So, I'm lazy. I've got an apartment now, and in a few weeks I'll be actually living in it. Hopefully that'll introduce a modicum of stability to my life, and hopefully that will massage my writing habits, which will therefore hopefully mean that I update this blog often enough to, you know, justify its existence.
Hopefully.
But anyway, I'm getting sick of my Gardener story, so let's make this be the end of it! This is gonna be the quick and messy mostly-summary version of storytelling, so you'll have to use your imagination a lot to fill in the gaps because, again, I'm a lazy, lazy man. Maybe, though, I'll make a quick-and-dirty novella out of it for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)...
So, if you don't know what happened in the last two installments, go read them. They should be right below and appropriately labeled. However, in summary, a dude finds a seed, plants it and it's a tree and everybody's all OoooOOoo about it.
Good summary.
So they live in this nightmarish wasteland, but all of a sudden, their world is shaken with the introduction of simply the color green. We last left the story with all the townspeople standing in awe of it, swaying gently in the breeze.
So what should happen next?
These people aren't responsible. They aren't good. If you give them something, they'll find a way to harm one another with it, or they'll find a way to sell it. But this tree is something else to them. Not one man or woman who sees it can bear to doubt its importance, no one can look away or harm it.
This generation of people cherish it because to them it was such a rare and foreign thing. They move their city to be within view of the tree, and soon the city prospers under the shade of the tree. They appoint one man, our gardener, to watch over it, and see to its safety. He sleeps under the tree at night, and stands by it, tending it in daylight. When he wakes up one morning to find that it can spread and grow more green, it becomes his responsibility to prosper that growth for all society.
The Gardener starts a family under the tree's shade, and when he passes, he is buried under it. His children inherit his responsibility of protecting the growth of the greenness and the trees. Under the care of the Gardeners, the greenness spreads as grass, bushes, and trees of all kinds. It spreads across the landscape, encompassing the world as a whole.
And society spreads and grows with it, under its shade. Life, so hard, so dry, so pleasureless, becomes easy, becomes a joy. Generations pass and people spread across the landscape, eating fruit and grains. The Gardeners tell stories of past generations, of the first Gardener for there ever to be and of the ages that followed.
Generations pass and people grow.
Generations pass and people forget in unbelief the story of the Gardener. They doubt the wasteland that once was, the world of trials and turmoil, of burnt and burning trees, and the place in which it never rained. Even the Gardeners, with time, forget. They took their name, their inherited legacy, and used it to build cities to rule, to shape the skyline as they saw fit.
The world was theirs, and all in it.
But when one Gardener disagreed with another, there was war. They fought over the green earth, scorching, tearing, and shedding red. The red spreads faster than green ever could, as the landscape is drowned out in violence and turmoil of the forgetting peoples. There comes a generation of people, Gardeners and others, who know nothing but violence, strive, hatred and redness. In that generation, greenness is forgotten entirely. There are few of this last generation, and they do not last long.
[Is war too obvious here? I mean, it's the first thing I thought of, so other people probably thought of it to. And it's been done to death. But then again, this story is kinda supposed to go the way you expect; it's about situational irony in which we know the fallacies of the characters, but they themselves are unaware... oh well, back to the story!]
However, one pair of footsteps wanders through the apocalyptic remains. They scramble over rubble, trudge through blackened oil pits, and meander down broken streets, cluttered with war machines. The steps belong to the last man, a Traveler whose home he holds on his back.
The lonely Traveler carries a brown sack, torn, and it's filled with scraps of food. In the Traveler's hands, though, there's always a book. It's singed at the corners and worn and faded along its edges. But at the first glimpse of each day's light, he awakens to read with the hope that a new day brings with it. And as the days near their ends, he reads, to face the coming darkness with the hope that it is once more temporary.
On these pages is a simple image in green: a tree and a man.
The Traveler wanders, and reads, and wanders and reads and wanders and reads until he is old, tired, and at last his body is in its final moments. He crawls into his home for that night, a cave beneath a building, and, as he has done for his years of wandering, the Traveler opens the book and reads himself to sleep in what remains of the daylight, prepared to die, as the last man on earth.
And although this man will die, it will not be on that night. He awakens that morning, with a little shade above his head, green, and growing.
The End.
*************
So what'd ya think? I went for a weird kinda storytelling flavor with this one, and it was at least fun to write. So there's that. Oh well, share, follow, and become a minion of greenness!
