Luna

Episode One

Prologue

With a fondness for episodic cinematic storytelling I have always wanted to write long form. From savoring Dickens “Tale of Two Cities” to Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” to “Downton Abbey” I appreciate writers who can transport us into memorable thrilling worlds with strong compelling plots and iconic characters.

For the past month I have been enjoying the private addictive pleasure of shaping such a fiction. I now wish to share it with you, as I write it, with weekly installments.

My inspiration is my 12-year old granddaughter, Emma, who lives in Phoenix. I am 68-years old and intrigued by climate change and what the future holds, and, contrary to my dark nature, I have been endeavoring to see a sustainable, survivable path forward for all my grandchildren and their grandchildren. The central character in my fiction is Luna, a 12-year old. The year is 2100. The story will span 10 very challenging years in her life and the life of her world. The setting is here in Arizona.

I will continue to post commentary and other works. I welcome your criticism. Always have. Always will. Thank you, dear readers for your friendship.

D. W. Fitzsimmons

Chapter 1

Before Carlos entered his grand daughter’s room he always knocked on the rusted tin sign that hung on her door. When he tapped it the thing rattled like the solar panels on their home rattled when the 60-mile an hour winds blew yesterday’s sandstorm across the valley, dumping a tsunami of sand on their semi-subterranean desert home. The sign featured a rosy cheeked homemaker smiling proudly below the phrase “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.” Luna appreciated the irony of that ancient artifact in a world where daytime highs averaged 115-degrees.

“Come on in, grandpa.”

The old man brushed the sand off his pants, coughed up the desert and shuffled his way into the dark room towards Luna who was listening to her “Atmospheric Rain Playlist-Creosote Dream No. 7 ” while texting with a friend on her Mind-pad. Stretched out on her bed, she was framed by her collection of hand fans, some cheap and common, elaborate and extravagant, some purchased, most found, all hung with care on the cool dark earthen wall behind her.

Luna became enamored with fans when she saw a clip from an ancient film from the black and white age called “Inherit the wind”. When she saw the cast fanning themselves in that southern American courtroom she was perplexed, surprised to see that people were hot way back then, too, even centuries ago. Then she found a discarded fan along the King’s Way, another refugee’s loss. Her grandmother Julieta showed her how to snap it shut with dramatic flair.

“The fan was your grandmother’s favorite. Took that sandstorm forever to die down didn’t it, mija. How’s life?”

“Hey, Grandpa. How is life. Unsustainable.”

“Smart ass.”

“Your mom’s asleep. Your dad will be home soon.”

“Why are you still up? What are you doing?”

“Listening to rain. Talking to friends.” The wind and the creaking windmills out back made it hard for Carlos to hear her.

“About?”

“The best place to live.”

“There is no place better to live. We’ve been here ten thousand years, mija.“

“You’ve been saying that to me for what? Ten thousand years, grandpa?“

“Where are you and your friends planning on running to? Mars?”

“Ireland.. Iceland.. Boise..”

“Boise. Good luck. Go to sleep. The sun will be up soon. Bedtime. We got a lot of sand to shovel when it sets tonight.”

Luna bid her friend goodbye, looked outside at the fading night and the humming violet, turquoise, crimson and lime neon that illuminated the nearby city street on the horizon. She said, “uh huh” and researched yesterday’s haboob on her Mind-pad. “Seventh sandstorm in this region. This season.”

“Seventh. Huh.“ Carlos stopped expressing alarm about extreme weather patterns long before Luna was born. “Come on girl, turn that thing off and get some sleep.”

Luna groaned, tapped her temple on the side of her head, blinked twice and shut her Mind-pad conversation down.”Happy?” She kept the ambient rain on. She couldn’t fall asleep without another world looping through her head.

“Yes. Good morning, kid.”

“Any leaks?”

“Rainwater tanks are fine, Luna. No leaks.”

“I’d hate to miss my weekly beauty bath.”

“I don’t know why.” His granddaughter’s stubbornness made him grin. “I like it when you smell like a javelina. Now. Go. To. Sleep.”

Carlos rubbed his sand reddened eyes, squinted out her window at the Santa Catalinas. He pulled her blinds down. He drew her dark heavy drapes tightly together to keep the white hot sunlight out when dawn would soon arrive and the sun would crest the Rincon mountains to the east and sets their hot hazy world alight.

”How about a bedtime story?”

“I’m not a kid anymore.”

“Are, too. And you’re full of sand.”

“You’re full of sand.”

“You are.”

“You.”

At the foot of the bed Luna’s robot corrected them. “The human body is made up of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus.”

Luna giggled. “Thanks, Rin.”

Rin was a two hundred year old pack robot Luna found exposed by a monsoon microburst on a hike with her dad last year. Much to their surprise the four-legged black and yellow thing that resembled a large headless dog was salvageable. Back home Carlos recharged and rebooted it. It responded to audio commands and it could carry nearly any modest sized burden and it could lope across any obstacle save for the omnipresent sand that trapped it a century before where Luna found it in the dunes like Dorothy’s tin man and named it Rin Tin Tin.

When Luna whispered,“Go to sleep Rin,” it laid down and the red lights in it’s tiny head went out. Carlos stepped over it and plopped onto the edge of Luna’s unmade bed where she burrowed in for a good day’s sleep among her tech toys and another of her favorite finds, a ragged Guatemalan blanket probably discarded by a hapless climate refugee most likely before she was born many dust storms ago, another treasure exposed by a freak microburst that washed away a century of sand. Luna liked to imagine it was abandoned by a courageous straggler, an intrepid pioneer heading for the subarctic.

Luna pointed at the old man’s equally ragged T-shirt. “You haven’t worn that old thing forever, grandpa.” Luna looked at the man-in-the-maze on the faded black T-shirt, an ancient bullseye image of segmented concentric circles into which a small stick figure, a human, entered from above.“Tell me what that thing means again.”

“The little white human being is you. The maze represents all the different paths you will take in this life.”

Luna pretended to snore. When he gently poked her she laughed.

“If you are wise, my beloved smart ass, each twist and turn—and even the dead ends you find in this life—will teach you something. And give you understanding. And make you strong. Like your mother.”

With his brown hands the old man raked his long hair back over his shoulders and pulled his silver ponytail taut. He admired his granddaughter, a girl in her twelfth year of life who was becoming a young woman. “As beautiful as your grandmother,” he said to the world. Her reddish brown skin was the color of the muddy waters that flooded the arroyos when the monsoons brought life and death to the desert. Her hair and eyes were as black as the night sky.

The old man sighed. “That was one Hell of a haboob wasn’t it?”

This summer’s rolling waves of dust storms felt Biblical in scale, coloring the skies across the west fiery orange, eclipsing the broiling sun, and sandblasting every electrical grid across the Baja Zone, raining dunes and black-outs on the just and unjust alike, stilling the whir of multitudes of atmosphere conditioners across the valley, leaving a ghastly silence, exposing the inhabitants to the jarring, lethal, hostile outer world of 130-degree days and 110-degree nights. “With the power back clean up will be easy. Lay down. Shut your eyes. I’ll tell you a story.”

The old man stroked his grand daughter’s black hair away from her closed eyes and began his story. “Once upon a time a princess named Maria lived in a village in the outback. Near here.”

Luna rolled over to face the cool earthen wall of their semi-subterranean “earth ship”, the name her great great grandparents chose for the home they had made themselves, long before any of their generation were in this present hot and waterless world. As grandpa told the story, “They made it with adobe, recycled materials and sustainable wisdom back when the world was only said to be warming and when the forests were only beginning to burn.” Back to the time Luna’s grandfather often spoke of with tears in his eyes, “when the once plentiful saguaros desperately blossomed flowers along the sides of their ribs, as well as on top of their crowns, signaling their distress to the blind world, signaling what they knew, with white flowers that tumbled down their sides like passengers off a doomed ship, that the seasons of drought would only grow longer and longer and longer.” And now, lifetimes later, Luna, suspected it was too late for the man in the maze to find a way back out.

Carlos cleared his throat of more desert and continued his story. “One day Maria’s father, the Chief, was visited by Hummingbird, the messenger from the spirit world. Hummingbird warned the Chief to warn his people that the great haboob was coming their way. ‘Tell everyone to take cover in their pit houses.’ The Chief thanked Hummingbird and did as he asked.”

Luna knew about pit houses. She remembered when she was little, when her father took her to one of his archeological digs to show her the place where hundreds of pit houses once stood, “back when this place was an Eden, baby girl. Long before the Europeans came. Before the Hohokam.”

She remembered when her father crouched down and handed her the small clay doll he’d found at that site near the footprints of an adult and toddler. The tiny tan object was the size of a stick of chalk with a small face painted on it that smiled up at Luna from out of the ancient past.“We don’t know how old that smile is yet. But I can tell you this my Luna. Our people have been here ten thousand years.”

As Luna grew older and storms and refugees came and went she wondered if the world would last another hundred years.

“Luna. Are you listening?” She mumbled that she was.

“The next day the great sandstorm spirit appeared on the horizon, blocking out the sun. The Chief called to his little girl to come inside. Once she was inside their pit house he warned her to never go outside during bad weather and to never disobey her elders and to never look into the heart of the haboob. Little Maria saw the sandstorm spirit in the distance, his legion of spinning dust devils dancing before him. Hummingbird and the Gods of Thunder and Rain fled to the other side of the world where they hid in their caves in the sacred mountains.

When the howling sandstorm spirit came closer to Maria’s village she wanted to see what was in the heart of the sandstorm spirit that her father did not want her to see. So she disobeyed him. And she ran outside! And the great sandstorm spirit swallowed her up and little Maria flew deep, deep, deep into the heart of the howling haboob. As she spun like a pinwheel, round and round, Maria could see everything swirling around her as the great monster storm roared across the desert.

And do you know what little Maria saw, Luna?”

Luna mumbled.

“She saw all the cities that had been turned to dust since the world had warmed. Since the seas rose. The forests burned. And the snow stopped falling. And the jackrabbits fled north.” That part always made the old man choke up a bit. He cleared his throat and continued. “Maria could see that the terrible howling sound was all of the mournful cries of the billions of souls that had been turned to dust by the Great Warming and the Great Famines that followed.”

Luna rolled over to tap her pet tarantula’s terrarium. It skittered into it’s burrow.. “What happened to the little girl?”

“She’s in there still. Should’ve listened to her grandpa. Pleasant dreams.”

“Very funny. Don’t you know any happy stories?”

“Next time. I promise. Sleep!”

Luna yawned, rolled over again and mumbled, “Good morning, grandpa. I love you.”

“And I love you, too, Luna. More than water. Bless you, bless us all, bless your brother in the Antarctic and bless Mother Earth.”

Carlos patted her, got up, shut her door and on his way to his room he stopped in the dark hallway when he saw his watch light up. He tapped his temple, blinked three times and the Mind-Pad notification appeared as the holographic image of a newsreader standing among statistics and weather maps looping in the darkness in front of him. “…has issued a lethal extended wet bulb weather alert with extreme high humidity and high temperatures forecast this coming weekend for the entire space port district and the entire life zone beginning 48-hours from now we encourage everyone to seek shelter and remain in place…” He tapped his Mind-pad off, closed the shades in his room and laid down. He turned to look at the small glowing figure on the nightstand next to his bed, a holographic image of his beloved Julieta, made on the day they wed. He sighed and said, “Now that was a beautiful day,” and turned it off. He rolled onto his back and in the cool darkness the old man whispered to the thick earthen roof above him, “We’re not going anywhere. Are we, Julieta. We've been here ten thousand years.”

Next Sunday: Episode 2