by LE Francis
It is not seen, but felt. They have gripped a branch in the home dimension. Glances of sunlight break the veil and cascade over a rough tapestry of fur, rousing the algae on the creature’s back.
The algae shimmers, newly greening — eager to feel warm again, to photosynthesize.
By the algae’s recollection, it has been a long time since they were last aware. They are beginning to suspect their host has been avoiding the right spectrums of light. They worry that they’d been purposely kept in stasis to avoid something they can’t remember — it’s been so long, you see. It?s been so long since they had a chance to think or speak.
Yet, it is the host that initiates conversation. “The orb in the sky — it seems to me the creatures here do not understand the significance of the solar storms that tear the eye of god.”
“It is not the eye of god, but god itself,” The algae answers, fumbling with language as their consciousness warms.
“I think you are too swayed by photosynthesis.”
“I think you are not swayed enough.” The algae are tempted to say more but have difficulty translating photosynthesis into language.
“I sway in the breezes of dimensions, I exist independent of light,” The host argues, “What need have I for photosynthesis?”
“You do not exist independent of me and I am sustained by photosynthesis.”
“Yet do you not exist still in the dark places?”
“I exist,” the algae agrees. “Yet, I am unaware. I am cold. Hours seem longer in the dark places.”
“How are you aware of being unaware? And if you are truly unaware then how do you feel cold or time?”
“I know nothing of this, sloth,” The algae answers sharply. “You are in charge of our survival.”
The sloth pauses, pressing its claws into a branch. “You trust your survival to a creature that requires symbiotes.”
“I only know of you and have no other creature to trust,” The algae’s response is clipped. In the moments that follow, it seems the sun is moving away, it feels as if the sloth is holding the algae in the shadows. The algae fears they have crossed into a dark dimension again, they fear the press of stasis. Then the clouds shift.
They travel for some time in silence, interrupted only by the occasional gust. The wind ruffles the fur of the animal and the algae hums in quiet response to the breathy song that plays through the trees.
“Where will we go this time?” The algae finally dare to ask, warm and vital in the sun and wind of the home world.
The sloth mutters something in its slow home-dimension tongue and the algae strains to hear through the song of the trees and the wind and the other animals that shuffle through the canopy. The response sounds something like “ranger” or “cage” and though not particularly loud or sharp it echoes, caught in a great burst of wind.
What follows is an impact that feels like yet another passage. The sloth doesn’t answer the algae’s repeated calls for it to speak up. The stiff disorder of stasis is upon the algae like an ice bath.
A nearby bird calls to the algae, but they cannot decode the rhythm of the calls. A squawk-savvy passerby would have learned that the sloth had gripped its own arm, mistaking it for a branch, and hurled down to the earth under the warm eye of god. The bird was terribly ruffled by the sound the sloth’s neck made and kept repeating the different things it sounded like. “A gunshot peeling out of a banana plantation, a tree branch failing under a fat jaguar, a Brazil nut smacking against a rock after slipping from the beak of some lazy macaw.” Still the algae knew no better. The symbiote was slipping further under the great glass surface of stasis as they wondered how long they must be still for this trip.
LE Francis is a writer living among the Washington Cascades. Find her online at nocturnical.com.
