amaranth

2/11/22 - a short, high concept blurb I started working on for ASAM173, but I think I’m going to try to turn this story into a bitsy game!

At the end of time, there are flowers: hyacinths, jasmine blossoms, star of bethlehem clusters, trails of lotus petals floating in acid-green water. Here, when there is only one eye to acknowledge their beauty, the flora has grown untamable and wild—lacing the edge of every surface and washing the landscape in discordant colors. At the last garden, things like seasonality, location, death were foreign concepts to these flowers; they were born for eternity.

Every morning, when the sun begins its treacherous journey from the horizon and its hot rays rasp the ground like scythe to stone, the skulls in the distance glow an unholy white. May has a ritual; she takes a marker, stands in the same spot, and from inside the glass dome, she circles all the skulls she can see. Maps out their trajectory. She pretends to see stories in their distance from one another: which of her brothers was the one furthest away? Had he loved May’s great-niece the same way their father loved them? What about his great-great-great niece, that skull nestled in dry brambles, would his love for her be diluted, water in blood? Look, her favorite skull, the one with its jaw open wide enough for mushrooms to have stuffed it whole, could that be her grandmother or grand-nephew? 

From then, May’s day rarely changes. She turns from the edge of the garden’s dome and ventures back into the wild. She brushes away vines, picks figs and apples, guzzles nectar down her throat. Sap sticks to her finger tips and at the corners of her mouth. There is small lake in the garden’s center, and May plunges in, first toes, followed by feet, crawling up to her thigh and waist and shoulders until she submerges herself wholly. The water is algae-green. Her father had called it Lazarus.

The outside world around her is half scorched desert, half decaying forest. Her father’s work was not clean; it spilled out to the world around them. In the scraped landscape, May can trace his thought process: what would splicing this gene do? How about changing the calculus here? This patchwork of climates and DNA culminated in his magnum opus: the Last Garden.

Immortality was her father’s greatest work. His second best was May. Now, at the end of time, there is only the two of them left.