Author: Aparna Paul

Aparna Paul (she/her) is a writer, banana bread enthusiast, chemical engineer, and amateur crossword constructor. She is a regular performer and sometimes host at the Boston Poetry Slam. Her work has been recognized by Gordon Square Review and LED, and she edited and published an anthology with Literary Cleveland entitled Reflections of The Land: Meditations on Environment & Industry. When not writing, she’s most likely playing cards or calling to a stranger on the street and saying “Look! The moon!”

Issue 7 Author Interview: Aparna Paul

interviewed by

Aparna Paul’s story, “Little Apocalypses,” unfolds as a series of stories told first by a mother to her daughter and then by the daughter to her aged mother as their world cycles through disasters large and small.

We spoke about the work of living through disasters and finding hope in our relationships with each other.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

E.C. Barrett: What were some of your inspirations behind this story?

Aparna Paul: I was thinking a lot about my relationship with my mother, which is always a dangerous place to start. My mom is from India and she speaks three or four languages. Her first language was Gujarati, which I don’t speak or read or write. One fear of mine is that she could get a neurodegenerative condition later in life. What if she reverted back to only knowing Gujarati and could not communicate in English anymore? That fear was part of the driving impetus. At the end of the story, the main character doesn’t understand what the mother is saying, but tells a story back to the mother anyway.

I had also just taken a course on climate change fiction with Professor Mary Grimm at Case Western Reserve University and I was thinking about climate change disasters from many angles—different types of disasters, across different landscapes, in different regions of the world. How would that look in a coastal town versus in the desert versus any huge city? I think with this story, I was able to take my many imaginings of the climate crisis and condense them all into one, through the vehicle of the mother’s stories to the daughter.

Also, for this class, I was doing some scholarship on this term, “solastalgia,” which is a form of nostalgia for a place that still exists, but has changed so dramatically that it no longer feels like the home it once was. It was coined by the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who defined multiple ecological dis-eases in his research of peoples’ relationships to the climate crisis. When we reckon with the climate crisis, we can feel a lot of existential malaise, like diseases, one of them being solastalgia.

With this story, I was thinking a lot about how a place can change a lot even though it seems like it should be the same. How do you reckon with the feeling that home has packed up and left without you?

 
ECB: What do you hope readers take away from reading it?
 
AP: As huge and pervasive and scary as the climate crisis is, the most important thing that we have is each other and our relationships to each other. In the face of all that change, and that fear, there’s a lot of hope because we have each other and our relationships to each other, which will remain. They’ll change over time, as all relationships and all people do, but they will remain the same in that sense that we’re not alone.
 
ECB: Your story focuses more on the disasters that we go through in our daily life than the disasters of climate change, which made me think about the fact that we have to continue to live with all of these things, while climate disasters are happening. Life and its troubles don’t pause for disaster. I wonder if that was part of your thinking, or something that you were working out. You were in college when the pandemic started, so you were coming of age at a time when there were plenty of disasters going on, yet you still had to go to college and figure out how to map out a future life for yourself.

AP: Yeah, I think that’s a good point and I like learning a little bit more about myself in talking about the work. I think that you’re spot on. There are a lot of changes and difficulties that the characters struggle with that are within the context of the whole world struggling on a global scale.

I think a lot in terms of cycles. Maybe I sometimes put too much faith in cycles, but I think we might be at the bottom of the wheel right now and we have ways to come back to the top. It might look different from how we originally thought, or from what it looked like before, but there’s still hope to make it back.

I appreciated the theme of water for Issue 7 of Reckoning, because water moves in cycles. There are always going to be dry periods and there’s always going to be hope to replenish as well. There’s always going to be a cyclical nature of a mother and a daughter and granddaughter and a great granddaughter moving forward and forward and forward through time. But they’re not exactly the same. They’ll change from generation to generation, but they’ll move on in that cycle.

 
ECB: Have you read anything recently that is speaking to you in terms of these themes?

AP: The Past is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente, which takes place in the not-too-distant future where the sea levels have risen to such an extent that there are no landmasses anymore. The remainder of the human population lives on islands of floating garbage that are pretty large—they have huge populations. The main character lives like an exile from the rest of the community and you don’t know why.

I think that book had a lot of potential for disaster and despair, but instead, it was about collectivism and hope. It was also about the main character forming one relationship that she kept coming back to over the course of the book, which I also really appreciated.

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin, which I thought about a lot when writing this story, because in that book, apocalypses happen repeatedly and the characters have to learn to reckon with them. This book also explores people’s relationships with the land, but also how these characters function within systems and how those systems control and exploit them.

When I was writing my story, I felt like the main character, the daughter, had the ability to stop these apocalypses from happening, but the only way for her to stop them was for her mother to tell her the story of the apocalypse. I was thinking a lot about how our actions can lead to that kind of hope and also the place of storytelling and narrative in building those communities and building a sense of resistance in the face of devastation.

 
ECB: What role do you see speculative fiction as having in the environmental justice conversation?

AP: I think that speculative fiction, climate change fiction, and science fiction are all so important in the conversation of environmental justice, because storytelling is one of the most important tools that we have to mobilize and organize around the climate crisis.

It’s difficult, sometimes, to make people want to care. And I think that all of those forms of fiction build an empathy in the reader that makes them want to care about the greater issues at hand. This type of genre fiction is incalculably important for striving towards a better future. And on top of all of that, it provides a space for us to imagine new futures, which is the most important thing that we can be doing. It’s not enough for us to say: “everything is burning. Everything is terrible.” What can we dream for ourselves? That’s what speculative fiction offers.

Little Apocalypses

one.

Fall is the season of memory, or so my mother always told me. Every leaf turns in its delicate dance with death. They beckon us to recall what the world looked like flush with green newness, what it looks like revealing grey emptiness. My mother was scared of the winter, of an infinite dark sky, ashes falling from the clouds.

In the fall, she would instead ask me to remember. Every autumnal equinox, she walked into my room and fed me a fairy tale, something warm to press back against the cold and dark of the night. It would begin like this:

“This is a story about the end of the world.”

And it always was. When I was six, this was the equinox story she told me:

“This is a story about the end of the world. There’s a fault line that runs the length of a state, through the middle of a city. And one day, but I don’t know when, it’s going to split it all down the center. This is a city with buildings that reach to the sky like trembling fingers, and buses crawling its streets like beetles in the garden, and a liveliness, a pulse of history. It’s always raining in the city, I think, and no one dares look towards the precipitous heavens.”

She took my hand then, and I almost lost the thread of the story, distracted by the way her fingernail curved around the tip of her middle finger, hugging close to the dry skin there.

“One day, this fault line shivers. Everyone is looking at the ground, they see the way it ripples below their feet. They look up then, in fear. They look at the person on the sidewalk next to them, at the table to their right, across the aisle on the bus. Their mouths are pressed closed, but their eyes have changed. Their eyes are open now. ‘Did you feel that?’ their eyes ask. Not ‘did you see the way the ground shook.’ Not ‘did you hear the way the earth groaned.’ Did you feel that? Did you feel it, same as I, the way the world felt it too? Did you feel it like a rumbling sadness, or a shaking anger, or something a little like love?

“You know the rest, I’m sure. The world split open like an egg. The streets ripped themselves apart. The cars all fell into the abyss, and the buildings, and the cobblestones, and the sewer grates, and the fire hydrants, and the everything, the all of it, the things that they built and called indestructible. When it was all done falling into the chasm, even some people, I think, the remaining few looked at each other, really looked, and they said, did you feel it, too? Do you know where we go next? And even if they couldn’t answer the question then, they gazed back at each other, and they tried to find an answer in the ruins.

“That’s how the world ends, tonight,” she whispered, and kissed me on the forehead. She turned out the lamp, and stood in my doorway, a silhouette against the light in the hall. She looked over her shoulder in a promise to me—to our home—that she would return, as if she would be gone a long time. The next morning, of course, she opened the door and gently shook me out of the little apocalypses in my dreams.

two.

In the fall of my seventeenth year, the skies greyed and the leaves turned with an urgency I’d never seen before. The world was dry as a bone, the sweet summer humidity sucked away as cleanly as marrow. Life felt empty, empty, empty, but when I stumbled home on the equinox, I was full, so full, of light and laughter and warmth. A little too much liquor. A rose would envy the blooms of my cheeks.

I pressed open the door, ever so quiet, and there she was on the couch. Wrapped in a blanket, gaze fixed on the wall. I was swaying in my too-tall black boots, trying to remember what day it was, when she turned to me, holding out a glass of water. She made me take off my shoes, walked me up the stairs.

She was all sighs and tired eyes, and I didn’t know it then, but there was nothing like disapproval there. There was only joy and reassurance in her heart, even if it didn’t know how to make itself known.

I sat on the bed, toed off my socks, my shoulders readying to flinch against her reprimand. But instead: “This story is about the end of the world,” she said. I tried to stop her, thinking of the personal statements and exam scores and recommendation letters on the hard drive of the downstairs computer.

I don’t need any other stories, I thought. I know my own, and I know how I’ve written it. I know how the rest of the words will write themselves—“And I don’t need to hear the stories you’re going to say.” She looked at me, then, her eyes dark and sorrowed and liquid, and she refused to stop.

“This story is about the end of the world. It started with the birds. They took to the skies, a streak across the blue, a cloud, if a cloud could be angry. Then the deer, crossing the road in front of cars. They were already limping, great lacerations in their haunches, fear in their eyes. And all the people in the town, they only noticed the intricacy of the antlers, not the way that they stared.

“The world was trying to share the most difficult truth in the universe: its heart was broken. When our hearts are broken, we feel like we only know brokenness. Everything that we touch, we think, breaks too. That is the greatest tragedy, that we blind ourselves to reality. Nothing is broken because we have touched it. It is transformed. It is made anew. The world, too, wants to transform, wants to make anew. The world is dry, and searing, and wounded. From there, it’s only a small step to wildfire. The blaze sweeps over our little lives, and its heart, its heart, wants nothing more than to feel warm, to share its warmth, to transform and make anew the coldness that is locked away in each of us. It does make something new, but this story isn’t about that. It’s about the end of the world, the ashes and the smoke and a hand pushing out of the scorched earth and into the steaming air, always, always reaching for the light, and reaching for each other.”

She stood, paused at the door, looked back. “Good night,” she whispered, but I was already falling, the alcohol dulling and dizzying the room. When the lightning bolt moon woke me up before the dawn, I’d already forgotten that she sat on the bed, that she told me a story. The blankets were disarrayed, and there was no impression of her in the mattress.

three.

When I was 27, there was no moon on the equinox. Nothing but silent dark. Earlier, I had stormed into my apartment, my roommate startling at the timbre of my footsteps. “Are you okay?” she asked, the paused TV a glossy reflection on her wide eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, leaning against the counter. “My mom and I got into an argument.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. What mothers and daughters always fight about, I guess. How to survive.” She blinked at me, inviting more explanation, but I had nothing left to give.

Instead, I laid in bed under the moonless sky, looking out at the streetlamp across the road, its brilliant orange Cyclops eye a beacon in the misty dark. What does the light illuminate, and what does it leave in the dark? My mother, in a fluorescent-bright kitchen, all the light in the world, and the shadows spiraling from the man across the scarred wooden table. My voice, inherited from the greatest storyteller I knew. In each exaltation and whisper and pause, in each valley and peak, she was there. All those cadences, and I couldn’t convince her to leave.

Apocalypses abound. The end of the world is unnervingly quiet, static on a telephone wire. Light slanted across my curious eyes, even as they closed, even as I slipped away.

In the morning, a voicemail: “This story is about the end of the world. This time, it happens in a city on a coast, where the ocean hugs the land. The ocean loves too much, if there were such a thing. It loves the timid ground and the blazing skies, but most of all, it loves the moon. But this isn’t a story about the ocean, or the moon, or love. It’s a story about the winter, which threatens to freeze the waters and the people and the everything into something static and immovable. Before all that, though, in this city on the coast, life is good. It’s a city that you can always find a parking spot in. A city that has the best sandwich in the whole world right around the corner. A city that makes your legs ache because you never want to stop walking it. Who lives here? Let me tell you. People who have forgotten what love is, almost. Every night, they look out at the ocean, and they see the way that it crashes on the shore, and it reaches for the moon, and they wonder what it feels like to yearn and to want and to love.

“Until one night, the ocean rises, the wind stirs it into hurricane, and the waters crash against the buildings, they swallow until there’s nothing left, nothing but an I wonder why the ocean moves just so echoing in the empty air. Good night, my love.”

four.

A decade later, I picked up the phone when my mother called. She was living with my estranged brother; we were connected by a straight line interstate, with an impossible ocean of time and space stretching between us. I couldn’t remember what the backs of her hands looked like. When her voice crackled out of the faraway silence, her words were laced with a distress I only heard when she talked about the winter. “Get me out of here,” she said, and it was the only time in my whole life that she had ever called me and told me, exactly, in no uncertain terms, what she wanted.

I crossed two state borders that evening, helped her pack, noticed how the dry skin around her middle finger was peeling even worse than it was twelve years ago, how the fingernail on her left thumb was ridged and distressed. I remembered more than I thought I did. I packed faster, hands folding and compressing and pushing down, the only place I knew how to direct my force.

In the car, speeding against the twilight, we were quiet, only the steady hum of the fan between us. The road stretched out, languid and lazy beyond the windshield. There were too many cars on the highway for an arbitrary Tuesday twilight, and my shoulders were hunched, fingers tight.

A car swerved into the lane ahead of us, close, close, close, like the metal was aching to be touched, even if it meant being destroyed, and I pressed against the brakes with too much force.

The silence between us was tense, after, and I said, “I’m sorry.” She looked at me, and I could feel her eyes on me, in the weighted way that mothers look at daughters, with hope and love and fear. “I know,” she said. A pause. “This is a story about the end of the world.”

five.

At thirty-eight, on the equinox, I don’t understand what she’s saying. Her eyes are as clear and bright as always, but her traitorous tongue speaks words beyond my scope. A language I never learned. The soft rhythms and smooth vowels of her childhood, narratives beyond my grasp, a brief word here or there, but nothing like a story.

And as my confusion grows, her panic becomes more pronounced. Quivering words and shaking hands and a crease between her brows. She takes my fingers in her own, wraps them tightly, tries to press the words between our skin since the air was so inadequate. I hold onto her.

I say:

“This is a story about the end of the world. Imagine a mother and a daughter. Imagine two women, with the darkness of a whole universe pressing against them. Imagine the light between them, the thing that keeps them awake, and alive. The thing that puts them to sleep, without any fear at all.

“Can you picture this? But how is this the end of the world, you wonder? How is this anything except beautiful? It’s the end of the world, you see, because that galaxy between them is gone. The thing that they created together, the landscapes and the oceans and the valleys and the hills and the jungles and the deserts and the trenches and the caves, it’s not there anymore. The world ended. Questions, questions, questions, and not an answer to be found. Fall is the season of memory. Every equinox, you asked me to remember. And I do, I finally do.”

When she closes her eyes, the world ends.