Pollinators
Without her pollinator suit, Serena feels naked. The farmers’ market saddles a strange line between familiar and foreign, the whole pavilion an earthy, vegetal cacodory. She encounters these scents daily, but only from the other side of a uniform that her childhood self always imagined would make her feel like a cosmonaut. Looking at the raw vegetables without the slight blur of the fine mesh over her face is odd. The textures she’s only felt through gloved hands are visible in the shiny skin of tomatoes and peppers as she stacks them carefully in baskets manufactured to look handmade.
This isn’t normally Serena’s job. Farmers’ markets are for the charismatic farm workers, the ones who know how to interface with the sort of people who can afford to shop at them. The ones who wear a smear of mud on their jeans to show how down-to-earth they are, not as a sign they’ve forgotten to do laundry for the third week in a row. In other words, anyone but Serena Kinnaird. But this week, here she is, filling in for an infirm Al, trying to look like she knows what she’s doing.
“Kinnaird,” Tara barks, fiddling with the little white chip reader. “When you’re done filling the baskets, can you take the empty boxes back to the truck? I swear we get less space every week.”
“Mm-hmm,” Serena answers absentmindedly, balancing one final, perfectly lumpy neo-heirloom tomato on top of a pile. Thinking better of herself, she adds a hurried, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, lighten up,” Tara says. “Stress’ll age you quicker than the sun will. Plus it doesn’t fit the Oasis vibe.”
As if that’s any less pressure, Serena just nods. “Right.”
Tara sighs. “What I mean is, don’t worry about screwing up. It’s only loading in and out I really need the extra hands for. Take your time coming back from putting up the boxes, wander around a little. Get a kombucha or something.”
Sure, Serena thinks, on a pollinator’s pay. She breaks down the empty produce boxes and gathers them up, weaving through rows of colorful stalls until she reaches the Oasis Homestead truck. Dumping the boxes in its bed, she turns around and surveys the New New Babylon Farmers’ Market.
The sun peeks over the treetops surrounding the market pavilion as the first flooding wave of customers fills the aisles. They carry canvas bags adorned in colorful designs, all matching their blouses and sunhats. If she didn’t feel out-of-place before, Serena certainly feels like an intruding weed now. She imagines herself at work, wading through waist-high tangles of pepper bushes and squash vines. The work of a pollinator is far from easy, but it is familiar, and Serena always tells herself it’s her preference for familiarity over luxury that’s kept her in the same job for twelve years.
“Wander around a little,” she repeats to herself. Still picturing the broad fields of Oasis Homestead, she untethers herself from the safety of the truck, falling into the crowd. From the inside, it’s not nearly as tight-packed, no harder to move between the bodies than between crop rows. At her stature, it’s not difficult to peer over the heads to eye the other stalls, all arranged more or less the same way Oasis Homestead’s is.
It’s a stall with paper-wrapped bundles of poppies that catches her eye. The stacked baskets of strawberries and okra are surrounded by a swarm of people, but the lone gray-haired woman behind the table moves with a fluid ease. The offerings, besides the bouquets, are much the same as any farm’s, yet everything about the produce is bright, from the shine of the habanero skins to the almost metallic green centers of the poppies. Serena lets the strange gravity of the stall pull her in, and as she nears the table, much of the crowd that had daunted her dissipates, purchases in hand, leaving her close enough to alone with the farmer.
“How many pollinators do you have to hire to grow flowers?” Serena asks, half joking, as she eyes jars of something smooth, golden, and translucent. She’s not certain what kind of fruit it’s the jelly of. At first, this farmer seemed somehow more genuine than Serena is used to. Real salt-of-the-earth, her mother would’ve called it. Now, it dawns on her how exorbitantly wealthy this woman must be.
The farmer chuckles. “Hire?”
Serena’s blood runs cold. There are always rumors about indenturers, swindlers who trick away your freedom, usually for much worse grunt work than running pollen between plants. Surely this woman wouldn’t be so bold as to brag about being one?
“Hoo, darlin’, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. I don’t look that old, now, do I?”
Serena can only stare. She is more out of place than she realized. How many of these tables are here only through loopholes in civil rights protections, left open since the last union boom died out? How much does she really know about Tara?
“Honey, are you okay?” The farmer’s face wears genuine concern, and the gears whirring behind Serena’s wide brown eyes click into place.
She picks up one of the jam jars and looks at the handwritten label.
Clover honey.
“How do you make honey?”
The woman laughs. “Don’t make it, I just collect it. You’re a farmer with a head full of ghost stories and no room for the bees?”
“I’m not a farmer, I’m a pollinator,” Serena corrects in disbelief. Real bees?
“You work the fields, you’re a farmer. Just as well you don’t tell ghost stories about the bugs, seein’ as they ain’t really dead. Bet they’ll outlast us eventually.”
Another wave of people crowds the strawberries, pressing in around Serena.
“Go on, take that,” the farmer says, nodding to the jar in Serena’s hand. Before she can protest the cost, the farmer’s chattering with a stocky man holding strawberries away from his child’s reaching grasp. Serena falls back into the crowd, slipping the honey into her overalls’ pocket, and drifts like a dandelion seed back to the Oasis stand.
The New New Babylon Farmer’s Market is in full swing, and this week, thankfully, Serena isn’t there. In the midmorning sunlight she wades through the squash vines, rubbing her pant legs against yawning yellow flowers. Through the fine mesh of her pollinator suit her eye catches movement against one of the stamens, and she crouches to examine the flower.
A shiny black bead of an insect, body framed in a halo of coarse golden hairs, explores the flower. Serena watches its wings open, beating into a buzzing blur as the bee lifts off the petals and wanders through the air until it disappears from view.