Wind Dancer

Since the beginning, I have been a wind dancer. My parents said we are of many planets, some from far away galaxies, and many remain on Earth's moon. For centuries, I have risen to the heights of the stratosphere and circumnavigated the globe. For long respites, I have rested on the Earth. At times, I was embedded within its depths, once stuck in a glob of resin for millennia until the Earth erupted and set me free. I loved the freedom of soaring over green valleys and mountain ranges, my course chosen by the wind gods. Rain would come. Weighted from water, I was tossed downward to land in a pasture to feed the hay or the desert to nurture an orchid. Once depleted of my excess payload, a new wind would launch me into flight again to a new purpose, destination unknown.

Over time, I witnessed a plague of concrete islands connected by black cancerous veins appear around the world. The scents of the air changed to acrid toxins that burned when my body absorbed them and corrupted my payload. Would my acidic nutrients nurture or destroy the ones I was created to aid?

My last mission sent me flying into a glass barrier that sped down a black top vein near a massive concrete island. The manufactured noise was unnatural and angry. I heard my ancient relative’s screams, and it haunted me. We were dancers and nurturers of the Earth. Their mutilation into glass confounded me. Who or what had committed this horror? For millennia, they would not fly nor dance, if ever again. I bounced from one foreign machine to the next and skittered across the black surface. Rubber tires crushed and tossed me to the sky, where a swirling ground wind shuttled me into a planter on a wood box within a concrete island.

The plant I found to nurture was a rose. I unloaded my payload to her roots and stood ready to take flight when a human creature reloaded me with water. Weighed down, I remained in Roses shade. I liked my new assignment with her, but I missed dancing in the wind. Bees buzzed about and danced to collect nectar and pollen. They reminded me of the dance parties with my vast family in the desert. As I had feared, Rose became sick from the corruption of my payload yet never complained. Her blooms became wilted and lost their vibrancy until she could not flower. The Bees never returned. Noise from a human black box, within its walls, grew louder and irritated us both to the point of torture. My inner core sensed destruction coming, but from where I knew not. The box of many voices grew angrier, and like a disease, transferred to the human who forgot to reload my payload. Starved and thirsty, Rose soon withered and died.

The sun rose hot and leeched my remaining store of moisture. Saddened, I would miss Rose but knew I would soon travel again to nurture another. A cataclysmic mystery erupted as a second sun burst into the blue sky, followed by hypersonic winds that launched me upward. Below, the Earth's patchwork surface once green, blue, and various browns, turned black and burnt red. Fires raged across the planet's surface and consumed everything in its path. What would be left to nurture as rage had obliterated every living thing? What would my purpose be without something to supply? Never in millennia had I soared so close to the edge of space, then plummeted to Earth's hardened surface to skitter across its barrenness. Over and over, the updraft lifted me and dropped me until I became dizzy.

One day, the wind stopped. All turned to silence as I plummeted for the last time to a dying Earth. I found myself surrounded by my vast family in a desert. Happy to be together again, yet sad because we could not dance with the same purpose to feed the world. The Earth had enjoyed a good life but had been destroyed. Would life return, or would we be reassigned to another planet like our ancestors? Until then, engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.

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