful. “What are you worried about? I thought you said the animals were gone.”

I slid off the tractor roof. My ankles popped as I hit the packed earth, and I grimaced. “I said rare, not gone. I don’t want you running around until I perform the contamination tests again.”

“But the Gardeners said—”

“I want to check them just in case.” I pulled out our noon vitamin drinks from a cooler and unscrewed the lids. “We will know by morning.”

Yose dug post holes while I unloaded the yurt. We raised the poles and, in between gusts of wind, tried to stretch the solar cloth over the frame. Inside, Yose trampled the grasses, circling like a dog, before falling asleep on my coat. I staked down the walls against the wind and stretched the rain guard for the night, positioning the rain barrel even though the stars shone.

The wind kept me awake. In the city, the breezes were channeled between buildings and caught all the exhausts. We’d lived near my job, one of the few food units, and the night air tasted of cooking bread, roasting coffee, soups filled with celery and cumin and bay leaves. These words meant nothing to my son, but he could recite the vitamin drink ingredients: Vitamin A, Vitamin B6, Vitamin C, magnesium, folic acid, zinc and on, all necessary to sustain life. His concept of taste was simply sweet. The wind just smelled good.

But here, the burnt flavors didn’t taste like fumes but something older—acid rain, bad water. A land bitter and dead when it should be green and sweet.

Gusts shook the yurt, snapped the cords. I curled around Yose, encasing him.

The next week, we donned gas masks and lit the brown-dead prairie. Dry grass lapped up the flames and sucked them deeper. Fire-repellent tarps circled the yurt, and I ordered Yose to stay inside with his gas mask on. Not even the scientists knew everything our great-grandfathers had pumped into the earth, absorbed by roots. The smoke could be contaminated. But Yose had only seen sparklers and candles and history class videos. The blaze drew him as if it were a street show. Fire seared across the field toward the broken tree. Heat waves distorted the landscape, and ash dusted us.

I brushed the cinder from Yose’s hair. All-in-All had choked prairie and cornfields, sucked the nutrients from soy beans and yams. At the time, some farmers blamed the company for the crisis since they made more money in ways to combat the invasive. But when everyone stopped farming, the company shriveled up. They’d expected limitless soil.

Black clouds joined ours at the other sectors. Yose told me he’d learned about farmers from ancient days who used to burn a portion of their crops, the scent a pleasing smell to the gods. We sent an insult into the sky.

In the morning, Yose and I wiggled into hip-high waders meant to be fire and water repellent. Soot shadowed the masks’ viewfinders, so we passed a handkerchief as we walked the black lands toward the dead tree, a three-fingered hand.

Yose explored in circles with me at the center. Halfway to the tree, he called, “Look what I found!”

I jogged, but the uneven ground slowed me to a walk. I wanted this blackness to be empty and waiting to receive, not retching up its dead. Yose crouched at the base of a mangled tower collapsed on its side. The metal supports had splintered, shards rising from the cracked cement base. I squatted behind Yose and tightened his gasmask straps.

Yose pressed on a joint with his boot, then kicked it. “Is it part of a house?”

I hovered my palm over the crisscrossing beams, but they had already cooled. I gripped a rung like a weapon. “It’s one of the reasons we are wearing masks. It’s a natural gas well tower.”

“What’s that?”

“We wanted the gas for energy, but to get it, we pumped chemicals into the ground, blasted the rock with water so gas could leak out through these towers. But the chemicals leeched into the water and the roots and were part of the cancer clusters that drove your great-great-grandfather off this farm. Forcing the chemicals so deep caused earthquakes, too.”

“Is that what knocked down the tower?”

I pried loose a broken shaft and speared it into the packed earth. “Maybe. Either way, we can reuse the metal, so we’ll get it with the tractor tonight.”

We approached the tree, and Yose ran between me and its shadow. Smoke wisped from the three branches like candle wicks just snuffed. Roots, femur-thick, punched into the flame-parched land. I closed my eyes and pictured the tree limbed and leafy. Yose circled it, stumbling over the roots. He held his hand near the trunk even though the heat radiating from the blackened bark distorted the air. “Too hot to climb,” he said.

I slipped an arm around his sweaty shoulders. “Wait for the first rain to wash it clean.”

“When will that be?”

“I don’t know.”

We continued beyond the tree to our roadline. Beyond, charred fields stretched to the next roadway—my cousin’s land, the Gardener. I shaded my eyes. Three ash clouds followed my cousin and her two children as they sifted through their fields, stomping sparks.

I pointed them out to Yose. “Well, you’re going to have some friends.” While she was in charge of observing all the farms, she’d been trained in the grain track while I was in the natural systems track. I hadn’t met her, just saw her name on the field map and watched her motivational videos—crap that nobody believed about learning to feed ourselves again, to regain our heritage. No, we’d come to see the sky without smog, the sky most of us remembered in our dreams. To feel grass on our skin. To see color created by nature, not the lurid reds of advertisements. I’d come to taste again.

I bellowed a hello and waved. My cousin flinched as if hearing a gunshot and drew her children close. After a moment, she released them and raised her hand as if asking a question. The children glanced at her, then dashed toward us. I gave Yose a nudge, and he scrambled across the road and down the slight incline. They met halfway, hesitant, until Yose extended his hand.

My cousin and I stomped through the dust. Ash grayed her black hair. Her eyebrows had been singed of, and I touched mine. One was mostly gone.

I tugged down my mask. “I’m Slate. Call me Te.” I nodded at our children already playing tag. “My son, Yose.”

She hooked her finger through the mask strap, took a deep breath, then pulled it back. “I’m Wend.” She pointed to the boy, then the girl. “Cedar and River.”

“I know who you are.”

“Of course—the videos.” She looked across her fields. Wind whipped her hair over her mouth as she spoke.

“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”

She shook her head and raised her voice. “I keep forgetting about the wind, too! For all the noise in the streets, this place is louder.”

“A different type of sound—maybe.”

“Are you adjusting?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Just like everyone, I’m hungry for the sun and fresh air.”

“We’re here for more than a vacation.”

I grit my teeth, a string of answers running through my thoughts, starting with the profane before pulling back into politeness. “I’m here to work. Just like you.”

The children broke us up as we became props in a game of tag since we were two of the three objects pressing against the horizon.

Summer.

Summer tasted of salt. Sweat turned our clothes to a second skin. Doubled-over for hours, blisters formed through the gloves. Weeding. Like our ancestors, we heaved at the stalks near the base, stabbed trowels at root balls. Anywhere the brown All-in-All sprouted, we plucked it. But it grew, grew, grew, just as the old ads had promised. We would clear a patch, and as the green prairie plants began to sprout, the All-in-All choked them.

The burn had energized the early prairie bloomers, and when I straightened above the grasses, some specks of color bobbed among the invasive. Creamy yellows, lavender, deep red, new green and dark green. But not enough to flavor food for a nation—or what remained of one.

In the evenings, Yose and I cut samples, drying them from the yurt’s rafters and searching guidebooks from three generations previous to name which plants were resurfacing. Many prairie species took two or three years to grow down, developing deep roots, then up. Don’t become discouraged, the Gardeners said. Their goal was two hundred species, though one hundred and thirty was the expected number. By August, we’d recorded twenty.

I counted off the wildflowers as I shifted to another bad patch of All-in-All. Tall, bright plants stuck out: goldenrod and compass plant. Prairie grasses blended together, but I’d learned big bluestem because it was taller than me.

I knelt and pulled the invasives from around goldenrod, stuffing the crackling stems into a plastic sack. When I straightened, brown whipped around my legs for a hundred yards until a purple speck, petals limp, speared the brownness—a cone flower, probably.

What I wouldn’t give for a flame-thrower. I could burn paths between clusters of flowers until all the Gardener’s would see on their drones was a spider web. Such designs had worked for the old, old farmers. Instead, I’d ordered a scythe. Once Yose and I had cleared safeguards around the native species, I’d harvest these worthless plants and burn them.

I knelt to clear a circle for the coneflower, and a buzzing passed my face. Wind almost overwhelmed the hum, and I froze, scanning the petals. A striped spot crawled from the underside and clung to the bobbing plant. It scurried over the head, hesitating to sip nectar. Pollen speckled its black legs.

A moment later, the bee zipped off, and I followed. It swerved among brown stalks, then dove. I nearly stepped on half-withered purple blazing star. All-in-All crowded it, and I snapped the stalks as the bee searched the crumpled flowers. Before the stitch in my side faded, the bee shot off. It would dip into the brown sea, finding the dying flowers that Yose and I had been trying to save. I’d uproot the brown until the bee lifted again.

I gave up at the edge of my field. The hive couldn’t build a nest on my land except at the dead tree—the opposite direction from the bee. The guidebooks had warned that bees can travel miles from a hive. I shaded my eyes, but no trees or rocks or even crumbling knolls suggested a sheltered place to grow a hive, but I did see Wend walking our property line. She used a twisted metal rod as a walking stick.

I waved. “Any news on my scythe?”

She shook her head. “Maybe next week. What are you doing out this way? It’s not time for your scheduled boundary walk.”

I stretched my arms, sweat trickling between my hollowed shoulder blades. “Can’t I enjoy the sun?”

Wend tapped her rod. “If you like to sweat, sure.” She kept walking, but I matched her stride.

“Once I get the scythe and clear out this crap, I plan on burning it. According to the histories, bonfires were pretty common. I wanted to invite everyone, so we could all meet. We’re family, after all.”

Wend scanned the ground, paused to stab a tussock with her rod. “What would we do, stare at the fire? Breathe in all those carcinogens? We have our own fires to sweat in front of.”

“I’m sure the children would like it.”

Wend turned on me. “A spark could set fire to our fields. If you’re going to burn, you need to watch the fire, not other people’s children.”

“I remember days like these, Wend. Don’t you? Don’t you remember coming together to eat?”

“That’s not why we’re here. Don’t let your emotions get in the way of the experiment.”

She strode off. Maybe she was here for the experiment, but I wasn’t. Once, at a picnic as a child, an aunt had given me a honey stick. Better than sugar, the honey tasted floral and of hot summer air and earthy roots. I wet my lips, tasting salt.

Fall.

After the first killing frost, I hooked the drill-seeder to the tractor. I ripped open a forty-pound bag of prairie seed—seedbank stock. A nutty, earthy, burst spread across my tongue. I leaned into the bag, breathing in the savory seeds.  Dry, but an overnight soaking would fix that if I were cooking them. I scooped a handful and drank in the scents. Saliva flooded my mouth. I let the seeds sift through my fingers, and, their savor still on my tongue, I gulped my breakfast drink without gagging on the artificial sweetness.

Frost had burned the color from the land, and I felt lost in a cold desert. Only the tractor’s compass kept my lines straight as I steered the drill-seeder. I hunched over the wheel, as close to the heaters as possible. Wind smacked like a hand against the side window, and I flinched.

Darkness flowed behind the sunset. I used the headlight even though it drained the solar batteries. The red sky silhouetted the tree, but the tractor’s light illuminated a bushy flower growing around the roots.

I dismounted and approached the plant. The trunk and few branches must have protected it from the frost. Yose had been careful to keep the All-in-All away from the tree, but he hadn’t mentioned his hard work paying off. Pale purple petals made me guess wild bergamot, once used to make tea. I flipped open my pocketknife. Fall was for harvest. The frost would take it by the end of the week if I didn’t.

Yose was finishing his homework on his tablet when I returned to the yurt. I set water to boil on the small stove, then stripped the leaves, rubbing them between my fingers.

Yose joined me. “What are you doing? Shouldn’t we dry that and send it back?”

The bruised leaves released a savory-minty scent, and I cupped my full hands to my face like a gasmask, breathing. Mint, a bit peppery, but past that, a herbal scent like roasted nuts—close to oregano.

“I’m not sending all our work for some lab coat to eat up.” I held my hand out to Yose. “Smell these.”

He sniffed and twitched his nose. “Sort of sweet, but it burns.”

I dropped the leaves one by one into the boiling water, reducing it to a simmer. “You can describe it as savory.”

He rubbed his nose on his sleeve. “I thought that was wild berga—berga something.”

“Bergamot. It is. But the flavor is called mint, well, partly mint, more peppery. Let’s start with savory. You’ll understand.”

We had no table, only a fiberglass desk, so I pulled it to the yurt’s center and set out two

mugs.

I breathed in the steam, picturing the dishes: garnish for a salad, the flowers floating in punch, even using it in a stuffing. I strained the tea through a cloth, saving the leaves. Yose approached his steaming mug and sniffed.

“Mom, it smells weird.”

I cradled the mug. “You don’t have to drink it if you don’t like it, but I want you to taste it.”

“Why?”

“It’s one of the reasons we’re here. To taste again.”

His shoulders sagged. He picked up his mug.

“Here, touch mine.”

Our mugs clinked, and he asked why again.

“It’s an old ritual. Not usually with tea, but it’s what we have.”

We sipped. Yose’s face contorted as if he was about to be sick, but he swallowed. I swirled the tea over my tongue, soaking in the mint, the earthiness, the smokey aftertaste.

Yose chocked down another swallow and shivered. “What was that?”

“What did you taste?”

“It didn’t taste like anything—just gross.”

I held the mug under my nose. “Think about when you are working outside. Does this tea remind you of anything?

He closed his mouth, moving his tongue as if he were chewing. “Like smoke. After we burned the prairie.”

I grinned. “Yes, and what else?”

Winter.

In training, I’d asked if we would relocate cityside for the winter. They said no. We would rest with the land—“commune.” A man in the back laughed. “All that’s out there will be ice.”

It’s all or nothing, the Gardeners explained. We were part of the land and must also be part of the seasons.

Our snow gear made life more comfortable than during our great-grandfathers’ days—as long as the solar panels didn’t ice over. When they did, Yose and I made a game to see who could scrape ice the fastest. The wind froze the land to twenty-five below, but it wasn’t the cold that ate at me, but the boredom. Yose always wanted to be outside, charging around in his snowshoes or spraying past on his skis.

Snow flattened the already barely noticeable dips and rises. Only the blackened tree stopped the eye, Yose’s oblong snowshoe prints always winding toward it. He’d made a circle around the yurt like fairy ring. Maybe mushrooms would grow there next year. What I would give for that earthy taste.

Twice a month, I walked the fields to record paw prints, wildlife sightings, or disturbances. Either most animals avoided the land for its poisons or they tread so lightly as not to leave a print. The only evidence was a small vertebrae and a raccoon skull Yose had collected over the summer.

I crossed Yose’s snowshoe tracks, so faint as if only a breeze had passed. Mine pockmarked the snow. I bent over a trail of prints, a rabbit maybe. At another spot, the snow had been plowed up as if by burrowing. I crouched and broke off the ice rimming the hole. A red fur tuft floated free before the wind snapped it up. Yose would be so excited to know a fox had moved in. I smiled as I turned to follow my property line—

The bison’s tawny color caught my eye. It had crested the slight rise between my land and Wend’s. It watched me, shoulders steep as slopes, and rib lines showing through the winter hide. Its haunches were thin and taut like new ice. Dull horns curved outward. Dark eyes searched my face.

Its ears swiveled just as the shot sounded. The noise ignited something primal in me, and I fell to the ground, arms over my head.

Ice scraped my chin. The cold burned my cheek, forcing me to rise. Blood spattered the snow and dripped from the bison’s blueish muzzle. I struggled to stand as the snow sucked at my feet. My cousin emerged over the same rise. We met at the body.

I knelt, peeled off my glove, and hovered my hand over its ribcage. Warmth spread from the tangled hair. “Why did you do that?”

“It’s a threat,” Wend said. “Our children are out here.”

Its glistening eyes stared across the snow, and I wanted to close them. Instead, I held my hand over the bullet hole. “We could have figured something out. A tagging system. Some sort of invisible fence. We need the bison!”

She levered out the spent shot and popped in another. “I will not find my son gored open in this place. We don’t need the meat. We don’t need these beasts.”

Even before I read the Gardener’s textbooks, watched their videos, I understood our connection to the land. My job required such a belief in the connection between the smallest molecules of flavor to the next spice. On my kitchen shelves, spices were aligned by what tasted delicious together. Without salt, most dishes fell apart. With only salt, taste faded.

I plucked broken All-in-All stems from the thick hide. “Bison trample prairie and eat the grasses. Their hides help pollinate. They break up the dirt. Even you could understand that.”

Wend slung her gun over her shoulder and turned toward her land. “I did what was natural. I protected my children. Sacrifice your son if you want, but I won’t.”

I straightened and caught her arm. “Who do you think I’m doing this for? People like you? It’s for our children, so they can see rivers and meadows again.”

She slapped away my hand. “Don’t be so self-righteous.”

“This is your holy experiment.” I pointed at the bison. “Weren’t the bison part of it? Or are only human animals worth the Gardener’s time since we can drive a tractor?”

“You just wanted out of the sweatbox like the rest of us.”

“I want my son to taste actual food. I need to eat again.”

She kicked snow at the bison. “Looks like it’s your lucky day. Bison meat is a delicacy, though imagine you’ve done little more than cook it—if that. Feast if you want to, if you can stomach it. We’ll be recalled by June unless this land is all green.”

As she stomped off, the gun barrel pointing toward the sky, I imagined running after her, dipping into a slide so my spiked boots bloodied her legs. I could steal her gun and point it down her throat. But that was the mistake humankind had repeated throughout time. Even in the old stories, death accompanied our trip from the first garden.

I shook my head and knelt beside the bison. Wend was right. It’d been so long since we ate meat it would sicken us. My fingers furrowed the wiry hide. What Yose would have given to spot such a beast through the binoculars.

Hunger drove Yose home around four. I’d already checked the tractor’s batteries and warmed a few hotpacks. I handed him his vitamin dose steeped with the last bergamot leaves. “Keep your gear on,” I said. “I want to show you something.”

The tractor, outfitted with sledge runners, packed the snow and the headlight ghosted over the whiteness. The icy surface reflected a full moon, and we drifted across a different kind of daylight.

The bison’s body appeared like a speed bump. Rigor mortis and the freeze made the body look crumpled, a note balled up and tossed aside. Yose swung from the tractor and staggered over the brittle crust. I cut the engine even though it would delay our return as it reheated. Silence settled as if in an abandoned building.

Yose knelt and bent over the bullet wound, carefully allowing the moonlight to shine across the body. “Did you kill it?”

My boots broke through the snow. Each step sounded like snapping teeth. “Wend did. She was worried about her children—and you.”

“Would it have hurt us?”

“Maybe, it might have charged. But we could have found a way to keep it and you safe.”

He hid the bullet hole with his hand, as if imagining what the bison could have looked like. “Did you see it before it died?”

“For a moment.”

He took off his glove and ran a finger along a dulled horn, down a boulderlike shoulder, over each rib, along the boney leg to the hoof. “I wish I could have seen it alive.” He stood and blew on his ungloved hand before stuffing on his glove. “Why did you bring me here?”

I pulled him close. “It’s on our land. What do you think we should do with it?”

“It’s not our land. The bison isn’t ours. We should let nature take it.” He tilted his head back against my ribs, looking up at me. His voice pitched higher. “Right?”

I turned us toward the tractor. “Yes, let’s go.”

Spring.

Winter passed in recipe cards. I could have written notes on my tablet, but I followed my ancestors and handwrote on paper scraps. One hundred and thirty prairie species, minimum, should sprout in the spring. Most had been eaten or brewed at some time. While Yose huddled over his tablet, studying farming techniques, I copied or invented stacks of recipes. Any plant that wasn’t poisonous, I created a drink or dish: Chicory Coffee, Bergamot and Mountain Mint Salad, Salty Primrose Seeds, Hoary Vervain Flatbread, Candied Violets.

Dried plants hung from the yurt rafters, dangling above my cot like constellations as I tried to sleep. What did my recipes matter if we would be recalled by June? These prairie plants would end up on my spice shelves, advertised on menus as Pioneer Delectables! or Taste the Good Ol’ Days. I wouldn’t be able to afford what I had harvested.

The next morning, I told Yose my plan. Since we couldn’t work on the land in winter, we should spend time learning from the other farmers, our relatives. We would host a gathering on the spring equinox.

“But we can’t tell Wend,” I said.

“Why not?”

I unhooked a bunch of bergamot. “You can’t have people to your home without offering them something to drink.”

“But we can’t use the Gardeners’ samples. You said so.”

I sat down on my cot and pulled Yose beside me. I took a deep breath of the peppery bergamot. “The Gardeners don’t need all of these samples. If you give up all of your harvest for nothing, then you aren’t a farmer, you’re just a hired hand.” I offered him the bundle. “We deserve this. Before we poisoned the land, people used to have parties where we could come together and eat and drink.”

“Kind of like where you used to work—a restaurant?”

“Sort of, except this gathering would be at somebody’s house. Do you want to help me host one?”

Yose designed the invitations, using language from the guidebooks and copied the folk art drawings. Wend would be watching the e-comms, but Yose suggested he invite all the children through their cyber school. Wend couldn’t be monitoring that messaging system.

I left him drawing on scraps while I drove the tractor to the tree. I’d considered not telling Yose about cutting it down, but when I had collected the stamina for an argument, he’d only said it looked sad anyway.

I steered along the path made by Yose’s snowshoes, and as the tree grew larger, no longer a smear in the white world, I imagined our table.

I’d read tutorials on how to cut down a tree, but this one seemed so large as I stood at the roots. It would probably be rotten inside, but if it fell the wrong direction, I could lose an arm.

After driving the tractor well out of range, I approached with the chainsaw dead in my hands. The wind quieted and let the tree stand tall, without moaning through the three broken limbs. I visualized the cuts, then pressed my hand to the crumbling bark, even though heat spread up my neck. You’re going to have a purpose now, I thought, then patted the trunk.

I ripped open the chainsaw and held the idling machine until my heartbeat lowered, until it felt comfortable in my grip.

Woodchips sprayed as I cut a triangular chunk, causing the tree to moan, tilt forward. I dropped the chainsaw and sprinted to the right as the trunk thudded against the frozen ground. One limb splintered off, cracking like thunder.

I panted and stumbled over to the tractor, leaning against the sun-warmed hood. Now, the prairie stretched unbroken, nothing holding back the sky.

I sawed the broken branch into firewood, then sheered off the other limbs, keeping them whole for log benches. A few blankets tossed over the knotty bark would make them comfortable enough. Turning the trunk into a table proved the hardest. The chainsaw was too stubby to split the log lengthwise, so I shaved layers off the top until I had smoothed a semi-flat surface.

It took three trips to haul the tree to the yurt. Yose and I used the tractor’s raised winch to lift the log and fit it with metal legs—rungs leftover from the well tower.

The table cut our yurt in half, and we arranged the benchlike seats on each side. In front of the flap, we built a fire from the remaining wood. The black bark sizzled and popped, but once it burned away, a fresh, loamy scent rose with the smoke.

We huddled by the fire as darkness stretched tight. Moonrise began, and still, no tractor headlights cut the night.

Yose shivered and leaned into me. “What if they don’t come? My friends said they would.”

I zipped his coat beneath his chin. “It’s a long drive, one they’ve never made before. Just wait.”

“What does it mean if they don’t come?”

I laughed it off. “It means more for us.”

He pushed from me. “I’m serious. I know this is important.”

I watched the fire until my vision was full of embers. “Well, it means we won’t share our knowledge. All of our information is sorted through Wend. I’d rather hear it from the source, the rest of us.” I searched the darkness and thought my eyes were still adjusting as tiny sparks shifted over the glassy snow. I nudged Yose.

Soon, ten tractors thawed the ground, and the yurt was so full and hot, we kept the flap pinned open, the doorway framing the bonfire. People sat on the logs, the table, the floor, sipping tea and laughing at each other’s faces as they tasted again. Some, like me, were old enough to remember the occasional treat, but most had forgotten. Yose taught the other children how to taste wild bergamot.

Talk filled the small space until I nearly had to shout, but these people were family, albeit distant. And they had more hope than I had heard from Wend. Two fields had turned green. Some tactics to push the All-in-All back had succeeded. I took notes as we talked and started compiling a field guide, listing the strategies and how we might each implement them. As Yose had done with the invitations, we sent it through the children’s school messages.

“What does it matter,” said one of my cousins, Mateo, “She’s going to find out eventually.”

Our Aunt Maya stood, her long grey hair icing her shoulders. “Most of you are too young to remember, but we used to take pictures when all the family came together like this. I believe we should take one and send it to Wend.”

Our gathering marked the end of winter. As I walked my land, I struggled through mud instead of ice. Wend never responded to my message with the photo, but I’d notice her watching from deep in her land when I would walk the property lines—watching from afar like one of the Gardeners’ drones. She’d crouch on her tractor, binoculars raised, or simply stand on a slight rise.

The bison carcasses faded with the snow until it was just bone. Then the bones cracked or disappeared. Fox tracks and some doglike prints ringed the body while raven, crow, and raptor feathers stuck in the snow. I examined it on each land walk and added entries to the field guide. Even if Wend skewed the data, we would have a record.

The tree stump marked halfway, and I would sit and be still. Communing with the land seemed beyond my believability, but if this project failed, I would be returned to the city. No more silence. So I sat cross-legged, eyes closed. After a few moments, I tilted my head toward the blue and opened my eyes.

So vivid, almost lured, deep blue. I ignored the Gardeners’ warning and drank it in until filled with color. In the city, people went insane all the time, and it was ugly and bloody. Out here, it must be beautiful.

I took off my gloves and dug my fingers like worms into the soil. Cold wind drew tears, and I wiped my face. The air tasted sweet with new growth.

Where I’d rutted the dirt, a stalk poked up—white, a fisted leaf waiting to unfurl. I knelt and examined the plant at ground level. Part of me wanted to radio for Yose, but there should be plenty of these moments. I wanted this one.

______

Phoebe Wagner holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment and currently is a PhD candidate studying environmental literature at University of Nevada, Reno. She has fiction published in Diabolical Plots and AURELIA LEO. She is the co-editor of two anthologies: Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation (Upper Rubber Boot Books) and  Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures (West Virginia University Press). Follow her work at phoebe-wagner.com.