creative writing on environmental justice
“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 . . .
The war had taken nearly everything from Dozan, but by leaving him his little daughter Ayula, he also found something he’d lacked most of his life: a sharp, crystalline sense of purpose. As they fled the Char-ravaged flats for the foothills, all of Dozan’s will bent toward keeping his daughter alive, and keeping the war from seeping into her as it had into him, . . .
The Society for the Preservation of Kynish Technology is proud to present the most complete artifact ever recovered from the Genetic Archive at Yor Yan. The following manuscript owes its remarkable preservation to its inscription on flesh paper, and its entombment in a bone box set into the foundation of the building. Both paper and box resisted even the hemorrhagic . . .