The Progress of Was
By Trager Watson, East Sierra Branch
The flower smiled with a brimming grin to the sun. Perhaps, it would rain today, and the humans would not come to play in the meadow of life. She the sunflower: yellow, bright, vibrant, wind tested, storm armored. She hid from the winter, the way an ostrich burrows its head from danger or a child hides under covers from the nightmare ghost.
The summer, though, was her ecstasy and rebirth for eternity. She was the flower among the kid’s playground of trampled grass. A thousand years or more she had lived, rebirth on Earth, because she was so kind.
Then the human ants multiplied and advanced with museums and books, the victories of the past. The blacksmith gone. The robot welcomed. Progress was in the air. Buildings everywhere; tall, short and the go between; houses of brick and stone. They put a man on the moon, dug ditches in ocean lands for diamonds set for wedding bands and had flying cars racing the bees, tunnel tubes next to the roots of trees…. progress everywhere. They evolved. Science brought nuclear weapons that were only twice used or more, counting practice rounds. Humans never self-detonate, only progress, never regress.
Animals were cloned, then humans: the lost sister who left a hair. How can one argue that? Towers produced food when land was scarce. Water was pulled from the sea and a lone dolphin was placed on a gold shiny dinner plate. Progress leaped. Everything could be cloned now in an aquarium or a fake salt sea. World hunger was a chapter in history books.
She could smell it, if petals could smell, but who really knows all the sensory and feelings a plant inhales. If a flower shivers in the summer, does she just need worms for socks or has an invisible curse crept into her roots of living.
The flower frowned and questioned. How could everything so perfect be so wrong? She watched the computerized brains – robots or humans all the same – with chips for memories placed in human flesh. Long gone, the drums of natives, now, replaced…progressively so…from the radio to the television to the mobile talk finger and the computerized brain.
The man had leaped to other earths, but they all became the same. Each one had rivers run dry and air that required an oversized helmet and oxygen tank. Soon the flower could not see the man, only moons and the blinking sun. But the intelligent human had telescopes to look back and see the results of his….progress?…thousands of years of progress… from two sticks of wood making flames for lovers under mammoth fur to new planets yet to be undressed into raw nakedness.
The man peered through his spacecraft window to his birthplace and watched Mother Earth say goodbye to the last flower. Her time had come. Their time had become. She, the sunflower, once the glowing creation of the sun and earth, slowly wilted, weakened, and fell into a fossil in stone. Earth now had a new name, a common one used for many man-made old homes. Just call it – another Moon.