My piece of flash fiction, “Only the Ancestors Bring Fire” is online at the Penn State Libraries Short Stories portal. It is told from the point of view of a female black bear who smells and sees a wildfire. While the piece doesn’t say “climate change,” it is about forests, soils, and wildlife changing because of anthropogenic climate change. What would those other beings think and feel about humanity’s alteration of their ancestry and legacy? This was a small foray into imagining that.
Her nose knew this smell. The people. The men. Men. Men took the trees. Men made them hot and orange. Men would touch the trees to make them glow in the night. The trees began a new life that filled the air with haze and smoke. It filled her nose with worry. It burned. It filled her with the smell that once was just change but not now. Not now with men. Men.
Bear felt inside her mind. She felt the ancestors push her to run, launch her legs to run. But she stood in place and sniffed, pulling the spirit of the forest into her, smelling the whiffs of fire beginning. She was brave. The sun’s light came to her eyes straight from the west as it prepared to die for the night. A woodpecker laughed and drilled into the trees. Somewhere the flames were eating the trees faster than the woodpeckers. Men must be somewhere burning everything because the smoke and smell permeated the air, changed the spirit.
Read on…and leave comments there or here.
Peter Walks for Democracy 