Authored: November 20, 2023

It’s the end, a world covered in snow.
I seem the only one alive.
I’ve traveled for weeks, one small fire at a time.
A stream of burnt wood and tin cans in my wake.
One day, there’s a light in the darkness.
I move directly towards it.
Contact is worth the potential for death.
Moving closer, it’s not a fire. Too constant.
Electric light.

Coming through windows in the darkness.
It’s a greenhouse, heated, the windows free of frost.
There’s a small flower inside.
A sunflower in the wastes.
There’s no one there, I enter quickly to conserve the heat.
I’m unsure of what the source may be.
There’s a terminal there, I investigate.
The system is run by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator.
Providing heat and power, like the spaceships.
How did it get here, who brought it, and why?
It seemed too well-designed to be coincidental.
The sunflower is there, beautiful enough to evoke tears.
Ah, so there is still some magic in the world.
It grows slowly upward towards the light.
I have a purpose now.

Gardening supplies, fertilizers, urine, introducing new components into the system.
It seemed to realize what I was doing, its leaves wrapped around my fingers, moving back to the light.
I set up a track, so that the light source can move during the day.
The sunflower follows the light, I feel happier to see it.
The light goes off at what I’ve programmed to be “night.”
In the dim remaining light, the sunflower is as tall as I am.
It is looking at me, and as I move it turns to face me.
It is sentient, somehow, and it is both astonishing and terrifying.
The black face wreathed by yellow petals like an eclipsed sun, an omen.

Because I can tell that it is kind, I cannot source my fear.
I aid it in pollinating, using a system to catch pollen and place it back onto the flower.
Yet it still looks at me in the dark, the same way it looks at its “sun.”
Does it see the same light in me, in some way I don’t understand?
I can tell that it does.
In this isolation, the flower feels like a person, mute yet intelligent.
On particularly good days, the flower looks at me even when the light is on.
On bad days, it doesn’t even look at me in the darkness. It feels lonelier than before.
Once it goes to seed, I collect them. The flower begins to go. I can tell that it is thankful.
I’ve begun to plant small vegetable plants using seeds found on my excursions.

I always plant a few sunflowers alongside them. We keep an eye on each other.
You don’t realize how much life there always was until you have so little left.

Someday the sun will come through the clouds again, I’d like to see it.
Until then, I’ll stand beside this flower, and we’ll open ourselves up to the light we have.