The rainy season signals the return of the Daisies. A homecoming as deep-rooted and scarred as the colony itself.
I help the other girls decorate. Dried flowers are tied to scraps of wire and hung on the walls of bunkers and dim, steel-built tunnels. The potpourri scents are ghosts of the blossoms they once were. Food is set out in rare abundance. There are berries with purple juice that stains the lips and fingers, many-eyed potatoes, sunchokes, leafy endive, and more. Most aren’t native varieties but were carried as seeds from beyond the stars. Our crops have limited yields, struggling to thrive in this land where the frontiers yet kill no matter the countless times they’ve been sowed and reaped.
As we work, I remember the gentle curve of my mother’s chin, the hardy wildness of her voice. How even when fear and worry pools in her eyes, the light shines through.
Preparations finish and colonists gather at the airlock. The girls-of-age stand slightly apart. I join them, hoping I look as though I belong, gripping my fingers until they turn shades of thin white fibrils. I don’t know what else I should do with them, and the more I consider it, the more I fidget. The pressures of expectation, of duty, of honor, cut into petal-soft faces. Our colony has always boasted more girls than boys. It’s an imbalance, but in school I learned nature has a way of correcting these things. Perhaps Daisies are an answer evolved for survival.
I stand among the girls old enough to leave. Season after season, my mother has made the choice anew: brushing my brow with a kiss, then squaring her shoulders before departing to explore the hostile frontier each new generation inherits. I understand why she can’t stay. But not why I shouldn’t join her.
Machinery whirls. My mother’s easy to spot. My heart stirs when I see her among the bouquet of Daisies stepping through the old airlock. They look dewy, misted by the decontamination sprayers. Though they’re fewer than when they first set out.
With the arrival of our guests, the Festival of Roots officially begins. Its joys and splendor will last but a single night.
When my mother sees me, a smile blooms across her face, radiant, faltering only when she notices where I stand. But then she holds me tight, and I hope she can’t feel my fluttering heartbeat. It betrays my fear of this fresh cut between us. Her scent is of raindrops and the wither of dead leaves.
We don’t speak. If we did, what could be said that’s not already known? It’s enough that she’s survived and returned once again. That she’s unwilted.
I asked once, how long Daisies were expected, on average, to live. My mother said the lifespan of any person is but a single flower’s blush and fade. As each year passes, a petal slips free, falling. But as I get older, I realize some choices mean fewer and fewer petals.
Already, I see the effects of the oxygen that circulates through the vents, invisible to me, but deadly for her kind. She’s trying to mask the pain, but I see her tell-tale flinch and the tears watering from her eyes as though she faces the first chill of a November wind. The festival is one night. Any longer in this air, and a Daisy will surely die.
My mother lets me go and drops her heavy travel pack.
The Daisies have brought gifts: their collection like seeds of hope. They’ve searched for new crops growing outside with nutrients we desperately need, and hopefully, the plants will flourish within greater doses of oxygen. Cloves of bulbs, tubers, edible herbs, dry seed pods, taproots, and others with names and leaves I don’t know yet but with time, will learn and memorize. Resources to provide variety and to cultivate the enriched soils of the greenhouse bunker. Taken from the edges of the deepest lakes, the swamp soils, the riverine.
I can’t even picture what such vast open places look like. I’ve never been outside, never seen beyond the limited viewing ports, for as high-levels of oxygen are deadly to the Daisies, there’s also a dangerous amount of sulfate found swirling outside.
The oldest Daisy struggles to free her pack. She’s thirty-four, veined and gray. She’ll likely not depart at dawn with the other Daisies, but choose instead to wilt in the arms of who she loves most.
A Daisy’s last breath frees the grafted fungus in her lungs. A local variety capable of symbiosis. If swallowed whole by another girl, it will grant her the ability to breathe the outdoor air. If only it didn’t feed off her vitality too, pulling petals free in tuffs.
I hold my mother’s hand. Our hands tell the truest stories to each other. Her grip is familiar, yet I feel a tension there I’ve never noticed before. A storm within, quietly raging beneath a clouded expression. I already know what she would say: to not make this choice, especially if it’s for her sake. And I worry if I make it anyway, if I don’t back down and risk myself, she may never forgive me. She always said she became a Daisy so I wouldn’t have to.
But why is it her choice to make, and not mine?
My mother looks back at me with those eyes that say so much in one brief glance. The night wanes, the food and the revelry filling the emptiness, trying to make us forget that with the dawn, the Festival of Roots will end.
And with the dawn, the airlock will open again.
To grow up is a division similar to cutting plants at their crown, separating roots and stems, nurturing future growth. I match my breaths to my mother’s and squeeze her hand. With each passing moment, I imagine I see petals raining down, collecting at our feet.
About the author:
Anna Madden’s fiction has appeared in Hexagon, Orion’s Belt, PseudoPod, and elsewhere. In free time she makes birch forests out of stained glass.
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