First came the water, inexorable like a tide, but fresh like the clearest stream. The people rejoiced for it. The water fed Mossfield’s crops, turned their soil, loosened the hard packed gutters that had cracked from the drought.
The people rejoiced and the water continued to flow.
The water covered the fields, swelled the river, blanketed the grasslands and slowly slowly, what existed before from the dryness of bone and the bleakness of starvation gave way to lush grasses and plentiful life giving water.
The people learned new crops that thrived on the waters that never receded, built extended foundations of their homes, carved channels and canals. They diverted the water and reimagined life in a town of shallow boats and heavy fields of rice. They laughed off the changes, unafraid of too much water after experiencing scarcity for so long. The water was a gift that kept on giving.
The aqueducts helped delay the inevitable. They turned the clearest water into power, into transportation, into tools. Waterwheels were outfitted at most homes and as the waters rose, the homes simply rose with them. Houseboats tethered to long drowned trees became demarcation zones for other towns, though Mossfield didn’t know it. They’d forgotten life without the water. It rose so slowly that generations passed before anyone realized the world was different than it had been.
There were travelers, sometimes. They’d ask about the water. Where did it come from? Why didn’t it recede?
The youngest residents of Mossfield had never known drought. Had fish where there had been famine. A grandmother or two remembered Mossfield as a cracked barren plain. Some said they missed it. To the children, Mossfield was their home, and they knew the secrets of life on the water and nothing more. The grandmothers squinted and worried, some said the water came from God, others from the mistakes of man. Some still called it a gift.
Regardless, Mossfield was dry no longer, instead a beautiful lush ecosystem of frogs and fish, birds and natural plants. Of houseboats and waterwheels. Of canals and aqueducts.
Mossfield was aptly named, finally, in a warm summer like nothing they’d ever had before. The water, which had been crisp and cold and clear years ago, ran warm and deep in the hot sun and silty earth. In a humid land once called a desert. The town- the lake- the river of Mossfield was plagued by mosquitoes and gnats and lightning bugs. Dragonflies zoomed through the fields and the boats dragged against something at the bottom of the canals.
The algae was pulled up from the shallowest canals first. It peeled away like a carpet from the curved bottom, dragged deep dark loamy soil up with it made rich and fertile by the water. Clouded the canal so it ran nearly black into the town and spread into the fields.
The algae was dense, and the fish flocked to it. Like so many times before, the people of Mossfield adapted. They pulled the algae up and piled it in fisheries, created ecosystems that never existed before built on dense green submerged farms that pulled in fish, crawdads, crabs, and little snails. That attracted birds who could be caught and farmed or eaten, whose feathers made decoration and softer beds.
The algae grew well in Mossfield.
The generations passed, and life with the algae and its fish and ecosystem became all the Mossfielders knew. Children knew the best way to keep the algae from gumming up the waterwheels, learned to coat the bottom of the boats in a resin that kept the algae from growing, came to remember Mossfield as it was and not how it had been.
Some grandmothers remembered a time before the algae, and they squinted and worried, saying it came from God, or a mistake of man, or as a gift to bring them more fish.
The algae grew and the people of Mossfield lived with it, in it, above it. It reclaimed houses of families who had died out, of fields left untilled. Conquered old trees and new canals.
The algae grew above the water, under it, in it. The algae drank the water, or the air reclaimed it and the spongy earth the water left behind was cushioned with algae and moss, though where one ended and the other began no one could say.
The people of Mossfield stepped off their boats, some sinking up to their hips into the flora before laughing as their friends pulled them out, coated in green slime and little leaves still damp from the groundwater. They laughed at the changes, maybe to hide their confusion.
Underneath the moss the water had become one with the earth, and the people had forgotten life without it.
But the moss continued to grow, and by the time the people noticed- hungrily, angrily; it was too late.
First the young adults were sent, taking their shallow barges down the canals, ripping algae up as they went, clearing their way with long poles digging into soft ground toward the closest town, beyond the aqueducts. Their boats, no matter how shallow, ran aground on forests of moss and algae. They tried to walk further, into the marshes that had formed around Mossfield.
They never returned.
Next were sent the able-bodied families, searching for their children. The fathers and mothers, the uncles and aunts, the extended family members who said they didn’t care. All of them took up arms and stepped off their houseboats and sunk to their knees in the algae left behind. They slogged through the vegetation, their toes catching on vines under the surface of the sludge like trip wires. They staggered away from Mossfield and never came back.
The lonely went next. The ones who hadn’t had families, the ones who stayed apart from the others. Those with no spouses, no children, no friends. They chose to stand for those lost, as a last connection to them, and the only one they’d ever had.
They went with tools and ropes, plans and nothing to lose.
When they were gone, finally those who were left noticed their absence.
Those who could not go stayed. They watched the canals fill with algae, the water get covered by writhing masses of moss, sliding up over homes. Inexorable. Inevitable.
Those who were left put up defenses of fire and poison, used what they could to fortify their houseboats, worked together to become a small but tenacious community fighting the moss.
The moss grew.
They untethered the houseboats to allow themselves to drift away from the encroaching forest.
But their houseboats had already grown into the mass and would never move again.
So the people lived out that way. The fish died, the soil settled, the moss crept and snarled the waterwheels. The soil under the moss was unreachable. The grandmothers squinted and worried about their lost family. They missed their families and their lives before.
They lost what they had left, and the moss grew to cover that as well.
First came the water, flowing like the tide. Then came the growing; first of the people, then of the land. And when humanity could no longer grow, the moss gained the upper hand in a war they didn’t know they were fighting.
The moss forest, they say, means no harm. It simply never stops, like the turning of the planet, like the changing of the seasons. The moss grows, as moss does. Growth is inexorable. People once tried to carve a life in it, they say, a beautiful little town of canals and fisheries. Of houseboats and joy. Of waterwheels and human ingenuity. They grew until they couldn’t grow anymore.
Now all that’s left is a moss field.