This week Futures is delighted to welcome Sarah L Byrne with her story Green boughs will cover thee. Sarah is an editor and writer based in London,  and you can find out more about her work from her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, Sarah kindly reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Green boughs will cover thee

The title of this story was inspired by Handel’s aria Ombra mai fu — or, more precisely, its English-language version Slumber, dear maid.

It’s easy to assume that one is a translation of the other, but in fact the lyrics are very different: the Italian praises a beautiful and beloved tree, whereas the English seems to lament a girl’s death. Yet the imagery of the peaceful shade of the tree’s boughs is the same.

How odd, I always thought, that the same song could have two such different meanings.

But isn’t that the nature of perception — like an optical illusion, where you can look at the same picture from different angles, or in a different frame of mind, and see different things? Or — coming back to the story — consider how differently two people, a parent and child, for example, can remember the same events.

It’s amazing we manage to communicate with and understand each other at all — never mind with other species. But, through some miracle of empathy, we do exactly that.

Studies have shown that not only does interspecies social bonding exist — certainly with domesticated companion animals such as dogs — but that it mimics or ‘hijacks’ the same mechanisms that evolved for human interactions, particularly the parent–child bond. Even plants have been shown to respond to touch, and may communicate with each other by releasing volatile chemicals into the air, so — in fiction, at least — the possibilities don’t have to stop with animals.

It’s interesting to reflect how much science fiction — from contact with alien life to artificial intelligence at home — is at its core about that yearning to reach out and connect, to understand and be understood. This story tried to explore that.

Most of all, though, the story was about two of my beautiful rescue dogs, now both gone to their final resting places. The troubled, abused, difficult one who bonded with me so strongly, who needed me so much, who demanded all my love and got it. And the little, good, gentle one who never got the time and attention she deserved; who was so quiet and uncomplaining that no one realized how unwell she was until it was too late.

Forgive me, little girl.