So the heat death of the universe comes, and I, being oh-so-lucky, am left alone at the end of it, to be the last one to freeze as my heating unit gives out. And do I get to go quietly, alone, in the utter cold and darkness?
No! I get some jerk whispering in my head. You must save the world.
Over and over again I hear it in my head, as over and over I die and over and over someone brings me back. I freeze into a popsicle, some jerk speaking in a hundred voices at once tells me I have to save the world, I thaw out again, the next second I'm frozen solid, the whole thing starts over again.
After who knows how many times this has happened, I finally use my one second of mobility to shout, “Fine! Okay!”
And then I stop dying. My feet settle on a flat plane of nothingness.
And there’s a bunch of raised garden beds in front of me.
Full of dirt, I might add, good rich soil and everything. A table with a trowel and tray full of packets of seeds. A watering can.
A watering can. A friggin’ watering can. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? The lone and level plane of grey nothingness stretches far away. No springs, no ponds, no mountains, no streams, not even a measly faucet. How am I supposed to use the watering can? I pick the thing up and tip it over one of the garden beds on a whim.
Out comes a splash of water. I tip it again. Out comes a splash of water again. I pour out what ought to be the whole thing and it just keeps going. I soak the entire garden bed and it just keeps going.
OhhhhhhhKAY then. Problem solved for me.
Sort of. I kinda ruined this bed for the moment. You shouldn’t do any gardening in soaked soil, it promotes mold. Or maybe that’s when it’s raining? The point is That this half of the bed is useless and I might not be able to plant all of these seeds after all. Well, I’ll do what I can.
I guess that means I’m actually doing this.
What the hell else is there to do? Sing songs?
I can do that while I’m planting anyway. And that’s just what I do, as I start planting the seeds. Sunflowers and marigolds, peppers and corn, squash and beans, eggplants and rutabaga, mulberries and strawberries and blueberries and...wait a second. Sunflowers? As in, sunlight? Which I don’t have? How are these things supposed to grow?
And for that matter, what the hell are these garden beds made of? What are these seeds made of? What am I made of? I don’t have a scanning electron microscope -- ahem, I said I don’t have a scanning electron microscope.
Nothing. Apparently this place doesn’t respond to obvious cues.
Alright, so I still don’t have a scanning electron microscope, so I can’t figure out what’s going on with any of this crap. Maybe I’m not even supposed to know, you know? Maybe I’m just supposed to believe. Well, believing is easy when you’re already seeing. The hard part is believing when you don’t see. Like how I’m supposed to believe that these stupid seeds will come up. I’ll have to wait and see.
Which raises the question of whether or not I’m supposed to sleep. There’s no sunlight, nor a moon, so I don’t exactly know what time it is. There’s no bed, except for a garden bed, ha ha. Ha.
I’m incredibly bored right now anyway. I flop down in one of the garden beds I haven’t planted anything in yet and close my eyes.
...
When I open them there’s a bunch of long green leaves bending over my face. I sit bolt upright and realize that I’m sitting among a bunch of plants I don’t recognize.
A bunch of weeds.
Weeds?
WEEDS?!
I start cursing God and heaven as I pull plants out of garden beds by the fistful. Flipping weeds! In the one place you’d think they could never appear! Stupid little twerps get everywhere! There’s no escape, dear fellow gardeners, no escape at all! Resign yourselves to your sorry fate!
And then I’ve finished ripping the weeds out, and I realize that as I’ve tossed them on the ground, they have instantly been replaced by dirt.
And now that I’ve uncovered all the crops, I can see that they’re all well past the seedling stage. Hell, the corn is knee-high. So its not like I fell asleep for months, it’s simply that time moves faster here.
Which means that these garden beds need watering again. Jeez, it’s like I’m in a farming simulation videogame. Soon as I turn my back the beds need weeding. Soon as I finish weeding they need watering. On and on and on. And on.
Eventually the crops are ready to be harvested. Which raises the question of what I’m supposed to do with them. I’m not hungry, there’s no one else to feed, there’s no way to cook them anyway...the best I can do is take the seeds out and plant them.
Which is just what I do, when I’ve cleared the stalks and leaves away -- plant them again, water them again, brace myself for weeding them again.
Except that I’ve got way too many seeds for these beds. What do I do with them? Throw them down onto the gray nothingness beneath my feet? I look down. There below my feet is not gray nothingness, but the very dirt that I’ve been creating this whole time. Dirt an inch thick fills the space between the garden beds.
Dirt that already has weeds in it. As if even this stuff can grow plants.
Which also means I’m going to be weeding a lot more. Oh, how lucky I am!
I walk around scattering seeds and stamping them into the dirt, then I walk around watering them. I pick a patch of dry dirt to lie down in and wonder what exactly will happen when I open my eyes again.
...
This time I wake up in a jungle. Some of the weeds are as tall as me. This is going to be an absolute nightmare to weed.
Then again...if they’re not in the raised beds, do I even have the right to call these plants weeds? The crops I’m growing outside of the raised beds are extra. I don’t need them. I can keep my little jungle if I so desire. All I need to do is create viable walking paths between the beds.
Which will require me to rip out the entire jungle, because there’s not that much walking space available. Alas, alas. The taste of home was not meant to be. I set about pulling up the head-high plants.
Goodness, their roots are deep. How is this possible when the dirt is only an inch high? I dig through the dirt and my feet and reach the grey nothingness quickly. Perhaps it is not nothingness, then. Perhaps it is just plain matter which has not been given a role to play.
If I want my jungle...I can just start throwing weeds out farther and farther around the garden, making more and more dirt, letting wild plants grow there, tossing in crop seeds here and there...I could make an actual jungle. And there’s nothing to distract me. Nothing to stop me.
...
I lose track of how many times I harvest the garden. I can only measure my progress by a rough estimate of how far out my little dirt island has gotten. It’s about a mile in diameter when I think to myself that this is some genuine Turtle Island shit. Out of the depths of nothingness I found a glob of soil and I brought it up and planted it and it grew and grew and grew. And that’s why we have land amidst the waters, children. No need to thank me. Just doing my job.
Which raises other possibilities.
I throw the last of my weeds to the ground and make the long trek back to the garden. There before me are the crops ready for harvest again. Squash and beans, peppers and corn, eggplant and rutabaga, blueberries and strawberries and mulberries, marigolds and...sunflowers.
I grab one of the heads of the sunflowers and throw it as hard as I can into a sky that I had never dared to observe closely.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then the entire world is bathed in light -- real light, living light. Sunlight. Every bit of color that had fled from the world returns. The yellow-green of leaves, the ruddy brown of the dirt, the brown-black of the rich garden soil, the reds and yellows and oranges of the peppers. Above me the sky is a brilliant blue, not a cloud in it.
And the air is a bit hotter.
Hm. This could be a problem. I will need to water the garden even more frequently. With one silly little watering can that might not work. And what about all the plants outside the garden? I’ve got a jungle going all the way out ot the edge, it will dry up if the day gets too hot. I can’t water that whole thing. What do I do? Earth had rivers to water the land and oceans to create the water vapor that would come down over the land as rain. What have I got? One measly watering can.
Then again, I had one measly sunflower head, and look where that got me.
I toss the watering can as high as I can into the sky. For a second, nothing happens. Then there’s a rumble of thunder that shakes my bones, the sky turns grey, and it starts raining. Hard. Sheets of rain coming down. I laugh to feel something on my skin that I haven’t felt in the longest time.
And then I realize that this land of mine is perfectly flat. So the water isn’t going to be going anywhere. It’s all going to turn into a sticky swamp if I don’t do something fast. What can I do? Try to tilt the entire land so the water all drains somewhere? Not likely. I’m not some giant from a tall tale.
The most I can do is fumble my way through the blinding rain, grab the trowel, and start digging trenches. Channels. Canals. Anything to collect the water. I drag the trowel through the dirt behind me as I make my way toward the edge of the island --
By the time I realize what I’ve done, I’m at the edge and I’ve dug an entire river-sized canal behind me. The rainwater is slowly collecting in the canal and trickling out into the grey nothingness.
Well that’s something, but the land is still flat, and I can’t dig canals everywhere, can I? I’ve got to think of something else. If I could make mountains, that would send the water in one direction -- but how do I do that? This place never had a single stone.
I fish in my pocket and close around the lucky quartz crystal that my mom gave me a long time ago when she was alive. Oh, wonderful. One stone and it has to be that one. Well, nothing for it, and no other use for it.
I go into a windup and throw the stone as hard as I can toward the other edge of the land.
...
It’s a pretty decent place now. Mountains in the west, and the river runs down them across the level floodplains to the sunlit sea. I can hear the sound of the waves from my garden. Probably should have added a bit more land before I let the waters flow but whatever, it was getting hot, I was desperate...
It’s pretty hot now. Steamy. The sun never actually goes down completely, it just bounces from one horizon to the other. This place really is a jungle these days. The only respite is the occasional heavy downpours.
I glance at one of the eggplants. Perfectly round...perfectly white...
I grab one and chuck it into the sky.
A wind kicks up as the air cools in the sudden darkness. The garden all about me is bathed in stark white moonlight. Ah, now this is more like it. Reminds me of summer nights on the porch with Griselda, watching the stars...
Dammit, I knew I missed something.
Well, it stands to reason that if a sunflower can make one big sun, a sunflower seed can make a little bitty sun. I grab another sunflower, shake the seeds out, hold them in my palms, and chuck them into the sky. All of a sudden part of the sky twinkles with many points of light.
A small part of the sky. Ah, nuts, this is going to take some work.
...
Upon an evening, as I wait for the stars to come out, I realize that, now that I’m no longer quite so busy, and I can sense the normal passage of time, I am awful lonely. I need a companion. I need...a dog. Yes sir, everyone needs a dog. How am I going to get a dog, though? You need a dog to make a dog, usually.
Usually. If this place is following Turtle Island rules then I may have another method.
Fortunately for me the harvest is ready again. Once I’ve got all the crops de-seeded I take some cornstalks and break them into smaller pieces. Then I crudely tie them together with the beanstalks, in the extremely rough shape of a quadruped.
It’s missing something.
I go out to the jungle and snap a branch off one of the mulberry trees. Then I come back to the cornstalk not-dog, snap the branch in half, and place one in the center of the cornstalks.
And there before me is a goofy-looking mutt, her tail wagging, her tongue hanging out.
I throw the stick towards the woods. The dog chases after it. The dog comes back with the stick in her mouth. This is the perfect dog. I am no longer lonely.
...
That being said, the jungle is lonely, and so are the mountains and the sea. I wind up tying together a lot of cornstalks and hoping for the best. For some things it works -- I place a leaf in the center of one corn quadruped and get a deer, I whisper anger and greed into the center of little corn biped and I get a seagull, I sing a little song into the center of another corn biped and I get a merry little songbird. Other animals, though, I can’t be sure about making. I have no idea what is in the heart of a bear, and I can’t be certain I have the materials for it. Nor the heart of a rabbit, a wolf, a fox, or a beetle. All of these I will have to devise in time...
This is one of those situations where two heads would be better than one, and Dog can’t help me. She can talk, sure, we are following Turtle Island rules here. But mostly she keeps asking to play fetch. Well, nothing for it.
I tie my cornstalks together in the shape of a tall biped, and I give it a big squash for a head, blueberries for eyes, and corn for a heart. And to the corn I whisper my whole story -- all my life up to the point of reaching the supposed end of the universe, and all I had done after. I whisper everything I know about humanity, all the foibles and fears, and love and care, the dignity and the nonsense. I sing every song I know, tell every story I know.
The first human beyond me blinks and opens their eyes.
“Greetings,” I say. “Welcome to Dirt Island. Your name is Zmorf.”
“Excuse me?” says Zmorf. “You could have given me any normal person’s name, like ‘Robin’ or ‘Sparrow.’ Why the hell did you name me Zmorf?”
“You’re special,” I say. “You’re the first. Gotta come up with something unique.”
Zmorf looks around and their eyes light on a little songbird singing from the top of a blueberry bush. “My name is Wren,” says Wren.
“Fine,” I say. “Whatever. I have to get to work making more of you. Go wander around, have fun, don’t eat the strawberries, those are mine, I’ll kick you out if you eat my strawberries.”
...
Of course it's after only the second flippin’ person I make that they convince each other to swipe my damn strawberries. Humanity never changes that much, it seems. And some stories keep happening. Some things I can’t escape, just like weeds.
...
After I make about the thousandth human, and I'm contemplating how to expand the island, I see a curious bright spot in the corner of my eye, and I hear a voice in my head.
Well done. You have saved the world.
“Excuse me?” I say. “I haven’t saved anything. I remade the world. One stupid little island, and there’s going to be a genetic bottleneck along with the cultural-transmission bottleneck if all thus Turtle-Island story magic runs out too quickly. So don’t tell me I’m done yet. Give me a few more weeks.”
“Who are you talking to?” says Wren.
“A very annoying and inscrutable person,” I say.
Fortunately, in all the subsequent years of adding to the island and building more people out of cornstalks and squash, I never hear from that jerk again.
...
So that’s the long answer to why you’re never going to meet my parents. They’re long gone.
Oh, you don’t believe me? Fine. How about we visit the island where it all began, and you can see my wonderful garden, and then you can tell me I’m telling lies.
And tell you what. You can eat whatever the hell you want from the garden, just to be certain that it’s all real. Anything except my strawberries. If you steal my strawberries, I swear to God...