Sierra Bibi
This story first appeared in Flash Futures: A 2023 Climate Fiction & Art Contest.
The Green Corps descended on Grandfather’s farm armed with sledgehammers and bulldozers. First, the decrepit outbuildings, or what was left of them, the mossy wood imploding in slow motion for many years now. Alyssa watched as a giddy teenager in an excavator razed the stable. A horse, her horse, named Buttercup, had once lived there. Within minutes it was gone.
Next, the old barn that had housed the goats. Routinely, she’d hide up in the loft, skirting responsibilities to read comic books. Once a sprightly red, now gray-brown with age, and before she could turn around, utterly destroyed.
Then the farmhouse.
“A lot of this material can be reused,” Gretchen had said during the initial survey, kitchen floorboards creaking. Pieces of Grandfather’s treasured home, living on in houses all around Oregon. It sounded great then. But now, as Alyssa watched her childhood home dissected board by board and loaded it into truckbeds and onto trailers, she wasn’t sure.
Gretchen must have noted her expression. She put a soft hand on her shoulder. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
“I had a lot of good years here.” Her grandparents had raised her here. Rising at dawn, she woke every morning to the smell of dark roast coffee. Time to feed the chickens. She’d plod down the stairs to see Grandfather, perpetually at the kitchen table.
“Good morning Aly Cat,” he’d say, raising his mug in salutation.
Summers, a gaggle of cousins would appear, as loud and as awkward as migratory geese. They’d play pirate games under the majestic white oak until the sun set. When they got too old for pirate games, they’d swim and fish in the lake and share swigs from warm cans of Rainier pilfered from Grandfather’s garage.
The tire swing, the heart of their games, was still suspended from the oak’s mighty branch.
“It’s not too late,” Gretchen said. “We can stop here.”
But there were bad years here too. The lake was gone. The water line retreated summer by summer until it was replaced by a housing development, which a few years later was replaced by an all-encompassing blaze from an errant spark.
They’d play cards in the dining room while the world burned outside. Without saying a word, Alyssa, Grandma and Grandfather all agreed to not speak of the wildfires outside their window. They suffered through the itchy red eyes and the headaches without complaint. The world outside didn’t exist.
Next year didn’t offer them that luxury. Ordered to evacuate and with minimal room, they were forced to leave animals behind. She opened the coop before they fled, letting the chickens loose.
“Maybe some of them will survive, if…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
The fire didn’t reach the farm, but an autumn heat wave burned the apple crop on the branch. A balmy winter followed, with a surprise cold snap in late spring, annihilating the seedlings just peeking their curious tendrils out of the earth. Followed by a foot of rain dumped in a day, washing away half of the field and drowning every one of the chickens.
“I swear this land is cursed sometimes,” Grandfather mumbled under his breath.
And then the loans. She hadn’t found out about those until she was older, but once she saw the bills she better understood Grandfather’s occasional melancholy moods. She hadn’t known about the furtive trips to the food bank either. Or the loans from aunts and uncles and family friends.
“That debt hangs over your grandfather’s head like an axe,” Grandma had confided in her on one of her last visits home.
And then the worst year of all. Grandma, seemingly hale and healthy, died suddenly of a stroke. She’d found Grandfather six months later in the garage, truck engine running. Forgive me, the note read.
“I think it’s the right thing to do,” Alyssa said finally.
In a week the house was a foundation in the ground. In two it had vanished completely, leaving the field barren save the oak. Nothing had been planted in years. A swarm of Green Corps hacked at drifts of Himalayan blackberry.
Fall arrived, late as usual. During her weekly drive to the farm, she spotted smoke on the horizon from the highway. A knot formed in the pit of her gut.
“What the hell are you doing?” Green Corps recruits sprayed flame throwers all around the acreage. A wild panic rose up in her throat. “What about the tree?”
Gretchen stood, clipboard in hand, the image of icy coolness in front of the burning field. “Fire is a natural part of the cycle.”
“I trusted you. I thought this was a restoration project.”
“The oak is fine. The Atfalati people managed this land with fire for centuries before settlers arrived.”
She had let crazy hippies burn down Grandfather’s farm. And for what, a few loans forgiven? Alyssa got back into the car. She didn’t want Gretchen to see her cry.
A knock on the driver side window. Hating the smell of smoke as it seeped in, she rolled it down just an inch.
“Come back in the spring,” Gretchen said.
Feeling swindled, she tried to push out the farm out of her mind. She trudged through the rainy season, spending too much time indoors and under fluorescent lights. But when April arrived her mind wandered to the first buds that must be appearing on the white oak.
Driving past the “Oregon Oak Savannah Restoration Project” sign, she pulled up on a sunny afternoon. The site was empty. The field was so intensely blue that at first she thought the earth had fallen away and she was staring into the sky. The weedy yellow field she left burning last fall had erupted into a bloom of azure. Camas. Clumsy bumblebees bumped into the wildflowers, giving the impression that the field was breathing.
Hope swelled in her chest. The immortal giant, the oak tree planted by her great-grandfather, stood proud against an impossibly clear sky.
Sierra Bibi 