CZM Book Club: "Spring Woods Spring" by B. Pladek

me to think that you'll like this week's story. This is really good and I don't know, gets at stuff about modern life and the future and how things are going, but in a way that I think you'll appreciate. This story is called spring Wood Spring and it's by b. Pladick. Here's a biography of Ben. Who's B Platick. Ben Platdock is a writer and literature professor based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His debut novel, dry Land, came out in twenty twenty

three and was shortlisted for the Crawford Award. You can find him sporadically on most socials at B Pladock, which is bp LA, D E K This particular story was first published by Strange Horizons in twenty twenty three. I think we've done some other Strange Horizons stories before, and there's a reason for that. Strange Horizons is a really good magazine, has really good stories. Y'all should check it out.

I'm not just saying that because they've published them of my fiction, but they have published them of my fiction as well as this story. Spring Woods Spring by B. Pladock. Harry first noticed the trees in May when he went out in the purple dusked to hear the woodcocks dance. The sun had set an hour ago. Along the maple's tangled arms flickered a slight luminescence, like the nave of

a candle lit church. By its glow, he could see what he usually couldn't, the male woodcock bulleting upwards, wings whistling to his parabola against the blue clouds. He watched for another hour until he was confident the light came from the trees themselves against Knight's dark lid. The canopy shown so soft an untrained eye might not notice. Maybe it was some new foxfire spreading north with the dying winters. Or maybe an electrical disturbance, an ozone fit kicked off

by the burning tiger. He'd lived in the little cabin beside the field station for two decades, watching it change. Aging beside it, very little surprised him any more. At home, he shucked his boots, then settled in with a book on bioluminescence. He ignored the cardboard boxes heaped neatly in the corner. The university had not officially asked him to leave, but he was getting too frail to maintain the field

station by himself. Undergrads came to chop and dig every weekend, as well as often his granddaughter Ava, who was too polite to call him old, but whose regular visits it was a five hour drive, spoke for themselves. Ava's father, Harry's son in law, had brought him the boxes. Bill had been sober for four years now. Last year he'd invited Harry to live with him. Harry couldn't decide if it was a genuine offer or a bid to get Ava to speak to Bill again. He wondered if she

resented him for considering it. He wondered if he resented himself. But he was old, he would have to leave some time, and maybe he didn't have to forgive Bill to live with him. He'd begin tomorrow. He was always beginning tomorrow. Setting down the book, he switched off the light through the window saw to starshine. The tree's orange glow touched every corner of the room, the old photos and books,

four walls, the exact size of a life. The next morning, when dawn still stood white and chilly in the Lowlands, he visited his wife's and daughter's graves. They grew at the bottom of the maple slope in a wind sheltered dell. For Lisa, he'd planted an arch of raspberry canes. When she'd learned the cancer was terminal, she'd demanded it, making some black and unrepeatable joke about him eating her fruit. She'd even helped him choose the spot, bare head wrapped,

shaking with pain and laughter. He'd never had the chance to ask Junie what she preferred after the crash. She hadn't woken up, and juniper would have been too on the nose, and besides, it wouldn't grow in such wet woods. So he chose nanny berry because it's dry fruit tasted like bananas, which Junie had loved. He hoped he wasn't being selfish, burying her here instead of an enormal cemetery like Bill had wanted. He wished Lisa had been there to advise him, though he was grateful she'd never had

to watch her daughter die. He touched the Raspberry's naked whips every day he visited the dell. When his undergrads had found out, they'd thought he was morbid. One eighteen year old had even suggested therapy to process. You can't mourn forever, she'd said, very young and benignant, it's not healthy. A thump from up the slope startled him, the familiar sound of Ava's civic door. Of course, she'd come to

talk about the lights. He heard the plash of her boots as she crossed the brook, then the bright, dry snap of a branch as she entered the hardwoods. Five minutes later, she'd found him. Her face was clouded before she spoke. As always, she brushed the furled buds of Junie's nannyberry. Hi Mom, She turned to Harry, hugged him. Have you seen the trees? She said? My pa is freaking out. She says it's not fungal and not atmospheric, it's worldwide, did you know? And the Amazon It's so

bright you can read a book by it. Even now, the glow was faintly visible, an orange thrumb on the bellies of the branches. He said, some things in nature resist explanation. Don't give me that crap, She laughed. What's your theory? You think I've got a better idea than your pi? Is it because I'm old? She laughed again, then socked him gently on the shoulder. Ava had moved out two years ago when she'd started her PhD. He had never asked about living with her. He knew she

couldn't afford it. Hey, I peeked in the window and saw you haven't packed yet. I thought you were moving out, Moving out, she said, carefully, rather than moving in with Bill. Her circumspection shamed him. He wished she would just be angry. He wasn't sure if he wanted it for her sake or because it would license his own anger. I haven't decided, She gave a small paint smile. Right, Can I bird

watch with you for a little? Of course? Above them, a clutch of yellow rumped warblers was twitching along a big hickory the trunk, shaggy bark seemed pearly smoothed by light. The bird's black claws stood out as if unfrosted glass. Ava swung her binoculars around on her shoulder. Harry raised his too. For her last two years of high school and all four of undergraduate, Ava had lived with Harry at the field station, helping him with the monitoring he

conducted for the university. That least, the reserves three hundred acres of maple, hickory woods, cattail marsh, and wet meadow. She was fleeing Bill, whose drinking had gotten worse after the accident, and who could barely offer his daughter the solace of a hug for the loss of her own mother, So deep was he sunk in his own self recrimination all those years, as Bill's guilt had hardened into denial, Ava had wandered the dappled shadows of the reserve, gathering

the woods around herself. Their green light had held her. Harry's chest pinched. He watched her as she gazed up. You can see it, she said. Her voice had a quaver he hadn't heard in years. A light in the woods like burning. It took two more weeks for the world to pay attention. First a third pager in The Times by their reporter on the quirky nature beat, then a below the fold feature on the light's effect on rural industries. Then finally a headline trees ruined sleep across nation.

This was an exaggeration. The light was too subtle to keep anyone but birds awake. Still, he knew the story had gotten big when Bill used it as an opening. You see these tree lights crazy, but Ava has some good theories. Even by text. He could smell Bills craving for pardon, which had never quite extended to an apology. So you think about my awe, it's a limited time. Maybe he was too hard on him, Harry thought sometimes. After all, Bill had loved Junie too, Going once, going twice.

He put down the phone without replying. By day, the trees glow was still muted, but at night the woods shimmered in perpetual twilight. The naked branches shone like the white pith of a flame. He was surprised there wasn't more panic. Maybe it was because of the quality of the light diffused through the new leaves. It length the maple slope a hazy, underwater feel, or the cloth soft atmosphere a fairy in an Edwardian novel. It did not

blaze like a burning bush, vengeful foreboding. It merely seemed sad. The locals seemed to agree. One evening, Harry found a group of them standing in a circle among the trees, wearing sage crowns and holding tapers. Forgive us, they chanted, forgive us. He didn't bother, asking for what. Every week the trees grew brighter on the news, the ecologists, grumbling, turned slowly to alarm. Gouts of confused bats poured from

caves at midday, flapping themselves to starvation. Leopards missed their pounces. Some night flowering trees stayed tightly furled while their pollinators buzzed past. The talking heads avoided calling it climate change for fear people would stop paying attention, but they were clearly worried. They were joined by the astronomers, whose dark sky areas were being polluted. Harry wondered at their calling at pollution when it seemed so natural, distinct from the

glare of a city's skyglow. It gave the trees so little agency. Maybe they had just decided it was time to burn. Only the agricultural and industrial sectors celebrated the tree lights. More light meant longer hours. Harry hated agreen with bit businessmen, but he liked the lights too. For half the night, he wandered the dimly greening woods, tracing their worn paths like a thumb, brushing a familiar cheek.

Up the cane, spiked with oaks, down the sandy kettle, threading the damn the beavers had heaped in the marsh's mouth. Here was the dell where Junie and Lisa had taken Ava for picnics, which Ava had cleared of buckthorne the weekend she'd first left home. You let it grow over, she'd accused. She had not cried, only hacked at the glossy shrubs for hours, over and over, destroying their foundations,

uprooting everything. And here was the yellow birch. Harry had seated alone after he tried to imagine his life without these things, waking to different birds, song alien leaves, Sprain refused. Maybe he was just unable to face change. Though he'd known what his life would become without Ava when she left. Though he guessed what might happen to him now if the trees continued brightening. What might happen to him now is that he might get a chance to support our sponsors.

What a sweet deal that totally has nothing to do with the economic system that has caused climate change. That if I mentioned you all would stop? Well, not you all?

for clinging? Most people mourned their loved ones in graveyards, dedicated ceremonial spaces they visited only sometimes. Surely, living atop the dead among Lisa's raspberries and Junie's nannyberries was excessive, not healthy. As his student had said, he brushed the birch's boughs as he did every spring, smoothing back its new leaves like a child's soft hair. In the tree lights,

they shone gold. By the time Ava returned three weeks later, twilight had brightened to the pale glove of a winter's cloudy afternoon. Her face was haggard. No one knows, she said. We've run every test we can, checked our results against teams in Brazil, Russia. Nothing. If we can't figure this out, what good are we? He guessed she had come to him for comfort. For Ava, that had always meant action,

proof that she had a handle on things. He loved that she trusted him enough to give her this not solace, but a whetstone. Do you want to help me chop a dead mape, he asked, It's a test I've been meaning to do. This was a lie. He could no longer fell a tree by himself, much less bucket for testing, and after that first book on bioluminescence, he had done no more reading experimenting. Every time he tried, his mind slid away towards the light. If Ava saw through him,

she didn't say. Together they tramped to a sugar maple whose trunk had been recently split by lightning. It would die soon. We've tried this, she protested, but weakly. Hafting axes, they chopped. Harry hacked the undercut. Ava taller and more solid, sawed through from the other side. Though he tried not to, he had to keep stopping to pant. He saw Ava WinCE watching him as they leaped back to let the

maple fall. She took Harry's shoulder watched the canopy. The trunk creaked, snapped clean, and landed with a shudder, and the leaf litter. At just the same moment, a pulse of light fizzed through the woods. After Harry could swear the trees burned brighter. Following Ava, he leaned over the stump. She traced the rings with practiced fingers. The wood was pale gold, all light quenched, snuffed, he said, and she nodded like I said. We've tried it. Every time one's cut,

the rest get brighter. It makes no sense. And you've ruled out pathogens, fungi, we've ruled out everything. She sat back on her haunches and pressed her hand's heel to her face. And it's not as if they've stopped logging. I guess you don't see it much here, since this is a reserve, but in manias it's getting unlivable. What are your next steps? If you got her to talk through it, you could help her find her strength. It was how they'd survived those first awful years. My next steps.

She laughed a little, then looked at him. He knew then, I live in the city. I'll be fine, but you should leave. Ava. I came to tell you that you should, that it's okay. She held his eyes, balancing her own pain up and away like a karatid. When had she become such an adult to carry the stone of her hurt while freeing a hand to help someone else. Harry had not taught her to do it, nor had Lisa, whom she hadn't really known, and Juni had died too soon.

Maybe the woods themselves had this remnant of a once great forest which grew straight and did not bend nor mourn. Despite the press of so much humanity. He was drifting. He shook his head, then looked at her. It's not I wish we could offer. I'm so sorry, but even with your Social Security check in Katy's salary, we could still just afford a one bedroom. The perils of dating a history PhD, he joked, because her face was wet marble.

She looked down. He touched her shoulder. You never have to apologize to me, I know, but this tree thing is going to be bad, so just promise me you'll go all right. I don't have to see him, It's fine. Have you ever considered that. I don't want to live with Bill either. I can't lose you too. The knife was swift and unexpected. His heart cramped on it. He looked at Ava and knew she'd meant it that way. Yes, she was an adult, now, unafraid to use the weapons

he'd given her against him for his protection. Okay, I promise good. She slumped forward, elbow on the damp stump on her back. The orange light pressed like a stone. She slept over that night in the trundle bed Harry kept for her. He pulled a blanket over the window for the first time in weeks. The cabin eased into darkness. He thought of the decades he'd lived at the field station, the long shudder of Lisa's death, the brutal punch of Junie's Like a torn mimosa. He'd curled up and withered

into himself. His heart became a closed fist. Outside life went on. The cattails clicked in the marsh. The yarrow lifted its balmy perfume through his silence. The robins whistled. He had shut them all out like a cuckoo clock marionette. He'd left his cabin on the hour, taken readings for the university, then swiveled to march back inside. Until Eva came sixteen and betrayed her heart so hard he was afraid for her. Taking her hand, he had led her

beneath the softening sea green of the maples. He had given her birds, eggs, coin, bright mushrooms, tubes of loamy soil until her eyes softened. She opened, relearned how to trust. He swore it would be her strength. But to believe in her openness he had to face his own. So he let the spring woods cut him. The green light pierced him with arrows. Their green smell split him in two. In his sealed heart, a crack widened. He walked in and through. He entered his grief as if for the

first time, and it did not feel like death. I could live here, he thought, kneeling between Lisa's Raspberry and Junie's nanny Berry, their cool leaves touching his shoulders like a laying on of hands. I could live here. Later that day, Bill texted again, if Ava's the problem, just explain it to her. I've changed, Harry. Don't you get that I'm trying to help you. He did not reply. As July passed, the corporate world's delight eroded to a

panic matching the ecologists. Forest industries stopped functioning to operate their bunchers, loggers donned blackout sunglasses. Trucks keeled off service roads. In British Columbia, Maine's pulp mill workers struck, and mass light was blinding eye melting in the Amazon. Companies tried sending automated loggers to clear cut space to dim the margin enough for manned machinery. When that failed, they tried burning. The trees just blazed brighter. The news did not know

how to talk about it. Active nature, active god, reaction, revolution. No one said climate change anymore, because the light seemed to be the tree's decision. Even if it wasn't, they were clear cut anyway. In vaster and vaster retaliatory swaths, no one mourned them, save the people who always had, who had never been listened to anyway. At first, Harry wondered at this, how could the world willingly slaughter millions of living beings without remorse or a breath for grief?

Then he thought, oh, when at first seemed to be a local effect quickly turned global. Even in reserves with no logging, the trees grew steadily brighter, as if sympathizing with their fellows in the dying rain forest. In the small towns near the field station, farmers began shrouding orchards in blackout or toppling their lines of wind breaks. Harry knew because he still had to drive for groceries once

a week. He wore sunglasses now too, especially when facing west, where an amber halo beat on the sky over the state forest. In one place, an arm of smoke reached ominously up to strangle the light. When he pulled up before his cabin, he was not surprised to see a bank of cars beached on the grass like fish. Atop them sat his neighbors and hats and dark glasses, cannisters of gasoline under their arms. His heart shivered like a flame. We came to warn you, said one man, sliding off

the hood. These woods are getting too bright. We can't live like this. You have to understand. It's a reserve, said Harry, You saying trees are more important than human life. They're not killing you, they're killing our livelihoods. That's the same thing. Not these trees, Harry said slowly. He shouldered his grocery bags and walked towards the cabin. Whatever you do here, you'll do with me in it. Think about that, you and your human life. Beneath his glasses, the man's

mouth scowled. Harry didn't realize how ready he was for them to do it, to lie down and be swallowed by the glow. Until still scowling, they packed their gas canisters in their cars and left with an indignant rip of turf. He was left alone before the cabin, every cell in his body shaking with light. As he was unloading the groceries, his phone beaped. Did you get my last? Text? Said Bill? I'm not going to ask again. What did av Us say, Harry? Are you getting these? Harry? That night?

What the clock said was night. Harry put on his sunglasses and went out. He lay down between Lisa's red Raspberry and Junie's nannyberry. Squinting, he looked up, Light pooled in his eyes and mouth warm, surprising. He was seventy four now, like a middle aged hickory or a very old willow. No elder in these woods, but no upstart either. Raspberries lasted a decade, nanny berry's four juny shrub would outlive him, as JUNI should have. If he raised his arm,

the glow smoldered through his sleeve. It could almost have been bark, much like our advertiser bark. Get your bark from the Bark Store. Listen to this new podcast about types of bark. Here's ads, and we're back. True to his word, Bill did not text again, but at the beginning of August, Ava called Harry assumed it was her because she did it five times in a row, refusing to be fooled, insisting he pick up. When he finally did, she said, you're still there. Yes, for fock's sake, you promised,

but her anger sounded tired. Are you all right? Can you still drive? Get food? I have enough, he said. After the neighbor's visit, he had only made one grocery run. He'd bought in bulk, brown rice, vitamins. Meat was easy. The light confused the rabbits. What about you. I'm all right. Katie bought tinch for the car windows so we can still drive. But my eye's hurt all the time. Mine too. We still don't know what it is. They convince people to stop logging the Amazon at least, but it's not

getting any dimmer. The supply chains are all fucked. He heard her swallow. It feels like an apocalypse. How do we do this? You'll figure it out, you always have, sure, she said. He wished he could hug her. Phone reassurances sounded cheap. He cannot twist his imagination into the anxious shape Avas must take every morning as a young woman with years ahead of her, who had been promised a world, a broken one, but a world His words had never

been equal to her losses. As for himself, he needed none. All the world he wanted stood outside among the trees. The thought should have bothered him, Then it bothered him that it didn't. Then he gave up and simply let it be what it was, a comfort, like warm light through a window. He told Ava about the woods. The

heliotropic plants aren't fooled, but the mammals are. The deer run into things, and the rabbits just stay in their burrows until they're so hungry they can't What about the birds we'll see during the micro They talked for another ten minutes. Harry made parental inquiries. Did she have enough money? Was Katie okay? Was Katie's family? Could she get her meds? The cabin's atmosphere of golden syrup slowed his thoughts. Yes, more or less, Yes, maybe not, because meds depend on

supply chains, and those, as she'd said, were fucked. I'm sorry, he said, and she said it's fine. At the end of the call, she lingered on her goodbyes. I've been thinking, Katie says, the nuclear family is a modern construction anyway. Generations used to live together all the time. So yeah, money's tight, but like you said, we can figure it out. His heart leapt. It was what he'd hoped for. Yet outside his heavy curtains, the woods were shining. Averi's dawn

call spiraled down through the gold afternoon. He heard himself say, that's okay, Aves, it's not We don't know how bad things will get the power grids are going and you're so isolated out there. I'm not that old. As vehemence surprised him, as did his lie about his motives. Through the curtains, the glow reached into the cup his cheek. Did he owe her this, he wondered? Did she have

the right to save him? Outside, the leaves of Junie's nannyberry gleamed like the warm red of palm, suffused with light. When did grief become a home? Look if it gets bad, We're coming for you. Okay, sure, he said, distracted a beat of suspicious silence. Okay, Gramps, love you, love you. As summer ended, light blazed from the reddening trees. It sheered off in great metallic sheets, like hopkins, God shining from the shook foil. Harry ate Less slept less. He

felt pierced and filled by radiance. Ava had been right about the power. It grew sporadic, and the Internet even worse. During the ever briefer gasps of service, he read the news around the world. Cities had slaughtered their trees. Country people had fled to plains and coasts and metropoles. Brasilia, Vancouver, Toms were emptying, and still the woods blazed brighter. The foresters must have found a way to keep felling the Amazon, or else no one had stopped them from burning it.

For their part, his neighbors never returned with their gas canisters. He wondered what had happened. He hadn't driven for groceries in a month. Slowly he ate down his preserves, strapped on his ski mask and glasses to forage for Chantrell's. The woods of his heart were changing, opening as if the light were a great door he could not quite step through. Most days he spent outside, ending each by lying down in the dell between Raspberry and Nannyberry, where

he had he could have mingled with their roots. He watched the animals adjust. So far, the only die offs had been the rabbits. But it was September and the squirrels weren't hoarding. No swallows gathered on the cables, no tins of geese raked the sky. Daylight never shortened. For them, it must seem like an endless summer. Though frost now stiffened the sedge on her calls. Ava's voice was tense. Things are It's falling apart in a new way. I couldn't have imagined it, Hang on, We'll come for you

as soon as we can. Up the esker, the maples were an inferno of yellow. On the highest crowns. Where the real sun touched, the leaves glowed ruby. Lisa's raspberry became a red lantern lit from within. Above it, the slope burned like a bank of prayer candles, one leaf, one flame for each palm in the Amazon, each jack, and the tiga, a million souls grieved by no one save themselves. For hours now he lay in the chilly duff between Lisa and Juny, his kindling sack or mushroom

basket forgotten, even shielded. His eyes throbbed. The shrubs leaves were palms of flame, laying him down. He was theirs. They held him. I'm sorry, he thought, tired, grateful, I'm sorry. Against his curtained windows. Beat the light, the light, the light. In November, the power died completely. Only his solar battery let him receive Ava's calls, half eaten by static. On the very last before his phone died, he thought he heard her say Soon. He put the phone down and

looked up beyond his four loved walls. The world was flame. The naked trees observed their masts, hickories, oaks, sugar maples lift in a thousand tapers. It might never end. He looked across the room at his scant pantry, the piles of wood he'd laid in for winter. He would wait until he couldn't. No matter when ava came, she would be on time, though with twenty four she might not have understood that for a while. Some things resist explanation.

From the corner of the cabin, he drew a tallow candle. Closing his eyes, he opened the door and walked out. He followed the path past the marsh, down the slope towards the Raspberry and nanny Berry. He could see the trees through his eyelids, through the fire in his chest, time to burn. When he reached the dell, he cupped the candle above him. The maple's nave flared a host of tapers that would perhaps finally burned down long after

he himself had guttered into the soil. He would stand vigil as long as he could, for love, for the woods, for the world, for everything that dies too soon and is not mourned. He touched the cool wick once to his lips, then he opened his eyes and raised it up to the light the end. I really like that story. I think anyone who knows me at all will understand why I like that story so much. I identify with

the person aging living in the woods. I love the intermingling of personal grief and climate grief because these things are not They can't be fully separated, you know, like we try to understand and move through our personal grief these days in the context of climate grief, in the context of like not really knowing that there's going to be a world in two generations and not knowing what that means, you know, and then tying that into how you know, Ava had been promised a certain life and

then isn't going to get it, and you know what that means for the people who care about Ava. I don't know. I really like this story. I hope you enjoyed it too. I asked Ben what he had to say about it, and he said, this story is based on a real field station near where I live. The

maples are very beautiful and fall. I also asked him what to plug, and he said, people who liked this story might like my debut novel, dry Land, which came out in twenty twenty three with You of Wisconsin Press, and is about a gay World War One forester who learns why martyr complexes make for bad ecology. Folks might also like my new short story at Strange Horizons, which is my favorite of ever written, The Spindle of Necessity.

Trans guy meets a beloved author in a dream he suspects was trans. Two things get weird, so I don't know, I'm excited to read that story too. In case folks aren't familiar with Strange Horizon, it's like a free online thing. You don't got to pay for it. I mean, it's like cool if you support their fundraising and stuff like that, right, and they're they're a pretty sweet magazine. So you should check out The Spindle of Necessity and you should check

out dry Land. I know that I'm looking forward to checking out both. And that's it. I'll see you next week on Cool Zone Media book Club, or I'll read you a different story, because I'm not going to read you this story again. I really like this story, but I think that probably at some point the producers would notice if I read you the same story over and over again. Next week, new story. Talk to you all soon Bye.