Children of the Blue Flower
(first published in the Waterhouse Review in October 2010)
by Patsy Collins
The food
and water are all gone now. It is time to leave my hiding place. I am
alive. After what has happened, I am alive. That’s all I know, I
don’t know the time or the day or the month. I think it must be
February. I know the year, 2037. That’s two things I know, I must
learn more. As I climb the steep steps of the cellar stairs and return
to the house, I am surprised by the warmth. It’s warmer than
spring, as warm as August. No nuclear winter then. Perhaps the heating
is on, perhaps it still works. I had not expected power. There can be
no power. I am right. The lights don’t work. I check the fuse.
Nothing. The warmth is coming from outside.
The air is dry and silent and dusty. The wind moves
the dust. There is a moisture-free smog of dust hanging; constantly
moved into new patterns by the strong wind. I’d call the wind
howling, were it not silent. The swirls of dust remind me of the clouds
of locusts that were shown on the news.
“A plague will come. Mankind will destroy the plague and himself,” The Leader had warned.
The locusts ate through Africa and the Americas and
on into the warmer parts of Europe. Then we heard no more. They
didn’t stop, not then, but the news was all of another disaster.
The power plants were no longer within The Company’s control. The
reactors were now beyond supercritical. There was no way of cooling
them. They would melt, radiation would leak then they, and we, would be
no more. The only safety would be underground. Details of how to find a
place in the shelters would follow. No one cared about locusts after
that. Very few stopped to wonder how the shelters had been built, or
when, or why.
I look to the horizon. The dancing lights have gone
now. The eruptions of orange and pink that lit the sky are there no
more. The beautiful deadly sign has faded, ended, gone. I look up. The
sky is a mottled, muddied blue. The sun a huge circle of lime green. I
am sick; vomit splashes my feet. The sun cannot be green, I won’t
look up again. The sun cannot be green.
I look at the garden. That too is wrong. The
snowdrops had not been showing through the cold earth when my family
left, when I shut myself alone into the cellar and pulled the
protective shielding over the door. The snowdrops are in flower now. So
yes, it’s February. I try not to notice the nodding bells are
cornflower blue. The leaves that last year were barely glaucous are
this year a rich, vibrant, turquoise.
I am a Child of the Blue Flower; trained to
appreciate the natural world, to care for the creatures and protect the
plants. Our Leader had known what was to come. He had warned; few had
listened.
“You who are left will be innocent as
children. You will see the blue flowers and know I spoke the truth. You
will know how to create the future.”
I turn to the golden ivy. Once it had lightened the
gloom with a cheerful sunshine yellow, it still echoes the sun’s
colour. The colour it cannot be. The holly, once smart with a frosting
of white variegation, is now neatly outlined in powder blue. I return
to the safety of the house. I don’t want to see any more.
There is food in the house. There are plenty of tins
and bottles and jars. There are bags of rice and pasta. In the cool of
the garage, there are potatoes, carrots, onions, apples and oranges. My
mother had sworn I’d be dead by now. She had left me a supply of
food. I won’t look at the green sun. Mother would not think of me
not needing the food. I try the tap, water flows. It looks clean, safe.
Will it be all right to drink, or contaminated? No more contaminated
than the air I suppose. I breathe the air; I can drink the water. There
is camping gas and a burner in the garage. Five cylinders of gas. Dad
said I was a fool to stay. No one could live when the power plants
failed. No one could live, yet he bought me spare gas.
I am alive; I know what I must do. I must fulfil the
promises we Children made. My task is to follow our Leader’s
teachings, to meet with the others, to begin again. I see the leaflets
stacked for distribution. We were too late, much too late. Less than a
tenth were ever delivered, and how many read? I look at the blue flower
that had been our emblem, our sign. I recall the words I helped write.
They warn of this, the collapse of the power stations, the changing of
the world. Some of the members had been alarmed long ago. The
world’s power supplied by one company, The Company, had scared
many. Most had been worried about possible high prices, not the end of
the world. The Leader, our great teacher had known.
I’d been introduced as one of The Children by
Danny. I had tried to persuade my family to listen to the prophecies.
They called us a foolish cult and banned me from meeting him. What do I
have now? I am a child indeed. I must follow the teachings of The
Leader.
The government told us the electricity stations were
safe and they built the bunkers. Great underground concrete caves had
been prepared. They had known, as The Leader did, of the disaster. They
hadn’t wanted to prevent it. They had wanted to survive it. They
had wanted to triumph. Now no single company provides the power. The
government has its own ways of supplying it, deep in the earth. They
control the supply, they are the power now. The only power.
“Man will shut himself away from the light and
the truth. He will be in darkness for one hundred years,” The
Leader had foretold.
Whole cities are now entombed together. My family
too. The Leader had known the future. He had tried to explain. Those
who listened; believed. We became as his children. The Children of the
Blue Flower. He could not prevent the power plants imploding, but he
warned of the imprisonment of man. He warned of the changes to our
world. His children did not want to be buried alive for four
generations. We wanted to live on the surface, to breath fresh air, to
see the sun or to die.
Why had he not told me the sun would be green?
I must find the prophecies; then I will know all of
the truth. Danny has the scripts. He had allowed me to read some of
them when I was with him. Perhaps he would have allowed me to continue
after we were parted. I had not asked. I will go to him now and ask.
Things are different now.
I pack food into a rucksack and take my
brother’s bicycle from the garage. It will take an hour to ride
through the city, to Danny’s house. It will take an hour if I
pedal hard and if there are still seconds and minutes and hours.
I find Danny’s house. He is not here, but I
see that he was. On the table is a vase of flowers. Blue flowers, of
course. I remember the argument in our sect about our sign. Some said
the flowers should be blue, should always be blue. Others said they
should be as far from blue as possible. As the colours returned, we
should select the darkest and the lightest to mark the change. I
can’t remember which was Danny’s choice. I look at the
flowers. There is no way to tell. They are blue. I haven’t left
flowers at home. I should have done so. I will leave some here, when I
have found the scripts.
In Danny’s bedroom, I find photocopied piles
of prophecies. ‘For the Children’ a note says. I take a
copy and pack it into my bag. I look in the kitchen, there is no food.
I leave what I have brought with me. I pick more flowers and leave the
vase next to those that Danny picked. I go home.
I read the prophecies and begin to understand.
“Man’s greed and inhumanity will be his
destruction and his salvation. The sky will fall in. The poison will be
driven away.”
The ozone had contracted with the implosion of the
power plants. The blue of the distant atmosphere had descended. The
pollution had been dragged by the escaping radiation away and above.
The sun is still golden. I am viewing it through layers of dust and
ozone and pollution.
The sun is not green.
I feel well and strong because the oxygen is now
concentrated in a layer close to the earth’s crust. The earth has
altered in its orbit now. The warmth is proof that the equator and so
the seasons, have shifted.
“Changes will come. The north will move south. A silent wind will warm the land.”
The Leader had known so much. He had known that
mankind would almost destroy himself. He knew that governments would
declare there was no safety. They had taken people below to teach them
how to live together. They were beginning again so that when their
great grandchildren emerged into the light they would inherit peace.
They would live in a simpler world, that they would treasure and
protect, not destroy. The Leader had begun to teach us. He wanted us to
think for ourselves, to do what we should because it was right, not
because it was all we now knew.
“You must learn the way of love and peace. I will teach and you must learn.”
The Leader and The Children of the Blue Flower could
not teach the people. We could not be heard above the rumours, the
fear. When the dancing lights lit up the sky, our families had gone
underground. The Children made promises to the people. We shall seek
out and care for any who were left behind. We will release pets. We
will protect homes. The earth will not wither and die. It will become
clean and safe. The great grandchildren of those below ground shall
emerge and share the new earth with the descendants of The Children of
the Blue Flower.
I begin my tasks. I cycle through the warm wind from
house to house. I carry food on my back in case I meet those in need. I
do not meet anyone. In each house I tidy and clean. I eat what food I
need, take more for my journey. That is all I take. I find no creatures
to care for. There are no animals and no birds either wild or domestic.
I find only empty cages and empty fields and woods. There are some fish
in tanks. I take these to streams and release them. I don’t know
if they will live. I hear no sounds save the clicking of the spokes on
my wheels and the running of water. There are no birds to sing. There
are few leaves on the trees. Those few there are, do not rustle in the
warm breeze. There are no locusts. There are no people, no voices.
“You will be alone, but you are my Children.”
At each house, I find a vase or glass and fill it
with water. I pick flowers, the bluest I can find and I set them where
a visitor would be sure to see them. The flowers begin to change. I
leave chartreuse daffodils, then navy tulips. Summer brings the blue
roses. Once so sought after, now the only option. The spires of
delphiniums at least look right. They are the brightest, richest blue I
have ever seen. Autumn brings dahlias and chrysanthemums; do I imagine
the blue is a little less true? They seem muddier, as though another
colour tries to break through. The winter comes, there are few flowers,
but more in this warmth than there would have been in previous years. I
pick snowdrops again. Maybe they are a little paler now. Maybe I just
want them to be.
For more than a year I have travelled. Occasionally
I find a vase of decaying flowers and know that I am not entirely
alone. Once in the summer the flowers were barely wilted. I thought I
might meet Danny. Still I am alone. I am tired. I’m going home.
I enter the house and see the vase I had left. The
same vase; but not the same flowers. These are still fresh. I look
closer. There are primroses of palest moss green, there are hellebores,
with the faintest rim of muddy maroon. There are tulips, just showing
colour. Colour that is not green. I look closer still and see drops of
dew still clinging to the newly picked buds.
I listen, and hear Danny call my name.
The End
