Darkweb by Lia Laserre

Author:Lia Laserre [Laserre, L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Mom messages me and says she’ll pick me up after school. I tell her not to bother as I need some time for jogging and my kickboxing class’s been moved up.

Her forwarded message is curt. She hates the sport. Thinks I’m going to get seriously injured one day. There’s no real answer to that, outside of, ‘well, life’s full of risks’. Yes, it could happen, but I could be developing skills that save my life.

I see Joey trying to corral me off at the front steps. Damn. Probably to offer me a ride to practice tonight, but I need some time to myself and some air, so I pretend not to see him.

Callous, maybe, but sometimes one needs to look out for #1.

I take the tram to Wellington station and get out, sucking in a breath of fresher air. Few people live this far out. Only some low rise tenements with big aerials on top, a public square and a few shops. The dipping sun struggles between hazy banks of cloud while a thin line of yellow grey hangs on the skyline. Old veils of pollution from long back before the Cataclysm. The tops of trees yellowed and scorched brown by solar radiation and a thinning ozone layer.

I put on my headband, roll up my jeans to the knees and start jogging, taking the pavement in long, leggy strides. I take the long way home, via Tydon Park, a maze of wooded pathways and long tracts of greenery, well yellowery, considering the heat wave and the drooping leaves and sagging branches of the reconstituted oaks. I pass a small pool where a school of three orange koi huddle in the murky water. These ones have enlarged gills, as if to compensate for the lack of oxygen in the acidity of the pool. They look like lubberly submarines. I pluck off some yellow cedar buds from the nearest low-lying branch and toss them in. The fish are grateful at first, as they come over to investigate, but ignore the offering, flicking their tails ever so perceptibly.

This spring is hotter than ever. Stifling. Already we’d had our usual battery of storms, heavy winds and rain. Now, in late afternoon, there are hazy skies but a scorching hot sun which, even low, beats down on my head like an angry god.

I pick up the pace and my legs burn for oxygen. My double-soled, lightweight, blue and white Roxy runners are getting into a rhythm, as I feel the tension ease out of my joints. The park relaxes my jangled nerves. No one really knows how the trees grew five-foot diameters. We’d just accepted their breadth as normal. But those darkweb headlines give me more clues…make me start thinking that maybe it was true that secret gene research experiments had gone awry and cross pollination had sent off a series of unfortunate mutations across the nation. The truth has gotten hushed up somehow. Or lost through time, probably the former.

Crazy! Look at these trees.

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