Tombstones to the Wind

by Ali Abbas

Shuki shrugged back her shawl and crouched beside her grandmother. It was breathlessly late-autumn warm on the hilltop. Their vantage point looked down on motionless lakes below. Clouds were perfectly mirrored, and for a moment a scattering of birds was doubled in precise formation. 

“I remember when the whole valley was houses, as far as the eye could see. Bright laundry dancing on the rooftops and swaying trees in the gardens,” Dadi said, “and my Dada told me it was all farms when he was a boy. All gone of course. I don’t expect it’ll change much now, though.”

“Why not, Dadi?” Shuki had heard similar tales from her grandmother several times. She’d usually turn up her ear clip and tune Dadi out, but not today. Today was different.

“Well, I can’t see the waters going back any time soon, and it’s not like the ice caps will re-freeze. Anyway, by the time you’re my age you’ll be on Mars, and your grandkids will all have gangly arms and legs from being born in lower gravity. They’ll need special suits to live there and special suits to come here.”

“But you keep telling Papa he should have gone to Mars.” Shuki nudged her grandmother to show she was teasing. She adjusted Dadi’s light scarf, pulling it from her shoulders to cover her thin, silver hair. 

“And I stand by it. Land of opportunity, it is. Nothing left here, just look at the valley. Neighbours, bakers, schools, all gone. You might not be able to breathe on Mars, but it’s hardly better here with all these.” The old woman pointed to the rows of wind turbines that staggered down the hillsides and snaked along the ridgelines. 

“The turbines are because of the rising water, Dadi.”

“At my age I don’t have to choose my sorrows. I can mourn the drowned landscape as much as the violence these have done.”

Shuki had read her grandmother’s views on windfarms at school. Knowing her, her tones and rhythms, Shuki found a more complex relationship to the slender towers than others chose to read into her grandmother’s words, or that Dadi herself would admit to. Tombstones to the Wind, her grandmother had called them. In certain circles, the name had stuck. Climate change deniers and landscape preservationists had found uneasy common cause against the work Shuki’s father did installing wind power all over the world. The quote from his own mother, a well-regarded poet, was gold to them.

They didn’t hear what Shuki heard in other lines. There was a warning that turbines had stilled the storm and stalled the surge, but there was also a note of pride in her son’s achievements, and indeed a little awe. 

“You’ve never felt real wind on your face, have you, dear?” The question came with a pat on the hand and a look somewhere between vindication and resignation.

“No, Dadi, I suppose I haven’t.” It took Shuki a while to reply. She dismissed the simulators; her grandmother would scoff at those. There was also the time that Shuki and her brother had taken their e-bikes up to this viewing point. They’d unplugged the rechargers on the batteries and freewheeled down the hill. 

Two-thirds of the journey was glorious. There was a wildness to it, her hair streaming behind her, face pummelled by air that moved only by natural forces. The final third had been pure terror because their bikes didn’t have manual brakes, and the rechargers weren’t designed to be disconnected. Her brother had lost two front teeth going over a low mud brick wall. Shuki herself had lost the soles of both sandals and ended up in a hedge. 

Her father had taken Dadi’s blame for that one. “If you didn’t want the children to chase the wind, you should not have killed it,” she’d said. 

Best not mention that one. It would either backfire or throw her father under the bus. This was not the day for either. 

“The wind up here used to pick you up and throw you off your feet if you weren’t careful,” her grandmother said. “We’d come up here to watch the sunset. The wind would make us feel alive, like we were part of the earth and the sky and the ocean, because it was reaching out to grab us and hold us and dance with us.” She gave a sudden, incongruous chuckle. “Every year tourists would climb up here, hoping to find some ancient wisdom, or just themselves, and one or two would get blown down the hillside.” The merriment faded as quickly as it had arisen. “Don’t get them anymore, of course. Who’d want to come up here to look at all these?”

The turbines were everywhere, no one needed to travel to see them. Besides, Shuki thought they were beautiful. Gracefully curved blades like ballet arabesques turned lazily, adding a background thrum to the otherwise still air. Above each a green and red light alternated. Green to show the turbine was operational, red for air traffic control. 

The design, which could achieve great height on uneven ground, was her father’s invention. Shuki hadn’t been born when the first one went up here outside their own hometown. Flooding in the lowlands had led her father to build where his ancestors had grazed their goats. A defiant gesture that divided his people. 

Not that there were any choices. Not after the seas rose more than most climate models had predicted and untold people died. Not after the UN banned the burning of fossil fuels. Shuki had been born in the early years of the Post Oil Period. POP kids grew up not knowing the baseline miasma of pollution, or the strength of more than a gentle breeze. Turbines filled the oceans and towered above landscapes the world over. 

Her father joined them on the hilltop. He hunkered down, one arm resting on the wheelchair beside his mother. Behind, the whine of an electric engine signalled the departure of his guests. 

“Well?” Dadi asked him.

“They haven’t signed yet, but I think they will. No shortage of wind on Mars, and this design has stood the test of time,” he replied. His tone was light, but Shuki knew every wrinkle and crease on his face. Tension wound tight inside him. He was not worried about the contract. 

Dadi must have sensed it too because neither of the responses Shuki was expecting—that the towers would be better toppling into the sea or that her father was always working—never came. Instead, a wrinkled hand reached out on each side. On the right to cover her son’s, on the left to cover Shuki’s. It wasn’t in Dadi to say something soft; not saying anything hard was enough. 

“How’s the weather, Papa?” Shuki asked, pushing the words past a lump in her throat.

“Still on track, pigeon. Any moment now.”

He tapped his phone with his free hand. In a line leading out towards the ocean, the green lights on the towers blinked out, and the ballerina-blades slowed to a standstill, holding their final positions perfectly. 

She felt it then, edged with brine. A push against her hair first, a tickle on her nose. It grew. A tugging on her shawl, an encouragement to drop her knee and stabilise herself on the ground. It swelled. She felt the shove, filled with the memory of hurtling down the hill. But this time it was not Shuki who was in motion. This was nature, primal and uncaged. Her hair pulled free of its clips. It streamed away behind her, a victory banner. She wanted to throw out her hands and laugh, but the laughter dissolved in an uncontrollable urge to weep, both held like a weight in her chest that stalled her breath.

Dadi’s hand tightened on her own. It was the wind pricking tears in Shuki’s eyes. Through them, she saw Dadi’s other hand pat her father’s once, twice, then go still. It was all the praise she would give him. It was all the praise in the world. 

Shuki blinked away the tears. Above, one by one, the green lights began to wink, and the ballerinas began to turn, and the wind died.

Ali Abbas is the author of two novellas: Silent Running is a hard sci-fi thriller published by Lost Colony Magazine, and Like Clockwork is a steampunk mystery published by Transmundane Press. A full list of published works and free to read stories is available on his author site at www.authoraliabbas.weebly.com. Ali maintains a blog at www.aliabbasali.com.