SolarState

    Air stillness. The sun rides high, watching over its herd of lumbering
clouds, their grayish underbellies flat as they graze on an invisible plain.
They tumble in an almost sullen manner, huge and puffy. But few block the flow
from the sun.
    It is late December.
    Christmas approaches with jingling steps. Hurried people descend on stores,
looting them of the goods inside and leaving behind only scraps of green paper
and rectangles of greasy plastic.
    Ultraviolet particles descend from their trip through the precious layer
of atmosphere, now tamed from their wild natural state. Sweat is stolen off
the skin by the air to feed the cloudbeasts. Zephyrs slip by, carrying a clean
scent of greenery and heated asphalt.
    If you were a visitor from another time and place, if you didn't know where
you were or what the season is, you might be confused. The feel of late spring
surrounds you, clashing with tacky christmas decorations, blinking lights, the
smell of spruce and pine and fir.
    Cars crowd the roads, the exhalations from their engines eaten by the
hungry sun before you can smell the tang. Inviolable hydrocarbons giggle as
they escape and scamper off to cause mischief. The people do not notice,
smiling or frowning, as they prepare for the coming holidays.
    You watch as the clouds glide massively across the sky, clustering in
groups here and there, planning their eventual release upon the land. Pouring
themselves towards the earth, the clouds will soak the dirt, wiggle down as
far as they can reach, down into the limestone and porous rock, to settle and
live for a time.
    Eventually.

    Zephyrs have left to wherever they live, allowing the slower, more serious
breezes to play idly through hair and clothes, trees and shrubs. The sky is
dark and bare. The sun has gone onwards, herding its clouds to another place.
Now the stars can be seen faintly, flickering and shimmering. A sliver of moon
arrives, a thin cup to pour out invisible liquid.
    You wander through the coolness of the air, comfortable without sweater
or jacket. The stores have closed frantically, shopkeepers thinking of epson
salts and unsore feet. A slightly damp smell pervades the grassy ground.
    Once, in a previous year, the place had been frozen, locked in a shiny
clear layer of ice. The city had grown dark and cold and no one dared to be
out. Grass and bushes and even trees has lost the battle and given their mass
to the ground for their children.
    Now, an azalea bush blooms, nearly scentless flowers of faint pink. Wasps
buzz and hunt, scraping together bricks for their homes. Reptiles a million
years old drift like logs in thick, greenish water. Unwary, beware.
    Brilliant dabs of colored light decorate the abodes of the student ghetto,
the suburban homelands, the downtown stores. A ferris wheel of electric stars
hums as it slowly turns, a miniature amusement park for inanimate dwarves.
    You think of heavy flakes of snow, drifts of white, cold snippery frost
coating windows and bark and dead grass. You think of snow balls and snow men
and children with runny noses bundled in layers of wool. You think of a white
Christmas.
    You look at the common, unthought of miracle of a green Christmas, and
stand silently.


[Copyright 1995 by author, Jeff C. Mercer]