Pollen Drift II

(if: $aster is 1)[ [[Monday 05:06->Flood]] [[Tuesday 06:24->Frogs ]] [[Wednesday 04:32->Zombies]] [[Thursday 12:00->Poison]] [[Friday 05:30->Darkness]] [[Saturday 13:46->Storm]] [[Sunday->Death]] ] //(if: $aster is 0)[[[Exit->Backwards]]]// (If: $aster is 0)[ { (print: "<script>$('html').removeClass(\)</script>") (if: (passage:)'s tags's length > 0)[ (print: "<script>$('html').addClass('" + (passage:)'s tags.join(' ') + "'\)</script>") ] } ]

The dull pulse of it dissipates, finally, in the dark blue crash of morning. Water rises over Carnation’s yellow flippers as she seals the second chamber. Makeshift pumps churn air outwards. The water reaches, passes over the plastic sheathe against her calf, her eyes, the top of her head. She bites down on the rubber of her regulator instead of her tongue. Clean air passes through her steel plated hoses and she exhales, bubbles exiting [[soot gray]]. She looks over to Basil, the youngest, and signs a question. Basil moves his hands, signals back, gives the OK. His bubbles are clear. The hatch squeals open, a violent light shudders through the waves above the roof. She steps out onto the submerged front lawn, kicks up off the ground, one hand hand hovering over her shark knife. The other, free to signal [[Basil.|NOTE]]

//Water levels drop through the night as the next plague crawls into existence. The storm frogs swarm their way into any open liquid substance. Carnation waits until O-4's head begin to droop, before silently swooping in. She uncorks his near full bottle and cracks open their sliding glass door. Humidity settles in like a weight, followed at midnight by the next amphibious plague. Carnation lets twenty or so scuttle in before closing the door. They infiltrate any pool avalible, some down the neck into the bottle, some wandering into the kitchen.// In the morning, several float dead in his near full container, bloated bellies and tiny legs pushed against the inside of the glass. The illusion of their clear skin bending with the curve, their visible organs thrumming to a halt, absorbing the unmetabolizable. Carnation walks to school through the grass in cleats. Basil follows, watching the other children smash the slippery, pellucid things against the concrete. She steps on as few of them as she can manage; Basil scoops one off the ground and tucks it in his pocket where [[it bruises and suffocates over the next hour.|it will bruise and suffocate.]]

Carnation traces her path downstairs, skipping the loose floorboard, and collects the bottles. Five off the ground, one from the O-4’s drooping hand. She rinses them, drinks the leftover fourth before placing them in the recycling. By the time Basil wakes up, the air is clear, the dishes are clean, and the O-4 has headed to work. Basil blearily makes himself a bowl of cereal, then ruins it when he pours in orange juice instead of milk. Carnation meets the day with a sharp blade and a delayed fury. The world is hot under her eyes, hotter under her fingers, the snap of bone underfoot. Brain on jeans. On kneepads. She lets one of the zombies slam an arm into her face, tearing out a chunk of her hair before she relinquishes the limb from its body. The next three. It twitches. The insignia on his lapel long since rotted away. She’s dislodged from her reverie when the thing’s head blows open. Basil stands behind her with his gun. He signs a question, eyes full of concern. Carnation rolls her eyes, curls her hand in an OK, and points with all five of her fingers towards the school. As soon as he turns away, she releases the gray breath she was holding.[[The residue drifts upwards, and vanishes.|The Schedule]]

The respirators are uncomfortable. They make Carnation feel winded, struggling against the mask. Basil hates them more than she does, claustrophobic in the extreme. He flies through the door as soon as the bell rings, leaving her behind in favor of being back in a building with filters in it. The Academy lets out early today, two hours before the overgrowth chokes the sidewalk. [[PFC Beck]] waits under the bridge. Her normal hiding spots simmer in today's spore clogged afternoon, crowded to even the weeds waiting to puncture her airtight suit with barbed thorns. She knows it's him, even through the full-face. His eyes are green through the thick yellow pollen. She turns her dial down until she cannot hear even the insectoid hum of cicadas in the distance. She reads his lips anyway as he issues an Instruction. “Gate four tomorrow. See you at 20:00.” Carnation will play along, will follow his Orders to the best of her ability. [[Diplomats do not say no.]]

To the benefit of her hangover, she will not see light today. She feels out the countdown rivets carved into her bedside with the pocket knife and rises from bed. Carnation was never good on dark days. Basil leads instead, the better of the two at navigating by touch and sound. He feels through the ridges underfoot, checking back periodically to make sure Carnation is behind him. The Others were the first ones set up the tactile pavement for their blind. Textured walkways that exist here on the outer edges of the expanded base, built sometime in the 60’s. A host of apologies was ordered and executed as soon as the land was taken. Took months to smooth over. Occasionally something will spark at the edges of the fences, and Carnation will receive orders to [[smother it]]. To bat her eyes and issue the statement.

Hail, fire. Whatever. She opens her reenforced umbrella to go snag some pixie-sticks from the [[PX.|The Schedule]]

The plagues are almost fair, equal opportunity in the danger. You never know what’s going to happen when the ball finally drops, when the seven plagues of the new year change again. Today’s festivities mark this day as one of mourning. It’s clearest in the families that meander on the edges, clutching their memento moris, a ribbon here, a cell phone there. Basil looks over at the blank Carnation in her yellow dress, the oldest now, and fiddles with Aster’s pearl bracelet hidden under his sleeve. He touches her arm, yells tag, and bolts. The air here hovers with that strange prismatic mist from the balance. Each vapor expelled by the lungs a release of joy, pride, sorrow; purple, red, blue. Culture is at its most potent here, ephemeral and dizzying, still muddled from their communal losses. The O-4 abstains in public, watching his remaining two children play, waiting to go home. Carnation comes downstairs into the kitchen later, finding him teaching Basil to use the bottle opener. She takes the small steel claw, the bottle, and sends Basil to bed. The O-4 doesn’t ask. He never will. She runs her fingers over the braille label and opens it with a practiced flick. Instead of the amber liquid breaking into color, it solidifies, the cloud that exits his lungs is charcoal dark. Carnation sits with him, taks a swig, [[and breathes in secondhand.]]

American images "commercials" Just video mon. of Timeline commercials Two Shisa stand opposed You buy them for your friend, tiny things with glossy American flags painted over ceramic bases. AFN commercials wring side of the road turn signal What rank is your dad Flashing peace signs at the pizza guys Mama sans Pointing menus tourist buses outside your house Ribbons on the outside of the gate Protests in front of your home Mayoral campaigns please move ambulances “please” Anthropomorphizing everything Ice cream garbage truck Temperature differences Id cards Street signs red tile roofs Everyone stops for flag General population age Taco rice Island weather VPN Timezones "group project" "sorry i live off base” growing up in a place that you can’t really call home, even thought it was home. Then you can never go back. Constant pressure of two nations watching They want us to conform to both of their standards The perfect American by both nations even though you are not that Where in some ways it is more diverse, but in others horribly conservative Subject to the constant strain of averages and bureaucracy They want us gone, they want us here, they do not care, they make due. Bowing Eye contact Handing change back/money Wake up. You do not feel a hole. You are friends of convenience Focus on the pressure of growing up between two nations (friction Between the two, actual events interspersed with commercials, history, Gothic fictional stories? (surreal) Snippets between different cultures) If there is a god, He is surely smiling down on you today. Tiny feet pepper pick the asphalt, tar lava that burns the soles that cant jump in the shadows of parked cars. Yellow plate for you, white for your neighbors. Naomi’s father is American. He has a short haircut like the rest of the base’s patriarchs. Naomi’s mother is a native Okinawan. She lets her hair down. Speaks english well but not without a little trip on her tongue over foreign bumps and ridges. Her father never learns Japanese past “good morning/noon/night and bathroom” Naomi grows up steeped in both, and at the dinner table, when her mother blanks, her father will look at her expectantly. She will spend her life bridging that gap. Naomi’s father tells her that her name is biblical Her mother tells her it means beautiful She asks you what your name means, “Nothing”  “What about your last one?”  “Dirt” you answer honestly Your family leaves later that month, and she’s still there three years later when you return. BASE (title

//Mid-November in the high 60’s. The last arms of a typhoon whip against the smoothing concrete grain of the quadplex. Aster is gone and the wound is still fresh, clean down to the bone. It's something Carnation can sew back together with a sterile hooked needle. She stays together. In that late after they go to bed. In that space between where you can feel your body teetering on that cliff of consciousness. She falls backwards with headlight eyes when someone climbs in with her. Aster’s faux pearl bracelet clacks as it pings off the corner of the bed frame. The ceiling spins as she turns on her side to look into her sister’s eyes, to ask for a hug, comfort, anything safe and away from the world. There's a raw feeling in her gut when Basil stares back at her in the dark, unashamed of his wet face, and says nothing. Carnation folds her arms over him [[and says nothing.|The Schedule]]//

//1:30, The O-4's voice quiets. 1:33, Aster’s crooked footsteps. She pauses halfway, exhales like a great coal engine, lets herself spin before dropping on all fours. 1:34, It takes her locomotive body the full minute to heave up the staircase. 1:35, Another just to open the door. 1:37, She crumples into Carnation’s bed. ==> 1:38, Something distant gurgles <== 1:39, Carnation manages to help Aster up. 1:43, Aster lays on her side. Breathing just a bit softer. ==> 1:44, Something distant sputters back to life. Something distant rumbles. <== 1:44, Aster sputters. Rumbles. =><= 1:45, Blinks away the salt. <== 1:46, Aster says she’s sorry. She’s so heavy. 1:47, She’s so so sorry. 1:48, Carnation leaves the room. =><= 1:49, Turns her attention on with predator’s eyes. ==> 1:50, She crawls out of the gulf of California. 4:50, Marches for miles ravenous, lost. 9:50, Crosses into Arizona, knocks over the bones of a long dead saguaro peppered with holes the size of dimes. 15:00, She doesn’t even make it to the Gila, and when she falls the government leaves her body there, just north of Why. <== 16:00, Aster wakes up. [[Drags another heavy mark down the edge of her calendar.]]//

This is what you know about Aster Kindle. [[Tuesday, September 3, 2013, 00:00]]

//Every senior in her class counts down their days, highlighter dashes, the oddball scribble. Aster's pen is red ink with a well, a gift from her father, for following Instructions. She's become their valedictorian, their leader, given them the same gift that Aster's father gave to her. She fiddles with her faux [[pearl bracelet.]] Feels its gravity. Sits on her bed and packs her schoolbooks into her bag. A cranium sized chunk of hail smashes a crater in their front lawn outside her window. It rests among thousands of smaller pieces, molar-sized, to be wiped away by tomorrow's heat wave.//

Basil clings. It's not a loud action, but he's not a loud person. Suffocatingly sweet. On those dark days while he leads her, Carnation thinks to herself that he never should have been born. Someone so kind. A creature without claws or thorns or even a scowl. The [[pearl bracelet,]] he hides it under long sleeves. Even though the weather is hot.

Connects to PFC Beck (he tries to bring Carnation into the lead after Aster's Circumstansial death) Aster spent her life trying to control, Succeeding, but was killed by something completely out of her grasp. Aster is connected to those cosmic bits loosely untill they come to kill her.

(text-color: grey)[//Carnation Kindle is a middle child, a second sister, of all things. So like all middle children, knows how little her role matters. She looks to Basil, but thinks of Aster down below. Carnation marches him up the stairs towards bath-time, out of the grey pall of the living room. To the above where the air remains clear for the next three hours, all three of them spent settling him down. She doesn’t read to him anymore by the O-4’s request. Basil’s fairy tales wait for him in an unlabeled box under his bed, behind the football he stuffed in front like a shield, sheets sweeping low over both like a veil over the eyes of the world. Voices tangle up from the living room through the vents, filtering the soot from their voices and muffling the details. Occasionally the O4’s sputters darker. Aster murmurs a light question that Carnation can’t quite discern through the bars. There’s a pause. Aster brings her leg up in the opposing armchair, she rests the half full glass one her knee. If Carnation had still been downstairs she would have grabbed for it, although Aster never spills her drink. It sways with her, like it was made for her to hold. The O-4 and her sit opposed, content in their own way. Aster has gone on for a while now, something about school, about the plan after- A low rumble ascends the hollow vent, raising the hairs on Carnation’s neck. She strains, but the metal won't carry it to her. Years later she will wish she hadn't been such a coward, hiding upstairs. Unable to study what was said that calmed him. Basil runs into the room and jumps on the bed in Carnation’s fuzzy polka dot socks. Carnation unsticks her ear from the echo of her fate, closes the door behind him, tucks him into the ocean of his bed lined with cartoon fish. She won’t read him his fairy tales, but she does stare at the fish, the pot on his windowsill with a tiny purple bud beginning to sprout, looks back to Basil. She thinks of Aster down below and asks him what he wants to be. He responds in that little voice, always beyond her. with a smile, reaches under his bed- [[“Don’t you mean where?”]]//]

Carnation's folder is smooth, yellow. She lifts it. Holds her breath. Bites her tongue. (set: $aster to 1) >[[Take schedule.|The Schedule]]

Carnation doesn’t put stock into things. She learns, in her life, it’s not her game to play. She is a Diplomat, her job is to say yes, of course, how can I help, what can I do to make things better for you Sir? For you Officer? For you General? It’s to follow her supervisor’s plan, to pick up her yellow folder at the Academy every morning, a schedule to keep. In times like these, who's there to quell the riots but diplomats like her? Who will speak in The Other’s tongue to calm them, everything’s fine, our Government has a plan for you. She’ll say this. Then return, hide, cower, surrender, behind the barbed wire fence. Behind the masked, armored guards, who don’t speak because they don’t know how. Who’s tongues are comfortable in their own guttural language, who refuse to learn the agglutinative tap of the Others. The language that Carnation threw herself into under the pretense of its beauty, into the shade of its canopy. [[Her words will always better then the alternative.|The Schedule]]

//The day Aster learned was soft in her mind, baseball on a hot day. The O-4 in his late twenties with white sinking into his hair. her hands are too small, and he throws too fast and she’s telling him to throw underhand, underhand dad under- The force of it hitting her face, near her eye, knocks her down backwards into the grass. Scares her, scares him. He apologizes. Takes a look at her eye. Tells her it’s gonna turn some interesting colors. Picks her up, dusts her off, hands her the ball, starting back across the yard. She's still crying-- the O-4 Panics, gives her an Instruction to throw it back at his face. As hard as she can. It’s ok, you can hit me back. She screams, and to her father’s horror, [[refuses]]. //

//X-ray slivers of bone scraped on computer paper, the print is evidence the way the fracture tells a story he forgot, caught too far up in the limbo of oblivion. Eyebrows furrowed, he mentions the front door that wasn't there in the photos from the war press, his words pass over the crack in his bones, the crackle of his skin. He remembers two children. A girl dragging her younger brother behind her. He mentions it only once, lungs dark, murmuring in his brand of conspiracy, about the urgency in which she pulled. He triangulates them in his memory, tries to calculate their fates. Aster sees too, understands the nature that draws him towards empathetic parallels. It’s the part that forces him to the ground, close enough to count every rock in the foreign sands. It’s the part that forgives because he’s analyzed this too, the privilege that dead men do not get. It’s the part that punctures the white guiding light of his Culture and bleeds grey across its moral boundaries. It’s the part that she inherits. The O-4 falls asleep the way he does most nights. slumped in his chair in the living room. Aster closes the blinds before she stumbles to bed. [[This is how it was.->The Schedule]]//

//2:30, The O4 looks at Carnation, a deep, achromatic cloud escapes his mouth, she takes another drink. 2:31, He says, “Leave it.” 2:34, He’s not talking about the bottle, she realizes. He sinks under, fishlike. 2:45, She runs as [[he drifts off.|Flood]]//

//At the end of Junior year he hands Aster the faux pearl bracelet, one gift for another, drops out and goes to [[bootcamp.|Poison]]//

[[They don't last long.|The Schedule]]

//Basil had stolen it from Aster before. She used to wear it to bed on the nights when she couldn't lock it up. He'd come in late. When all the black smoke had drifted to the ceiling and her snores were half smothered by the pillow. Her arm hung off the edge of the bed, [[it was easy enough to slip it off.]] //

And in someother timeline. Maybe one where her sister had lived, she would have gone through with [[the plan.|The Schedule]] (set: $aster to 0)

(text-color: white+grey)[Years later the pearl bracelet is still [[hungry.]] ]

(text-color: white)[But she’s taken it away from its context, from its creation in PFC Beck's basement turned lab turned origin of a stillborn revolution, years away from its completion. Basil sits in the last great hall of learning. Her work will, eventually, unravel the plagues and their ties to honor culture. She will find a way to break the yearly plague cycles, once thought to have been imposed by an angry god, which will lead to a rebellion, then a coup. She will live, and eventually, die under the new government that unfolds under her watch. She will be the last Kindle to depart, and the only one who survives their time on the island. But for now, Basil continues her letter to Carnation in short sleeves. The pearls clack against the wood of the library desk. Outside, the wildfires burn the tangle of poppy flowers that sprouted the day before. She looks across the ocean, to where west turns into east. "I've noticed something strange about the plants this cycle." She taps black painted nails against the surface, once, twice. Finishes her last paragraph. "Pyrophiles! What quick thinking they have. To just work with the fire. Couldn't we have learned a thing or two from them growing up?" She lights a small candle for Carnation, and uses it to burn the letter. The smoke is grey, and sticks briefly to the back of Basil Kindle’s throat. ] [[END|The Schedule]] (set: $aster to 1)

Sunday, 12:34 She cannot think about what she wants to be, Carnation decides, tangled in the midday forest. She guides a clean black mark across a line of her notebook, the beginning of her Statement erased in the dark. Left to right, down and out, over her orders, writes the symbol for it down in their language, then spells it out in romanjii. She looks it up in Theirs, in Ours, finds meaning in the roots. [[Mori|Mori]] She knows it will fit. Affix itself to her fate someday.

森 [Romanjii: mori] 1. (n) forest From 木 [Romanjii: Ki] A single tree. The first one to grow, its topmost branch the first line to dry, the least likely to smudge. Carnation draws the second tree, places her trunk under the first. For the third, she takes out her purple pen, steadies her hand, and traces the last one out carefully. The ink sparkles, pearlescent. Nearly alive. If a tree is lucky, it will find a place in the deep soil, survive the first bits of rain that threaten to drown it. If it’s lucky it will have fallen in a patch of light between the rest of the plants racing to the top of the canopy. If it’s lucky it won’t fall to hungry beetles, disease, fires, and other random acts of god. If it’s lucky, one of its thousands of seeds will fall into their own patch of sunlight. If it’s lucky, one will find its way into the belly of the wild boar, and be carried to richer soil and brighter sunlight. Three trees make a forest. Three children make a family. Carnation tears the paper, ripping the top half off. She takes the first tree, folds it as small as it will go, and swallows the paper. Carnation switches books, east to west, and finds it in the [[roots.|roots]]

Mori 1. (v) To die. The Forest rests its lungs around her. If she sat here for a thousand years, she could watch the ocean air crawl into the island’s limestone innards. It would pry open the history of this place, //unclench the soil curled around the million fragments of civilian bones before they fall into the water with the rest of the shells, calcium, and rust. The sunburst plane resting to the southeast shore quietly sets. Their pilot’s remains, a murderer of sixty six men and one boy, are gone now. North of here, his surviving family in the mainland have a black and white picture of him. He’s an honorable seventeen, smiling at the camera and holding a Tosa puppy, the day before he drove his plane into Our destroyer. Carnation breathes it in. Clenches her fingers over the roots of the banyan. Wonders, and wanders. Away from reality into the danger of the realm of possibility Aster once stalked the edges of. She sees Basil there, a little older, freshly uniformed. Watches a red flower bloom and melt the skin off his face, sees his teeth blacken. Watches that water roll in with the vines wrapping around the last of the rusting ammunition cans, bleeding red back into the wet rock under their bones and washing the sacred war out to sea. And her with it.// A drop lands on a small purple sprout in her periphery. It glitters in it’s one dot of light on the forest floor. Again she thinks of Basil. //His face wreathed with the color of his soul. Purple, the royal dye.// Thinks of his “where”. [[Thinks of a bright spot absentmindedly smothered.|Schedule]]

Carnation's father doesn’t give Instructions anymore. The O-4 is too busy entangled by his routine, [[his silence|these days.]]. He will not notice her absence for one evening, nor the soft stumble of her socks against the floor as she sneaks back in the morning.

↶

↷

Sunday, 12:34
She cannot think about what she wants to be, Carnation decides, tangled in the midday forest. She guides a clean black mark across a line of her notebook, the beginning of her Statement erased in the dark. Left to right, down and out, over her orders, writes the symbol for it down in their language, then spells it out in romanjii. She looks it up in Theirs, in Ours, finds meaning in the roots.

Mori

She knows it will fit. Affix itself to her fate someday.