creative writing on environmental justice
Paved roadways run across my body like a complex system of exposed veins and arteries. Over the years, they’ve carried you from one milestone in life to the next.
By bus or by car.
On bike or on foot.
But our relationship, as it currently stands, is unsustainable. None of this will last forever.
1994: The first time you ever saw snow. Microscopic flakes fell from . . .
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 . . .
The mystery behind humans and their avarice for power is unfathomable. Over the years this enigma has perturbed our hearts; still no answer is readily available. For so long our forefathers have been water nomads, leaving abruptly at the sight of humans and their heavy machineries polluting our waters. It has become a habit for us, expecting them to always invade . . .
My granddaughter Nisha bounces on the tips of her toes, with flutter kicks in between, a hummingbird barely touching the sidewalk. I adjust the rebreather plugged into my nostrils and push myself forward. Keeping up with her has gotten harder, not just because of my age. Walking is different now. The air resists my habitual gait. Little hops lift me into the thickened . . .
This is your reservation reminder from Palmetto Kayak Adventure Tours. Your four-hour self-guided tour is scheduled for today, 1–5pm. Reply 1 to confirm, 2 to cancel. Hope to see you soon!
The text is waiting when I wake up. White letters stark against the black text box. I don’t bother looking at the number. I’ve made no such reservation, nor the one for Lowcountry . . .
Paige was twelve years old when she first noticed the buds along her spine. She was in the upstairs bathroom, the one with the vining yellow flowers in the wallpaper and the faux-tile linoleum, about to get in the shower. She stopped to examine herself in the mirror above the sink, not yet steamed with the hot water. Did her elbows look weird? Were her widening hips . . .
“Does the defendant admit posting this message after the sinking of the ship Deep Power?” The prosecution lawyer looked up from his papers, directly at Kaveri. “I quote: ‘A hundred oilers nowhere near make up for even a single whale fall, but I guess it’s a start, el-oh-el’.”
My cousin, blank-faced in the dock, said, “Yes.”
The tight bun she’d made of her plaited . . .
Later I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian Ocean. Before I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am loose and free, lax between the stylist’s comb and humming shears, as Lian meets their own eyes in the wall-length mirror.
“Just the left side,” they say.
The stylist winks. “I hear . . .
Near the end of the last year of her projected life expectancy, Cora knows she shouldn’t be spending any moment on frivolities. Her store of oxygen tanks is depleting. Her body begins wheezing halfway up the stairs to her apartment. Every last breath in her body needs to be spent on work, on microscopes and slideshows and documentation and the full spectrum of . . .
‘What is the meaning of this?’ Pradip Shankar yelled as five men with sticks burst into his OB/GYN consultation chamber. The receptionist screamed. She ran out the glass doors just seconds before a stick swung and shattered them to fragments. The two patients who were waiting to see him, Mrs Singh and Mrs Malkani, grabbed each other as glass shrapnel flew everywhere. . . .