Excerpt from GREEN JEAN

I am so thankful to have this pencil and some paper. But where did they come from? I’m sitting here at the entrance to a cave. The cave is a shelter I don’t really need. It hardly ever rains here,  and the temperature is mild, but there seems to be no shortage of water, or moisture. The rocks are a little damp. There is some kind of green moss on the rocks at the entrance where they get some sun. I myself like to be in the sun. The sun makes me feel better, stronger. But I’m not mossy. I am, however, green. 

I’m naked too. I have been ever since I arrived here. Green and naked. Naked and green. My new reality. I thought I was going to a festival, and a ritual. An ordinary celebration. Like a small, local burning man festival. And now they say it was long ago and far away. I have no sense of time, or place. Just a cave and green and naked people who have all traveled very far from home. 

My name is Jean. I was living in the year 2000, as if that means anything. On planet Earth. Now I’m somewhere with two suns. And there is never any night here, just twilight at the most. 

At the festival a light appeared and gathered us up. My whole group of friends, and ones I didn’t know, at the little festival. The Hensons were nice to let us use a part of their land. They said that alien spacecraft and alien creatures had appeared there along with a big cave of living glass. And then it all vanished. 

I feel disoriented. Most of my group does too, or so they say. Others don’t talk at all. 

We are two groups here. Mine from year 2000. The others from more than a century later. They had space travel in their day, but they came from an Earth so very unlike my own. They said that wars and disease and profound shortages had wiped out much of humanity. They met in what used to be the Hensons’ garden. It was the same land where we had our little festival so many years before. 

Don is the leader of that group. But Joseph flies the personal space vehicle, the one that takes them to the other side of the mountains. The Hensons live there now. And they are supposed to be building a garden, like the Hensons had built on their land long ago. 

Joseph takes various volunteers with him in his little PSV as he calls it. It only holds four or five at the most, including Joseph. They work in the Hensons’ garden. They wear clothes for the trip. The temperature and weather is not as kind when they travel over the mountains and to a completely different part of this planet. They can’t go anywhere else though. Joseph says there is some kind of barrier that prevents the PSV from going anywhere else. It can’t go too high or too far. Just to the other side of the mountains. I don’t know where the clothes come from. They are only available for the trips.