“Mama, do you miss the Sun?” I try to ask as inquisitively as possible.
Her eyes shine with that artificial glow from above as she stares out into the field we’re standing in. The languid grass under me grazes my barren ankles. Mama said grass used to be vibrant green and had a distinct sort of robust smell. She said she was allergic, but I can tell she would give anything to walk through grass like that again. A soft, mechanical breeze blows by us. It smells of metal and oil grease, but it was familiar, at least to me.
I watch her sigh deeply, probably trying to figure out the best way to phrase her next words.
“Yes, I do.” She tried to hide it, but her voice was etched with sorrow that made my heart hurt.
But I’m curious. “What was it like?”
She looks off into the distance again, likely trying to paint the memories back onto the barren landscape before us. She used to live here, she had told me. There was a little house just off to the left, and they had apple orchards and cattle, and little chickens full of pristine, ivory eggs. She breathes in deeply and I can almost sense she was remembering something pleasant. Something before Earth had to live with life support, a ventilator here, a tube there, wires upon wires coursing through its body like veins.
She was still gazing off to where a little well would have sat back in her youthful days when she says, “It was brilliant. A golden apple in the sky that warmed the Earth, so much so, that in the summer you could smell the plump blackberries that grew on the vines just over there.” She points to a spot where I imagined a whole garden had lived. “And sometimes, if there was a light breeze, it carried with it the scent of the mint leaves and burgers on the grill.” She seems to become lost in a memory, for a moment, as if she was walking through it again.
“Kelpie, I wanna smell a breeze like that.” Henry chirps at my right knee.
My name’s actually Kepler, but Henry doesn’t catch on to things very easily. Kepler—he was a German astrologer, then a star, and then a promise in the form of a ship. A ship that was supposed to take us somewhere warmer, in fact. One of the engines had failed before we could take off with the rest of the fleet, but I was only a baby then, nine months old in the belly of my mother. My father had been on a different ship because he couldn’t make it to us in time. We never heard from them again, but Mama says they’re waving to us on one of the stars that are broadcasted into the sky at night.
When they had to evacuate everyone from Kepler, my mother’s water broke. That was when the Celestial Sphere had closed around Earth with only a fraction of the population remaining. Mama said when I came out, it had been so cold outside that I had turned bluish. She had thought I was dead.
I’m still here though—pallid skin, left unkissed by a sun.
Mama named me after that ship because she said that like it, I had been a miracle, but sometimes it makes me wonder if she really thinks that the others are waving to us from one of those stars. That she knows that they’re probably nothing more than memories and dust, and we’re just the lucky ones that stayed behind. I had tried to shake the thought from my head but it seems to be a part of me now, like when a child plays with glitter. You’re never able to shake it off completely.
“What was it like eating blackberries from a garden?” I ask.
“Wonderful.” She replies, simply. “Absolutely miraculous. You reap the gifts from mother nature’s back to have an explosion of taste flood your mouth. And the rain—oh the rain. It smelled like damp concrete and mud and wildflowers.”
I like the way Mama words things. I want her to keep talking about that time before the Sphere.
“Yeah, it was wonderful. Now everything’s grown in a f*cking petri dish.”
That’s my older brother Josh. He was eight when Kepler failed.
“Josh, sweetie, not in front of Henry, alright?” My mother scolds, tiredly.
That’s when that exhaustion floods her body, draining the joy right from her speech. It’s because Josh and Mama are always fighting nowadays, but I have a feeling that everything was easier with the Sun. I have a feeling that we would actually have warmer nights. Maybe better ocean waves if the moon would only shine through. That the stars would shine brighter without the holographic interface. That Henry might be a little brighter too. That Mama and Josh wouldn’t argue so often. That I would have copper skin like my mother used to. That maybe—just maybe, I could try a ‘blackberry’. And that Mama would smile without crying.
That the world would become radiant with the Sun.