Roots
Week 3, Day 1
It had been decades since the last tree fell. Since then the land seemed to have processed through its grief stages and, just then, was starting to think about coming back to life. Real life, not the holding pattern it had languished in, cloaked in the gray brittleness of raw despair. The predominant color was still flat, the feel of the place still heavy, but there were glimmers of hope here and there if you knew where to look.
The couple had waited. They waited while the final death throws shook the land. They waited while all their neighbors drifted away. They waited, standing in support of the grieving earth and doing some of their own grieving right alongside it. They waited and trusted and hoped and, on the really hard days, prayed.
Terr was big and broad and a man of action. Dre was small and lithe and a man of words. Both were sensitive enough to see what others missed and passionate enough to fight for the underdogs. Men of the land, for the land, even as it grieved. They had each other, and the land had them.
***
The night sky was, as it always had been, full of stars. That was what had entranced Terr when he first landed. He’d disembarked from the plane and stood on the tarmac looking around at the airport too small to be taken seriously. When he looked up at the sky he’d done it out of habit and hadn’t expected to see much of anything beyond the man-made glow of lights.
Normal airports required so much lighting things like stars were only left to the imagination. But that’s how city airports functioned. The major hubs he was used to with terminal after terminal, runway after runway were full of lights. Lights on the buildings, lights on the ground, even the staff carried lights with them to make them visible to the huge jets that crisscrossed in the sky.
When Terr looked up and saw stars — actual stars, grouped in constellations that he could discern without the use of a telescope — he both knew he was home and that he was likely too late. He was standing out there, alone on the tarmac after the other crew members moved inside following the gravitational pull of proper bathrooms and brewed coffee, when Dre had his own moment of clarity.
Dre was used to the stars. He’d been looking up at them, feeling connected to them, his whole life. They were part of his earliest memories and he expected them to be the last thing he saw before dying. What he hadn’t seen before was someone like Terr.
There were other men, of course, that Dre had encountered both in town and out in the world. None of them exuded the quiet strength he felt emanating from Terr that first moment. Terr was, on the surface, almost the exact opposite of Dre. The surface didn’t matter to Dre. What mattered was that, for the first time, he’d encountered someone who fit.
***
This is a story-start — if you’d like to see where the story goes “clap” for it. My “winning” start (based on number of readers who clap for it) will be developed further and might grow into a full short story!
