The Bright Garden by Alex Puncekar Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY May, 2017 The Bright Garden Alex Puncekar I hereby release this thesis to the public. I understand that this thesis will be made available from the OhioLINK ETD Center and the Maag Library Circulation Desk for public access. I also authorize the University or other individuals to make copies of this thesis as needed for scholarly research. Signature: Alex Puncekar, Student Date Approvals: Christopher Barzak, Thesis Advisor Date Imad Rahman, Committee Member Date Eric Wasserman, Committee Member Date Dr. Salvatore A. Sanders, Dean of Graduate Studies Date ABSTRACT Calli Hayford lives on Kipos, a recently colonized planet far from Earth. Amongst the jungles and ravenous animals that threaten the various settlements across the planet’s surface, Calli is dealing with something much more dire: her sick mother, who is slowly dying from an unknown sickness. With funds scarce, Calli decides to do the impossible: to locate auracite, a rare mineral native to Kipos, in the hopes that it will provide her with the money to afford a cure. She leaves home with her friend, the sly and scruffy Sera, and encounters a whole new world outside of her own, one that will force her to answer questions she never knew she needed to answer: how far is she willing to go for someone she loves? iii Table of Contents Prologue 1 Chapter 1 6 Chapter 2 21 Chapter 3 35 Chapter 4 57 Chapter 5 80 Chapter 6 92 Chapter 7 123 Chapter 8 136 Chapter 9 156 Chapter 10 165 Chapter 11 192 Chapter 12 220 Chapter 13 245 Chapter 14 260 Chapter 15 279 Chapter 16 296 Chapter 17 313 Chapter 18 333 Chapter 19 358 Chapter 20 374 Chapter 21 387 iv Chapter 22 397 Epilogue 403 v Prologue Diana Hayford remembers Autumn. A metaphorical death, and the promise of an eventual rebirth. It hangs there in her memory like a stubborn strand on a piece of clothing, refusing to be ripped out when tugged. She experienced one Autumn on Earth that she could remember, and that had been years ago, when she was a child. Now, she wakes up - every day for the past twenty years - someplace new. Someplace that isn't Earth, and thinking of Autumn. When she does wake up, she stands up from the bed with a quick start, stomping through the bundle of clothes she's forgotten to wash. Again. She nearly storms from the small gray room she calls her own, and walks into the kitchen, if one could call it that. There's everything she needs - a stove, oven, sink - but, like everything else that the corporation provided her, it never felt complete. Calli, her daughter, sits at the table with a nearly empty bowl and spoon that clinks the dish as she drops it in for another bite of cereal. "Morning," she says. Diana rubs her eyes. "I was gonna make breakfast." "I'm gonna be late for school." Diana looks at the digital clock on the wall, reads 7:34 AM, and she sighs. "Sorry, baby." Calli just sips the milk from the bowl as she upends it. She puts it and the spoon in the sink and goes for her backpack, which sits on the floor by the door. 1 Diana is always surprised at how much Calli looks like her father, like the two of them are always inhabiting the same space at once. She often sees bits and pieces of William through Calli's green eyes. Sometimes she just wants to ask her what she thinks of her father. Diana already knows what she would say. "Today's the field trip, isn't it?" Diana's words stop Calli before she can exit the mechanical sliding door. If anything, Diana wants to talk to her thirteen-year-old daughter. Just to talk. "Yeah," Calli says indifferently, then tries to head out the door, but Diana cuts her off with more questions. "You have everything?" "Yeah, Mom." "Gas mask?" Even though she could clearly see it, Diana watches as Calli shows off the gray, composite plastic gas mask that is hooked to the loop in her pants. "Got that too." "Okay," Diana says, finally giving her daughter some respite. Before she could say "Have a nice day, honey," Calli is out the door. She sighs. She wants to chalk it up to underserved teenage aggression, reminding herself that she was like that once upon a time. But Diana grew up on Earth, and subsequently on large colony ships bound for distant planets. Calli was born on Kipos, a new planet where opportunity was growing thin day by day. 2 She wonders if her daughter will have a chance in the world. She shakes her head, as if to come out of her own thoughts. Make that future for her, she thinks as she makes herself breakfast - a measly bagel with cream cheese spread on it and a cup of coffee. She gulps the food down as fast as she can to the point of giving herself hiccups. A shower and a quick change of clothes later, and she's ready for work. Diana wears the same gray and yellow jumpsuits that all engineers at the shield generator must wear. She - and, in fact, most of her coworkers - would agree that it’s an ugly thing. Her warm, bronzed skin and dark shoulder-length hair would be often being hidden behind computer screens anyway, and it wasn't as if she had to speak with customers or deal with nosy visitors. All she has is the work, and that's how she likes it. The Silsparrow Exploratory company gave every affordable housing to every member on its work force, which usually amounted to a two-bedroom complete with most necessities. The homes themselves, from the outside, look like warped, domed igloos made from concrete and metal, each one sporting a different number. Diana steps out of the sliding door and locks it behind her, heading out onto the dirt road that snakes in front of her house, which was numbered "07" on the side. Installation 4B-1. Or, as most people call it, Belhall. It's Diana's home, and she walks down its streets with an air of familiarity. Since the day is beginning for most people, she sees that many are doing the same as her: leaving their homes and heading off for work. It's the same sight every day, like a movie on repeat: the workers do their job, they go to bed, they do it all over again the next day. It certainly hadn't been something 3 she expected when her parents took her onboard the giant colony ships, back when she was a child. Colonization is redundancy, she thinks as she walks, turning her attention to the blue sky. Find and establish land, then make it so boring that everyone wants to find more. The circle of human expansion. She heads to work, to the shield generator, and gets to it. Fix the emitters, they tell her. They're acting on a delay, they say. She grabs her toolbox. Mere hours later, something gets her to look up from her welding mask. A group of kids, all of them following a security guard. That's right, Diana thinks. Calli's class is doing a field trip today. Suddenly, the alarms go off, ringing and blaring. She knows this sound. "Sickstorm's approaching!" someone yells. "Masks on." Reflexively, Diana reaches for her belt and finds her mask. She puts it on, then looks at the group of kids. Each of them place their masks on. The generator isn't a sealed facility, so the storm could potentially get inside. She sees Calli. She doesn't have her mask on. Diana runs from her station, calling her daughter's name. When she reaches her, Calli looks scared, frightened. "Mom--" she starts. "Your mask, where is it?" "I..." 4 A voice comes over the comm, rising over the din of voices crying out for help. "The storm will hit in ten seconds." Diana makes a choice. She rips off her mask and tries to put it on Calli's head. "Take mine," she says as she puts it on her daughter's head. "What?" Calli starts, her voice muffled under the mask. "But Mom! You're--" "Shhh, dear," she says as she hugs her. "Shhh." The purple storm enters the room, and overtakes everything. Diana closes her eyes and breathes in the toxic air. 5 1 Calli Hayford smells the astringent scents of the hospital and nearly fights off a wave of nausea. She had been coming here for the past two years, and still she wasn't used to the stench. I hate it here, she thinks as she stares out the plexiglass window into the quarantined room. She herself stands in a sealed off area of the hospital while is about a mile away from Belhall, her home. Even though the doctors have containment under control, she was forced, as she always was every time she visits, to don a bulky gray respirator and a white plastic suit that covers every inch of her cool sepia skin to keep disease from spreading. On the other side of the window is a room with a patient inside - a woman - hooked up to various machines and intravenous tubes. Another doctor is inside the room and checks some of the instruments, writing down things on a clipboard.