flash fiction islandSciFi "The Outpost"

Secret Life

     How many times since the beginning has the island pondered its role as ancient battlefield; how might it have been if it simply resisted its birth; if it fought back harder with its flaming magma against the massive primeval ocean, stayed hidden beneath the surface, never to rise up to see the light of day, to receive the gift of photons from the sun. Would it have known anything as odd and active as riders on horses and the clamor of steel... or bodies pierced with sword, next to great banners? It is only left to wonder, alone, out here in a vast ocean of the possibilities (had it remained just below the surface) to ignore, or simply forget about, the beauty it would become, the cool place amidst blue ocean floaters, the happy oxygen producers(H.O.P.). Yes, to have remained close beneath the surface, that would have been a happy enough life; instead, this accepted fate offers of itself to any and all takers who manage to find her. She with her now vast lush valleys and endless supply of clean carbon locked within cellulose, as if so much mother's milk: to be approached with treachery and fights for ownership; the long struggle with intermittent episodes of friendly (or not so friendly) commerce, human traders so urgent it would create her as a deathbed of international garbage dumping, only to be brought to life again by her own hand, the cool crystal waters that never gave up on her, the ones that continue to flow from the mountains in their duty, or at the very least, in servitude to father gravity, to make her the lush thing she is today. Endurance of human traits from other places and other times, loss of sheepishness, and now, acceptance as battlefield agriculture anew(B.A.A.), she only offers her rain as burial shroud; joins in the dream, without thought, to give life to intelligence in the form of natural selection, with its attending ghosts of extinction. It's her own life now, where midmorning sun glints off wet, hanging, green mosses over cliffs in mysterious scent, her own secret life.