creative writing on environmental justice
I watched the clip again: the lifeless body of a white-winged dove entered the shot at the top of my screen and plummeted off the bottom a half second later. Whoever was holding the camera didn’t notice; they stayed focused on a white guy speechifying about City plans for a soccer stadium. A few seconds later, four or five more birds fell behind the guy at the podium. . . .
It may take a decade or longer to train a human clinician, but it took a team of Ministry of Health technicians only seven days to certify me a Clinically Adept Machine Sentience (CAMS) and hand me control of their newest clinic on Zamalek Island. My mission: to keep the locals healthy enough to perform their essential jobs in and around Cairo, and away from human-staffed . . .
“Your shuttle will arrive in—four!—minutes. Please proceed to—Caladan Avenue.”
Benny tapped the air above the “Dismiss notification” button on her HUD. She’d been at the shuttle stop for twelve minutes already, and wished she’d taken the time to pee before she left.
Her leg, both where it was and where it wasn’t, felt weird.
She flipped through her notifications. . . .
We gathered Her pieces from across the land.
She left them under a palmyra tree where She huddled overnight. I would say ‘slept,’ but I think no one there truly slept, unless, perhaps, the infants. I imagine they dreamt of the earth cracking around them.
Others were deep in drifts of white beach sand, itself made up of fragmented bodies of long-dead sea life.
One . . .
Robin’s toy nestled in my hand, purring with something akin to life. The clear ball was filled with undulating blobs that changed color when they bumped into one another, merging into new forms before splitting off in a graceful mitosis. Coming together, falling apart, together and apart, over and over. Ahimsa told me it was inspired by a pre-Depletion Era artifact . . .
1.
I remember the soil first. When I reached in and filled a farm trowel with it, damp, red, breathing under the greenery, it clung to my fingers like memory. It felt like something alive. It was alive, duh. But I mean something different. The soil felt like it was intelligent. Like it knew what was going on. Like it knew what was about to happen, the evil that was about . . .
“What should we bring Pawpaw for dinner?” I asked Mama.
Her bronze urn rested in the passenger’s seat, secured by the seat belt. Her ghost sat in the backseat, wearing the green skirt suit I’d buried her in, a thin blue aura haloing her body.
We were driving from Birmingham to Pawpaw’s farm in Sweetcreek. The high-rises and billboards gradually surrendered to . . .
Akka left for the war. She didn’t come back, not right away.
For a while, we thought that our mother might go, since she was the marine biologist, but Akka was a pilot, an astronaut in training.
The monsters had come from the sea, and we had to take the fight to the deep dark waters, so alike and yet so different from the vast quiet and emptiness of space. Deep pressure . . .
I never knew a river could be in a state of apparent death. I learned about it recently when I read that the Atoyac was declared clinically dead, and for the past 30 years, efforts had been made to rehabilitate it to no avail.
Don’t ask why, but I imagine the river as a person being wheeled into a hospital on a stretcher, paramedics shouting at the emergency room doctors: . . .
No sabía que un río podía declararse clínicamente muerto. Me enteré hace poco, cuando leí que el Atoyac lo estaba y que, desde hacía 30 años, se intentaba rehabilitar. Sin éxito.
No pregunten por qué, pero imagino al río como una persona entrando en camilla a un hospital y los paramédicos gritando a los urgenciólogos: ¡Emergencia Uno! Pero lo cierto es que no es . . .