Daughter Earth

Mel Cleary

There’s mud on her sneakers.

Nothing extraordinary about that. Nothing unusual about the one-two rhythm of her feet pounding the packed earth, nor the small leaps to avoid rocks or tree roots, nor the sudden feeling of wet seeping between her toes as she realizes too late that she’s stepped in a puddle. Not that she minds particularly much.

She never minds the rain, nor what it does to the dirt on the trails. There’s something lovely, exhilarating, (dare she say it? intoxicating) about the moment the shoe goes farther into the ground than she’d expected, as if the ground were reclaiming her, or at least trying to get a taste before it fully decided. She likes the split second of uncertainty when she lands on a slick of particularly slippery mud, the instinctual way she raises her arms for balance. She’d laugh, if she had the breath, at how her elbows are bent in a way that almost makes it look like she’s imitating a chicken. Or, perhaps, a question mark—the question hanging suspended from gravity, whether or not her efforts will be enough to save her from a fate of falling spectacularly on her ass. The image of brown streaking down her body, almost looking like shit but not quite, the almost feeling of clothes too heavy with wet and with the weight of moving the earth at her will. At her footsteps. Carrying the ground itself with her on her sneakers.

She’s never minded any of that, nor the rain mixing with sweat to coat her face in a waterfall sheen. She revels in it, lives in it more than she feels she lived in the daily monotony of other people and deadlines and chores and the strange, inconceivable cruelty of the human mind.

All this to say, it is not unusual for her to have mud on her sneakers, coating and clumping around the synthetic material in patterns of past motion. A record that she has gone into the world, and that the world has come back with her.

So there is mud on her sneakers the day the world changes. There is a song in her ears and a frosted glass of her own breath in front of her eyes as she dirties her hands by knotting—double knotting—the caked laces. When the heavy door swings shut behind her, the whisper-thud of its closing echoes for a moment, just a moment, in the air around her. She hasn’t taken a key with her to slide into the lock like a knife into butter because what could happen in thirty, forty minutes? She’ll be back soon.

Funny, the promises we make to ourselves.

Her feet find the trails as if the mud on her sneakers is drawn magnetically, yearning for the home it has been taken from.

Her muscles pump as she leaves the world behind her, constructs her own planet within her mind. The oceans are her blood, and her heart is the moon, controlling the tides with its delicate, violent, beautiful pulsing. Her muscles are the land, and the sky is the pleasant-lonely-luxurious pain that ribbons throughout her planet of a body.

She breathes in time to a galactic orbit and uses the wind of the vacuum, the wet stars on her fingertips and eyelashes, to convince herself that, no. She does not hear anything menacing beyond the forest around her.

In a way she is right—there is nothing but a forest around her. But she fails to realize one crucial detail: 

Not Every Part Of A Forest Is Benevolent.

If she is a planet, then it is now that her star goes supernova. She feels the fire overcoming the land, burning trees and grasses and tiny little habitats for tiny little creatures that might have been cute, in another life. A life that hasn’t gone up in a heat that tastes like candy, but burns like salt in a wound. She feels the sea, too, or what’s left of it. Boiling. Bubbling. There go the sea creatures, and then the rest of the water. There are only bones now, littering the valleys of trenches. A crack reverberates, tectonic plates crashing and fracturing. The earth itself cannot stand the fire, the pressure, the tearing and chomping. The planet—Daughter Earth, shall we call her?—is destroyed. 

She processes none of this, but she feels all of it before her world, the world, turns to ashes, and then particles of ash too small to touch. Too small to taste.

It is a mercy, that she doesn’t understand her own death. Here one minute, gone the next, with just a little confusion in between.

This is what I tell myself as I slough back through the forest that is my home and that is me, barely bothering to touch leaves or twigs. I tell myself it was kind as I suck the sweet taste of her blood from the crevices between my teeth. This taste is her legacy, I think, and I shall not let it go to waste. I shall hold onto it for as long as I can.

She is gone, now, but there is still a mess of sinew and cracked bone on the trail, waiting for someone to find it. And two sneakers, one on its side.

Perhaps they will be able to recognize her from the mud on her sneakers.

Then again, perhaps they won’t see it under the blood on her sneakers.