Forever Magazine Issue 69 by Gord Sellar & Sandra McDonald & John Chu

Author:Gord Sellar & Sandra McDonald & John Chu [Sellar, Gord & McDonald, Sandra & Chu, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2020-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

October, 2031

A lone gopher crouched just off the highway, beside one of the entrances to its burrow. Anxious at having sensed something approaching, it sniffed the air for anything beyond the familiar, endless off-gassing of the field that had begun following a visit by mechanical sprayers weeks before. Then it sensed a faint rumbling in the distance, somewhere far off down the highway.

The gopher relaxed, perking its head up and it turned slowly. It had lived in this spot all its life, long enough to understand that the enormous, rattling machines that roared past generally posed it no threat. As one of those machines approached, the gopher watched it, incapable of imagining that something else might be looking back at it.

But something was . . . or rather, Jim was. When he saw the animal, he was momentarily startled. They were so rare down south these days that the relocation project had shut down a year or two back. How many more of them could there be here? Was the poor little guy all alone?

Though he’d only briefly glimpsed it, the image of that little gopher remained within him, strangely haunting. He found himself thinking back over childhood winters: back in those days, these fields would’ve been ankle-deep in snow, as far as the eye could see, the houses nestled in it and their chimneys belching white fumes upward. The gophers would’ve been hibernating in their burrows for months already by now.

And yet this one remained, tenaciously clinging to this changed land, enduring the world’s ruination: the warping of the seasons and the internal rhythms of its own life; the diminishing sustenance of the vegetation that grew in the area; the binding chemicals that were sprayed onto the topsoil after the harvest, to hold it in place until the snows finally did come, if they did. The poor little creature survived it all, somehow.

Jim found himself turning toward the backseat, to look at his daughter, Angie. For some reason he was unsettled by what he saw there, too: Bonnie was feeding their little girl apple juice from a silicon sippy-bag in the back seat, while Angie clung to her stuffed pony doll.

“I just saw a gopher,” he said, in a voice that sounded strange even to him.

Or, rather, only to him, for Bonnie simply replied, “Oh yeah?” She was busy, didn’t notice the way Jim looked, as if he’d seen a ghost.

“Yeah. Strange,” Jim said, leaving it at that. There was no point in talking about it: they had before, dozens of times, and always ended up at the same place. Angie would grow up in a different world than they’d known, and they had to do their best to prepare her for it. Jim pushed himself to set the thought aside in the way people do, the way people always have done.

Dinner with Dad, he thought, turning to look back at the road for a moment, to take in the plume of dust that had risen behind them. He

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