cycles – The Word Worker

No one would ever have known it was there, in that tiny retreat from the bustle and concrete tucked in a cluster of apartments. No one remembered that before the garden, before the apartments, before the city, it was there. The city rose around it from apocalyptic waste, slowly but determinedly reclaiming the destruction.

Once walls had surrounded the artifact, high impenetrable walls guarded by marines armed and armored with the pinnacle of military technology. Then budgets and memories failed. First guards then walls disappeared, redirected to new pursuits and construction as civilization marched onward to cover the past. Still it remained, an unimposing but immoveable relic of forgotten death.

Eventually the city overtook it, and a developer born into Upper End luxury fancied it to be an old broken fountain. It became the centerpiece of nostalgia, a hodge-podge tribute to the geometric tranquility of the ancient English garden incongruous between siding and palmettos of The Southern Age as discovered by archaeologists. Birds and lovers alike twittered about its intricately molded layers and cooling sprays, pretending to know of times far before memory.

Until the day the topmost fountain ground to life and the birds flew away. Iron screamed against iron and gears long unused turned layer after layer, settling each within the other until all rested in the base with a click. And they came to repeat history, the hordes of destruction, pouring from the lock to scour the Earth clean for another beginning.

She stretched her nearly thawed wings to brush the trees on either side. How much fun dancing among the branches had been, their bare bones crackling beneath the ice of her feathers. How delighted she had been by the cooling that had silenced the world and dressed her in crystal lace. The touch of her dancing feet had adorned every surface with a shining imitation of her, and the flakes that fell from her fluttering wings left white drifts into which she plunged again and again in gleeful abandon.

How strange when warmth began to creep upon her, first little more than an odd spark within her belly but quickly growing to melt her lacy garment thread by thread. The warm drops that fell from her exploded with color where they landed, transforming her playground into an artist’s palette. Silence slowly filled with song and chatter. The wind that had played with her became drunk on her increasing warmth and ripped the melting ice from her wings to fling it to the ground where it sprouted green in soggy puddles.

Soon enough she understood. The warmth had tired her, left her sitting or walking quietly among the blossoms, until her body could no longer contain it. Her child, this flame that had transformed her, hovered near her with the uncertainty of infancy. Wings still unformed, she blinked at the world from the familiarity of her mother’s palms. Her mother fed the last of her strength into the child, who sprouted wings of flame and hurtled skyward with all the enthusiasm of youth. Her fire would grow until the world reflected it’s brilliance, then cool in the last fling of youth before the birth of her own spring.