Free World by Aelius Blythe

 
     
    NOTE
     
    This is our home.
    The beauty of the natural world, leaves of
grass, blue skies, open plains – we have always waxed on about this Nature.
    What about our Nature?
    A useful tool or a beast that needs to be
controlled, technology – just as much a fixture of the environment
for those grown up digital, as the grass, and the skies and the
open plains – misses the poetic raptures given to the skies and the
natural world under them.
    But the sky is above us.
    We are in the world too.
    And this, this is our Nature. More
than a tool, more than a beast, this is our natural world.
    In the woods, a grizzly lurks behind a
blooming blackberry bush. A deadly snake ripples through a peaceful
marsh. Sunshine fades before a freezing rain. And helpless
isolation sits just this side of serenity and solitude.
    Here, too.
    Grizzlies haunt our world. Snakes hide on
the trails. Rainy nights freeze travelers. Crushing isolation
leaves its scars.
    But there is sunshine, too. Sunshine, and
serenity and solitude and peaceful places. The berry bushes bloom
here, too.
    Here are the windows that look onto distant
corners of the earth. Here are the shelves of infinite libraries.
Here is the hive mind, the lone voice, the compulsive intellect,
the wildly creative.
    This is our home.
    Dangerous. Miserable. Deceitful.
    Beautiful.
    It is our Nature.
     
    Once buffalo roamed the plains.
    Under the open skies, over the endless
grasses and the crystal clear sunlight, buffalo roamed. The plains
were lonely. Expanses, vast and empty, hostile and alien, stretched
underfoot. Dangerous. Miserable. Deceptive.
    Beautiful.
    And the buffalo, too. The buffalo were
dangerous. Heavy herds, tramping and wild, stretched over the
plains. Dangerous. Menacing. Volatile.
    Beautiful.
    Gone.
     
    This is our home. These are our plains. We
are the buffalo. Dangerous. Lonely. Deceptive.
    Beautiful.
    Here are the stories of life on these plains – the wide open skies, the things living under them, and the
stories that come out from under those skies.

 
     
    Desert Snails Sleep
     
    The wallpaper munched. Toothless, it gummed
the room inside it. Drear tapped one finger against the window
sill, again then again, and ignored the wall. The shadows in the
corners of the room edged closer, they wavered when headlights
passed or when a light flicked on in the next house. Sickly plaid
wavered, brown bars against tan bars. The bubbles under the paper
and the tears in it and the messy spaces where there was no more
paper blinked in and out of focus like dirty sores in a gaping and
sickly mouth.
    "What happened today?"
    "Nothing much."
    The menace of the walls disappeared with
those two words.
    "I know. Boring isn't it?"
    But it wasn't. It wasn't boring. Nothing in that window was boring. And Drear lived in that window.
    He lived in the window and was never bored
because there he forgot the walls and the wallpaper and the
wavering plaid, and the sickly gaping mouth of the room.
    The silver glow of the night was a comfort.
Shadows and dark spaces lurked outside the window, but the night
wasn't menacing. It wasn't claustrophobic. It wasn't lonely. It
wasn't any of those things that the darkness of the room was. The
darkness on the other side of the window sill held infinite
possibility. The darkness inside the room was a trap.
    On the other side of the window, there was
always some place to go. On the side with the wallpaper, there
wasn't any place to go except between the walls. The side with the
wallpaper, was finite. On the other side of the window, the there
was everything.
    There was Eyes.
    A snail sat on a leaf.
    Drear watched.
    "Hey, Eyes?"
    "Yeah?"
    "Snails in the desert can sleep for three
years. Did you know that?"
    He never said hello. He didn't need to. Just
like the shadows under the rhododendrons, Eyes would emerge as soon
as the sun went down. She was easy to talk to and there was no need
to fill up the space with formalities, especially with so