Chlorophyll

I remember when we first heard the news. We were children. Our teachers did a special science assembly on it, and there was a report on Newsround. We all imagined little green foetuses growing in test tubes, like  those gooey aliens that we used to play with until they got stuck to the ceiling, where they'd linger for hours then flop to the floor where they'd languish, covered in lint.

We didn't give it much thought. But 40 years later they walk among us, green babies grown into green adults. They are rare, of course. A flash of green skin on busy street; pale green face on a crowded train; emeralds in the dirt. Sometimes you see them in parks during sunny lunch breaks, lying prostrated on the grass, eyes closed, green skin bared, palms open.

I wonder what their lives are like. I imagine they face isolation, exclusion, persecution; the kind of things any other minority may have, in the past, fallen victim to. They did not choose this; no one does. But their physical advantages seemed to instil hatred in their disadvantaged peers. The strange beauty of their eyes, their skin; a green tinge that, depending on race, ranged from pale jade to wine-bottle. The silver spoon upbringing they were blessed with bred jealousy in those with bitter hearts, as did their emancipation from hunger, from the expenses of feeding oneself. But what a price they had to pay! How strange, how lonely, would it be to be parentless, to be raised by scientists, to have test after test carried out on you from birth. To be a walking experiment. To be unaware of how long you would live, what illnesses you could be susceptible to, if any. Indeed, current science journals postulate that this new strain of our species could outlive their counterparts by upwards of fifty years. The poor souls. I don't know if I could bare to see this century out.

Many say they are our only hope for the human race. If we are not to perish, we need to be able to produce enough food to feed the world's population. We need to be able to feed ourselves. The green people can. They can live off little more than water and sunlight for months at a time. They need to eat, of course, for proteins, for nutrients, but much more rarely than do we. They are our hope for the future. They are a cure for world hunger. In Africa, children will lie down in the desert and eat their fill of golden sunlight. This is what they say. They say these people are lucky, they are blessed, they are beautiful and perfect examples of what can be achieved by science. To develop human cells which produce chlorophyll! To have photosynthesis taking place in the human body! We never thought it possible. No greater miracle, they say, have we achieved than this.

It will be a long time, centuries, before this trait can truly integrated into the human race. We do not even know if it is viable, in the long run. The green ones could be stricken by disease. Their offspring could be defective. They could be our downfall. But they could also be our saving grace.

Once I turned a corner and found myself face to face with a green man. Our eyes met for milliseconds; it felt like millennia. Those eyes. Two toned like variegated ivy, deep green on green-white. Green like secret pools in the depths of a forest. We drifted past each other and I dare say he forgot me, seconds later. But the sadness of those eyes haunts me. The loneliness they exuded. They stand alone, these chlorophyll people. Tall trees, standing singular and stationary as all around them crumbles and deteriorates. Basking quietly in the sun's light.