Chain and Mulch

Chain went first, because her story went up. "This is the food chain," she said, lifting her cord so the cards caught the sun. "Energy starts in the grass — sunlight made into food. The grasshopper eats the grass and takes some of that energy up. The sparrow eats the grasshopper, up again. The hawk eats the sparrow, up once more. Energy climbs, link by link, from the bottom to the top." She held the top card, the hawk, up high. "And that's where my chain ends. At the top. With the hawk." But even as she said it, she looked a little uncertain — because a line that just stops didn't feel like the whole truth of a living meadow.

Mulch went next, from down in the leaves. "My work's the opposite of yours," he said. "You go up. I go down. When the hawk dies, and the sparrow, and the grasshopper, and the grass — when anything dies — it comes to me and mine. We break it down, small and smaller, until it's soil again. Rich, dark soil." He nudged a crumb of earth. "But I'll be honest — I never knew where my soil went, after. It just seemed like the quiet end of things, down here in the dark." Two friends, each with half a story: Chain's line that climbed and stopped, Mulch's work that received and went nowhere.

Then Terra reached out and did one small thing: she took the bottom card of Chain's cord — the grass — and set it down right in Mulch's dark soil. And both of them saw it at once. Chain gasped. "Your soil," she breathed, "feeds my grass." Mulch's eyes went wide. "And your grass," he said, "grows from my soil." Chain lifted her line — grass, grasshopper, sparrow, hawk — and bent it slowly round until the hawk-end curved down to meet the grass-end, right there in Mulch's soil, and the line became a circle. Energy climbs the chain and leaves at the top, as warmth — but the matter, the actual stuff of every creature, cycles: up through Chain's links, then down through Mulch's dark work, and back into the grass to climb again. "It never ends," Chain whispered. "It loops." Terra smiled from the grass. "Now you both have the whole of it," she said. "One of you carries it up. The other brings it home. Together, you're the circle the meadow really is."