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Articles by Author Renan Bernardo

Renan Bernardo is a writer and computing engineer from Rio de Janeiro. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Dark Matter Magazine, the Life Beyond Us anthology, Three Crows Magazine, Simultaneous Times podcast, and other homes mentioned at his website, www.renanbernardo.com.

Featured Article

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest from Fix. Learn more about the power of imagination in Fix’s Climate Fiction Issue.

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I say Torre Verde Vertical Farm is our marriage. It’s a metaphor, of course. Juvenal says it’s nothing like that. I rebuke saying the farm has been our home for the past 40 years, and it’s where we met for the first time and plucked our first lettuces from a growth gutter to make a salad for dinner. Juvenal insists that the farm — our farm — is just the means to an end, a collection of processes to feed a community of 300,000 souls. To which I reply that our marriage is also a means to an end, and the end is love. Our discussion usually ends when he says I suffer from GMTFS (Getting Metaphors Too Far Syndrome).

But, oh boy. Lately, I truly fear that instead of our marriage, Torre Verde might be our divorce.

Juvenal wants to retire. I want to too, only not now. I’m 78, he’s 79, so he has a point.

“We’re turnips far too ripe in here, Nádia.” He sometimes utters a silly metaphor to provoke... Read more