creative writing on environmental justice
This story does not begin with my birth; neither does it end with my death, but I will tell you of it regardless for I feel it is important you know of how I left this world in a baptism of blood and oil. Before then, I will tell you what happened in 1958 in Ogoni, Bayelsa state.
PART 1
Brown, marshy mud clings to the bottom of my feet, the dunlop slippers I wear are practically . . .
House at night is quiet despite the insects and bird cries and creatures. Floating in liquid. As if the house were sloshing around. A container in which fluid was sloshing. Tidal house. House waves. Amniotic. We cling. We root. We tumble. The sweet gum tree has a greater tolerance for salt than the oak and other hardwoods, and there’s the loblolly pine, fast-growing . . .
Cheena’s so quiet, she never talks anymore after her shifts. She just comes home and puts her clothes away. Drapes herself in a white sheet, tied like a toga, doesn’t worry about anything hanging out or staying in. It’s the shape the toga makes against her thighs that matters to her. The strong edges and the void covered by cloth. I wonder if it’s true what they say, . . .
605,421,005 modular sensors floated across Earth’s waters, analyzing around 54% of the oceans’ chemical makeup. 26,304 of these sensors lay along the passenger ship Afẹmọju’s trans-Atlantic route. This was a microscopic percentage of the global sensor count, but sufficient to keep track of the vessel’s trail of pollutants. The crew and passengers were . . .
So just when humans started dying due to mass suffocation for lack of air to breathe, the teens took it upon themselves to solve the problem and took root—literally. The adults weren’t so surprised, as one would imagine, when the first girl turned into a sturdy Narra tree with dainty yellow flowers. Wasn’t that what rebellious teenagers do anyway? It was just . . .
For generations, the kanoa drifted in the dark.
Orocobix slumbered within, watching, waiting. The craft jostled as the gravitic maw of the nightsea gripped its calcite hull. Clutched by dark currents, it plunged, bound for a turquoise sphere that shimmered like an island in the oceanic void. The kanoa trembled as it bore through a fiery membrane of sky, amid . . .
“You hear about those people putting gills in their necks?”
“Yeah.”
“It won’t let you live underwater, y’know, like a fish, but it gives you a bit of time. Lets you stay down longer.”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I’d kill for some gills sometimes. Remember when I got my arm stuck? I could’ve had time to get free on my own, wouldn’t have gone loopy. Wouldn’t have needed you there.” . . .
Salt had crept in while he was away, and now the freshwater wetlands of Gino’s childhood are a marsh, brackish and fickle. There is the soccer field where he’d stained his knees; it had been a low, dry rise of earth bracketed by mud and cordgrass, and today is impassable, a thicket of cattails in algae-skinned water, a humming choir of insects. And here the Jiffy . . .
They’d been restarting the earth for over five years now.
Marie picked up a box of seeds and some jars of bugs and soil bacteria from the dispensary. They gave her hackberry seedlings too, a good, hardy tree. She put all these things in the large panniers on her bike. She was instructed to go north and west, and she went by train to her first stop, where she switched . . .
The engineer is kind enough, in that he lets Marin breathe his enriched oxygen. He lights something to smoke, lets most of it burn off into the room. The filters kick into high gear. Filters. Her lungs sear; her throat feels scorched. Marin holds her oxygen pack to her face with one hand and lets her father handle the pleasantries.
“You know, that’s contraband,” . . .