Kzine Issue 18 by Graeme Hurry et al

Author:Graeme Hurry et al. [al., Graeme Hurry et]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kimota Publishing
Published: 2017-05-21T23:00:00+00:00

THE BLADES

by Fred Senese

First time I saw him, I was picking blueberries on the hilltop. It was the last perfect day of September. We’d had first frost, the night before, and the blueberry leaves had gone blood red around the edges. The berries were soft and fat and they fell into my bucket without any coaxing.

I stood up, a full bucket dangling from each hand, and that’s when I saw him. He wore a hard-hat. Arms crossed, leaning against his truck, watching me the way a tomcat watches a rabbit. He didn’t belong there. There was no road there. He must have ploughed right through the berries; he must have left a swath of broken bushes all the way down the mountain.

I was sixteen then, old enough to know what he was thinking, old enough to know better than to run. You run from a bad dog, it’ll chase you. So I picked up and walked fast as I could, without looking at him. A blueberry bush caught one of my buckets by the handle and yanked me back. I dropped it. When I turned to pick it up I saw that he was following me now, pushing aside the branches, pretending like he was in no hurry. I could see the roof of my house poking up through the trees in the valley below, I could see the mouth of the path home on the edge of the field, but it was a long way away.

He could have caught me before I got there. As it happened, he didn’t.

Mama told me never, ever go up there again.

We watched the hilltop from the porch over the next few months. One day an impossible tower rose up above the trees. It was white as bone, ten times as high as the hundred-year old oaks on the edge of the woods. Another day three gigantic blades were hoisted to the top by steel cranes. It stood over the valley like a wind-up Martian death machine.

“That’s our property,” Mama said. “I’m sure it is.”

“Can’t we stop them?”

“Somebody will,” she said.

One day the blades started to turn. We heard them and felt them before we saw them. It wasn’t just the terrible swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. The blades dragged sound across the sky, invisible ripples that I could feel inside me. And they never, ever stopped. Day or night. We couldn’t sleep. Mama moved her bed down into the cellar, but it didn’t help.

By the end of that summer, there were thirty-five of those towers standing along the ridge.

There were meetings, after church. Words were spoken, words like “infrasound” and “brain slush” and “eminent domain”. Everyone gathered under the blades of the first turbine after church, carrying signs they’d made. The pastor gave sermons about the strong and the meek, how the meek could stand up against the strong.

One day some company man showed up, flanked by cops. He told the pastor that this was private property. That the time for talking was before the turbines went up, and that time was long gone.

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