“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 brilliant advice from scientists Jonathan Tonkin and rebecca hooper. The story you’re about to read is from this project. You can find all the stories as a special Top In Fiction Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher Erica Drayton.
The story I started writing in response to the Future of Nature prompt became much more involved and lengthy than I either anticipated or had time to finish by the deadline! So I ended up cutting much of what I had written in order to have something that could be a standalone story to publish today. I may come back to this to edit/rewrite/incorporate the rest of what I’ve written, but in the meantime, here is my Future of Nature story. I hope you enjoy it!
It was the start of the summer before Maya would begin middle school, and the first time she felt it, she knew it wasn’t real. She wasn’t a little kid anymore, she no longer believed in magical happenings like talking animals or water that could stare back at you. When she was little, she had been possessed of what her teachers called “an overactive imagination.” Like one day when she stepped on an ant as it made its way across the concrete walk in front of her house. She had probably stepped on many ants before this one, but that day, she stepped on the ant on purpose, for no other reason than to squash it. Caught in the strange sheen of summer’s web, she had experienced one of those rare moments when time felt like a circle instead of a line and the universe seemed to open like a flower to reveal its secrets. She had been frozen by the sudden certainty that all insects were connected and that they communicated with each other, and that word of her capricious microviolence would travel to the most fearsome of the insects in Maya’s four-year-old world —the Queen Bee —and that the Queen Bee and her henchmen would now come for Maya to exact retribution for the murdered ant.
Now eleven, Maya knew this had been a silly fantasy, and she wondered whether she’d even believed it back then, or whether she’d just been playing pretend. She was a dreamy only child growing up in the church of a vengeful God, in the quiet brown and green of an island populated by a tight-knit network of close and close-lipped families. Such vivid childhood daydreams were an obvious side effect, maybe even a rite of passage. These whimsical imaginings dwindled as she grew older and eventually stopped altogether.
But now it seemed they were back, and when she was too old for them. She’d recently gotten her first period and was sitting on the pier at the creek, dangling her feet in the water, thinking about how strange it was to sit quietly and bleed in secret. She felt grown up but also like her body had gone rogue on her, which was alarming. The cool water on her feet had been a source of calm, until it felt like her feet were being held by the water instead of the water flowing around them, and she was suddenly deeply sad, as if someone who loved her was saying goodbye. She jerked her feet out of the water with a splash and went back to the house.
These strange sensations occurred with increasing frequency that summer, though she tried to tell herself they were just daydreams. But then something happened that was impossible to dismiss. She’d been out by the shore, watching a Great Blue Heron take a few careful steps on his long stalk legs. Herons had always seemed wise and ancient to her. Lately, she longed for some wise old friend in her life, an impartial and fair-minded someone she could go to for advice. With her parents, advice was fraught. She knew they loved her, and the three of them were close — sometimes more like friends than parents and child — except their worrying over her seemed to get in the way of their ability to listen, to help her figure out for herself what she thought. She considered eleven years old to be an age when you should figure things out for yourself, maybe with a little help. The Heron looked like he knew things, and like he would not care one way or another what you did, such that his counsel could be lightly held, easily given, received, or discarded. That was what she wanted.
If you want someone to advise you, I am not the one you are looking for.
Maya’s attention, which had drifted and unfocused her vision such that she was gazing without seeing at the whole of the beach before her, jolted back to the present. She looked around, alarmed, the palm of her right hand bracing the ground in preparation to propel her up and into a sprint. She saw nothing out of place. All was quiet, no one was around. A light breeze blew, an osprey gave two small shrieks and flew out over the trees. She was not sure whether she had thought the words in her head or heard them spoken out loud. The meaning of the words was clear in her mind but the sound of the words was a fog she could not hold onto. The Heron was looking right at her. She looked back.
“Did you say something?” she asked, feeling silly.
If you were listening.
Either the world around Maya went silent, or the pounding in her ears had become a roar because now she could hear nothing but her heartbeat, the blood it pumped through her body. This Heron was communicating with her. She was not imagining it. She counted to twenty before she spoke again, keeping her eyes locked on the Heron.
“I’m listening.”
The Heron neither blinked nor responded.
“Have you...have you done this before?”
Done…?
“Spoken to a human before?”
If this is what you mean by ‘speaking,’ the earth is always speaking. Humans are rarely listening.
“Okay. Um. I’m Maya.”
Without warning, the Heron plunged his head down for a fish or tiny crab, something Maya couldn’t see. How the Heron had seen it was a mystery, because his big yellow eyes had not moved from her face until the moment he dove to spear his catch. His wings remained folded as his head remerged and he tossed the morsel into his beak. He did not seemed inclined to reciprocate her introduction.
“I’m not sure what to do now.”
Why do anything?
Maya considered this.
“Fine,” she conceded, and sat back down. The Heron turned his gaze from Maya to the other side of the cove, remaining stationary for a few minutes, then took off into the earth-bound sky, his blue-grey wingspan lifting him up and over the trees until Maya could no longer see the shape of him.
She walked for a while along the shore with her feet in the surf, dangling her shoes from one hand, contemplating what had happened, and whether she believed it had happened. She hoped she wasn’t going crazy.
Although the water was cool, her feet and ankles and shins began to feel warm and tingly. She stopped walking and tossed her shoes on the beach several feet back from the waves, then waded in until she was deep enough to put her head underwater. Holding her breath, eyes closed against the salt, she assessed her body temperature. Definitely very warm now, although the water was not.
Then, the water said to Maya that she knew what she knew and of course she wasn’t crazy.
Maya surfaced quickly, rubbing water from her eyes as she looked around. Had the water just spoken? She shivered at a caress on her back and whirled around. There was nothing but water, a clump of seaweed floating a few feet away, maybe that was what she had felt.
Overthinking, chided the water. Just float.
Maya blinked a few times, mouth open in disbelief. Then, at a loss for logical options, she decided to heed the advice of the water. She closed her mouth and closed her eyes and leaned back against the surface, making her legs and arms into buoys. She thought of water striders, how delightful it would be to skate across the surface like those spindly predators. The water gently rocked her like a baby, and she felt soothed.
Good.
Maya watched the clouds floating above. She heard a boat engine far enough away that she couldn’t smell the diesel fumes. She floated this way for a time that felt outside of time, then pulled herself back to the shore and lay like a snow angel in the sand so the sun could dry her.
Maybe she had heard the water and the Heron, and maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she was daydreaming. She was a little lonely, she could admit that, if only to herself. She decided she would not overthink it — the water, or the voices in her head, or whatever it was — had been right about that. When she was mostly dry, she headed back home. At dinner that night she was quiet but this was not unusual for her, and her parents were accepting of the ebb and flow of moods in these last years of her childhood. A time of metamorphosis, the self digesting itself, a radical softening within a protective shell.
Maya and the Heron saw each other often that summer. Sometimes they communicated and sometimes they didn’t. The companionable silence they shared was often Maya’s favorite part of the day. She liked simply being around another creature without the pressure to do or think or say or act.
The water spoke to her many times, and her feelings about these exchanges were far more confusing. Sometimes the water was a comfort, holding and cooling her in the heat of summer, revealing amusements like crab dances and slippery schools of minnows around her legs. At other times the water spoke of change and loss and left Maya feeling sad and uncertain. She knew the shoreline was receding fast, had heard the adults talking after church about the fate of Pell’s, the neighboring island — how everyone had had to move away, and about the gravestones that sometimes turned up on what was left of the beach, which was all that was left of the once picturesque town. The water could hold but it could not be held; it asked her to account for herself but would not be held to account.
She thought back to the ant and the bee and the way she had known all those years ago that everything was connected. Now she understood that she had been onto something back then, but the connections didn’t add up to a hierarchy — there was no Queen Bee, no queen or king anything at the top — that it was all much bigger and more expansive and complicated than an eye for an eye or human notions of justice. She was part of the network too, and so was everyone, except most people seemed to think they were outside or above it. Maya felt a growing sense of agitation that barely concealed the grief she carried deep and buried within her.
She went down to the shore after breakfast one morning when the sun was already hot enough to make her sweat while she waited for the Heron. Humidity curled the baby hairs around her forehead. Watermen like her father started their days at 3 a.m. so they could be back in before the weather became dangerously hot. The past two summers, the island had lost three watermen, one only in his thirties, to heatstroke. The islanders had taken to observing a siesta during the hottest part of the day, like Spaniards.
As soon as the Heron landed, Maya began to speak softly and urgently to him.
“I hear things,” she said, “that sometimes scare me.”
What things, Little Sister?
The Great Blue Heron was solemn and implacable. He had heard many things over many long years. None of it scared him.
“About things changing,” she whispered, “dying. Ending.”
All things change. All things die. All things end.
Maya looked down at her toes, buried in the cool, rich silt and covered by murky water that came up to her shins. Tiny minnows tickled her ankles.
“I was thinking maybe I can help. Because I can hear the earth talking. Because I listen. Maybe I could save the island?”
The Heron turned his yellow eyes upon her.
You can’t save it, Little Sister.
A tear sprung to each of her brown eyes. The one in the left eye caught on her lashes and hung there until she blinked. It fell into the water, the salt of her body returning to the salt of the tributary that was her home. A light breeze ruffled the powder down of the Heron’s chest and the loose strands of the girl’s hair.
Maya took a shuddery sigh. “I didn’t think so.”
Somehow she was solaced by the Heron’s honesty, not knowing that to the Heron, there was no honesty nor dishonesty, no truth nor lie, there was only the world and not the world, now and not now.
The Bay moved gently around the legs of the young girl, hardly noticing the impediment of human appendages rising from the silt bottom, brackish water lapping around skinny ankles and leaving a pale salty ring she would carry home with her. Many humans had stood in the Bay’s waters, had fished and crabbed in them, swam, drowned, and played in them. The Bay remembered everything. When blood was spilt in its water over oysters. All the trash and fertilizer and chicken waste runoff. The children who waded into its body every year for decades, holding hands, seeing how far they could walk before their toes were no longer visible. The girl was warm and bright and alive and sent her own magnetic current rippling out into the water around her. And in the timescape of the water, the girl would soon be gone, and the water would continue in whatever form it took.
Lovely work. I loved the imagery of the water and Maya's developing relationship to the world around her.
Lovely story, Stephanie.