Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead

Author:Oliver K. Langmead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan

When I was seven, I saw a cartoon

About a group of kids with a secret:

A magical hidden wizard’s garden

Where, each week, they had a new adventure.

That cartoon stuck with me for years after,

Not for its predictable storylines

But for the vividness of the wildlife.

I wanted my own enchanted garden.

Nowhere lived up to my expectations;

The grasses were never quite green enough,

The flowers always desaturated,

The humming of the bees a bit too coarse.

To this day, I’m certain I still believe

That rivers should be blue, trees should be brown

The sun circled with yellow triangles;

That all days should have an autumnal warmth.

The Calypso’s algae farms are humid;

Beads of moisture drip down the wet-slick walls;

My clothes cling to me here, so drenched in sweat,

Yet I stay, and watch the algae baths swirl.

Catwalks overlook the cylinder vats

Where the crew stir the algae – a green mulch

Thriving beneath ultraviolet lamps,

Shifting strangely in the ship’s gravity.

When the heat becomes intolerable

I move through an airlock, take gulping breaths

In the sudden chill of the corridor.

Shivering, I wring out my sodden clothes.

There is an enormous porthole window

And I stand before it, drying my hair,

Watching the new world – a shining blue bead

Surrounded with white and now stained with green.

I find it difficult to reconcile

The mossy growth clinging to the new world

With Catherine, my friend the engineer,

Who I first saw dancing with deep green vines.

Unsettled, I move through the Calypso,

Wandering past her manufactories

To her engines – her plasma reactors;

Mostly dormant now we are in orbit.

Colossal conductive metal banks rise,

Surrounding me, humming with potential;

The power to move a ship between stars.

My skin prickles with tiny static bursts.

There is a snap like the crack of a whip

And a flash of light bright enough to scar

A jagged white line across my vision

As a bank discharges its potential.

At the second discharge I realise

My mistake: these engines are not dormant.

Feeling my hair rise up from my shoulders,

I crouch in an attempt to ground myself.

White strikes arc overhead, burning the air,

Each snapping loud enough to tremble me.

I clasp my hands and offer feeble prayer;

This would be a foolish way to perish.

A figure dressed in a strange wire mesh cage

Advances on me, illuminated

As the reactors strike it fiercely.

It shields me as it ushers me forward.

The heat is far worse than the algae farms.

As I traverse the angry corridors

I realise how deep I had wandered,

Unthinking among the ship’s plasma banks.

At last I emerge, drenched in sweat again,

Breathing hard of air that is not burning.

The crew converge, their expressions fierce,

Shouting at me in their evolved English.

The mesh suit is glowing, almost molten;

The figure inside waits for it to cool

Before untwisting the melted wire mesh

And revealing a man I recognise.

The herald steps wearily from his suit.

Wiping at his face with a towel, he smiles,

Waving a charred and blackened glove at me.

“Thank you,” I tell him, over the crew’s shouts.

When the last of the ruined suit is gone,

The herald sits and sips at cool water.

The rest of the crew begin to disperse,

So I sit down next to him, still shaking.

When the worst of the shivering subsides,

I turn to the herald.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.