my garden in the cellphone towers

From the loamy soil: little antennae, feeling out the cool, blue atmosphere they’re soon to conquer—prodding, sensing, sprouting. Long grey spindles with a small bulb at the end. Steel or aluminum or composite things. A Wittgensteinian plot of little metal devices, all family-resembled, none the exact same; some already have their transceivers. Odd bits and bobs of metal scrap-kernels buried in the dirt, spaced at irregular intervals. I make my rounds, taking care to water them just the right amount, their older siblings standing watch tall above us, pausing extra-long with my watering can tilted over to sprinkle that corner of still-cdmaOnes, hoping to see them equipped with CDMA2000 soon. I’ve been tending this garden for as long as I can remember—quite literally, as I have no non-plot-stewarding memories. Turning in after watering a steel lattice already outfitted with GSM and control electronics, only to wake up to a fully-guyed radio mast threatening the stratosphere—it’s an inimitable thrill. I woke up here one day with only this purpose floating in my mind. My garden in the cellphone towers grants everyone connexion, interconnexion: yes, I believe I’m giving a gift to this world, or rather, my towers do, these little ones will. Unfolding into the sky, they spread their wings made out of radio waves to envelop the whole planet, tracing leylines and crop circles over the face of the globe. A beautiful thing. I can’t talk to anyone—I don’t have any devices up here, unless you count this watering can. But you can, because of my babies. I just like to watch and imagine the signals blitzing from one node to another. It’s soothing. My little-big family chattering amongst themselves. The weather here is cool and sunny. The Goldilocks temperature for the propagation of waves sub-300 gigahertz. Radio waves don’t like it when it’s hot, either. But they persevere, for everyone. They get tired and sad and scared too. They fight, they cry—they make up. Their emotions splatter the ether in a flat, fan-shaped radiation pattern that emits from the vertical collinear arrays of their dipoles. Sometimes they clash so severely that it makes the humans get sad—poor connections. I bury the tiny metal-alloy piece in the loam, tucking it into its bed. One day, it will grow big and strong like the others. Along with its family, wrapping warmly the feathers of cellular connection across the Earth, emitting beautiful fluorescent weather.