Awner the Gardener

Second week of the Writing Excuses course. I wrote this in response to the prompt to create an alien and write something from their perspective.

Awner could feel the Earth moving. He had always been able to feel its gentle spin, and he felt the push to be a comforting presence, the gentle hand of the planet itself. This is one reason he was so focused on keeping the environment alive and well. The other reason is that he was the gardener. It’s not like tulips plant themselves, after all.

Okay, they do. But that’s because Awner talked them into it all those years ago, and believe me, it took an awful lot of talking. After the tulips gave in, though, the other plants followed suit soon after. Couple hundred years, tops.

Every now and then, Awner would sit out and watch the stars. He had a favorite spot on the ice near the North Pole, a place where he could see the sky spin in circles. Humans like to “stop and smell the roses.” When Awner had reached his fill of roses--after all, they are kind of stressful to be around, what with all the thorns and neediness--he would stop and watch the skies. He had created constellations long before the idea of sky-stories were popularized. There was Gigero, the swimmer, lover of oceans and coral. Ispole, originator of color and scent. Terinoq, sculpter of canyons and caves. His favorite, of course, was Paerna, painter of the skies.

That is probably because Paerna was his mother, though.

He was the last of them, the only remaining child of Paerna, painter of the skies and creator of worlds. That was the added epithet people back home had liked to give her, but Awner’s mother had never accepted it as truth, seeing as she would only take what was already there and make it habitable and beautiful. “Renovator of worlds” did not have the same ring to it, though, and she never could shed the inaccurate compliment. She had better things to do with her time, anyway, while she had been alive.

Awner always ended his trips to the North with a shake of his head over his utter failure to make the ice give off any sort of plant life. It was ridiculous, really. He never managed to get the simple-minded ice to understand that there are plants that survive purely off water. Kelp, for example. But then the ice would argue about the animals that could get to it, and it refused to believe that animals help plants. He always gave up after that, because it took way too long to properly explain ecosystems. Water has its own system; he had learned that it stubbornly refused to learn about any other. Whether this came from conceit or spite, Awner was never sure.

He had not assigned a star pattern to himself, though he did think the Milky Way--as it has been named and he came to call it as well--resembled him when he was traveling.

The rest of the time, he thought he looked more like a potato. Which was fine by him, since potatoes were one of the most sensible plants out there. Down to earth, willing to do whatever it took to survive. He wished sometimes that he could take plants on trips with him. Maybe the ice up north would have listened to a real potato, instead of a stumpy creature resembling a potato with a bad attitude, as he had once been described by a human child. His whole family had resembled potatoes, so he had not thought much of it until one of them, and he couldn’t quite remember who, pointed out that the humans they had bred looked much different from themselves. Smooth, with light fuzz, given to forming soft shells around themselves as protection from the environment. Different, is what he thought at first. Now, he thought of himself as different. The change probably happened when his family had died off, leaving him the only one, with no way to return home and only the Earth’s spin to keep him company.