Pollen and Kernel

Pollen went first, because her move makes the seed. She hummed to the flower and dusted it with gold from her leg-brushes, and it trembled and took. "Watch what I do," she said. "I carry the pollen from flower to flower, and where I've been, the flower stops being a flower and starts becoming a fruit — with a living seed growing inside it. No carrier, no fruit; no fruit, no seed." She circled the plant. "That's my whole half — I begin it. I turn a flower into a fruit-with-a-seed. But then the fruit ripens, the seed dries, and..." she landed on a pod, "...if nobody keeps it, the birds eat it, or it rots in the mud, and all my carrying comes to nothing. A seed I make and nobody saves is just a seed that's lost. That's where Kernel comes in."

Kernel kept the seed. She opened the ripe pod Pollen pointed at and rolled out the fat seeds inside. "Pollen makes them — I choose and keep the best," she said. She walked the row, watching. "Not from the sickly plant, not the first to flop — from the strongest, best-fitted plant right here. That seed remembers this land." She dried the best of it and tucked it in a labeled tin. "That's my half — I carry the seed forward, from this year into next. But —" she held up a shriveled, hollow husk, "— look. This one came from a flower no carrier ever visited. There's nothing inside it. I can save it all I like; it's dead. I can only save a seed that Pollen made alive. Her carrying is what fills the seed I keep."

Then they did the move that is theirs — the one neither can do alone. They followed the loop all the way around, together. Pollen pollinated the flower; the flower swelled into a fruit; the fruit's seed filled and ripened because she'd carried the gold; Kernel picked the best of that living seed, dried it, kept it labeled through the winter; and in spring it went back in the ground, grew into a plant, and flowered — and Pollen was there to pollinate it again. Round and round: a flower Pollen fills, a seed Kernel keeps, a plant that flowers, a flower Pollen fills. "My carrying with no one to save the seed just feeds the birds," Pollen said. "My saving with no carrier to fill the seed is a tin of dead specks," Kernel said. "Together — the field grows its own future, on its own, forever." A single plant, between a bee and a mouse, had become an endless harvest.