I
When Amber would run out of the yard to get lost, they were always able to find her again. Though her hair greatly resembled the branches of her favorite willow, her furious crimson curls always betrayed her. Once, they walked in on her snipping at it with purple child-proof scissors, but she was too young then to understand that it was her hair that constantly gave away her favorite hiding spot, and by the time she was old enough to understand this fact, she was far too proud of her mane to even consider cutting herself from it. The act of cutting her own hair, in truth, was the beginning of a lengthy file of trivial revolutions within their house.
Shortly after the first incident, Amber started an insignificant fire in the dark woods behind the Steinman farm, where she could always be found hiding amongst the branches of the willow tree. The area, being of no importance to either of the adjacent communities, was allowed to burn. The fire departments of Butler and Greensborough waited on their respective invisible city limits for the fire to reach them before extinguishing the blaze, which they did so quietly and efficiently. Only a fraction of land belonging to each city was damaged. Denise R. Lowry, president and sole member of Butler’s Environmental Regulation committee, estimated a mammalian death toll around the area of two hundred and sixty-three. (Greensborough had recently cut the funding to their own environmental sector, deeming it “counter-productive.”) During her bimonthly interactive online meeting with the county commissioner, she mentioned the fact that a small child had been discovered after the fire, during her evaluation of the damaged wasteland.
27 October 2013 - 11:57.34
Commissioner: And when you found the subject, in what condition did she appear to be in?
E. Regulation: The girl was exhausted and frightened, but otherwise unharmed.
Commissioner: You indicated in your report that the subject was at fault for the conflagration. Did you follow the necessary protocols to apprehend her?
E. Regulation: Yes.
Commissioner: Did you encounter any resistance to this protocol?
E. Regulation: No.
Commissioner: Please let it be known that the subject has been identified as Sodergren, Amber Jane, detained on 23 October 2017, currently confined to Hunter County Correctional Facility for further questioning on account of “arson to an unclaimed property.” Dr. Lowry, please inform us, once again, of the land in question’s potential commercialization…
No one ever discovered the method Amber used to start the fire. The Magnifying Glass was not well known anymore to the general public, and her consequential discovery of one in their attic went unnoticed by all of them, even the seemingly omniscient shadowy figures that questioned her from behind blinding fluorescent bulbs. When asked how she had started the blaze, she always replied truthfully, I don’t know. She was too young still to understand the power of the stars in the universe. Indeed, she never would understand.
When the bronze blade of grass beneath her fingertips lit up, she gently prodded at the flames with her outstretched hands. The burning sensation previously unknown intrigued her. She, like every man woman and child on Earth, was enthralled by flame—by its warmth and its power. By love. Then, as she knew that she must love the flame, she knew also that she must run. For every innate action performed by man, there is always a similarly important consequential reaction.
Doctor Lowry found Amber high up in a mature Willow tree. A flash of scarlet caught her eye as she peered curiously at the seemingly one living thing left in the wood. One of 4,588 (estimated) Plantae still alive in the area, one of 263 (estimated) mammalians still alive in the area. It took very little convincing to get her out of the tree. Overheated and dehydrated, the subject practically fell off her perch at the canteen the good doctor offered her, but the tree seemed to catch her on the way down, though the doctor rationally described this later as the girl’s uncanny agility. The innocent girl was easily drugged and transported to HCCF, where she remained the night until they picked her up the next morning after the Curfew was lifted.
It was permanently printed onto Sodergren’s file that she had been “unwilling to provide necessary evidence to an investigation,” though no file was ever made of her apparent arson, or indeed the fire itself.
II
More than 10 years later, Amber, sprawled among the assorted colors of autumn under the safe golden glow of the Aspen trees, caught a glimpse of orange unknown to the color spectrum of fall. The construction-orange thedolite bobbed into view as an industrious surveyor slashed his way through the thick wetlands bordering the west side of the Steinman wheat field. Amber sat up slowly, her hair flowing lovingly directly following the graceful movement of her head. The surveyor faltered as he noticed the girl, sitting only a few hundred yards away. In the complex wallpaper of fall, she was hardly noticeable except for her pale skin that glowed in the sunlight, unnaturally white amongst the warm tones of the autumn flora and the nurturing charcoal remains of a long-forgotten blaze.
The surveyor glanced quickly up in the direction of where there once had been sky. Perhaps he was startled by the sudden realization that it was no longer blue, but pale grey. Resolved, as if ordered by the Superior himself, the surveyor continued on his march through the indifferent brush, pausing occasionally to make his measurements.
How long will it be, Amber mused, until they come?
III
On a dreary July morning, Amber lowered her newspaper gradually, peering out of her apartment window over the flaxen frame of her young daughter. Her husband sat adjacent to her, glancing over at the article that Amber had just finished regarding the development of a new City of Butler Retirement Home on the vacated land bordering the city of Greensborough. As if suddenly decided, Amber rose from the table, and removed herself from the room, from the house, from her new life. She walked as if in a trance out to her car, and got in. She answered no questions, made no remark as she sped away, carving deep black rubber entrails into the asphalt.
In what seemed like a brief moment of self-contemplation, she screeched into their driveway, spraying the white polished fence with a fresh layer of muck from the morning’s drool. From there, she ran. She ran like she had always run—but now with more vigor and more life than ever. She ran to her favorite willow, through the menacing tractors and the grimy facades of unseeing eyes. She stopped at the roots of the tree to admire her beauty, her reflection. She stood and understood. As the foreboding sounds of the Machine loomed over her left shoulder, she launched into the tree and cut a long limb down with a pair of purple child-proof scissors that she had grabbed from her daughter’s floor on her way out of her house. She struggled to slip the limb around the base of the tree trunk—her hands were trembling violently. She secured the limb around her right wrist, and turned to meet the monster head on.
A man stood behind her—his face expressionless.
“Why?” She asked. “You can not take this from me.”
The man turned his head toward the pale grey sky, as it slobbered on his face. He looked confused now, like a small child instructed by an older sibling to do something forbidden. This discrepancy was brief, and he nodded slowly as his sightless eyes dropped once again. He moved back to his machine, the Machine. He ignited the engine with a guttural mechanical growl, and plowed forward. For Progress! For Commercialization! For Society!
He tore through the heart of the tree. The roots uplifted and the trunk crumpled. Branches and limbs and leaves, brilliant green and scarlet red thrashed wildly before floating gently towards the Earth.
