Reed Planet by Zary Fekete

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Hiding in the shadow of the earth, just beyond the horizon of night. Woven of wicker and willow, a dim sphere whose fiery heart provides a shield of heat to the earth. Yes, a warmer heat comes from the sun, the light that governs day, but a cooler heart comes from the reed planet, waiting in the coming twilight; a heat of growth and balance.

An old man stood on the crest of a hill, looking toward the north. A young man stood behind him. The old man pointed toward the horizon, toward a dark arch that hung in the twilight sky, its fire extinguished.

Without taking his eyes from the sky, the old man pulled from his cloak an unlit torch. He beckoned to the young man and then pressed the rough wood instrument into the younger’s hands. A silent word passed between them. Then the young man began to walk toward the horizon.

The young man stood at the top of the world. Stretching out before him in an impossible twist was the white ribbon of the winter bridge. It reached into the sky, disappearing as the distance sucked it away from sight. The young man pulled out the torch. He struck it. Once, twice. On the third try he coaxed a flame.

He stepped onto the bridge and the earth tumbled away below him as though the bridge was a spindle that held the firmament of the sky in place. The only thing firm was the bridge. He stepped, one foot after the other. Soon the planet had dwindled behind him into the soft blue sphere that had swung around the sun for eons.

The bridge ended at a void. The young man looked down and saw the churning turn of the darkened reed sphere below him. Vines twisted and rolled below him in the dark hollow. He looked back at the earth. It lay still and silent in the black valley of space.

He held the lit torch above him and jumped. The reed planet’s gravity took him straight down into the reed heart.

“What is it?” The child looked up into the night sky, pointing at the flickers of color among the clouds.

“The northern lights,” her mother said. “Not usually this far south.”

“What makes them?”

The mother looked up from her phone, distracted. “I don’t know, dear,” she said. “Something about solar wind blowing through space.”

The child looked up again. “It’s like light between tree leaves. And branches….”

Bio

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella Words on the Page out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete

Author's note

The common reed, found surrounding most still bodies of water throughout Central Europe, is a culturally appreciated phenomenon in the country of Hungary. Many newspaper pieces have been written, usually in the lead-up to summer, recalling the author’s childhood memories associated with leisure time spent on the Balaton lake shore, looking out at the sunset’s rays scattered through the gently rustling plants. Indeed, many Hungarian poets have written fondly about their own reed memories as does János Vajda in his poem “On a Reed Lake”, “Edges of reed groves…they manifest, they appear. An image of the rotating present.”

Vajda has his pulse on the nation’s heart in his poem as he highlights the iceberg-like nature of the slender plants, soft and almost weightless above the water’s surface while firmly anchored into the lakebed and crucial to the self-cleansing nature of Hungarian lakes and ponds. Does the reed perhaps touch on the Hungarian citizen’s perspective on themselves? Hungary has an over 1000-year history in Central Europe, yet the small country has often found itself tossed between competing visions of the future in conflicts and political worldviews. Throughout the nation’s history, however, the Magyar country and its people remain proudly planted in Central Europe and nurture a distinctive national character which has never been overwhelmed by the tides of historical change.

This brief science fiction piece was written with one eye on the value of the common reed and one on the mythological tradition of various plants in Hungarian folklore. The following story imagines the reed as a planet-sized necessity for the earth, hidden in the world’s shadow, invisible to human eyes yet made manifest through certain twists of light, especially during active solar winds when the northern lights are visible in the north sky. This past May many countries were afforded a special treat when the northern lights ventured far to the south of where they are typically glimpsed, a phenomenon that led one Hungarian author, Mónika Landy-Gyebnár to write, “On the night of May 11th and into the dawn hours of May 12th was viewable the aurora borealis which we can safely say: whoever managed to observe it had one of the most beautiful experiences of their life.”