---

Holding Patterns

By Jennifer Hudak

I dream about the trees sometimes. I think we all do, even though none of my generation were alive when the forest was actually growing. We don’t dream about them the way they are now—stunted and dormant—but the way they were when the first colonists arrived here on Ariadne: pale smooth trunks growing straight and true, latticed with ropy, red-leafed vines that cradled the heavy fruit dangling off the branches. The canopy towering dozens of meters overhead, everything quiet and lush and smelling of damp. People say that back then, you could watch the trees growing in real time, budding branches and unfurling leaves. Even in the vids and holos they show us in school, the trees look so sturdy, so real—so permanent—that you could forgive someone for believing that they’d grow forever.

But the trees here want something we can’t give them—some murmur of information, an arboreal greeting, the plant equivalent of a rough hug and a shouted Hello! Good to see you! They’re waiting for something that will never happen.

Just like us.

---

Xander and I are knitting by the glow of the solar lamps in the south hall. Only the first moon has risen; the second one—the brighter one—won’t make an appearance until long after we’ve gone to bed, which means we’re stuck in gray dimness all evening. My back and neck ache; my hands are chapped. The yarn, made from the fibrous tufts that sprout from the top of pearl-grass, is rough against our fingers, and it constantly threatens to unravel.

So far, I’ve darned five pairs of socks, reinforced the elbows in two sweaters, and started on a sleep sack for a baby in Hab Three, and still I’m only halfway through my chore list. Sometimes, on nights like this, it feels like I’ve always been knitting. Like I’ll never stumble back to the apartment I share with my dad, like the morning will never come. If it weren’t for Xander—slouching sideways, one long leg flung over the arm of his chair—I’m not sure I could stand it.

Then, abruptly, he says, “Hey Leslie. What if I told you that I can get us into the dome?”

I glance around, but as usual, we’re the only ones here. There aren’t many places in our hab where you can truly be alone, but nearly everyone avoids the south hall, especially between the first and second moonrise. It’s darker than the other halls even on a sunny day, since its windows are blocked by the dome covering the nearby trees, and the solar lamps seem to cast more shadows than light. Xander and I don’t care; we knit by feel, not by sight, and we value privacy more than anything. Still, he should know better than to say something like that without at least checking for eavesdroppers.

“Did you hear me? I can get us in,” he repeats. He’s already done with his tasks for the night, of course; now he’s just playing, his needles spitting out scarf after scarf, each one longer and more elaborate than the one before. Knitting was my chore before he was assigned to it as well, and it annoys me that he took to it so easily.

“I heard you,” I whisper. “Be quiet.”

“You don’t believe me.” He reaches into his bag and grabs a new wad of yarn—a pale, algae-dyed green—and I eye it longingly. We’re not supposed to dye the yarn. This wasn’t always the case; sometimes you’ll still see a sweater or jacket with a hint of washed-out pink or pale yellow, remnants of old garments that have been unraveled, their yarns reused. But that was back when the colony was new and everyone was still filled with optimism about our life here. These days, with the trees nearly dead and everything feeling so dire, both our time and our resources are strictly controlled, and dyeing yarn is considered a waste of both. Who cares if all our clothes are the bleached-out non-white of the pearl-grass, as long as they keep us warm? But the only person Xander allows to see his brightly-striped scarves is me, and he knows I’ll never tell anyone. Usually, sharing this secret with Xander gives me a warm feeling; tonight it just makes me irritable.

“There’s security around the dome, Xander.”

“Barely. It’s just for show. No one cares anymore.”

I frown, because it’s kind of true. Back when our parents were kids, everyone still thought that they could stop the blight if they isolated the affected trees. It seems obvious, now, that the dome could never have worked. Maybe it was obvious back then, too; maybe they just built it to keep everyone from panicking. Maybe they simply thought it was better to do something than nothing.

Now, scientists go inside the dome to experiment on the trees that first showed signs of blight. But no matter what they try, the trees won’t grow more than a few meters tall, and they won’t produce fruit. These days, you’d have to travel to the other side of the planet to find any forests unaffected by the blight, and even those trees will be sick within our lifetime if it keeps spreading the way it is.

“Come on, Leslie,” Xander wheedles. “You know you want to see what’s under the dome.”

“I know what’s under the dome. Dead trees.”

He affects a look of shock. “Bite your tongue. They’re not dead. They’re just not growing.”

“Same difference. Anyway, they’re no different from the trees outside the dome.”

“Maybe.” He raises an eyebrow. “But that’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

Xander lets out a deep sigh, as if he were so disappointed in me he can’t even answer. He’s already used up the green yarn, and has moved on to a strand of pink that he dyed using leftover fruit pulp that should have gone into the compost. He uses whatever scraps he has handy in his knits, sometimes switching yarns in the middle of a row. His bag is full of forbidden color. I wish I could plunge my hands into it. I wish I could add a single purple row to the sleep sack—something bright that would catch the baby’s attention, help its eyes learn to focus.

I wish neither of us had to hide.

I hunch over my sleep sack and rework a twisted stitch. The yarn in my hands is the same non-color as the ground outside, cast in the sickly glow of the first moon. I think about the trees under the dome, isolated and withering. I imagine the blight spreading underground, from root to root, turning everything gray. It’s as if the entire planet is in shock. As if sorrow were contagious.

That’s what’s beneath the dome, I want to tell Xander: sorrow. But I don’t need to tell him, because he already knows.

---

The next night, at dinner, my dad says, “I talked with the team. You’ll start your apprenticeship next cycle.”

The ground-nut soup I’m eating sours in my mouth. Once I start my apprenticeship, I’ll spend all day doing maintenance on the hydration systems, like my dad. I’ll come home smelling of chemicals that don’t wash out during my allotted shower time. I’ll be released from evening chores, which means the knitting will fall to a younger teen. And when the apprenticeship is over and I’m a full-fledged worker, I’ll move out of my dad’s apartment and move in with my match, so that we can start raising a family of our own, the next generation on this dying planet.

My dad has been beaming at me like he’s offered me a gift, but seeing my reaction, his expression hardens. “You’re of age, Leslie. It’s time for you to start helping the colony.”

“I know. I know.” My hands are shaking and I set down my spoon. “It’s just, I thought maybe I’d be needed somewhere else.”

“The hydration system is crucial for the trees. It’s an important job, and we need good people for it.”

“But…” I take a breath. “If we took down the dome, we wouldn’t need the hydration system at all, right?”

He gapes at me. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know we can’t take down the dome.”

“Why not? The blight has already spread.”

“So, what, we should just give up? Stop our research? Are you saying we should just let the forest die?”

“No,” I answer, stung. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I just…I feel like we’re all doing things just to say we’re doing them, you know? And I don’t see how any of it is actually helping.”

My dad doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he lets out a heavy sigh and reaches across the table to place his hand on top of mind. It’s rough and familiar, comforting and stifling at the same time. “We left you kids a mess, didn’t we? We didn’t mean to, but…” He gives my fingers a squeeze. “We’re working the problem, Leslie. You know that, right?” When I nod, he squeezes my fingers again and then lets go, sitting back in his chair and clearing his throat. “But you have to do your part, too. That’s what all this is about. Your generation—it’s up to you. You can solve this. But you have to do your part.”

My dad nods, satisfied, and starts eating his soup again. To me, it feels like he’s taken the weight of the world off his shoulders and set it on mine. But the path he’s asking me to follow is the same path that got us here, and looking ahead, I don’t see a solution. I just see a dome full of dead trees.

After dinner, I meet Xander in the south hall. He’s already finished mending a pile of socks, and now he’s returned to the colorful scarf he started last night.

“Good, you’re here!” he says. “Have you thought at all about what we talked about last time? You know.” He leans closer and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “The dome.”

“Can you just be quiet for once? I have a ton of work to do. Some of us aren’t as fast as you are.”

He makes a face at me and slouches back in his chair. “Someone’s in a bad mood.”

“Forget it.” I look at his scarf. “You know, someone could walk in here any second and see what you’re doing.”

Xander groans. “It’s not a big deal, Leslie.”

“You’ll still get in trouble.”

“What could they possibly do? Arrest me? Good luck getting anyone else to mend a hundred pairs of socks a week. No offense,” he adds.

“It’s a waste of yarn!” I don’t know why I’m saying this. I don’t even believe it; pearl-grass is the one thing this planet isn’t short on. It’s a weed, and if anything, it’s growing faster now that the trees are dying. Xander would be well within his rights to argue the point, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t argue at all. When he does speak, his voice sounds strained.

“I do everything they tell me to do. Everything. So what if I want to blow off a little steam? What does it matter?” He’s still knitting while he’s talking to me, furiously clicking his needles together. He’s grabbed a strand of yellow now and is knitting with both that and the pink at the same time, feeding each color with a separate hand. It’s like the more upset he gets, the more color he adds.

“They could stop us from hanging out together,” I say quietly.

His hands abruptly still and he looks up at me. “They wouldn’t dare.” His chin is thrust out and his eyes are dangerous. For a second, I imagine reaching out, taking his long, graceful fingers in my own. I imagine pushing my chair next to his, so that we could knit with our elbows bumping and our legs touching. But it’s impossible.

“You know they would. They wouldn’t even need a big excuse. You and I are matched to other people,” I remind him.

“Matched,” he scoffs. “That’s just about the gene pool. It’s not about…” He doesn’t say love, and I’m grateful. Love is messy. It’s chaos. And it’s nothing we can afford out here on this planet, where every drop of water is reclaimed and every bite of food counted. Where the next generation of settlers can’t be left to chance.

Xander carefully binds off his scarf and smooths it out. It’s the only color in the room. It might be the only color in the entire world. In the dim light of the south hall, it’s as loud as a scream. “Sometimes it feels like the blight is inside me, you know? Like it’s inside us. Like we’re just withering here, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

“Xander…”

“Don’t you ever want to just…do something? Something that isn’t planning for the future or ensuring our survival? Something stupid, just to feel alive?”

I swallow hard. He’s not just talking about his scarves, or his scheme to get inside the dome. He’s talking about us. The secret smiles we give each other when we pass in the hall. Everything hidden and hopeless, like roots underground, desperate for something they’re not being given.

I look at my stitches so that I don’t have to look at Xander. So that I don’t have to see the dome out the window and imagine the dying trees withering inside. “I start my apprenticeship next cycle,” I tell him. “So I just don’t see the point, I guess.”

For a moment, Xander  just stares at me without speaking. Then he digs in his bag and pulls out a tiny strand of bright red yarn. I’ve never seen a red that intense, not in any of the dyes he’s produced. It looks juicy as a berry.

“How did you make that?” I ask him.

“You probably don’t want to know.” He threads the yarn through a tapestry needle and slides off his chair, kneeling in front of me. He’s never been this close to me, not since we were too young to know better. My heart is beating so hard I can hear it above the noise of the ventilation system. He reaches for the bottom of my sweater, a question in his eyes. When I don’t pull away, he lifts up the hem—just the hem, careful not to expose my undershirt—and embroiders a heart, tiny and vivid. Then he smooths the sweater back down, hiding his work.

“Remember that Old Earth poem we read last year?” he asks. “About the fish. You remember it, right?”

I nod. Then I whisper, “Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.”

His hand rests on my lap for an extra breath. Then he rises, and swiftly returns to his chair.

I glance down at the smooth knit of my sweater, the pale gray of undyed pearl-grass. You’d never guess there was a burst of color inside. I can still feel the heat of Xander’s hand, even though he’s picked up his needles again, slouching in his chair as if he’d never gotten up.

“That’s the point,” he murmurs, so quietly I barely hear him.

Later that night, instead of sleeping, I run my fingers over Xander’s hidden heart. I think about how next cycle I’ll be apprenticing with my dad, working long hours for sick trees that might never recover. I think about how the colony still thinks it has everything under control: the trees in their dome, the kids in the hab. Me and Xander on separate chairs. I think about how “under control” is just another way of saying “trapped.”

I wonder how long this can go on—this holding pattern, this stasis. How long before the trees either grow, or die.

I get up and lock myself into the bathroom, and message Xander.

Do you still want to do something stupid?

His reply is just a single word, all caps:

YES

---

Two weeks later, I wait for my dad to fall asleep, and I sneak out of our apartment. Xander meets me in the south hall.

I hold up my backpack. “I brought my stuff.”

“Excellent.” He hoists his own pack, which is much larger than mine and stuffed to capacity.

He’d stolen a pair of lab coats and his parents’ ID badges, and we take advantage of a middle-of-the-night shift change at one of the checkpoints. I’d envisioned something very covert and high-tech, but Xander was right; sneaking into the dome is surprisingly easy. The guard at the gate is young and bored, and barely looks at us when he buzzes us through. Even after the gate clangs shut behind us, I half-expect the guards to come vaulting over it, chasing us down. But they don’t. No one shouts or brandishes weapons. No one stops us as we walk into the dome, and into the forest.

The lights are dimmed for nighttime, and the further we walk, the darker it gets. Ahead of us, the forest is just a collection of shadows. But as our eyes adjust, the trees take shape like an image clarifying, pixel by pixel.

“We’re doing this, I guess,” I say, my voice shaky.

Xander’s smile flashes in the darkness. “Can’t back out now.”

Another few steps, and smooth, pale trunks surround us. Like ghosts, they glow slightly in the night. Save for the sound of our footsteps and the whoosh of the ventilation and irrigation systems, the dome is absolutely silent—no chittering of animals, no swishing of leaves in a breeze. Nothing but the trees, motionless sentinels. Watchful. Expectant.

Waiting.

I reach out and stroke the bark of the nearest tree with the tips of my fingers. It’s smooth as skin, and it warms beneath my touch. I wonder if my father has ever taken off his gloves and rested his hands on these trees. If he’s smiled at them, or talked to them, or if they’re just a job to him. I press my cheek to the trunk and hear sap flowing just beneath the surface.

Xander clears his throat. “We don’t have a lot of time. Come on.”

---

When my dad’s phone rings in the morning, I’ve only just fallen asleep. For a few foggy moments, I’ve forgotten what happened the night before. What Xander and I did.

Then my dad says, “Holy shit. Holy shit. I’m on my way.”

“Dad? Is everything okay?”

He’s dashing around the apartment, pulling on clothes and raking his fingers through his hair. “Get yourself breakfast, okay? Something’s happened. I have to go.”

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure yet. Don’t worry—we’ll take care of it.” And then he leaves, without even making himself a cup of tea.

I sit in bed, my heart beating like a fist inside my chest. I’m expecting to hear from Xander, but I still jump when the message alert chimes.

Meet me at the dome

I blink at the words a few times before responding:

Too suspicious. Somewhere else?

I’ve barely finished typing when his reply comes back:

Dome NOW

As soon as I leave the hab, the noise of dozens of overlapping voices hits me. It seems like the entire colony is on its way to the dome, buzzing with anxiety and confusion and… something else. People are moving in jostling streams, like schools of fish: bumping into each other, letting the crowd take them. At first, I hang back, unwilling to be swallowed by that mass.

But then I notice that everyone is looking up, not forward. And when I follow their gazes, I understand why.

Trees.

They’ve burst from the top of the dome, and now they tower overhead, stretching out arm-like branches as if they’ve just woken from a long nap. A breeze rustles the leaves, and the smell of the forest cascades out into the open air. It’s like the trees have let out a giant breath. I inhale, taking it deep into my lungs.

They’ve grown.

They’ve grown.

“Leslie!” Xander calls, waving his arms to catch my attention. He’s forcing his way against the flow of the crowd, trying to reach me. There’s a look of ecstasy on his face that makes me weak, and between that and the trees it takes me a second to realize he’s wearing one of his scarves, right out in the open where everyone can see. When he’s finally within reach, he grabs my hands. His fingers, like mine, are rough and dry from hours of handling the yarn. “Leslie, can you believe it?”

“Did we do this?” I whisper. “Is this because of us?”

Unbelievably, he starts laughing.  He cradles my face with his hands, and for a second, I think he’s actually going to kiss me, right here, in front of everyone. For a second, I think I’m going to let him. But then he grabs my hand again and starts towing me toward the dome. “Come on.”

It gets harder and harder to move the closer we get to the dome. The crowd has thickened considerably, and since I’m shorter than Xander, all I can see in front of me are the backs of heads and shoulders. Dozens of bodies press against mine. It’s complete and utter chaos. Any moment, we’re going to bottleneck, and Xander and I are going to be stuck in this claustrophobic mass.

But then, improbably, the people nearest us stop jostling and step back; they’re staring at Xander’s scarf, its stripes screaming against the rest of our bland clothing. They back up enough for me to see that the gate to the dome stands wide open, and the scent of the forest pours out. It smells green. It smells alive. I imagine the trees breathing in, pulling in all of our exhalations, our mingled scents of soap and sweat.

Xander starts tugging at my wrist again, pulling me toward the gate, and it’s like his scarf is some kind of secret pass; everyone lets us through.

“They know,” I whisper. “They know what we did.”

“Just come on.”

It had been too dark last night for us to see the effects of our handiwork. Now, as we enter the dome once more, the sunlight streams through the torn roof like fresh water, washing away gray and revealing color, shocking and glorious.

Our multicolored scarves—Xander’s and mine—encase each tree trunk like a sleeve, stripes of pink and yellow and green and purple hugging and warming the bark. We’d secured them around the trees by feel, not by sight, and so our stripes don’t match up at the seams, and the long tails of yarn hang loose since we didn’t have the time to weave them in. But in the sunlight, none of that matters. In fact—now that I’m looking closely, I can see that the yarn tails, rather than dangling like they’d been last night, are now clinging to the trees like vines; they’ve migrated both up and down the trunks, twining themselves around branches and roots. I crouch down and see that, down by the soil, the yarn is frayed, each strand snaking out to hold hands with fungal filaments, making a network of fiber and root.

Up above, buds swell at the ends of branches, and while we watch, they crack open, as if they were waiting for us to arrive. From each bud emerges a brilliant aquamarine blossom.

“How…” I whisper.

Xander shakes his head in wonder. “I have no idea.”

Overhead, a darting movement makes several people gasp: a bird, holding a bit of yarn in its beak, flies between the trees before alighting on a branch where a nest is in progress. Xander reaches out and pulls me close, and I don’t pull away. Zig-zags of color write joy across the forest, and I clutch Xander’s hand as tightly as if our fingers were knitted together. As if, after years of living in solitary stasis, we’ve found each other again, for the first time:

Hello! Good to see you!

Hello!

And everything is rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.

---

Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was Holding Patterns, by Jennifer Hudak, narrated by Kat Kourbeti.

About this story, Jennifer says:

I’ve been fascinated by yarn bombs for years. They are both public art and a means of protest; they use an old-fashioned skill to make something loud and wild and often hilarious. This story took many shapes as I was trying to figure out how to write it, but what ended up being important to me was the idea that art is never incidental; it’s vitally important, both as a means of expression and resistance.

And about this story, I say:

I thought this was such a sweet story about hope and community. Leslie and Xander are searching for ways to feel hopeful about the future, in a present that is as colorless and scratchy as a pair of pearl-grass socks. I loved the little ways in which bright colors and caring are woven into each other in the story. Xander is experimenting with “unnecessary” dyes, and then he embroiders the tiny heart onto Leslie’s sweater. 

The yarnbombing is more than just a colorful act of resistance, it’s also an act of warmth and community. At the beginning of the story Leslie suggests that the trees are waiting for the plant equivalent of a rough hug and a shouted hello. And a hug, and community, is what the two teenagers give all the trees, both literally and metaphorically. I like that even though the story gives you the option of thinking, oh maybe the trees just literally needed some certain symbiotic reaction from the pearl-grass, it also feels in a less tangible way that the trees needed hope and community just like we all do. It certainly feels like this world, both trees and humans, might now be headed in a better, more joyful direction– together.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

How do you share it, you ask? Well! In addition to your social media of choice, consider rating and/or reviewing us on podcast listening sites, such as Apple or Google. Maybe you could even yarnbomb something about us around a tree, I dunno, but more reviews makes for more discoverability makes for more Escape Pod for you.

Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members. So! If you enjoyed our story this week, and why wouldn’t you, then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that yarnbomb the extra-terrestrial trees.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Twyla Tharp who said  “Creativity is an act of defiance.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.