Our Future is Bright

The iron door slams shut in front of her as she stares without emotion through the bars of her prison cell. The metallic sound rings out, echoes down the dark corridor. The locks rack shut with finality, more of an intimidating symbol of the state’s power to silence her than a necessary restraint—where could she possibly go? They've got her. Twenty years for an act of civil disobedience. A draconian sentence. She is too dangerous.

        Winter moves her face closer to the bars, lets her vision soften and blur. The bars curve and fade into the periphery until they disappear. Her eyes burn. Her daughter had the same eyes, sapphire emeralds. Skye, named after the deep blue skies that have turned perpetually yellow- brown from the constant fires, after another tipping point had been reached. She remembers getting lost staring into the universe of her daughter’s eyes. Even with terminal bronchial asthma, they shone like galaxies.

        Her field of vision grows softer. She is deep inside now. Her mind migrates from the dank dusky dungeon of her cage and goes metaphysical. The grey opaque prison wall across from her cell turns transparent. Through it, she sees a cabin in a forest, hears the burbling of a creek, the whistle of a hummingbird alighting past her ear. She smells the sweetness of a field of white clover, each flower designed to trap honeybees in a symbiotic ritual.

        Deep in her memory, yet resolving in front of her, an airstrip extends to the horizon. An airplane is parked there, near the cabin. Its wings are covered in solar panels. On the fuselage is the word “Sunseeker.” A pilot sits in the cockpit. Beside the plane, her husband Potter is rigging two parachutes. Their white and brown Jack Russell Terrier, Zipper, stands alert, tail high, nose into the wind, tinted doggles secured over her eyes.

        In her escaped mind Winter watches Potter meticulously pack each parachute into its deployment bag. From his crouched position, he turns and looks directly at her. “We’re ready,” he says, and his words vibrate, become electric.

*******

 	The heat used to be tolerable, Potter thought to himself as he watched Winter swing the axe over her head and split another round of lodgepole pine. They bucked up trees that were dead and on the ground every summer. They liked that they were both creating a fire break near their cabin and supplying themselves with firewood for the colder months. Not that they really needed to warm their home anymore, though; it was only ever cold for a few weeks of the year. And the heat during the summer had become intolerable.

        He knew the reasons why—everyone knew by now, even though they’d forgotten, he reminded himself—and through their organization Snap Out of It! Lies! (SOIL!) he had planned and executed a number of disruptive actions in defense of nature: he had dangled from the Crazy Horse Bridge in a climbing harness during rush hour traffic to protest the construction of yet another new oil and gas pipeline through Indigenous lands; he had rappelled in through the open roof above the fracking exhibit in the Museum of Petroleum Education (MoPEd) and sprayed sewer water all over everything; and he had scaled the thousand-foot-high Shexxron Oil Building, planted a red flag on its roof that said “6th EXTINCTION” and BASE jumped off it in a wingsuit in broad daylight. His acts of civil disobedience were calculated precisely to snap people out of their unflinching devotion to the mantra of the extraction economy, repeated with regularity at the end of state media newscasts: “drill, baby, drill.”

        The problem, Potter knew, was that everyday people were brainwashed and had become too gullible to see the poetry in his subversive acts of civil disobedience. Ordinary folks had grown tired of climate protesters snarling traffic, defacing valuable works of art, and blocking access to airports. They didn’t want to see more electric cars on the road and would take every opportunity to harass them whenever they saw them on the highway. They wanted protestors punished. After each stunt SOIL! planned and executed to choreographed perfection, leaders of civilized, prosperous nations would hold news conferences and remind citizens, as one world leader recently had, that “Those who disrupt our everyday lives and break the law should feel the full force of it. It’s entirely right that selfish protestors should be convicted and sent to prison. "It’s what the public wants.” His words were broadcast and repeated until they became true.

        Potter loved Winter even more after the asthma attack that knocked Skye to the ground and had them on their knees, praying to a god they knew couldn’t help them. Sometimes couples split up after a tragedy, go their separate ways and try to pick up the pieces. But for them, they became even more resolved in their mission to do what they could to keep the world from sliding into an ecological collapse, and now that they were doing it in Skye’s memory, it was even more important.

        Winter met his eyes, caught him smiling in unexpected reverie. She did not smile back. She never smiled anymore. Things were too serious. She was focused on the task at hand. She broke eye contact with him and addressed the pilot.
“Will the plane be able to lift off in this heat?”
 
        The pilot checked the thermometer hanging from a tree branch in the shade. Earlier, it had been a hundred fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. But now, late in the evening, it had cooled to ninety-five. “We should be good,” he said, patting the fuselage with his open hand.

        Potter nodded as Winter returned the axe to the shed. The smoke from distant fires lit up the sunset in apocalyptic oranges and reds. It was beautiful, he had to admit, but it was unnatural and always filled him with indignation. He crouched down under the wing of the plane and packed the parachutes they would need for their next act of rebellion—one that Winter had planned and that would be underway in just a few minutes. “Don’t forget to double-check the straps on the chest harness,” Winter reminded him. “We don’t want the banner to detach from me before we land.”  

         “Check.” Beside him, Zipper snapped at grasshoppers jumping past her snout. She stood, shook herself, and signaled to Potter with a whimper. Potter secured the doggles over her eyes to protect them from the wind while she flew. He zipped up the deployment bags.

         “We’re ready.”

***

Won Suh, the pilot, completed the manifest and climbed into the cockpit of the solar-powered Sunseeker airplane. He watched unspeaking as his passengers boarded the aircraft. Ahead of him, the dirt runway extended to the fiery horizon. He turned back to face his passengers who had settled into their seats.

“You’re sure you trust me?” He loved asking this question right before takeoff. Gallows humor. Helped him relax, and he was still relatively new to flying.
 
        As a young man, Won had decided to become a high school science teacher. Physics. He had high expectations for his students, but managing their behavior made his job enormously challenging. Students would provoke him in a myriad of different ways and practically force him to kick them out of class, and then they would dance the “griddy” on their way out the door. Then one day, a highly impulsive adolescent, the son of two wealthy attorneys, walked over to a model electric engine Won had helped a group of students build and pretended to urinate on it. Won lost his temper, grabbed the kid, and pushed him out of the classroom into the hall. The next day, he was asked to resign. 

        Won entered flight school the year after and learned quickly. He was fascinated by aerodynamics, the way objects flew through air, and could see molecules of O2, H20, N2, O3, CO2 displace in front of him to make room for him to move through the world. It was a reawakening. He promised he would devote his life to truth, justice, the rules of aerodynamics, and to flying airplanes powered by solar panels and the stored energy in lightweight batteries.

        “Yes, we trust you, Won!” He could tell that Winter was irritated by his sense of humor, but he shook it off. He knew he was ready. He had taken a number of test flights, lifting off and ascending above the trees, circling around like a hawk, and landing the quiet plane as gently as an eagle on a cool, dewy morning. When it came to flying, he was fastidious.

        This was going to be anything but a normal flight. Behind him were his friends and partners in rebellion, parachute deployment packs on their laps and a Jack Russell Terrier strapped into one of them, panting in the heat. Strapped to Winter’s chest was a huge rolled-up banner, large enough for people to be able to read from a distance. Their target was only thirty minutes away.
 
        The plane accelerated down the runway and lifted off. Won pointed the nose into the wind and flew the plane west, into the setting sun. He stayed below 10,000 feet off the deck. They were now flying into restricted airspace, Won knew, and he would only have one chance.

        Behind him, Winter was preparing for their jump.

        “DOOR!” he heard her yell, and watched as she threw streamers out the door to gauge the wind direction. Potter stood beside her, Zipper strapped safely to his back, as the pilot flew them above the football stadium.

        “This will be my first time at the Super Bowl!” Potter said to Won. “You ever think you’d get to go to the Super Bowl?”

        “Won doesn't give a shit about football!” Winter answered for him.

        “Get the fuck out of my airplane!” Won yelled, and they jumped, faces to the earth, arms tucked to their sides—these two brave defenders of nature, who were tired of the ash and carcinogenic debris in the smoke polluting the sky and turning it a constant putrid yellow-brown and killing their daughter; these two skydivers who had been training for three years for this moment to communicate their message of defiance and love; these two patriotic lovers with nothing left to lose and hellbent on snapping people out of their foolish, brainwashed loyalty to a demagogue whose family long ago had sold their souls to the fossil fuels industry to remain in power, and had stolen their future from them—they jumped, carrying a banner that they believed might wake people up from their collective delusion that everything was fine when it wasn’t, and the proof was all around them in the increasing cases of bronchial asthma killing their children just as Skye had been cut down by the disease, wholly preventable. They jumped as an act of hope and love. They jumped.
 
        After they jumped, Won the benevolent pilot, the former science teacher, barely registered the F-16 fighter jet suddenly appearing on his tail, ripping a hole in the sky and blowing him apart to all four points of the compass.

The last thing he ever saw was their parachutes opening.

***
I’m a flying dog I fly while all the molecules move through me I love it! I can catch frisbees. I catch them and then beam the camera in mid-air and run around the field like a fucking bucking bronco. I race through indoor agility courses where the air is clean and I jump over the highest hurdle you can set, then I float into the tunnel and slalom through the weave gates and…pause…on the very end of the dog walk see-saw just for a second to score points with the judges, dig my claws into the artificial turf and accelerate so fast and tight around a corner that I swear I’m the one rotating the Earth. Then I found flying now I fly and I love it I love it and when people see me in my harness on top of my human and they see me with my doggles on and my nostrils flaring flying through space they say “Daaaamn! That’s a flying dog!” and I say that’s right cool your jets my name is Zipper. You just can’t know how much I love this. Flying like I am now.

***
 	From his seat behind the bulletproof glass in the VIP booth above the 50-yard-line, President Baron heard the thundering sonic boom of an F-16 fighter jet, threatening to ruin the otherwise beautiful, perfect sunset. He thought he saw a flash of light in the blood-red sky above the stadium. His advisers gathered around him.

        He watched as two forest green parachutes opened and the skydivers floated onto the field during the Super Bowl. Was this part of the show? No, halftime was over and the game was well into the 3rd quarter. Why hadn’t he been told of this? His advisers shrugged. He watched, bewildered, as the skydivers landed and unclipped their parachutes and unfurled a banner right over the huge Super Bowl logo on the 50 yard line. He couldn’t read what it said—not yet—as he looked on in growing anger and the players and referees retreated to the sidelines. The game, which was being played for his entertainment—and was the biggest opportunity of the year he had to show his strong leadership to the people who worshipped him—had been rudely disrupted.

        By activists. Protesters with a banner. Scumsuckers. They were stealing his energy. He had to look strong. His whole life, he had known he would be President. Keep the people divided, he'd been told, and their hatred for each other will consume them, leaving you free to do whatever you want. Just do what Big Oil tells you, villainize anyone who speaks out against them, and you’ll be a wealthy man, he’d been assured. His training, he remembered, taught him how to operate like a cult leader: once the people believed he was fighting for their interests, they would love him, and adoration for him would spread throughout their families and communities and would provide people with a feeling of belonging. They would see themselves as part of a tribe—a coal-rolling on the highway, Prius hating tribe—who would get together and party with each other at great rallies, which would become safe spaces for spreading wild conspiracy theories that could never be proven, they were just true. Once membership to the tribe became a central part of people’s identities, he knew that he would be able to get away with anything, because turning their backs on their tribe would mean that the people would have to reckon with the truth: that they had been duped all along. And that would be too damaging to their egos. He knew.

        “These people are scum,” President Baron said out loud to no one in particular. From his seat high above the field, the President looked down and watched the skydivers unfurl their banner. A dog was running circles around them, barking and ecstatic with joy. Above, the hellish sky was now dark red, approaching dusk. He could read the banner now under the stadium lights, even without binoculars.

        REMEMBER OUR FUTURE? the banner asked rhetorically in white capital letters. A Columbine flower and a hummingbird were painted on opposite corners of it, and on the other two corners the words SOIL! popped off the canvas like a street artist’s tag on a cityscape mural. “Remember our future?” the President asked, “these people should be shot!” His aides, now huddled around him, nodded in unblinking affirmation.

        He watched the police tackle the skydivers and collar the dog. It felt powerful; he was the one in charge. He needed to say something strong, but also show his sense of humor, which people have told him is delightfully dreadful. He leaned into the microphone on his table overlooking the field. “Don’t be so nice to them,” he said to the cops. “You can rough them up, even the woman. Especially the woman.” He glanced fiendishly at his advisers, who smirked at their leading breaking another taboo. “They’re all scum!” He screamed. Feedback screeched. His voice was shrill. “Take them to jail, lock them up forever.” He smiled smugly and dismissed them with a wave of his hand as they were dragged into a police van and driven away.

***
 
From the drab horror of her concrete prison cell, Winter thinks about that night, after the Super Bowl, when the world changed.

        She sees the inside of the police van, where she was punched in the face for no reason as the van was blocked by mobs of people in the streets in spontaneous protest, demanding the President’s resignation. Potter yelling and cursing at the officers, she and Potter marched separately at gunpoint to the city jail. Zipper, who, she convinces herself, now lives on a big ranch with a pack of other herding dogs. She thinks about Won Suh, the pilot and hero, the conscientious teacher and friend. She thinks about her daughter, Skye, for whom they had committed their peaceful act of rebellion and were charged with conspiracy to commit a public nuisance, convicted and sentenced to the full extent of the law. She knows her lawyers are already planning her appeal.

        But Winter thinks mostly about flying. Levitating above the prison that holds her, she can look down on it now, in all its concrete greys and lives stolen and despair. She drifts away from it into a warm sunrise light that folds her up and embraces her, and she smiles, knowing she's ignited a movement.






Brandon Sheaffer is a veteran educator of ten years in public high schools, and he is currently working toward an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Colorado University. Before becoming a high school English teacher, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan (2010-2012) and worked as a wildland firefighter in Mammoth Lakes, California. He wrote for a small mountain town newspaper in Mammoth and published news and feature stories as a freelance writer from 2001-2013. Sheaffer currently lives in Carbondale, Colorado.