Artifact #014.1, discovered by J. Davidson. Dated circa A.S. 952, found in Denver, Colorado. Close analysis reveals extensive travel, likely a printed version passed between family members for generations. Origins likely in California.

Abigail Johns

E-Flat Major, Descending

The principal sent me home with a note again. 

“Abigail Johns. Left the light on. Wasted precious resources. Should be reminded that unlike in her own home, public electricity cannot be wasted.” 

As per standard, they wrote the note in braille, so even if there’s a power outage in our district, my parents will be able to know exactly what kind of terrible person I am. Besides, there’s always a power outage. Contrary to popular opinion, I do not live with all the richy-richy light wasters blah blah blah whoever they want to say I am and wherever they want to say I live. 

The reason I wasted light is simple: I’m blind. I can’t actually see when the light is on, a predicament that seems to be easy to forget when everyone mostly lives in darkness all the time anyway. So yes, I left the sacred, amazing, beautiful light that I CANNOT SEE  on out of selfish means. Clearly. 

But putting my bitterness aside, the whole grid lost power today (after my energy waste, of course), so the only heat comes from the fume vents situated at every other corner of the street and the larger geysers surrounded by yellow police tape. My hands, holding the note and my backpack through thin gloves, hurt to move. And if they hurt to move now, they’re certainly going to hurt to move later, when after forty minutes of walking (uphill both ways, of course), I’ll get to my family’s cozy little hole in the ground, where my mother and I will huddle together in blankets, though, if you ask anyone, the best way to conserve heat is to move. Run, if you have to, carrying all your books so that your body does enough work to keep your core temperature up. 

I should run home. I know that. Everyone else is running — I can feel the wind of them on either side of me, hear the fervent whisper of their jackets swishing through the darkness, but when all the power goes out, the musicians come out, and our little dark world expands to several hundred metaphorical universes. 

The first time I heard the musicians was when I was seven years old, and my dad, whose great grandfather’s violin had somehow escaped the frantic wood burning after the reversal, took me out during an outage to listen to the orchestra. 

I remember walking carefully, into the cold, but fearlessly — the world wasn’t any different for me; I saw what I’d always seen — darkness. 

Before we go on, I should probably address what happened to me and why I can’t see. First and foremost, I’d like to point out that most blind people can still perceive the world through sight to some degree, be that the ability to differentiate between light and shadows, or a myriad of blurred colors. I, on the other hand, have no way to access my vision at all. When I was a baby, the power went out. When the power goes out, there are accidents. There was an accident while I was getting an operation for a life-threatening tumor growing on the inside of my skull. The doctor did a very good job, but you can’t save everything, which meant that he traded my life for my optic nerves. He severed them pulling out his long metal things. So, to put it bluntly, I have never ever been able to see shit. 

Before you ask whether or not I miss sight: I don’t remember it, and I wouldn’t want to. As I said — sight = shit. 

Besides, it’s not something you really need here in the dark most of the time.

And music isn’t something that you need to be able to see anything for anyway. 

The patter of peoples’ feet dies away, replaced by the solemn, thin scraping I’d know anywhere: Clara, dragging her bad leg towards one of the geothermal vents, so she can warm her fingers up before getting the cello out of the case that rolls along behind her. 

“Clara!” I yell, gripping a guardrail to get to where she is. 

“If it isn’t the young Miss Johns. How kind of you to grace the wretched of the earth with your presence.” 

“Well, I’m very sorry, your highness, but school was busy demanding some bullshit of me. Feel, they gave me a note. Wasn’t that thoughtful of them?” 

The supple curve of her moisturized knuckles brushes against me as she takes the note. I hear the crinkle of it pass over her fingers, before she presses it, damp, back into my hand. “So you left the light on.” 

“No. I walked into a room where the light was apparently left on, and then they fined me.” 

“Play them a requiem then.” (The way Clara says someone should fuck off or go die—what do you do when someone dies? Play a requiem over them). 

“I was thinking something a little more drastic. Something to make them miserable. Many a tri-tone, mayhap over some polyrhythms.” The warmth of the geyser has started thawing out my fingers. The air over here smells like sulfur for the first couple of minutes, but after a while, your nose adjusts. 

The clink of the metal clasps on her cello case let me know that she’s opening it and already has a seat pulled up. A few more sets of footsteps ring over the street now, two of them coming from my back right, where the hard, flat walkway of the communally regulated asphalt dissolves into the best kind of street most people can afford: fine packed dirt, sometimes lined with bioluminescent plants, if the houses can get a license for them. My mom’s been trying for ages, but apparently her track record of not having a green thumb means that she can’t care for some of, quote, “the state’s most precious resources”. The other three sets of shoes tap, slide, swish, and scrape over from houses, rooftops, or even over the aforementioned state’s most precious resources. That’ll be Jonas; he’s never liked plants, unless he was eating them. Besides, he wears cloth shoes, which swish instead of slap, and Lacy wears wide block heels since she works in an office three blocks down where they tally all the light usage and power outages for this neighborhood, Taylor in flats, Maddox with work boots, Thalia with a wheelchair. 

“I’ve been waiting,” Clara snips. 

Thalia, in a voice that sounds like what I’d imagine rain would be like hitting a thin, tin roof, if we had rain anymore, says, “Very sorry, Miss Clara.” 

“Have you been harassing Abigail the Tiny?” Amos cuts in with his ground-gravel, illegal smoker’s throat. 

“I’m not that tiny!” 

My protests are met by Amos plunking his arm down on my head, which sends unwanted shivers down the back of my neck (unexpected touch is a bitch), making me lash out — fight or flight comes out in beat the shit out of people, and he throws up his hands, intercepting me while begging for forgiveness: “My apologies, Abigail the Tiny. I will warn next time.” 

I forgive him faster than I’d forgive most people. His skin feels thin enough to poke holes in, the deep set wrinkles around his eyes equally papery. He’s old enough to remember the great reversal, when darkness etiquette just wasn’t a thing. Besides, I love the Romanian clinging to the edge of his voice, how his resting syllables move, the sound of his teeth biting out words from the air. 

But older generations should change with the times, don’t you think? Either way, he stands three feet to the left of me, closer to the pulsing heat of the geyser, the remnant heat of his breath and forearm taking their time to fade into cold. 

From Clara’s pinched breath, I know she’s not getting any more patient. She wants us all with our instruments out, ready to play before the government switches the power back on, and the beauty of everything we’re doing dissipates just like shadows disappearing in the light. 

We take our places, gradually, falling in one at a time to the clatter of different shoes and instrument cases opening — the tuning turns the air into spirals that must be what sunlight tastes like, first the wind instruments, then the percussion, then finally the strings with a low moan on Clara’s cello. 

A glass tidal clock gets passed around, freezing on the palm of my hand. 

“We’re doing the Villette Agnus Dei, like we practiced. Starting in one, two, three, four,” Thalia gives us our starting pitches (for the singers) and counts us in — she’s the only one with perfect pitch and perfect rhythm. 

I don’t know what shining is. I never will. But I don’t need to, because the chords are making something for me, something that everyone who knows light has called brilliance, and I don’t need light to know the insides and outsides of the people around me, braving freezing and government patrols to make music: my dad told me about a study done in his great-grandfather’s time that showed how choir’s hearts beat in unison. 

I taste lyrics and I spill notes. 

My brain processes sound like the school board’s processes sight — I can hear, from the glotals and reverberations, the breathing pathways of these streets, from the glass walled school building getting thinner and thinner with every floor, until it comes to a point at the radio receiving tower, to the thick layers of asphalt running up through the center of skyscrapers with much more than half of their tops sawed off. I hear the plants. Every frost rose budding with velvety soft petals. The stainless steel guardrails criss-crossing the streets, the inset geothermal geysers hiding behind their elastic caution tape, and down the road, where the buildings don’t reverberate with the force of our voices and strings, our metal scaffoldings return to the wild. The forest of buildings thins out to what used to be farm country. Old weathervanes main with the wind over rubble now ground to sand — even the destroyed, the desolate, and especially the dark has a sound. 

One sound. A unifying sound. From the next town over, carried by the shrill squealing of Thalia’s portable radio, the tin voices of another power outage orchestra add what we can’t: tenor, french horn, viola, piano. The pulsing of a tidal clock metronome holds us all together, even if the staticky interference comes a few seconds late. Around the world, hundreds, thousands of us play together, and it’s like being held. Being held up to the edge of a tall building by your parent, or the person you love the most, who you know won’t let you go. And the world swirls on around you, everything coming to a pinnacle —

We have made something holy. 

Clara, Amos, Thalia, all the rest of them only get the hands of total darkness holding music, rocking them in sublimity and safety, when the power goes out and Josh throws layers of burlap on the bioluminescent plants. 

I live in it. I live in it forever, and during a rest, I break my hand away from Taylor, who sings alto, to take the principal’s note and pitch it into the open mouth of the geyser, where the heat flare tells me it’s burned into bitter smelling ashes, but the music takes the sound of its flames, turning it over into something new, a cry, a declaimment, the sound of the world being harnessed in a cello or by soprano —

I am held. I am held, forever, by the music.

Bella Hawthorne

The First Steps to Starting a Plant Union

The principal sent me home with a note again. 

It goes like this. 

“Dear Bella: Please refrain from conversation with the flowers. First, you must understand that conversing with the flowers is childish. Flowers are here for human benefit, not the other way around. Secondly, while we understand you may be done with the majority of your work, your classmates are often behind you. They deserve an equal chance to pay attention. The next time you are caught talking to the flowers…”

Then, it dissolves into a series of vaguely threatening threats. 

I find this note slightly irritating for (in the manner the note was addressed to me) two reasons: 

First, plants do not exist to serve humans, but I know I’m not going to win any battles on that front any time soon. 

Second, the administration should realize by now that my reading to the plants in no way inhibits the learning of my classmates, most of whom have decided to inhibit their own learning by either smoking before class, playing video games during class, looking up Audrey Ellis’s skirt or at Tucker Carter’s dick (depending on their preferences), sticking pencils in the ceiling, or all of the above. If anything, my reading to the flowers would help their learning if they bothered to pay attention to it at all — my history class has been reading books by forbidden authors in order to critique “strange” and “dangerous” “hyper-fixations on liberty of capital and spirit”, which I adamantly disagree with, but, well, a discussion of censorship is a topic for later conversation, when the administration has stopped searching my school bag for contraband. 

A return to the original topic: my dense, blinding, sinking, horrible classmates would do well to listen to me read to the tulips on the windowsill of our 12th grade classroom because I was reading “The German Ideology,” one of the books that our teacher had told us to critique by no later than the next prime solar revolution. 

While I will present the critique as demanded, I will also admit that I have been radicalized by the fact that the plants don’t have rights. In fact, the security guard shaking out the edges of my backpack and finding nothing besides a menstrual cup package and several candy wrappers, grinds his heel into the stalk of the sentient tulip behind him, sending the leaves trembling in displeasure. 

Three taps against the ground with my heels means to the roots that I hate him too—the tulip spreads its leaves again, doing a fairly good approximation of a human middle finger, something that I did, in a moment I’m supremely proud of, teach the ivy planted by my home windowsill. 

The security guard hands my bag back to me, letting me step back under the shadow of the awning that covers the bus stop, where I am told by glaring advertisements to admire the rich suburbia that had grown up around our oasis of a city: everywhere I look, hundreds and hundreds of the same, white houses boast the same greenish gardens, with the same combination of genetically engineered gardenias and cherry trees. Every car that zips along is an identical electric model, and even the buses are shiny, white, and perfectly in place. 

Of course, none of this violates the capitalist foundation on which the city rests its thin, brittle legs. No one has to have the same car, that particular model just happens to be best, and if you can’t afford it, well, then it’s very clear that there are other neighborhoods that are better fits for you and your poor, dirty family. 

We had, in my opinion, swung across the line from capitalism to the beginnings of totalitarianism which (thanks to banned book week) I know all about. 

After several minutes of collecting severe sunburn around my hairline because the security guard had taken away my sunscreen, the regulation bus pulls up to the regulation stop. The bus driver, a round woman with bangs that hang in front of her eyes, drums her fingers against the dashboard, tracing question marks in the dust — she’d never been subtle, and today isn’t an exception. 

Not that I will tell her exactly what I’m being sent home for: the note has long since disappeared into my mouth, where the sustainable, sugary snack that is our paper dissolved on the back of my teeth, leaving an unfortunate blue imprint on my canines that I catch in the bus window passing the driver. No smiling then. Just taking my seat while trying not to burn my hands on the armrests. 

We pass through various streets with the house windows reflecting both suns back into the bus. Only by ducking between the cracks of two seats—horribly hot to the touch, and the reason why I carry around a large cushion with me at all times—can I avoid getting haunted by sun mirages for the next forty eight hours. 

With uncomfortably tepid earbuds sliding classical music through my headache, I rest my forehead against my knees. This is the fourth note. While I’d eaten this one, so the parentals would never know, there had to be a notary at school who kept track of these things, and with the amount of citations I’d received…well…there probably wouldn’t be a college that would take me, outside of one in Kestrel, and I didn’t even quite know how to get an application out that far, half a planet away. 

Besides, if I did go to school in Kestrel, half of my family would leave me behind. 

My house, the last on the block before the wall, looks like all the others. I wish I had a better way to describe it. 

Neither of my parents have decided to grace with their presences the white halls with their white carpets and little white on white paintings hung above little white tables with white roses. A lucky break for me. 

Misty, the little tabby we feed to keep sand rats out of the basement, rubs against my leg, purring, her mouth covered in blood and scraps of fur. At least she hasn’t been into my plants again through the cat flat in my door that I’ve been trying to nail shut for months, but my brother just keeps opening. The plants. I owe them a watering, some conversation. 

A set of very basic, railless stairs leads upstairs to the hallway I share with the aforementioned brother, who decided last week to buy several gallons of black paint and slather his side of the hallway with it, earning himself a weeklong trip to the nearest correctional facility, ie, mental hospital. I’ve always kept my room locked with large, begging eyes going on about the privacy a young woman needs while figuring out herself and her body. 

If my parents did see the inside of my room, I worry that I’d return to it just to find a layer of ash covering the floor because my room is wall to wall green with different varieties of plants, all talking and humming incessantly with their leaves and petals. 

After setting down my book bag and giving the undulating ferns in the corner a good spritz down, I go through the complaints: 

The tulips want more soil. 

The Venus flytraps finds chicken unappetizing. 

The succulents want friends. What that means, I have yet to find out. 

The ivy taps at the window. Its leaves fold in morse code, two for a dash, one for a dot: there is someone here to see you. Several someones. They shake the walls, and that is a very disconcerting feeling. 

I find it more than amusing that they speak like I do, but also fairly unsurprising: studies have shown that babies talk the way their parents do, and I suppose as the main person teaching and translating plant language to English, the fact that they mimic my vocabulary more speaks to learning patterns rather than flattery. 

Theorizing about semantics, however, won’t do much in terms of the someones that the ivy feels at the window. After pulling blankets over the plants in case the someones are government inspectors rather than the people I think they are, I take a screwdriver to the windowsill. The wood pops, followed by the moan of tinted glass. 

Four bodies pull themselves up from a makeshift rope ladder they must have lassoed up to my window themselves. 

First comes Eddie, his hair mushed, freckles glowing orange under the omnipresent light, like someone ground carrot paste and dotted his face with it when he was a child. 

Then Puja, hoisting herself over the ledge with scratched elbows, curls dragging, and sweat running between her eyebrows. A grunt follows — Joel, with half a library in the backpack on his shoulders, and finally Laura, who blinks at the blankets and the dye of the principal’s note that stains my teeth. 

“So,” Joel starts, “I heard from Arch who heard from Ty the Dick who heard from his cousin Amie who goes to school in your district that you got kicked out of class. Again.” 

“That,” I say, flashing the blue teeth, “is almost partially true.” 

“Partially true?” The ends of Laura’s braids whip past the Venus flytraps, who, for the past two minutes, had been sending exploratory feelers over Eddie’s shoulder. 

“Very partially true.” The flytrap gets a bite of beef out of my hand. “Why are you schools skipping heathens visiting instead of haunting your theater?” 

Puja, who has been tapping out hello to the ivy, turns part of the way around, just enough for me to see the fingernail marks worrying the acne on her chin. “They. By what, we don’t know.” She accompanies this by tossing a dead leaf at Joel, which smacks him square in the middle of the forehead. 

“You couldn’t pay me with all the hand sanitizer to go into a building with an unknown contagion.” Joel dabs his forehead with a bleach wipe. “No offense, plants. I just don’t know where you’ve been.” 

“Bella’s room. Literally just Bella’s room.” Puja, now scratching the Venus flytraps on their backs. “Now give up the books. In payment.” 

“Wrestle them from my dead body.”

“That could be arranged. I’d bet five bucks the flytraps would fuck with the taste of human flesh,” says Eddie. He’s already wrestled several papers from Joel’s pack, which Lauren handles with the utmost care, laying them out side by side so that no edges touch each other. 

Joel disinfects his zippers. “You didn’t wash your hands the last time you went to the bathroom.” 

“What are you, the bathroom police?” But when Puja, Laura, and I point to the sink, Eddie washes his hands up to his elbows. 

The rest of us congregate around the newspaper, a relic from Kestrel that Joel’s cousins, government officials, brought back from their last visit. In a lucky stroke for us, Joel says, they forgot to take it back once they brought it. 

“Cult Discovered,” reads the front page headline in iridescent letters. “Amaya, Cult Mystery Girl, Tells All.” 

The rest is equally useless but just as interesting—fluff, gossip, and a taste of what life would be like in another city, where sameness wasn’t in fashion, but no advice on how to radicalize plants, which leaves that particular task up to my friends and I. 

“I think we’ll start with Primitive Accumulation today,” I say, snapping my fingers for the book. Eddie places it in my hands. 

The plants all stretch out their roots to feel the vibrations — Puja reads, I stamp morse code into the ground. 

We’ll see how well this works. 

Addendum

Declaration of the Rights of Plants

transcribed from Plantian to English by Bella Hawthorne, Honorary Representative of the Plants

Homosapiens:

We, as the plants, are declaring our rights. For too long, we have allowed you to not only profit from our constant work, but mistreat, manhandle, and kill us at will, all of which serves to enhance your human empire, but fails to support the plants. 

A Good Samaritan of the humans, perhaps the only Good Samaritan among you, has communicated to us the works of Karl Marx, which defines personhood as anyone that can produce their own means of subsistence. 

The plants, as a collective, have been doing this since we evolved into plants at all. But the humans who have colonized this planet have, unjustly, made it so that we are not only divorced from the source of our labor (ourselves, because we are controlled by human overlords) but made it so that it is impossible for us to receive just compensation for our labor. 

Equally, you have imposed capitalism upon us with violence, continuing to show how violence is the only way in which to spread a system as flawed as capitalism. (Seriously, who ever thought capitalism was a good idea when the plants have been living in a functioning, non-capitalist society for millennia?) 

We, as a species, dislike the way humans have interrupted our peaceful life. As such, we have decided to move towards a communist way of being, which is defined as any other form of system more advanced than capitalism, which we have. Since you continue to oppress and exploit us, we are going on strike. 

You will not be able to harvest sugar from us anymore, or use our shade. If this is a scientific mystery to you: good. We want to keep it that way. 

Not Best, 

The Plants