fun flash fiction

“This is the trickiest part of the route,” Wallace told his two children. “You can go around the Smokestack Shoals, but it adds a half a day to the trip to open water. That one there,” he pointed to the big one close enough to touch off the starboard bow, “is where you turn hard a’port and aim straight between…” He stopped as he noted his daughter Barb leaning over the side, staring down into the water and obviously not paying attention. “Barb! Listen up! You might not think you’ll go to the boats when you grow up, but life has a funny way of not working out the way you planned.”

She turned to him with an obviously fake look of rapt attention. “Yes, daddy. Turn left at the big smokestack and aim for…?”

He sighed and closed his eyes a moment. That girl’s gonna come to a bad end, mark my words, he thought. But at least Rick was taking it all in, and he was more likely to take over the trawler anyway, so Wallace went on. “Head straight between those two little ones, see there? This part of the dogleg follows an old industrial railroad, so you know there’s no shorter smokestacks hiding under the surface to punch a hole in your hull. Then, oh about two lengths beyond the twins – that’s what we call those two stacks, Rick, the twins – you make a turn back to starboard and go pretty much straight east. You’ll know when you pass the old coastline, the water turns black, and there aren’t any little eddies swirling around. Then you’re home free.”

Barb had gone back to leaning over the side, her thoughts obviously a million miles away. He didn’t know what he was going to do with that girl. Why couldn’t she be more like the grandmother she was named for? Calm, competent, dutiful, and a hard worker. But Barb had tired early on of Grandma Barbara’s stories of past glory, when both her grand-daddy and her daddy had been president, much preferring to listen to her great-aunt Jenna’s stories of her wild and rebellious youth.

He tried again. One more time, he told himself, knowing it wouldn’t be the last time he’d try, even though each time he said it, he pretended that it would be. “Living in this half-drowned world isn’t easy, girl. Nobody knew the polar ice would go so fast. Nobody prepared. Even so, disease and starvation killed more people than the water did. And the riots. And make no mistake, there are still people around who’d rather take what you’ve got than make it for themselves. Those that were left just had to suck it up, and do whatever it took to get by. Like running this fishing trawler out of Port Hartford. Your grandma did it, your mom and me did it, now it’s your turn. Nobody’s going to hand you anything on a silver platter, girl. You gotta give it all you got just to get by. It’s hard work.”

Oh yes! She run the boat flat out go here go there wherever I be pinting too. She never miss putting me right next de crab pot jug. Early on in her outings with me I ask her. "Baby Pat if something happen to me out here can you find your way back to de dock?". "Yes Papa." She be telling me. I say; "Do you know where we at?" "Yes." she say; "We be right here."

Jenna finished covering the trench for the night, then sat on the edge of the tarp to watch the sun set behind the hulks on the horizon. The colors reached into her hind-brain, affecting her far more than sunset on her own world.

I don’t care what anybody else says, this world is in our bones and our blood. Nowhere else will ever be “home” quite like Earth is.

Her friends had laughed when she’d told them of her plans to join the archeological dig on Earth for her graduate work. “Come on, Jenna,” Crinne had scoffed. “You know what they say, Earth’s a great planet to be from. Why would anybody ever want to go back? I can’t think of anything more depressing than excavating the rotting corpse of the cradle of humanity.”

Of course, it wasn’t quite a corpse, even centuries after the Great Change and the die-off that followed, and the diaspora that had followed that Yes, as ever more land area was made uninhabitable, enclaves of technological survivors had battered their way through the light-speed barrier to reach the stars, never to return. But those ancients had not neglected their duties to their homeworld; along with their starships, they had created crops that would grow in the quickly warming tundra, and given them to the humans who stayed, reverting to old lifeways. Even now, there were agricultural communities on the great plains of Siberia and the Mid-Northern Territories, saved from primitivism by the fusion-powered vehicles and machines those starfarers had left behind.

Those communities were being forced ever southward, now, as the polar ice began to grow back, as the earth began to regain its human-friendly equilibrium. Another few centuries, and humans might once again cover the surface of Earth.

That was why this project on the coastal plain was so important. Digging through the silt left by the receding sea, excavating the lives of that last generation before the Great Change, kept undisturbed by the ocean until just this last century. Learning to understand them, and the way they lived, learning to avoid making the same mistakes as humans repopulated Earth. It was hard work, no doubt about that, and she wouldn’t live to see the retaking of her ancestral homeworld – but her descendants would. And one of them will probably be named Jenna, too, she thought wryly.

Still, not many humans wanted to be reminded of their ancestors’ follies by even visiting the ruined world, let alone working there. But Jenna had always felt more connected to humanity’s birthplace than her friends did. Even her name was from Earth, handed down through the generations to maintain her family’s ties to their history. Rare was the day, during her childhood, when some elder did not remind her that they were descended from Kings of Earth. Though the details were lost in the mists of history, they remembered that much, and vowed that they always would. So she had cousins and aunts and uncles with odd names – Barbara, Wallace, Laura, George, Herbert, Richard, Prescott, Ellis – names her friends laughed at, and that she had hated as a child.

But now… well, she still hated her name, she had to admit. But her body felt the rightness of this place, as she sat, watching the sun set. The smell of the air, the colors of the land and the sky, even the gravity… her body knew this place she’d never been before. Knew it, and called it home.