creative writing on environmental justice
We had to close up another building that day—bolt the doors shut, board over the windows, stop up the chimney and all the vents with concrete. Hank Parker came stumbling out of his house, gasping and cussing, dragging his two oldest kids by the arm while his wife huddled on the sidewalk with the three-year-old. As soon as Hank got clear, he was shaking the two kids, . . .
Iridium09457 scans the brown husk 22,000 miles below her orbital path. There are no signals to relay, no bandwidth to support, no transports to track. Another day of nothing. Fifty-two thousand eight hundred and three days of nothing in a row.
Iridium tilts her solar panels more optimally toward the sun and feels the surge of energy. She can’t comprehend the . . .
1.
When the shuttle left the ionosphere, Abby Huang saw bands of light playing across the poles. The earth filled up half of the silicate window, a shrinking, light-blue horizon. Abby had looked at the receding planet in the distance, and thought to herself:
That tiny blue ball—that’s Home. That’s Everything.
There was a moment of awesome spiritual terror. . . .
The community’s gardener, Mr. Ussander, tosses the clock radio on the counter and demands a refund. The radio looks holy to me. He tells me to plug it in. “It is Well With My Soul” belts out of the mono speaker and the clock glows the unmistakable blue of an LED.
“My wife wants to know why you are so intent on condemning us to eternal damnation.”
He won’t touch the thing, . . .
“Mom? Why does this freeway have so many lanes?”
“Well Tom, remember when you were six, and the schools were all closed, and you did all your schoolwork as homework? And your teacher came on Zoom every day?”
“Er . . . yes?”
“Well . . . remember, before . . .
momma yell from the kitchen julius buzz her in.
buzz who
my ol high school chum dont you forget turn the hall light on
hall light dont work momma
hall black like the devils ass you open the parlor door get light down there
i done it momma
she call it a parlor goodwill couch goodwill chairs i hear this come up the steps high heels who wear them things
mr robinson watch at . . .
Robot Cities roam the baking deserts of the ocean beds like Baba Yaga huts. They strut about on titanic rusting legs so tall that to fall from the crotch to the ground takes a human 30 seconds. They sing songs, these Robot Cities, melancholic folk songs with introspective lyrics. They sing about shame and adoration, they sing about that sweet moment when love has . . .
On Thursday the sun rose red and stayed red, and stared at us red and red through the shifting candlewax layers of sky. We sealed the windows and cancelled gym, and forbade the children to leave until their mothers came for them, and through lunch period they pressed their noses to the glass and left smears of rainbow oils there. Before their faces and ours the bloody . . .
They hired me last Sunday to suck the carbon from the sky. I imagined the job might give my writing wings; I’d fly across the lower atmosphere with a vacuum strapped to my back like a forgotten character from the Ghostbusters franchise. But it turns out to be nothing like that. I was given the job mostly because my pilot’s license is still valid from the war.
Lee, the . . .
I’m lucky because they replaced a bunch of chairs last month and I got a new one. A good chair is important when you spend ten hours a day in a cubicle talking to strangers about their problems. I’ve been here three years and worked on most of Westermorgen’s services which means I can with no thought help grandma set up her wifi. Or troubleshoot banking software. Or . . .