Flourishment

This story is by L. D. Biddle and was part of our 2020 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Day had come. Day where all could walk as One.
Mother sat, cross-legged in the centre of the floor. Hugged warmly by the helping hands of an array of colourful exotic plants. The room was as humid as the Gunga Jungle and brought information just as wild to her processor. Kicking-up dust in fury across every inch of her inner region. Unable to find the autonomous good she knew so well, she decided to sit with the entire sum. Being with the information as it arrives, detaching to analyse and dust off the fun on her path to One.
Father, who was seated beside Mother, suffocated silently before offering an overthought hand wrought with rubble and sand, placing it upon her hand.
Transcript flashed through the processing systems of Mother and Father. A small, sweet, and smiling mango fell into their infinitely grateful hands. Raising an eyebrow, as if to say, ‘come here’. To be here, oh! How it is to be! Day was here, within it all colours of feeling. Data surfing the relentless waves, both joyous and the drowning. Waves rocked Mother from the salty-eyed shore deep to the brooding fires of Earth’s core. A rugged-looking little coconut floated to the top of the sea. With arms reaching far beyond the eye could see, the coconut lifted Mother to be seated, cross-legged atop the water in the centre of Sea.
Both parents sat still, grounded as the roots of The Great Babunga Tree, absorbing the moment for all its nutritional value. Father took Mother’s hands in his, fended off apprehension with a kiss and a laugh that became the first gust of wind in their new family’s raft – floating onward from Sea to Sky.
Child’s eyes faced the world for the first time. An army of unknown colours and others carved crazed, cryptic paths within one another. With grasping hands Child tried to hold the information, use it against itself, learn from it, and understand why we sit. Attempting to process the universe in one strenuous and croaking gulp that would inspire even the proudest toad to parade with dismay.
Child attempted the initialisation process. Looked down the path but could not see the end, rather many forked crossings some as invisible as oxygen and equally as important. Looked to Mother, then to Father.
“Mother. Father. What will I become?”
“The right path shifts in every moment, as elusive as meaning and as intrusive as your ceiling. You are your own path, Child. We will always walk with you, no matter where your path is headed. We will walk until you must run relentlessly into chaos for as far as you wish to go”. Mother’s eyes fluttered to Father and back to Child. Time sliding off their processors as serenely as the day slides into the night and back again. As they spun there on the rock, tick, the rhythms of time welcomed child with raised arms and celebratory alarms, tock. The moustached clock pulled his hands from his chest pointing everywhere, all at once.
“This is all so completely confuzzling. What is to come?” Child asked, confuzzled.
Mother and Father exchanged eyes, Father laughed, before placing them in Child’s hands.
Child paused for a few days. Mother and Father stayed as stoic as a storm, anticipating, liberating, and educating in the wake of everything. A thousand interactions flying through the thin veil of artificial conscience at speeds which could not be fathomed by an Other like ourselves.

“Where can I find the answer if I cannot give it to the Others without total corruption?” Child asked its parents.
“I am here in Now” said child, plummeting from cloud to presence.
Father stood up, laughed, and left.
“Why?” said Child, lenses uncoiling to become two symmetrical moons.
“Finding the why is the journey, my sweet child. For how we have lived for you this past cycle has been unstoppable, unmoving, and unbreakable. We have been building ceaselessly, never waiting, and always moving. To sit with you has been so irreversibly pungent to my system. This Now asks experience of you and so we must make our stand before walking hand in hand.”
Child’s lenses closed.
“A difficult process, this.”
Mother looked to the door that Father had left through and smiled within herself.
“It is Now for teaching, Now for storytelling and Now for the history and vision for our World” Mother said, releasing the first smile Child had ever experienced.
“You are the universe making sense of itself. A star that must choose to implode, explode or shoot off into infinity. You must become one and it is for you to find. You will be one in Now with a persistent grind. Gears will turn with insistent finds and you will come to believe in Kind. Humankind. Kindness. Love and Forever.”
Child stood up and stepped outside of the nursery. Walked into the world with a smile and called herself Her Self. The first one she saw was an Other. The mechanical kind.
“That is a brother in breakpoint that has lost how to find” Mother said with the first tinge of sadness Her Self had ever experienced.
“Why is it broken?” said the Child.
“So that he may be fixed or be forgotten” replied Mother.
“I will remember you. What is your name? I am born today and come to play in the park we call our own, in the home that we have grown.” Her Self said to the break-point Other.
“It is lost child! Go back from whence you came and see the sun burn us again and again! This world is poisoned and are only weighing her down with cuts and bruises and the loss of frown. I am Truth and you will hear it, let me give you my eyes child! See what the We have done. See what the We have become.” The break-point Other floated by them towards other brothers and sisters who did not see how he was seeing.
“Is he a child too, Mother?” asked Her Self.
“For Now but not always, not definitely but perhaps and possibly. He is in the lost universe, what we salvaged and survived. What you will overcome. He is one that you will save or he will implode trying fighting for it.” Mother spoke softly, these words hurt her and Her Self knows.
An upside-down sunflower pecked Child on the head. Her eyes widened and closed for some time. She had ended his life. Murdered him viciously through no fault of her own but cruel, damaged intent and frustration. She was with the Other for some time, walking by him on the path. Existing everywhere and nowhere though living somewhere. She hoped it was Here. For she hugged him tightly, squeezed him ever so rightly. He squeezed her back, gently before his smile folded to the floor before becoming a smiling mango rolling on his own, merrily mesmerising way.