By Kevin J. Phyland
The thought came unbidden into Coulson's head: Dance like nobody's watching!
It sounded like something his grandmother would have said, but wherever it came from it had been taken to heart by the group of dancers in front of him. Whirling like demented dervishes, they circled around the large plexiglass case at the summit of the hill. Dressed in white leggings and embroidered tunics with bells sewn into the hems and wreathed with garlands of plastic flowers, they disported themselves with embarrassing abandon.
The sun was still just below the horizon but would make its appearance for the summer solstice shortly. The local mayor, a woman with the unlikely name of Teegarden, sidled up to Coulson.
“Magnificent day for the festival isn't it, Mr. Coulson?” she said.
Coulson nodded. The Solstice Festival had been held here or somewhere near here for countless years. It was an opportunity for local hippies and bored middle-class eccentrics to prance about and usher in the change of seasons. This year the big drawcard was that they had an actual tree to dance around.
“What sort of tree is it, Warden?” Teegarden inquired.
As the regional plant warden Coulson was the expert on the botanic aspects of the festival.
“It's a Taxus baccata. A yew tree. English longbows were sometimes made from its wood.”
Mayor Teegarden looked momentarily puzzled. “I thought they were quite a large tree?” It was more a query than a challenge.
“Ms. Teegarden, the tree you see in that protective case is about three years old and as you can see from the sign in front, it is the last tree in the whole country. We made an exhaustive search.”
She shook her head. “It's such a shame.” Coulson nodded agreement.
“It was inevitable,” he said, “that plant life would suffer from the sulfides in the air after the Big Shudder, but we managed to save a few seeds from the ruined Arctic seed banks.”
The Big Shudder, the rather prosaic moniker for the global tectonic and vulcanological event of two decades earlier, had ambiguous causes. Some said fracking, others that it was simply a long overdue event in the life of a terrestrial planet. Whatever the cause it had been devastating for forests. Surprisingly fungi were barely affected.
She smiled and congratulated Coulson as if he personally had rescued the trees from a burning building. Only Coulson knew the bitter truth.
At sunset the festival closed and Coulson oversaw the tenting, packing and transport of the tree back to the Botanical section of Reinvigilance, the company he worked for.
The locals had been ecstatic to have had the tree there, if only for a day, and the promise of another one in a few years time had made the mayor's day.
Back at the company compound, Coulson closed the hermetically sealed doors of the ready room, entered the plexiglass case and started dismantling the tree. It was artificial of course. The last real tree had died about a dozen years ago and had been far too valuable to truck around for the plebs to gawk at even then.
The attempts at reinvigorating the plant life continued but so far the atmosphere had not cleared enough after the global vulcanism of the Big Shudder.
Coulson had plans for a symbolic new tree for future festivals. A birch.
Historically a tree of hope. And just maybe he could whip up a few flowers as well.
About the Author
Kevin J. Phyland
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Retired now from teaching he amuses himself by reading, writing, following his love of weather and correcting people on the internet.
He’s been writing since his teens and hopes he will one day get it right.
He can be found on twitter @KevinPhyland where he goes by the handle of CaptainZero and his work is around the place if you search using google or use the antisf.com.au archive.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Ed lives with his wife plus a magical assortment of native animals in tropical North Queensland.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Tim Borella is an Australian author, mainly of short speculative fiction published in anthologies, online and in podcasts.
Diana writes speculative fiction about weird people doing weird things.
Leon D Furze moved to Australia in 2009 and now lives on a farm in Western Victoria with his wife and three children.
Jon Michael Kelley is an internationally published author and novelist of literary speculative fiction.
Lynne Lumsden Green lives in Queensland, Australia, though – in reality – she lives inside her head (it’s cosy in there). She writes both fiction and nonfiction.
Col Hellmuth lives a quiet, uncomplicated life, off-grid in the Daintree rainforest of Far North Queensland.
PS Cottier is a poet who lives in Canberra, with a particular interest in speculative poetry.