I’d be an orphan soon. Mama was dying. I knew it and so did she, but it was a topic we never touched. Like maybe if we didn’t say it out loud it wouldn’t come true.    

“Remember that picture book we had when you were little? With the forests and fairies that lived in the trees?” Mama’s voice was small. 

I rolled her empty wheelchair to the corner of the claustrophobic room and sat beside her at the edge of her hospital bed. 

“Yeah. I thought it was a magical world, but you told me it was just what Earth used to look like.” I grew up in Kansas, when the rains stopped falling, and the Great Plains returned to a dustbowl. Even in my wildest dreams I couldn’t imagine the lush green world depicted on those pages. “Without the fairies of course.” 

Her lips twitched, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. Hers were focused on the ceiling. “Would’ve liked to have seen one.” Her chin quivered. “A forest.” 

She smelled of sweat and sweet sickness when I kissed her forehead.

Jacob Lander was my neighbour in the apartment building where I lived. He led the Unitarian service in the lobby on Sundays and was a loving father to two young boys. He was also a black-market food smuggler. He didn’t work in the vertical greenhouses like I did, but word among my coworkers was he could get almost anything for the right produce, which was how I found myself at his kitchen table the evening after Mama told me her wish.

“Hannah, it’s impossible.” I could barely hear his soft voice over the hum of the AC and the news looping on his screen nearby. “Even if I could get you a pass from the city, it’d be a one-way trip. No way you get out and back without the force finding you.”

I surveyed the glowing city outside Jacob’s floor to ceiling windows. It was the dry season and a few hours after sunset, so the building’s solar shields had peeled back from each window to allow fresh air in. It smelled of sunbaked concrete and heavy, lingering smog. 

Most of us labourers that lived in the city’s glass towers only ever saw the world like this, through the windows, at night. Before the sun rose tomorrow the shields would come down again, closing over the building like the scales of a snake. Only these scales were covered in solar panels. They powered the AC that made sure we didn’t all incinerate in the heat of the skyscrapers. 

“I know. I’m-I’m prepared for that.” 

Jacob’s short beard sounded like a wire brush when he rubbed his hand across it. “I might know someone who works in ID security. But I don’t know what they’ll want. It might be more than you can get.” 

I wiped sweat from my upper lip. “I can get whatever they want.”

He studied me for moment longer before he nodded. 

After that, each shift at the greenhouse I found the small areas not scoured by cameras and filled my pockets with anything I could. My hands shook each night as I emptied potatoes, carrots and onions onto Jacob’s table. Each day I took more and more, until I was sure I would be caught. It would’ve meant deportation back to the wasteland that was my home. 

When I arrived to offload my haul one evening a couple weeks later, Jacob was studying a tablet on the kitchen table in front of him. I could just make out the lines of a building plan before he cleared the screen and stood to greet me.  

“You’ve done really well, Hannah. Everything you’ve reclaimed has gone straight to the hidden gardens where it will be multiplied, like our very own miracle.” He winked. “Your bravery feeds the lifeblood of this city. Workers and their families. Those that have been discarded, just like you and yours.”

I nodded, loading vegetables into the box he had ready for me. I was used to hearing Jacob’s sermons. 

“I’ve heard from my contact and he’s working to get you the pass, but you know it’s a really big ask. He needs one more thing. I told him you have access to the greenhouse supplies. He needs you to bring me a bag of fertilizer.”

The dusty potato in my hand froze halfway to the box. Some labourers and refugees believed we were past the point of asking nicely for equal rights. The movement was called Liberty. I’d heard that a recent explosion in the city, a gas leak according to the newsfeeds, had actually been them. They’d bombed a government building, after hours, but I’d heard that at least nine died, including two cleaners. Their methods may have turned my stomach, but I didn’t doubt they had the right message. We deserved our liberty; it was long past time.

“For the worker’s gardens?” I asked the question slowly, not meeting Jacob’s eyes.

“Of course. All for the workers.”

I remember the day we arrived in Vancouver, and I saw the ocean for the first time. We were in a cargo plane with other climate refugees that had escaped the Midwest. There were only a few small windows, so Mama and I took turns peering out one as the plane descended. She leaned hard on me. 

“Another chance, honey.” She’d whispered it against my hair. We’d thought she was just tired, stressed from fleeing, but the disease born of a lifetime of pesticide exposure was already marching silently through her body. 

Even from the plane I swore I could hear the waves pounding against the fifty-foot seawalls that protected the grey towers of the city. The black water frothed as the waves beat endlessly against the concrete. The whole force of the ocean pummeled our measly human walls. I struggled to breathe. I didn’t understand why we should even try to fight something so inevitable.

I came to understand that urge to fight in the weeks that followed Jacob’s new request. I found the same breathlessness too. Mama began to slip away from me. Most days she spent sleeping. When she was awake she barely ate; her bones rose to peaks above the hollows of her cheeks. She could hardly speak anymore, communicating instead in slow, jerky movements of her head and faint squeezes of my hand. 

Between Mama’s deterioration and the constant threat of being caught stealing at the greenhouses, I thought I might finally buckle. The stress ate at me. I could feel it peeling away at my stomach lining, leaving only acid behind. I became irritable, my temper quick to flare at things that weren’t worth getting riled up about. Usually this was something Mama had done, or tried to do, in her weakened state, in an effort to assert her failing independence. She would sit there, calmly, while I stomped around cleaning up whatever mess she’d made, with a sad, knowing look in her eye. I knew it wasn’t her fault, just like I knew it wasn’t her fault she’d gotten sick and was dying, but that didn’t make the anger go away.

One morning, when I was sighing loudly and wiping up a bowl of oatmeal she’d spilt while stubbornly trying to feed herself, she whispered, “I’m scared.”  That burning anger inside me was doused, not even embers remained. I held her while she cried loud, gulping sobs fueled by panic. And when she pleaded, turning to me with sage green eyes that were mirror reflections of my own, for me to not let her continue wasting away like she was, I nodded. I told her I would always take care of her. 

I traded a nurse at Mama’s hospital a head of lettuce to turn a blind eye as I wheeled her into the service elevator late one night. At the greenhouse I’d taken the head apart leaf by leaf and stuffed them beneath my navy work overalls. In the basement we passed the morgue before reaching the exit. Tears pricked my eyes, but Mama’s jaw was set, her gaze facing forward. 

Jacob met us in the alley behind the hospital. He knelt, despite the filthy pavement, and squeezed my Mama’s hand before handing me the small swipe card that would let us out of the city. Yesterday I’d used a garbage cart to steal the fertilizer. He’d met me at the loading dock with a beat-up black truck and we’d loaded the bag out hidden in real garbage. He’d given me a salute as he drove off. I hadn’t pressed him any further on what he and his associate planned to use it for. I didn’t want to know whose blood would be on my hands. 

Mama and I took the mag train out of the city. Only a few government officials, returning to their spacious outer-city estates, rode with us. None of them spared us a second glance, their eyes glued to their screens, but that did nothing to calm my heartbeat. It was only a matter of time before someone discovered the missing fertilizer. I knew they would see that I had accessed the supply room and that I hadn’t shown up for work today. I clung to Mama’s side, prepared for the force to board the train and rip us away from each other at any moment. 

At a station halfway up the coast we exited out into the night. Away from the persistent heat dome of the city it was cooler, and goosebumps rose on my arms. On the outskirts of town there was a preserved stand of ancient trees. It was a popular tourist attraction; I’d seen the selfies online. 

The forest was louder than I expected. Branches brushed against one another, and creaks came from the trunks themselves. It smelled moist and loamy, like the greenhouse when I started a morning shift. I parked Mama beside a bench that faced East, and we waited for the sun to rise. 

I woke to moisture on my forehead. I was tucked against Mama’s shoulder and her tears had run onto me. Her wide eyes spun, taking in the giants that surrounded us. The sky lightened more each second, changing the clouds from lavender to magenta to dusky rose. Each shade reflected on the silvery brown tree trunks. 

We sat, silently clutching each other’s hands, until the colours faded. It was slow, miserable torture that seemed to rush by in seconds. Only when the sky was clear and bright did I pry my shaking hand away, to fumble in my pocket for the syringe I’d loaded back in my apartment. I tried to be strong for her, but when I hesitated, my breathing wet with snot and tears, Mama was the strong one. She turned to stare deep into my eyes and nodded firmly.

We sat together, in the forest that looked just like the one from my picture book, long after she was gone. I whispered to her how I’d always love her and how she’d been a good mama. How I’d do it all over again, all the stress and heartache and pain, just to have another day with her. The morning, insensitive in its beauty, unfurled around me as I had never seen it before and as I would never see it again.