Three Writers Respond To "The Blue Marble"

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELD REPORT

by Karl Frederick

Expedition: Terra B Outpost: 1 Site: Lat. N39d:44m:33s; Long. W104d:57m:13s Artifact ID/Date:* EX-TB-1 / 03 21 14,075 CE Desc Code: Art

Location:
Limestone cave complex of apparent religious significance. To the side of a large meeting area, a sleeping alcove carved out of cave wall, one meter above the floor: two meters long, one wide, one high.

Evidence:
Inside the sleeping niche, a further recess holding an oil lamp, ventilated to parts yet undiscovered. Matted straw. On the underside of the top surface of the sleeping area, visible only from supine occupant perspective, the subject art, etched (process unknown) into limestone, faintly colored by vegetable dyes of unknown origin.

Findings:
Apparently the site of a planet deity-worshipping culture, this art resembles other representations from the early post-banishment millennia. It represents a two thousand kilometer altitude view of the planet when sea levels were 200 meters lower than currently, and cloud cover scattered.

Open question:
How did these apparently agrarian people, with no access even to metal-working technology, obtain a space-based image of our planet prior to the Great Submerging?

Karl Frederick was born in the mile high city, in Mercy Hospital, at North Lat. 39d:44m:33s; West Long. 104d:57m:13s. Present occupants of the residential building now occupying that location sometimes hear strange voices that seem to come from an adjacent apartment. A corpus callosum with no speed limits contributes to Karl’s penchant for elaborating the mystical side of the mundane.

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COURTSHIP

by Gail Larrick

Even before I knew her, she was beautiful, with green eyes and a swoop of dark hair. In many pictures, she is wearing jodhpurs. I think she didn’t ride. She loved to tango on the wooden floor of the dance palace beside the lake where she spent summers. Ripples of water. Tiny lights. One boy danced so beautifully that they nearly became engaged until they realized that dancing was not enough, though waltzing with him did take her breath away.

She was tiny all over. She always went home with “who had brung her,” as her mother, my outrageous red-haired grandmother, used to suggest — until one picnic night when she and Don, who became my father, swung at either end of a long board swing, leaned against the ropes, and talked until they knew each other well. The moon rose. It seemed larger even than the Earth they stood on. She left her date behind and let my father drive her home. My father did not dance, but she overlooked that flaw, knowing it meant that she would stand still for most of the rest of her life. He would be a good father.

That was the trade off.

Gail Larrick writes, reads, loves to wander. She lives in Cloverdale, California. Her spirit heart resides, though, at 38.2000 degrees north, 111.1667 degrees west.

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THE GLOBE

by Nancy Norton

My Nana gave me this glass ball, a snow globe she called it. She saved it from the olden times. She says it shows the world as it used to look, all blue from water covering more of the earth than the land did. Those white parts are ice and snow — that’s what water looked like frozen into mountains and falling from the sky, like a dust storm of tiny bits of snipped plastic, to cover the ground. Nana said men used year’s worth of fuel to fly high above the earth, to the moon, even, to capture the true nature of our world before it was lost.

Brown now, every shade of brown — the stone, sand and dust we live under in our burrow, the trickles of water we search for, the grubs and guinea pigs we grow to eat, the wind beaten shells of the cities and towns, the sky above us all. Brown is all I’ve known. Nana says she still dreams in blue and green — of running barefoot through wet, green grass, of floating in the blue sea. I wonder what a blue sea looks like. How does green feel between your toes?

Nancy Norton left a glamorous job in Digital TV to follow her heart and spend part of every year writing in a garret in the small village of Soreze at longitude 43.4539° N and latitude 2.0672° E in southwestern France. Her poetry has appeared most recently in CALYX, The Comstock Review and Susan B & Me, a book of women’s writing and photography. She is nearing completion of her first novel.

Necessary Fiction