Strawberries
For April, The Sunday Morning Transport features stories by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Margaret Dunlap, Rich Larson, and Brenda Cooper. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.
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In this month’s first, free story, D.A. Xiaolin Spires makes her spectacular Sunday Morning Transport debut in a far-flung world. Please enjoy and share!
~ Julian and Fran, April 5, 2026
Strawberries
by D.A. Xiaolin Spires
Everyone needs a story to live by. This story has been fed to me ever since I have been frozen. That we were lucky. That we were saved. That it was beautiful in the past and we can re-create it here on this stark land. My people, the beautiful rolling hills of houses. Every morning, we were bussed to glittering farmlands, they say. Robust peppers and mouthwatering lettuce heads. The tinkling wind chimes that hang off orchard trees and birdsong. Sure. It’s not that none of these things ever existed; it’s just that I’m convinced they were never so perfect.
My tattoo itches. The raised constellation of bumps tickles as I consider these rose-colored images. I know the images are fake; they can’t be real. The tattoos were implanted by the only people I trust—my aunt and uncle who raised me back Earth-side—and send me impulses that intimate the sham. They taught me to coax the earth to fecundity, drawing fruit from the land. To fix things, from the pH of the soil to farm tech to rice cookers. Now they have been dead for hundreds of years, buried far away, probably scattered into space alongside the big blast. The only remains of them is this contraption under a patch of faux skin. Had I the key, it would tell me more, access more.
Scratching noises outside catch my attention. I jump back, hitting the wall. Rubbing my elbow, I turn on the camera. The mirror dissipates, replaced by a panoramic view of the acres of farmland against a purple sky. I scan the crops as spinning vigorberries, like many stormy eyes of Jupiter of my ancestor’s solar system, catch violet dusk light. In the distance, a fiery blast peeks through the Dyson sphere’s crosshatching. I bite my lip, smile, and help Claudia tie up the wire nets we’ll use for this row of swiveling spheric vigorberries. My peripheral vision spots movement and I grab the waterwick band for protection.
The camera flashes and zooms in. It’s not a pilfering neighbor. What is it? It’s buzzing and flying about.
Ghheeee. The memory chip tells me it’s a bee. “A bee.” I say it with the buzz of the initial b on my tongue and it sounds foreign. My tattoo lights up and I say it in Japanese, hachi—the voice of one of my ancestors responds for me. The thought must have triggered its awakening. I focus, but no other output comes from the tattoo.
Bee? Hachi? That can’t be true. Bees don’t exist here. I wait another minute, but it must have disappeared while I was focused on my tattoo’s sudden harmonization. I run a scan over the farmland, but it renders no organic foreign substance.
I peel off the dermlayer mask and splash water on my face. My eyes look bloodshot—like Hoshi’s flares. The solar bursts catalyze more images from my tattoo, harmonizing with the memory chip, painting a clearer picture of the past than I ever could access. A ghost of a face emerges and fades. Machiko? Maeko? No, Mika . . . How many are real and how many are glitches from hundreds of years of frozen disuse as I glided through the silence of outer space?
I scrub my face with a towel, reattach my secreskin, and swish signal the door closed. The panel retreats and a futon lowers from the ceiling.
Better get shut-eye before cavorting with our chain-mailed Ol’ Furnace, Hoshi.
#
The ship rumbles and Claudia and I recite safety checks. Once the ritual is done, we zoom past the pull of planetary gravity. The shaking is getting to me. I heave. Nothing comes out. It’s not often they call on us to do maintenance, as there are guardians closer to the D-sphere. But this isn’t an ordinary case.
The crushed vigorberries porridge with bobbing red eye seeds stops trembling. I take a sip from my straw, hoping it will calm my stomach. It doesn’t.
It tastes bland, sour almost, or maybe my taste buds feel weird up here. I’m nervous from the shaking, and insecure about being away from my crop. If I don’t make harvest quotas, they’ll reduce my housing space again. I barely fit into my domicile as it is. I worry about the whisper of bees and perilous work ahead.
Who would want to spend their days off-planet recalibrating Dyson sphere supraslats? It’s tedious and the cooling system does just enough to keep us not fried. There’s always the off chance a solar burst will come licking you with radiation. But every so often we’re mandated to fulfill our civic duty. It’s a test of patriotism—or hazing.
We put ourselves in stasis to regain energy for the mission while the ship’s velocity equalizes. I inhale the heady smell of fortified vigorberry nutrient mist. The crisscrossed pattern of the glass before me reminds me again of barbed wire and I hear the shout of a girl—Mika?—as I drift off.
#
Mika, no, who is it? Yes, it’s Mika. Her braids, her smile, in her summer yukata. Earth’s tilt to the sun is at max now; all sunshine and blue skies. It’s the dog days, with sultry heat and sticky lethargy, but she looks as peppy as ever. Kids are always like that. Resilient, eager.
On her yellow yukata are strawberry twins repeated over and over—perfect, crimson, heart-shaped, shimmering. Mika’s playing with her obi, ending in a generous bow on her back, until her mom yells at her to stop fidgeting.
Her mom comes in a light dress and wooden geta that clack against pavement, a basket of juicy strawberries in her hand. She fixes the lapel of Mika’s yukata. “Mika-chan, ichigo. Tabetene.” As Mika grabs an armful, her mom tsks. “Be careful. Don’t get your yukata dirty. Too old for a bib.” But as Mika shovels fruit into her mouth, her mom can’t help but laugh joyously.
With juice dripping down her chin, Mika nods. You can tell in her eyes and in the scrawls of calligraphic scarlet on her chin, she’s never really considered being careful. There’s a gleam imprinted on her brown irises as she digs in the basket for more.
The fruit she has been eating is not fragaria × ananassa, the cultivated one the city is officially celebrating, but fraisier des bois, the scattered wild one plucked from embankments. It is remarkably sweet, like mochi, a flavor incomparable to any human-raised cultivar.
It’s a statement that Mika’s mom and her neighbors bring out wild strawberries during the strawberry matsuri. They are not welcome at the city’s festival—so they hold their own gathering, eschewing planted crops for wild ones. They dust off crisp summer wear and take out pretty fans and hairpins for accessorizing.
They wield sharp knives and cut strawberries.
Even Mika takes her round with mochitsuki. She holds the kine up high and brings the mallet down on the glutinous rice on the wooden mortar. Her mom pushes the sticky dough back into place.
Once the rice cakes are ready, they fold wild strawberry pieces into them. The supple daifuku look luscious with gleaming dough.
They pull out tarps, lay these treats out against the vista of the half-harvested cultivated crop.
Besides desserts, they enjoy the fruit fresh, sun-ripened and succulent. They stare out at twinkling heart-shaped fruit embedded in rows of fountains of verdant leaves. They chat and laugh in this reprieve after the labor-intensive work of clearing out stumps from already logged land, earning measly cultivation rights on land they are banned from purchasing.
Mika jokes that she will be the Strawberry Queen. Every year, they print a photograph of the crowned queen in the paper, her skin and teeth powerfully white against the gray of the strawberry on the black-and-white front page. Her mom purses her lips and tells Mika not to talk with her mouth full. Immigrants are never queens here.
Mika will never get a chance to participate in the official strawberry festival, let alone be Strawberry Queen. No, that’s what their private matsuri is for.
The scene pulls away. The harmonization of tattoo and chip hiccups. I get chills.
Little do they know their charming farming world, as tough and strenuous as it is—will all come to an end as they are relocated, herded like cattle into enclosures miles away.
And the rows and rows of glittering strawberries will, poof, disappear along with the yukatas.
It’s not an image, just a hazy feeling.
#
“Wake up, Fumika,” says Claudia, her eyes black and wide with fear. The stale air within the pod clears and it takes me a moment to realize the hatch to my pod is open. An alert pings from its shell.
Claudia waves a self-winding wrench in her hand, and a whimpering twang emanates from her throat.
My tattoo sends relentless waves of tingles down my spine. My head throbs and I massage my temples.
“Where am I?”
Claudia places a cold hand over my forehead. “You were doing that thing again.”
No strawberry fields. No yukatas and ichigo daifuku.
Claudia pulls me up. She’s already chatting before I gain a sense of my whereabouts. “I need help—you won’t believe it. I just fixed the energy binder when the shutter nodules detected something strange.”
Oh right—we’re on our way to the Dyson sphere. I was resting in the stasis chamber.
I teeter over to the enhanced viewing portal. The giant iris lens cover appears to blink, scrunching in as it begins to swirl open.
A panel gets caught and the lens cover sticks. Claudia rams her wrench in and it winds on its own accord. This ship has seen better days. “Our course has been interrupted. Maybe the mission was a ruse.”
I startle. “A ruse? From Central?” She nods at the spare wrench. I grab it and jam it in with hers. “That doesn’t sound right.”
The panel budges with a shudder. I’m sent flying toward the ground.
With a groan, the lens cover retracts fully, panels receding into the frame, revealing the expanse of the sky and the brilliance of Hoshi, its light dimmed by the lens’s special viewing glass.
Something’s off. The hairs on my arm stand within my puffy suit.
There are constellations spread across the Sphere. Orangey red and extremely bright, burning gases with great strength.
No—
I turn to Claudia as her surprised brown eyes settle on mine.
Something is wrong.
“Not constellations,” I say.
Claudia squints and winds her fingers this way and that, as if threading an invisible string across the twinkling objects. I can’t help but imagine her hands moving across vigorberry patches, securing netting. “A Q formation.”
They twinkle in unison, in an offbeat way. A message.
I put my fingers on my temples and rub. My mind wanders:
Sparkling red, a strawberry patch. Ichigo.
A radiant outburst from a sudden solar flare activates the auxiliary shield system. The room dims to warn of the radiation outside.
My tattoo stirs as it harmonizes with my memory chip, the two forms of tech linking up, called to action from the intensity of the radiation. I shut my eyes and scratch the itch of my tattoo. The haze of confusion thins as twinkling flashes strike my eyelids. Reflexively, I mouth Wabun Morse code, passed to me from generations ago and synced through picoprocessors.
“Rebels. Red rebel ships,” I say, opening my eyes to see the ships even closer. Now more like the size of vigorberry seeds rather than tiny dots. Such incandescent fiery colors—even post-flare-up Hoshi behind its D-sphere cage looks dull against these shimmering flashes.
Claudia raises her eyebrows, thwacking the wrench into her palm repeatedly. “Red rebel ships? You sure? It can’t be. . . . I didn’t think the lore was real.”
“What else can they be?” I sweat, counting the number of ships. Can there really be that many? I count again. Fifty of them, and if my calculations are right, with a crew of about ten each. We barely have two hundred people in our settlement. I take note of their flashes, but I need a mechanical translator.
I have to make contact—let them know we’re not an enemy ship. Are we?
Claudia already shifted to the comms, clearing out the security codes. “I won’t send anything until we agree on what to send.”
I run about grabbing emergency supplies: tethering straps, extra food pellets. “Okay, gimme a minute to think.”
Claudia’s pretty good under pressure, but I notice she’s shaking slightly in her suit as she clicks away on the comms. Her billowing sleeves tremble as I raid cabinets.
“Central lied to us. Said there was no one out there anymore. Told us we were the last of the lost outposts and we should give up.” Claudia’s voice is mechanical, but a tremor belies her composed tone.
My tattoo is throbbing. “Not now,” I plead to it softly, throwing a can into the sachet.
“If it really is them . . . then it wasn’t actually Central who sent the orders for us to come here. . . .” Her voice trails off. Her expression changes as she turns to face me. Her inflection becomes melodic as she recites: “Our mission is like naranja amarga—more bitter than sweet.”
The Code of the Refugees. Banned by Central. It’s been so long since I’ve heard those words.
“But our blood runs through us with the crimson boldness of hamantaschen cores,” I say, thinking of the red ships outside and red vigorberries that we strive so much for.
“We float in our capsules over the depths of space like kabab khashkhash,” says Claudia. And for a moment the image escapes me. But she whispers it again and her voice triggers it. Minced meat kebabs floating in a sea of red.
Claudia stares at me from the iris window. Her luminescent brown eyes pierce me to the core. What’s my cue? Claudia takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. C’mon, her eyes plead.
“Scattered like sakura petals, we are blown away,” I say finally. The voice that comes from my mouth sounds like my aunt’s and not my own, but Claudia looks satisfied. I stuff gloves into a sachet and avoid her searching eyes.
She taps at the glass—Wabun Morse code for 聞いて, “listen,” but perhaps it was only a coincidence. I stuff radiation guards into the sachet and glance at her.
Claudia looks out at the ships and keeps her voice low. “Gỏi cuốn, wrapped up, we will find each other again.”
With the last utterance, I know she is in. That she has firmly pulled away from Central’s promise of a steady life in this harsh world—that she has hopes for something more. To unite again—after we have been pitched out into these foreign posts. Our last meal together with all of us estranged—before all this, before the freeze, before the explosion, before compromises with Central—consisting of this concerted smorgasbord of food, an assemblage of goodwill as refugees of Earth. It was hopeful then, even when we knew our odds were low.
I remember being so cold. They said you can’t feel the cold in cryostasis, but I remember it. Maybe my body always knew—that recollection of cold trapped in my cells. I shudder as a change takes hold in me. A warm jolt travels down my spine. Only now, with the reciting of this code, is that frigidity trapped in my psyche beginning to thaw.
That twinkling strawberry patch of ships—maybe going to them would doom me. Maybe these rebels won’t be strong enough to deal with Central. Maybe they want something we have. But maybe they’re here to help. Central is far away, their visits scant. These ships—they are here now, for better or worse.
My tattoo itches furiously and try as I may to refrain from tracing its grooves, I find my fingers on their raised path. I tell myself to stave away the reverie for now—that I have important business to accomplish, but my vision’s darkening.
“Should we do it?” Claudia says through the dimness of the harmonization-induced trance.
“Yes.”
“Yeah?” A waver of uncertainty fills her voice. But things are starting to fade, and I smell a mellow sweetness in the air.
“Yes, absolutely. Alert them of friendly intentions,” I say with lucidity before going silent.
Far away, I hear the beeps of a lightgram and then everything is black.
#
It often starts with the strawberry fields. Mika with her yellow strawberry-print yukata. Her expression of her wish to be the queen. Mika’s mom’s disapproving look fades away as the food comes, the desserts get eaten, and merriment ensues.
After that, it is only snippets of my aunt and uncle tinkering and the memory of cold instilled in my body.
An uneasy feeling of being confined.
But today—today is a different day.
We are released. Years later.
Years of neglected homes, businesses, pets. Vineyards, restaurants, stores closed and sold off. Pre-evacuation sales stir in our memories as we revisit these spaces turned non-familiar.
Strawberry farms—many of them. Fields and greenhouses sold for a pittance. No longer ours.
I have never felt my tattoo itch from within the memory chip’s embrace. But today I do. I know this is an accumulation of the past beyond that stuck point of dread and confinement.
And it is opening up greater and greater. I am receding into another point in time.
The watchtower appears again. Now there are faces. Never before were they so clear. The camps.
Now I can see everything. Acne on skin, dilated pupils, faces of guards—some stern, some bored. They stand in front of barbed wire and carry arms.
People here, they work. Tanaka-san is the head doctor at the medical clinic. He smiles despite the conditions. Sato-san heads the schools and keeps a pencil behind her ear. Suzuki-san dishes out milk, macaroni, and pickles at the mess halls. She receives a heavy load of complaints on the lack of fresh vegetables. Enomoto-san squeezes out fresh milk from udders. Even I help plant the daikon radish seeds alongside Watanabe-san.
Sometimes I’m dancing. I’m dancing at the mess hall. Laughter surrounds me and I’m laughing too. Laughing and dancing and wearing the only fancy yukata I have.
There’s a mochi in my hand with strawberry, just a piece of one from a small harvest, but for me, it’s enough to bring tears to my eyes. A real strawberry-filled ichigo daifuku.
It’s one of the better remembrances that the tattoo harmonization triggers.
#
I hear voices in the distance and feel the heavy shake of strong arms.
Memories pass by me that I have never encountered before . . . unlocked . . . the key must be unlocked. . . .
Leaving the gates. Walking right past them. The war over. Different decorations on my old house I have not seen for years. A different family under my roof. Destruction of property. Vandalism.
The endless search for jobs, arguing for loans.
New farms, new houses.
I’ve never gotten this far out in time beyond the watchtower and the grimness of the barbed wire in the remembrances. I try to hold on, grab all I can from my ancestors, the bitter and the sweet, but they race by, too fast for me to process.
And then Claudia is before me speaking rapidly. “We’ve made contact. They want to know what you are picturing.”
“What I am picturing?”
“They’ve accessed your files. Not the content within, just the metadata. The content—it’s what they’re after. Information. History.”
She tilts her head. “Honestly, I didn’t know you still had it on you.”
She shows me her own armpit. Something had been excavated, leaving only a network of scar tissue.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “My aunt and uncle—I was never supposed to tell anyone about the tech.” I don’t even try to hide my stroking of my tattoo now, as the regularity of its bumps soothe me.
“And it’s good you didn’t, because I’m sure Central would be there to take it away.” She stares at my arm. I feel self-conscious and turn away.
“They’ll be boarding in a few hours,” she says. “I’m not sure if they’re like us—frozen and revived—or they’re from generations after. I’m not sure what this means about our stay here—our lives, our vigorberries.”
I think about the orange globes of fruit with their knowing eyes.
“Claudia, the rebels, they’ve unlocked something in me.”
“The key?”
I nod.
“But that’s apocryphal.”
“Maybe. But I feel it. Experienced it. I know much more about the past. Not only about my people. But I suspect there’s hidden information in there. About survival.” I open my eyes wide. My tone sounds supplicating, desperate, but I don’t care. It’s been so long without reason to hope. “Maybe there are instructions. If these rebels . . . if they are here, maybe there are more of us. Maybe our communities are still alive.”
Claudia shakes her head. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high—”
“But even if not, I’ll share it with you. My knowledge. Let’s do it. My tattoo is your tattoo. We’ll go with them and see. And if it doesn’t work out—”
“Yes—if it doesn’t?”
“If they don’t have our best interests at stake, we survived before. We’ll find a way.” I pull out from my emergency bag beside me a long cord of triple-plated twisted wire. “I have a grappling hook shooter for the vigorberry zip lines and equipment for repairing Hoshi. Improvised weapons and a shipful of resources. We’ll manage.”
Claudia smiles. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
She passes me a handful of something and gives my shoulder a squeeze.
“I have vigorberry seeds in cryostasis,” she says. “I was testing pollinators that I’ve been working on secretly. They change the way the vigorberries develop so they can survive the cold.”
I play with the seeds in my hand. They still feel cold.
“Cryostasis? Pollinators . . . bees?” I remember the buzzing, the bees, the hachi.
“Inorganic pollinators. I’ve been seeing if the seeds can survive the cold with these pollinators. I’ve plucked out a few seeds and pollinators for good luck to keep with me—and they look great. I’ve got the recipe to regrow the right soil, too.”
She quickly scrawls out some formula I don’t understand and then erases it. “That’s not quite how it starts. I have to check my notes.”
“I mean, I know we’ve invested a lot in these seeds. But, Claudia, c’mon, are they worth regrowing elsewhere?”
“I found out the real reason Central wants us producing the seeds—let’s just say they induce a chemical change in them that they don’t with us—and I think an illicit production business will be underway if we make it out. That is, if you want in.”
It takes a while for it to sink in. Illicit production. Chemical changes. Departure.
I open my gloves and for a second my tattoo twitches and I think I see the heart shapes of strawberries. Ichigo. I blink. No, this is not the germination of the destruction of my people past, but the lifeline of my people to come—the vigorberry seeds.
We would be producing unrestrained, unfettered, growing our own crop for our own leverage. It is how my ancestors would have liked it, I’m sure of it. I feel like I am living out my given name, Fumika, 史果, wielding history toward fruition. My tattoo sends out a warm feeling of comfort I haven’t felt since the freeze. Not the jolt of flashbacks but a heated tingle of gentle reassurance.
Claudia smiles and we both turn to the viewport, watching the ships get incrementally larger.
I rub the seeds and roll them around in my palm, imagine them spinning and growing. These organic seeds look so red, so much like the ships approaching. They look almost sentient—disinterred from the ground that Central claims and now free to flourish, so eyelike, swirls of knowing, staring at me and imploring.
#
Thank you for joining our journey this week.
D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as NY, Hawai’i, various parts of Asia, and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. She has a PhD in anthropology, writes speculative fiction and poetry, teaches martial arts, paints fantastical art, and enjoys gastronomic adventures. Her stories appear in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Nature, and Galaxy’s Edge—and have been selected for The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories and The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time. Her poetry has been nominated for the Dwarf Star, Rhysling, Best of the Net, and Pushcart Awards. Website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com. Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/spires.bsky.social.
“Strawberries” © D.A. Xiaolin Spires, 2026.
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