Hi folks, this is the Reckoning Press podcast, and it’s me again, Michael J. DeLuca, publisher. This month we have for you Naila Francis’s poem “After encountering the grey whales in El Burbujon, Laguna Ojo de Liebre”, read by the author. This piece originally appeared in Reckoning 7, our “oceans” issue. I’m of the feeling any preamble to this would be gilding the lily, so instead just let me say that if this poem speaks to you, you should absolutely go learn more about Naila Francis and her work on grief. There also exists a lovely piece of ambient soundscape by artist Paulito Muse featuring this poem among others, which for the right project would make amazing background music to write to.
The Pushcart nominations deadline has snuck up on us again, and we got ours in just under the wire. 2023 is the year of our oceans issue, Reckoning 7, edited by Priya Chand, Octavia Cade and Tim Fab-Eme. As is the case every time we’ve had to pick just a few pieces to submit for any award, I bristle at the implication all our contributors might be anything less than eminently worthy to have accolades heaped upon them! But in this case, we could only send six.
Bruce is seventeen feet long and would’ve weighed around two tons when he was murdered by a trophy hunter. Killing rare creatures for sport is supposed to be a relic of the past now that most of the world’s wild animals are some level of endangered. But for some, the desire to prove something runs deeper than the fear of punishment. Thanks to a bartender’s tip about a local bachelor party bragging about plans to go shark hunting, the Marine Conservation Enforcement Guard made it to the dock in time to confiscate the kill. A year in jail and ten thousand dollars later, Bruce’s murderer has apparently paid his debt to society, but it was too late for this white shark.
And, maybe, for all of the white sharks. Only two sightings have been reported in the past three years, neither confirmed by experts. Scientists have been shouting for decades that we’re killing an estimated 97–99% of our ocean’s apex predators, and now that we might actually have done it, there are suddenly rallying cries. Humans love to begin caring about an animal as soon as it’s about to be wiped from the planet. Too bad that by then, there’s almost nothing we can do about it.
But with Bruce, whose body was flash preserved and taken to a conservation lab for immediate regrowth, we’re trying anyway.
We can’t reanimate him, or grow a new Bruce. It’s too complicated. We’ve never had enough specimens to fully understand shark biology, and full-body cloning laws are prohibitive enough that it would take us years just to get the go-ahead to try.
But we can grow new insides for a simulacrum using synthmuscle tech that was developed for prosthetics, faux cartilaginous skeletal elements, and sensory organs grown in Petri dishes. All housed in Bruce’s own skin, more permanently preserved than the rest of him.
The result is, well . . . about as much like a shark as the new human-skinned androids (now available in your choice of skin tone!) are to people. One more reminder that we need to save the actual sharks, or this is all we’ll have left.
But, hell, we worked hard on Bruce. He can swim like a shark, he can use most of a shark’s senses, and best of all? He can interface with a human mind—my mind, once we finish the security procedures.
As usual, I go through the checklist with Callista, one item at a time. Any gaps or fit issues with the skinsuit? No. Reoxybreather diagnostics? Green light. Interface fluid tank? Full. Core temp control air system? Working properly. Intravenous regulation line? Secure. And then I’m in the chamber at the heart of Bruce’s body, curled up like a fetus. Ready to be reborn a shark.
Callista hands me the breathing tube and face mask, and I expect the cool practicality of her fingers brushing back my hair and placing the wired nodes. But it’s Deng’s voice, low and solemn, that calls out gently instead. “Let me do it.”
She doesn’t argue or make a snide remark, and I’m grateful, even as my heart speeds up. If she can see it on her diagnostics screen, she keeps it to herself.
His fingers, rough and callused from the rigors of our daily work, run through my hair as gently as he can manage. He strokes my hair slowly and deliberately, and for a moment, I can’t breathe, my mind filling with what-ifs. If he hadn’t sworn off love after his husband died in a car accident the year before I met him. If we’d both gotten a little drunker that one almost night in the lab last autumn. If we hadn’t dedicated every moment of our waking lives to Bruce, to finding the last white sharks left in the world. To saving Carcharodon carcharias.
He draws in a breath, about to say something, and the world stops for one moment, full of potential.
And then he coughs, a sound that catches in his throat, and I hear him gulp before he whispers, “Come back to me, safe and whole, okay?”
He doesn’t add I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t or anything that dramatic. But it’s more than he’s ever dared say before, and I tuck away the memory of his words.
Come back to me.
“I will,” I whisper back.
He places the nodes and helps me adjust the breathing tube and face mask. Then the chamber closes, and I hear Callista’s disembodied voice in my head.
Are you ready?
Yes, I reply by thinking the words forcefully.
The chamber fills with interface fluid as Callista double-checks everything before zipping up Bruce’s skin.
The water parts for me as I glide through it in Bruce’s body, perfectly designed for the element to which humans are so ill-suited. As with all thunniform sharks, I need only bend my tail from side to side to propel myself forward at incredible speeds. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been in the body of this shark more times than my age; I find myself marveling at the raw power in my synthmuscular tail, the flexibility in my skin. Creatures so perfectly built for the ocean that they’ve survived everything this planet threw at them for millions of years.
Everything except humans.
I try to shove the thought aside, to let myself have a few minutes of wild, unbridled joy. I’m here. I’m really here, in the open ocean, as close to being a shark as anyone has ever become. This is my reward for every afternoon in the simulator, swimming faux seas. This is what I thought about on the long nights spent circling the tank in the aquarium after hours. This is what I dreamed of as we spent the last two weeks at an inlet, Callista and Deng keeping watch while I familiarized myself with a piece of the ocean.
I dash ahead, looking around at the vibrant life around me. Fish that scatter as my bulk approaches, neon specs that blur below me as I blow by them, until Callista’s voice tells me to slow down! We’re giddy at seeing the things we’ve dreamt of seeing up close. I slow down, swimming toward the ocean floor for a closer look.
Don’t descend too fast, Callista reminds me, and I hate that for a moment, in the joy of discovery, I’ve forgotten. This isn’t like diving; not exactly. The preservation fluid, readouts from the nodes, and intravenous lines snaking into my arms cushion much of the risk of internal pressure building to dangerous levels. And it helps that my mind is the only part of me that’s awake to connect with Bruce. Technically, my human body is asleep, which means I can’t panic and gulp in air or hold my breath, both lead contributors to diver deaths.
Still, despite the advantages we’ve built into Bruce’s body, it doesn’t hurt to be cautious when we’re paving new ground. I slow my descent, scanning the area both to give myself a clear look at the wonders beneath me and to offer Callista and Deng the footage they’re both craving. In a shallower pocket of ocean, psychedelic purple nudibranchs covered in neon orange quills crawl by, their squirmy bodies swaying with the rippling water. Wolf eels dart out of their hideouts in a rocky reef. A lobster sporting honey-colored spots snaps long pincers as it scurries away from me.
Got your fill? I ask Callista. Her yes response is followed by a contented sigh. Carry on the mission. I try to hold the images of bright, playful creatures in my mind as I wave my tail, speeding back up and heading for my destination. But dark thoughts keep creeping back in, staining the happiness burbling forth. Many of those cute little critters will eventually die off if the oceans continue warming. There might be nothing where you’re headed. It might be too late, and you’ll have spent years on this effort only to confirm what you already fear the most: we’ve killed off the last of the white sharks.
A roiling, selfish cloud of frustration settles over me. I just want to enjoy ten minutes of unvarnished freedom. Haven’t I earned it, working hard these past few years? Every moment we haven’t spent on Bruce has been spent in talks given to universities, to diving clubs, to elementary schools. Filmed, captioned, and shared online to improve accessibility and reach a wider audience whenever we could get permission.
We spoke with anyone who would have us, though we kept Bruce secret. We’d have loved to share each step in his development along the way, but our investors—the company whose animal interface technology we’re testing as part of our funding agreement—insisted we keep the project hidden during development.
If this trip is successful, Deng will edit the footage. Once our investors give the go-ahead, we’ll share what we have with the world. We’ll compile everything, slapping on bite-sized slogans to hook viewers so that we can get to the real, sincere, earnest talks. The interviews we’ve been recording with oceanographers and deep-sea divers. Lab tests done by a salinity expert. Footage of the whales who beached themselves thanks to the volume of underwater missile testing, so excruciating to their sensitive ears that they’d rather suffer a painful death on land than stay underwater for a moment longer.
None of us is a fan of the sensationalism of many documentaries out there, using worst-case scenarios and spun figures taken out of context to spur people into action for a few moments that don’t linger. There’s enough real danger that we don’t need to exaggerate. We want to drive continuous, sustained action. Ours will be not a single documentary, but an ongoing, interactive series. Maybe it’ll be just as ineffective as the rest, but we’re hoping Bruce will be enough of a splash to get people interested.
Nearing your destination, Callista says in my head.
I swim the last stretch, silently hoping we didn’t do this all for nothing.
The White Shark Café is halfway between California and Hawaii, a spot unofficially named by Stanford researchers decades back. The satellite tags they used to track four white sharks found them travelling frequently to a spot centered at 23.37°N 132.71°W. It once housed a diverse food chain, rich in nutrients—and mating partners—for white sharks, but none have been seen here for years. From time to time, we’ve heard rumblings about sending a submersible down to the Café, but it never seems to happen. There are too many ecological crises and too many endangered species, but never enough funding to go around.
What if we do find a white shark, and it tries to mate with you? Deng joked when we settled on the spot. I tried not to think about the taste of the word mate in his mouth as I sent back a quip. Something along the lines of let’s hope none of them have necrophiliac tendencies.
As I approach, proverbial breath held, it’s clear that won’t be a problem. There are no white sharks in sight.
Nothing yet, I tell Callista, mostly to break the mental silence. She and Deng must be as tense as I am.
Look around, she says.
Aye aye, cap. There are other types of sharks here. A shortfin mako speeds past, zipping out of sight before I can inspect it further. It’s exciting to glimpse it here—even if shortfin makos don’t top the endangered list. I swerve to avoid a large jellyfish undulating by. Fish of numerous species and sizes mix in the Café.
After spending some time circling the area, I catch sight of a blue shark descending into the depths, probably in search of food. It’s about half my length, and bears signs of mating scars in the form of bite wounds; a mature female, then. I hear a sob from Callista, and know if I were in my human body, I would be welling up with tears right now. We haven’t killed them all. Blue sharks, once an abundant species on the planet, are now critically endangered and thought by some to be extinct. They were heavily fished for their fins, their bodies often thrown back into the ocean to rot.
Our trip has already been worthwhile. I relax slightly.
Callista’s maternal grandfather was a restaurant owner who served shark fin soup every weekend at wedding banquets. Before trawling was banned worldwide, Callista’s father worked in the seafood industry, tossing unwanted animals back into the ocean after they’d been caught in massive nets. They may not be her sins, but more than the rest of us, she feels the weight of everything her ancestors contributed to the ocean’s decline. As a kid, she tried every tactic she could think of to convince her grandparents to stop serving shark fin soup. In doing so, she fell in love with the creature she desperately wanted them to care about: the blue shark.
Tag it? I ask, and Callista hesitates. We’ve equipped Bruce to fire tags if needed, so we can track migration patterns. But we’re here to reintroduce sharks to the world. How would it look if the first thing we do is show us shooting tag darts at them, even if it’s for research?
No, she says, and it’s probably too late anyway. The blue shark is out of sight. At least we got footage.
Yeah, I agree. Good footage, hopefully. How much time left?
Just under an hour before you need to head back. Your heat regulation is running through its power pretty fast down there. But you can come back at any time. We can always try again tomorrow.
I continue swimming.
It’s only when I’ve finally given up and resigned myself to the return trip that I spot her.
She swims below me, a deep blue hue that barely stands out from the color of the ocean. This far down, where most colors of the spectrum aren’t visible, everything is tinged various shades of blue. I feel a chill, impossible as I know it is in Bruce’s skin.
See her? I think-whisper to Callista, as if our conversation might spook the shark.
Yeah! Holy shit, she’s a beaut.
I follow, heart pounding.
Don’t go too fast! Callista reminds me. And don’t stay too long. You’re low on fuel.
I know. But as I follow the white shark down to a thousand feet below the surface, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to tear myself away. I’ve seen videos of white sharks, of course. And I’ve been swimming as Bruce for a year. But watching her up close makes everything about my movements look clunky, like an animatronic, or one of those ancient stop motion movies.
I can see her muscles ripple as she cuts through the water. There’s a playfulness to her movements that belies the terrifying sight of her massively muscular body; or perhaps I’m too stuck viewing her through a human lens to understand the inherent alienness of the creature before me.
Though of course, in this domain where she reigns supreme, we are the aliens.
She speeds up, vanishing from sight, and I’m left looking desperately for her. We already have the footage, but . . . what if she’s not here when we return tomorrow? What if she moves on to another region? What if I never see her again?
And then suddenly she’s before me, so close we’re nearly nose to nose. The first white shark anyone has seen in years. In my human body, I’d be drawing in a huge, nervous breath right now. As a shark, I merely stare and hope.
Holy shit! Callista says.
Holy shit, I agree.
Oh my god. Look at her underside, Callista says.
I do, staring at her belly, which would be white higher up in the water but this far down is merely lighter blue. I stare at the proportions, all wrong, her light underside bigger than those of the models. My first instinct is to be afraid. What if she consumed trash humans threw into the ocean and got an infection? She looks healthy, and . . . .
Oh my god.
She’s pregnant! I shout the word in my head, startling myself with a jubilance so strong it’s like it’s my own pregnancy I’m announcing. A seed of hope, tender and fragile, blooms in my heart like a little green stalk poking up through hardened dirt. There’s hope yet.
Despite us, the white sharks might survive.
She turns tail and swims off and I follow her, eager as a lover. Without speaking her language, I don’t know if she wants me along for the ride or if she’s indifferent, but she doesn’t try to get rid of me. Trailing behind her, I listen to Callista’s uncharacteristic chatter in my head. We did it! We’re following you in the boat, Ally. Oh my god, I can’t believe we did it! I wonder how many pups she’s carrying. Five? More?
We cover the terrain together, leaving the Café far behind. We swim so quickly that everything feels like a blur and it’s all I can do to keep my focus on her, not to lose her. Just me and the unnamed female shark. The ocean is ours.
Ahead of us, the water begins to vibrate.
The net comes of out nowhere, scooping her up. I barely miss getting caught in it myself, and the edge of the rope skims my skin. I scream as I see her fight to break free, dashing ahead. I can hear Callista cursing, her horrified shouts mixing with my own panic as I swim after the net.
Those fuckers! Deng is calling the coast guard!
It’ll be too late, I think, following the net desperately. I watch, helpless, as the shark thrashes against the ropes that press into her side, packing her indiscriminately in with countless confused fish and bits of sharp, torn coral from the ocean floor. As the bottom-trawling net drags by, it leaves behind a trail of flattened land, destroying the natural landmarks many marine animals use to navigate the ocean.
I open my jaws and aim for a spot in the net near her, thrusting forward with all the power in my synthmuscles before clamping down on the netting.
Blood fills the water as my bite catches some of the fish in the net, severing their heads. Powerful as my massive jaws are, they’re nothing against the motorized forward momentum of the illegal fishing vessel. It drags me along, teeth still locked around the net. I shake my head vigorously back and forth, trying to saw at the rope, but it’s built to withstand worse, and my teeth were made for sinking into the soft flesh of fish and seals, not the tight twine of thick rope. Meanwhile, Callista’s updates run through my head.
We’re too far off the coast. They can’t get here for hours.
I let go and try again. The water is heavy with fish blood, and the shark begins to thrash harder, snapping her jaws wildly. The scent of fish guts is likely overwhelming her, telling her it’s time to feed. I manage to tear the rope in a few spots, and a few smaller fish stream out through the opening. I saw and bite again, and somehow manage to open a few more spots, even as my attacks continue to fill the water with the dizzying scent of death.
We’ll be at your coordinates in about fifteen minutes. Deng has his equipment ready to film the trawling ship. Are you okay?
Fine. Stay out of sight. And be careful!
We all know that if the trawlers find us here, witnesses to their crimes, they’re likely to shoot us. And if they discover a white shark in their net? She’ll be their prize, sold captive to a collector for a king’s ransom or, if they find her dead, stuffed and added to someone’s private display.
If I were in my human body, tears of frustration would be filling my eyes. Instead, all I can do is try again. At the thought, I realize I’ve been a fool. I’m acting on instinct, keeping the shark in my sight. But trawling nets are a human problem, and I need to think like a human. Quickly, I swim up to the line attached to the ship. Disconnect the net first, then get her out.
I try and try but this line is much thicker than the netting, and my shark’s teeth, so terrifying to humans, are nothing against the dense rope. It’s like trying to saw through a tree with a shard of broken glass.
Fuck fuckfuckfuck!
When I return to the net, the shark is stuck fast. Her fins are tangled up in the rope, lines on her skin rubbed raw. She’s cut up where the broken coral has pressed into her. I’ve barely made a dent in the rope. There’s no fucking way I’m going to get her out this way.
I watch, feeling more helpless than ever, as human greed swallows up the only evidence we’ve had in years that wild white sharks still exist. She’s pregnant, almost fully gestated, no small feat for a species that spends a year in the womb. She’s proof that there are more sharks out there—at the very least, the shark who impregnated her—and she feels like the last chance we have of knowing there will be more of them to come.
I can’t give up now.
Ally? What’s going on?
Deng’s last words to me fill my mind, echoed by the promise I made him. I wrench my thoughts away, heart already hurting at the choice ahead.
We assume human life is more valuable than any other kind. But is that still true when there’s eight billion of us and only a smattering of them?
Ally? Hello?
Does the math still hold when there’s an abundance of humans and a scarcity of sharks?
Ally? What’s going on?
I don’t want to do it. My thirty-five years don’t feel like enough.
There’s a crackle, and then the soft baritone of Deng’s voice. Ally Elizabeth Chen. My heart skips a beat. I can hear the panic, barely masked beneath each syllable of my name. Don’t do this. Please. He knows me too well, because he’d do the same in my position, and I in his. He knows.
I’m sorry, I whisper. Unspoken words ache in my throat. I know if I let him keep talking, he’ll talk me out of it.
Before I can change my mind, I activate the function we all hoped I’d never have to use, doing my best to tune out Deng’s pleas as I’m untethered from the simulacrum. A jolt of adrenaline shoots into my system as Bruce opens up and jettisons my body—my human body—into the cold, unforgiving water.
The air tank goes with me, part of the precautions we take. It takes all of my willpower to breathe steadily; gulping air could form an air bubble that paralyzes or kills me. I have just enough oxygen left to get to the surface safely, spending the proper amount of time at each depth interval. At the top, I can inflate my vest and wait for Deng and Callista to arrive. They’ll be at my coordinates in ten minutes. All I have to do is go up.
I swim down, chasing the dragging net and the shark tangled inside. With each movement of my muscles, I feel the shock of going from interface gel to cold water. Silently, I beg any being out there listening to please don’t let me cramp up, not now. Reaching into the pack strapped to my back, I pull out a diver’s knife and begin to saw.
My fingers feel tight and raw as I grip the rope, whittling away at each strand, cutting through piece by piece. The knife slips, slicing through my skinsuit and cutting into my arm. Pain floods me, and I barely hold back a scream; afraid my mouthpiece will fall out. Gritting my teeth over the mouthpiece, I continue to saw strategically until at last, the rope begins to come apart.
Carefully, I make my way over to the shark, who stares at me through alien eyes. She blinks from the bottom up, a movement that feels disorienting. I force myself to look at her wounds as a primal fear urges me to leave, now. A part of me finally understands why all humans fear her kind.
I watch her as I cut through the ropes, carefully cutting away the piece binding her fins and lower body first. Eventually, I make my way to her jaws.
It’s a mistake to check my air gauge when I already know what it’ll say, but part of me can’t help it. Even if Deng started putting his gear on as soon as we talked, even if Callista has sped her way to me the entire time, even if Deng jumps in the water as soon as they’re in range, it’ll be too late.
Two minutes.
It occurs to me that my arm is bleeding. There’s blood in the water, and I’m weakened prey, ripe for the taking.
My last sight might be the inside of a shark’s mouth.
I saw away the last of the entangled rope, using my remaining strength to pull it free from her, as gently as possible. She bursts through the hole in the net, wounded from coral cuts and rope burns. I hope that someday they’ll scar, because it will mean she’s survived this. That she’s survived us.
As the last of my air runs out, I watch her muscular tail bend back and forth, propelling her with incredible speed.
She swims away, into the dark waters, injured but free.
It was Bobby’s last wish to be composted and spread over their vegetable patch above the Yellow River, just a couple of miles upstream of its confluence with the Mississippi. They grew peas, eggplant, tomatoes there; firm, tasty lettuce, cauliflower, and kale; even a patch of wheat that yielded symbolic amounts of flour, but that Bobby had been passionate about. The rich alluvial soil of the riparian required no fertilization to speak of, and hardly any irrigation, but Bobby had dreamt of resting among his crops, of living on in next year’s harvest.
The vegetable garden sat where the sloping grass leveled out before plunging down into the fecund abundance of the riparian proper. The garden bathed in sunlight throughout the day in most seasons, and Bobby and Alfonso had spent many an afternoon lying in the grass overlooking the rows of pea stalks and the low, cobbled width of the kale crops, drying and basking in the hot summer rays after swimming the calm flow of the river.
Al stares out of the study window at the garden across the river, a medical bill with hiragana and English printing clutched in his arthritic hand.
He had never expected Bobby to be the first to go.
His husband had always been stubborn about his health, both when all doctors had still been human and now that RD-TDs, Robotic Diagnostics and Treatment Devices, had mostly displaced the traditional white coats and stethoscopes. He rarely fell ill, and even when he did, he’d sooner cross the river for fresh vegetables than go to their GP for a pharmaceutical solution.
So when his eyes developed a yellow cast, and later, when sharp, stabbing pains in his stomach made him double over, he’d shrugged and cooked some kale.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, holding Alfonso’s gaze with yellowed eyes as Al argued through his tears.
“You can’t know that. You keep saying that our house isn’t medical, that it could be wrong. But it could be right, Bobby. Not just about the hep, but about the cirrhosis, about the liver cancer even. What if our house is right?”
Bobby squeezed Al’s hand and shrugged.
“Then we’ve had a good run, sweetheart. Who would have thought we’d get to our golden wedding? Not your parents, that’s for sure. Or mine, for that matter.”
They had chuckled in unison, until Bobby’s laughter turned into a coughing fit. Al had helped him sit up straight and adjusted his pillow. Together, they had watched through the panoramic bedroom window as the sun set over the Yellow River.
Bobby had been right. They’d had a good run. But even after fifty years, he was gone too soon.
And now Alfonso can’t even fulfill his last wish.
REMAINS DISPOSAL QUESTIONNAIRE – ROBERT “BOBBY” REOLIN
Please answer the below questions completely and truthfully and correct any information already provided. Withholding or misrepresenting information that may affect the disposal of your loved one’s remains is a class-3 misdemeanor under the Funerary Environmental Impact Act (FEIA) and will result in an automatic determination of Reuse.
1. The cause of death for your loved one is registered as:
COMPLICATIONS FROM AN UNTREATED HEPATITIS C INFECTION
The medication your loved one was taking at the time of their demise is listed as:
NONE
Please enter any information concerning the cause of death not included in this description, and/or list any medication they were using that might affect the disposal of their remains.
Al smooths the Japanese medical bill on the desk surface. Such a little thing, really. Bobby’s dental had covered all of it. Such a little thing, with such major consequences.
He sighs and gets up from the form-fitting desk chair with a grunt. Grabbing his coat from the rack by the front door, he makes a stop in the garage to rummage through their toolbox. He unplugs the Mazda from the charging socket and buzzes down their wooded driveway, taking Route 401 into town. He may be too late. The disposal director may already have processed Bobby. He may be too late, but he may just be on time.
All he needs is five minutes alone with Bobby.
It’s very rare these days to get a composting permit. It has grown as uncommon as burial and even cremation, what with all the prosthetics and chemo. For the thousandth time, Al wonders: how much of Bobby’s refusal of treatment was prompted by his desire to be spread over their vegetable patch?
2. Please select your preferred method of disposal of your loved one’s remains.
X Composting – By selecting this option, you apply for a composting and fertilization permit under FEIA.
0 Burial – By selecting this option, you apply for a burial permit under FEIA.
0 Cremation – The per-Lb fee for fuel and for carbon dioxide compensation will be calculated from the weight of the remains at the time of cremation. By selecting this option, you commit to paying this fee in full.
If the above options are greyed out, it means that medication, artificial bodily enhancements, and/or prosthetics present in the deceased’s body at the time of their demise as registered in the Central Administration of Medical Procedures (CAMP), preclude composting, burial and cremation. In that case, please select Reuse below.
0 Reuse – This may include, but is not limited to: organ transplant, scientific research, trace element reclamation, food production, and construction (primarily bones). If you select this option, please also select one of the previous ones for those body parts that turn out to be unsuitable for reuse.
The parking lot at the Disposal Home is almost full. There must be a ceremony in progress. Al hopes it will make his job easier. In a practical sense, that is; emotionally, he’s afraid this will be one of the hardest things he’s ever done.
When he enters the lobby, the receptionist recognizes him and gets up with a flustered look uncharacteristic of the disposal profession.
“Mr. Reolin, one moment.” She disappears into the back and returns with the familiar, kind figure of Mrs. Ahenny. Mrs. Ahenny rounds the reception desk and takes Al’s hand in both her own.
“Alfonso, it’s good to see you. I was just processing your beloved Robert’s composting application . . . .” A look of concern draws across her face, and Al’s heart sinks. Is he too late? She guides him to a conference room, all subdued colors and monochrome flowers. They sit at a low table.
“Is everything in order?” Al asks, but he already knows the answer.
“Well . . . .” Mrs. Ahenny places her fingertips together and gazes earnestly into his eyes. “Of course, we’ve discussed dear Robert’s deeply felt wish to be spread over your lovely vegetable garden. As you know, the FEIA is very clear on the rules and regulations surrounding composting. And I was processing your response to question 3 in the disposal questionnaire and assessing dear Robert’s earthly remains . . . .”
That’s it. They have found it. They have found it, which means that as far as Mrs. Ahenny knows, he has lied in the questionnaire. The automatic misdemeanor conviction isn’t the worst of it, not by a long shot. Al feels his tears starting to run as he realizes that any chance of a composting permit is now lost. Mrs. Ahenny has no choice but to report him, and Bobby will not rest in his beloved garden above the river. His remains will be processed for reuse.
The pliers in Al’s jacket pocket are useless now.
3. Please list any prosthetics, bodily enhancements, and/or other artificial items and materials that would prohibit composting. To obtain a composting permit, all of these items need to be removed prior to disposal director assessment.
According to the CAMP, the following items are known to be in the deceased’s body:
NONE
Al remembers their trip to Japan, the remarkable range of delicious foods, the terraces overlooking Kamo River, the cherry blossoms, the overwhelming beauty of the temples . . . and the acute pain that had all but incapacitated Bobby. It had been one of the few times Bobby had ever submitted to visiting a medical professional. The Japanese dentist had performed an efficient root canal, and Bobby had felt no pain for the remainder of their vacation.
Back Stateside, Bobby had had every intention of reporting the procedure to the CAMP. But administration had always been Al’s responsibility in their marriage. So of course, it got forgotten.
Until Al found the bill in Bobby’s desk yesterday.
If he had remembered, or if he had gone through Bobby’s papers before filling out the questionnaire, he could have mentioned the composite filling under question 3. He would gladly have paid the fee to have it removed.
Too late now.
“Mr. Reolin?”
Al sits up with a start, realizing Mrs. Ahenny has been speaking to him for some time.
“Sorry, what was that?”
She smiles.
“As I was saying, when we assess a loved one’s remains, we sometimes discover foreign items that were overlooked or forgotten, and thus accidentally left out of the questionnaire. Quite often, it’s nothing more serious than a molar with composite filling.” She pauses and looks him in the eyes. “If they were disclosed in the questionnaire, we would of course remove them; we have the tools right there, in an unlocked cabinet in the mourning room. But if the questionnaire doesn’t mention those items, FEIA requires us to report the omission, and to deny composting.”
She gets up and folds her hands in front of her. Al looks up at her with grief and dread. He is so certain what she’ll say that when she does speak he has to play her words back in his mind twice before he understands. And when he does understand, relief floods his eyes as he hugs her in gratitude.
“Would you like to spend some more time with your beloved Robert in the mourning room, while I prepare the composting permit?”
The glass facade of their home reflects the splendid, riotous sunset. Darkness will soon descend over the valley. The smell of grass and soil is loud and strong in the air, a scent Bobby used to love. The birds have already grown silent, and Al hears only the quiet murmur of the river and the wind whispering in the spruces above the house.
He kneels in the soil beside Bobby’s memorial and rubs some of the rich, fertile clay between his fingers. His gaze drifts over the garden. He sees Bobby’s ruddy cheeks in the curve of the tomatoes; the blond locks of his youth in the waving of golden stalks. Al knows he is being fanciful, but he deserves some fancy.
He turns to the marble monument and brushes off the splashes of mud from last night’s rainstorm. The words ‘In loving memory’ at the top of the stone are untouched by the mud, but Al takes special care to clean the carved letters of Bobby’s name. He straightens up with popping knees and surveys the result.
Something still mars the surface of the headstone. A drop of mud is covering the dot in their last name, the ‘i’ in ‘Reolin’ an irregular brown splash. Al bends over and gently brushes the last mud away.
The white, knobby ivory in the half-inch dot sparkles in the reflected sunset.
Aparna Paul’s story, “Little Apocalypses,” unfolds as a series of stories told first by a mother to her daughter and then by the daughter to her aged mother as their world cycles through disasters large and small.
We spoke about the work of living through disasters and finding hope in our relationships with each other.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
E.C. Barrett: What were some of your inspirations behind this story?
Aparna Paul: I was thinking a lot about my relationship with my mother, which is always a dangerous place to start. My mom is from India and she speaks three or four languages. Her first language was Gujarati, which I don’t speak or read or write. One fear of mine is that she could get a neurodegenerative condition later in life. What if she reverted back to only knowing Gujarati and could not communicate in English anymore? That fear was part of the driving impetus. At the end of the story, the main character doesn’t understand what the mother is saying, but tells a story back to the mother anyway.
I had also just taken a course on climate change fiction with Professor Mary Grimm at Case Western Reserve University and I was thinking about climate change disasters from many angles—different types of disasters, across different landscapes, in different regions of the world. How would that look in a coastal town versus in the desert versus any huge city? I think with this story, I was able to take my many imaginings of the climate crisis and condense them all into one, through the vehicle of the mother’s stories to the daughter.
Also, for this class, I was doing some scholarship on this term, “solastalgia,” which is a form of nostalgia for a place that still exists, but has changed so dramatically that it no longer feels like the home it once was. It was coined by the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who defined multiple ecological dis-eases in his research of peoples’ relationships to the climate crisis. When we reckon with the climate crisis, we can feel a lot of existential malaise, like diseases, one of them being solastalgia.
With this story, I was thinking a lot about how a place can change a lot even though it seems like it should be the same. How do you reckon with the feeling that home has packed up and left without you?
ECB: What do you hope readers take away from reading it?
AP: As huge and pervasive and scary as the climate crisis is, the most important thing that we have is each other and our relationships to each other. In the face of all that change, and that fear, there’s a lot of hope because we have each other and our relationships to each other, which will remain. They’ll change over time, as all relationships and all people do, but they will remain the same in that sense that we’re not alone.
ECB: Your story focuses more on the disasters that we go through in our daily life than the disasters of climate change, which made me think about the fact that we have to continue to live with all of these things, while climate disasters are happening. Life and its troubles don’t pause for disaster. I wonder if that was part of your thinking, or something that you were working out. You were in college when the pandemic started, so you were coming of age at a time when there were plenty of disasters going on, yet you still had to go to college and figure out how to map out a future life for yourself.
AP: Yeah, I think that’s a good point and I like learning a little bit more about myself in talking about the work. I think that you’re spot on. There are a lot of changes and difficulties that the characters struggle with that are within the context of the whole world struggling on a global scale.
I think a lot in terms of cycles. Maybe I sometimes put too much faith in cycles, but I think we might be at the bottom of the wheel right now and we have ways to come back to the top. It might look different from how we originally thought, or from what it looked like before, but there’s still hope to make it back.
I appreciated the theme of water for Issue 7 of Reckoning, because water moves in cycles. There are always going to be dry periods and there’s always going to be hope to replenish as well. There’s always going to be a cyclical nature of a mother and a daughter and granddaughter and a great granddaughter moving forward and forward and forward through time. But they’re not exactly the same. They’ll change from generation to generation, but they’ll move on in that cycle.
ECB: Have you read anything recently that is speaking to you in terms of these themes?
AP: The Past is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente, which takes place in the not-too-distant future where the sea levels have risen to such an extent that there are no landmasses anymore. The remainder of the human population lives on islands of floating garbage that are pretty large—they have huge populations. The main character lives like an exile from the rest of the community and you don’t know why.
I think that book had a lot of potential for disaster and despair, but instead, it was about collectivism and hope. It was also about the main character forming one relationship that she kept coming back to over the course of the book, which I also really appreciated.
The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin, which I thought about a lot when writing this story, because in that book, apocalypses happen repeatedly and the characters have to learn to reckon with them. This book also explores people’s relationships with the land, but also how these characters function within systems and how those systems control and exploit them.
When I was writing my story, I felt like the main character, the daughter, had the ability to stop these apocalypses from happening, but the only way for her to stop them was for her mother to tell her the story of the apocalypse. I was thinking a lot about how our actions can lead to that kind of hope and also the place of storytelling and narrative in building those communities and building a sense of resistance in the face of devastation.
ECB: What role do you see speculative fiction as having in the environmental justice conversation?
AP: I think that speculative fiction, climate change fiction, and science fiction are all so important in the conversation of environmental justice, because storytelling is one of the most important tools that we have to mobilize and organize around the climate crisis.
It’s difficult, sometimes, to make people want to care. And I think that all of those forms of fiction build an empathy in the reader that makes them want to care about the greater issues at hand. This type of genre fiction is incalculably important for striving towards a better future. And on top of all of that, it provides a space for us to imagine new futures, which is the most important thing that we can be doing. It’s not enough for us to say: “everything is burning. Everything is terrible.” What can we dream for ourselves? That’s what speculative fiction offers.
“This is my home,” my mother says to me one overcast day.
Picture this: mother and daughter are sitting on the couch together, our ponchos pooling and swallowing us whole. We are looking at a picture on the internet, a snapshot of the valley in Petorca. My mother was born in that Chilean city, a tiny bird nestled in the bosom of the Andes, gasping through thin air and an ever-evolving awe of the world. I expect, watching her then, a cloud of nostalgia to fog her eyes, for her to fly away from me and the couch here in Canada.
She does not fly away. I notice her speech warbles with hesitation, her throat holding that last word down, home, dragging it out long and narrow like the country. How I remember her staring, the rubbing of her eyes, the drugstore eyedrops, and the small circle of her mouth.
When she finally says it again—“This is my home”—no longer is it a statement, rather a climb, peaking in a question. She leaves me behind then to dash to the safe upstairs, rummaging through our family’s birth certificates and citizen papers and passports and who knows what, until she brings back to me an old picture.
My fingers retain still the feeling of that smooth, glossy paper; of how I turn it, checking the back to see ink splotches faded with time:
Lxxx, Petorca, 1975.
Wistfulness, I understand then, means there is some semblance of a home to yearn for. There is still something there to return to—yes, there could be little differences here and there—but you can walk the land and observe, with tinted sunglasses, a kaleidoscope of memories and endless futures gleaming in the sunset.
Nothing of that nature is found in the photograph in her hands—it is a reality which does not exist anymore. It was, as I consider the image, something beautiful, with swathes of green and yellow and blue. It was, she tells me, the place she was happiest in, even if she did not have hot water or had to use an outhouse or went hungry. It is, as I discover, somehow, the same place as the cracked, parched desert on the internet labelled Petorca. The jarring combination of speaking, of thinking, all at once present, past, and unknown, makes for an ominous blanket heavier than the warmest poncho.
This is my home? This cannot be my home. Did I ever have one? I had one, I know I did, once, but it is not this. How long can the world go on for? How long can I?
“What happened to the river?” I say, taking the role of the fool who asks obvious questions before a disaster foretold.
I remember the soft curve of her jaw as she cranes her head to our popcorn ceiling, going past it to enter something holy and safe.
“God help us all,” she responds.
What can one say about the environment that has not already been said? How could we reconcile with the fact that the place we were born will not be the same place we will die, even if the maps, even if our hearts, say otherwise?
My old university here in Canada floats on top of a marsh. I can feel the chill of the mornings I’ve spent walking along watery pathways, frogs croaking and salamanders whirling near my feet; occasionally, on these walks, my eyes wandered to the trail of smoke that wafts up from the clanging industrial parts of the city. Group projects in my academic career consisted of developing apps that would help the user report turtles crushed and splattered by cars, to hopefully have someone help take them to wildlife rescues. My lectures had many students yawning through the degradation of our Great Lakes, a source of life, with algae blooms and gifts of spewing sewage and oil spills.
At these institutions, one looks at the data; one maps and calculates and writes obligatory reflections that are more opinion pieces on the reality of things, and then one moves on. Moving on commonly means a hiring event where major oil and mining companies, among others in little cliques of giggling imperialistic friends, gather us ready and bright-eyed, one by one.
A funny thing: my tía abuela, Juana, a stout woman in her nineties, still works to run a family goat farm in Chile. My tía sends my mother a video of the old woman on the news, appearing on the screen with hands curling like tendrils in a garden.
“No way,” I say, looking at the old woman in amazement, seeing a continent of toughness etched on her pixelated face. “She’s still alive?”
My mother slaps me before she starts the clip again, leaning in, trying to listen to her tía’s words carefully.
Petorca province is a major provider of that emerald jewel of a fruit, the avocado—la palta—which can only grow in certain regions. A just right environment is mandatory for the fussy fruit. Raising them requires 320 litres of water per avocado. Agricultural companies and politicians and the like illegally divert the coursing river to these fields. Once grown, they are exported to a European or North American country, a destiny coded on stickers and red-flag sale signs, all to end up part of people’s self care smoothie or a sandwich in a bougie restaurant.
There, on television, my tía abuela Juana speaks of the town’s water crisis: people cannot wash their clothes, they cannot take showers, crops are wilting, livestock dying from dehydration. She could not afford to buy the avocados that her neighbours grow. She is still alive, yes, todo bien gracias a Dios, but who knows about the well-being of her children, many who work at the farm, if all her goats die from no water? What about her grandchildren; her great great-great-grandchildren; her great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren?
In the climate crisis, it is those at risk—ones statistically contributing the least to global pollution and energy consumption—who will encounter the worst effects of it. Though I believe that designating those at risk is to make the sacrificial lamb a matter of inheritance, instead of the truth of chronic disenfranchisement, of intentional displacement. Everything has a price to it, and some people are willing to be paid. Even the world burning has a price.
In Chile, Patagonian fluvial systems, running like veins to the end of the world, suffer as their ecosystems are upset by deforestation and pollution. Lithium exploitation in the name of green electromobility in turn consumes water in the north, with mining sites near primarily Indigenous communities. In my home here in Canada, water still has material needs we must provide, a necessary relationship that the media calls disruptive and violent and holding this country back. The water does not need oil spills and fertilizer pollution and waste; it does not need to water golf courses or suburban lawns or mall fountains; it does not need people to face police brutality for protesting these violations.
There are things to say about Indigenous sovereignty. There are things to say on how the fight against colonisation is the fight for water justice. There are things to say about our power as a group of people, that through each home we love, those which are fracturing like cracks in clay, we make our attempts at resilience. We survive. Fight.
I do not write about this for the love of writing about this. I do not write believing I have a voice that is good or matters above the rest. Those things to say on environmental justice perhaps are said better by others instead of me: an overwrought, disabled, neurotic Latina, with a persistent fear of misstepping hovering over me like a fly. However, now is the time where we must drive our purpose towards the collective needs of our people, and to the land.
I laugh when someone asks me if I consider myself an academic or a writer. It is unnatural for me in those ecosystems. What is there for people in that hierarchy of beings, with those intellectuals that love to create and fondle and debate among each other? However, I do consider myself an eternal student, and read anything that could explain the seedlings of questions that sprout from my chest: what is justice, what is the environment, who are we all in between?
Taking an Indigenous Knowledge class, I loved my time there, my professor almost lulling me with stories and exciting me in challenging the normative way of thinking, even when it was difficult at times. There I read and analysed, as part of our curriculum, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass.
“Wow,” I wrote to my professor late in the evening, happy to see the poetry in the world around us translated to words I could finally comprehend. “She’s just like me. For real!”
I believe the part of the book I just must write about goes like this, after introducing the reader to the Onondaga Thanksgiving Address: “Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.”
A great achievement of colonialism is that it convinces people that hyper-individualism is good. That there is not a right to anything unless you buy it. This is seen in Chile, with waters regulated by private property laws, which are a symptom of the infection of neoliberalism, implemented after the coup of 1973. For how could one own water? Why do government officials hand water out on a first-come first-served basis? The delusion of hyper-individualism creates the mantra this is just the way things are, that it is natural for an old woman to go on television and plead for water in the community and to stop desecrating the land she was born on.
It cannot be an individual’s responsibility to save watery ecosystems and the turtles by banning straws; we cannot turn up our nose at disabled people’s need for plastic straws and not do a thing to, say, fast fashion companies overflowing landfills and causing water pollution with last micro-season’s trends. It is abhorrent that the average person’s carbon footprint is always scrutinized, yet a celebrity can use private jets to fly mere minutes on a whim. There is a need for community. There is a duty we must fulfill to each other and the land.
Because for what, for whom, do we declare environmental justice?
There may not be a complete reversal of the climate crisis. That opportunity may very likely wave us by. Unprecedented times are precedent-setting times. Yet it is still within our power to continue forward. I do not mean that we all hold hands together and sing la-la-de-da, because there are those that oppose what needs to be done. There are those who will say that this injustice, these crises, are not real, even when we look at them in our own backyards. I also do not mean that progress, even technological progress, is bad, for there are things like ecological socialism to take into consideration as we move forward, ever forward. There is no one solution that may tie up neatly in a bow; we must think of the tangible, we must think of each other, and not fall into traps of ecofascism or relentless nihilism.
We live in a perfect green and blue spaceship. This is our home. We are born here, of course we will take care of it, one way or another.
After we watch the news and say our goodbyes to my tía, my mother and I prepare food together. She speaks of childhood memories while baking fresh bread; I simmer with the squash soup in all the ways I feel helpless—and all the ways I feel hopeful—about my power in this world.
When I sit with my family at the dinner table, that precious glass of water stays by my hand, waiting to give me a gift, and I accept it in each swallow. Tomorrow, I think to myself, tomorrow I’ll return the gift, in full.
While forks scrape plates and conversations lull, my mind drifts away: to snowy peaks and pine trees and endless sky. I remember the smell of the sea, the sun on my back, the green of the valley. I dream of mountain goats following at the heels of an old woman. I see the happiness that land gave my mother in her smile.
But what about the river? Its silence now is louder than the rush of water ever was. I hope our children hear its song again, one day. I hope our children have a glass of you, dear river.
Pero todos bien gracias a Dios, y mi gente.
References
Wall Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
In C.G. Aubrey’s “A Predatory Transience,” mysterious text messages direct a kayaking eco-defender to a boat of booze-soaked white men who are shooting bonnethead sharks for fun. We spoke about the importance of individual action and systemic overhaul, and artificially drawn divisions between human and non-human nature.
Our conversation, which contains spoilers, has been edited for clarity and length.
E.C. Barrett: Identity is an integral part of your story. I’m thinking of the different ways your protagonist is conscious of where she exists in the social order in terms of how people perceive her and what that allows her to do or doesn’t allow her to do. What are some of the connections you make between identity and environmental justice?
C.G. Aubrey: My character and I are both middle aged, or close-to middle aged, white women. I don’t get into her economic background, but I grew up below the poverty line in the South Carolina Lowcountry and that creates a very specific sort of worldview.
Environmental injustice is absolutely tied to racism and other forms of human injustice. You wouldn’t have areas that were heavily polluted if wealthy white men—though white women have definitely benefited too—weren’t the ones choosing where their runoff goes, where their factories are going to pollute. Most of our pollution doesn’t happen in pristine, beautiful areas of untouched, unsettled land. The same areas that become undesirable through pollution tend to be populated by marginalized individuals.
In the United States, we have a culture of early conservation that was very much linked to wealthy white people–our national parks being a very good example. That land was taken from people—indigenous people in particular—and then set aside for privileged white use. I won’t say they’re kept wild or kept perfectly, but they don’t have fracking or other sorts of environmental awfulness occurring there. That happens in lower economic neighborhoods, downstream or on the other side of the tracks, or whatever euphemism you want to use for land that has traditionally belonged to people that the elite don’t value. I saw a lot of that firsthand, growing up, because I lived on the other side of the tracks.
It’s also people in the top 10% economically who are doing the most damage, and it’s important to acknowledge that.
ECB: Right. I think about Elon Musk and Taylor Swift hopping on their private jets to get across town and I know nothing I’m doing is actually contributing anywhere close to what they’re doing in a couple of flights.
CGA: One year of their life is more damaging than anything you’re going to do over the course of your entire life.
It’s easy to look out and see things snowballing in a terrible direction and say, “Well, I’m never going to do enough good. I’m never going to do enough to matter when Taylor Swift, or anyone, can fly back and forth across the globe, or across town, and undo any possible good I might have done.” But there are whole species that are rebounding because people have yelled enough to stop stacking rocks in streams. So it’s important to remember that our actions do matter.
ECB: Your story offers some catharsis for that sort of despair, as well as a call to action.
CGA: I think it’s important for us to encourage each other. We have to take direct action. We have to be prepared for not just the good parts of our actions leaving a better world—like saving the sharks in the story—but also how that kind of action will change us. It changes my protagonist. She could be viewed as a very morally upright, good human, but then does these very horrible things without any real sort of remorse. And that changes people. We have to grapple with how we will be changed by our actions to improve the world and that’s one of the roles of fiction, helping us imagine ourselves in other situations, having made other choices.
ECB: Are there any books or writers who have helped inform your thinking about these issues?
CGA: Coyote at the Kitchen Door is a great group of essays that talk about how the nonhuman natural world is now encroaching upon us. More recently, I read A Natural History of the Futureby Robb Dunn, which is very good. The world will be around so much longer than we will and non-human nature will rebound and it will produce new, beautiful things and we will just be the tiniest blip on its timeline. I think there’s a little bit of optimism in that, but as a human I would like for us not to destroy ourselves. I love the idea that nature is reaching out, because we all belong in nature, there shouldn’t be such a division between human and nature.
ECB: There were dandelions in my yard this January, when there should be snow on the ground, not flowers. It briefly made me incredibly sad. Then I noticed there were bees out gathering pollen from them and it was wonderful, because the dandelions and bees were working in concert and it was strangely comforting to witness how the non-human world will find a way to survive us. More to your point, though, the dandelions and bees were also in the process of making food and medicine that humans could use in a climate-changed January.
CGA: Bees are a great example of humans and non-humans in community. Bees need us to harvest their honey. Without human intervention, bees will produce so much honey that they then have to build a new nest or they’ll end up with so much extra honey that they produce two queens, which can lead to hive wars. They have evolved to live as long as they have, and continue to do all the wonderful things bees do, because they have done that in conjunction with us.
ECB: Your story blurs the division between human and non-human nature, as it seems the bonnethead sharks are in cahoots with whatever entity is sending the texts that, in effect, use your protagonist as a survival tool. I have to say, it’s a bold move, having a heroine who kills humans to protect marine life.
CGA: Yeah, I’ve read through Reckoning Issue 7 and I think my story may be the most violent–which will be unsurprising to those who know me.
Not that I’m particularly violent, but I have a very strong sense of justice. There’s so much frustration about the injustices going on and it’s important for people to feel that individual action does matter. You can make a difference, especially at the local level, in your community.
Of course, I’m not saying go out and murder the bad guys. Even just going out and picking up trash when you kayak, like my main character does, makes an immediate, quantifiable impact. We’ll be so much better off if enough individuals feel like they can make a difference. That is really important to me.
ECB: I was thinking about the violence in your story and how one of the things it does is take seriously the rights and value of the marine life that these men were killing. When I say take it seriously, I mean, it begs the question: is this violence actually bad? What makes the human hunter’s lives more valuable than the marine lives that they were taking? Could you talk to me a bit about that, and how speculative fiction allows you to take that seriously in a way that you maybe can’t in real life?
CGA: Normal disclaimer: murder is bad. The violence in the story is real, but the murders themselves are a metaphor. And the reason I say it that way is I don’t think that we can affect the kind of change that’s necessary without it being perceived as violence. When you displace people who have that kind of power over other lives, it’s going to feel violent to the people being displaced or even to the people who are affecting that change. Because it’s not as simple as picking up garbage. It’s going to take real systemic overhauls and those overhauls are going to feel very violent, whether they reach the point of actual bloodshed or not.
We know that the choices of the villains in the story are very deliberate. Most of us have, in some way or form, encountered those affluent white men who have no regard for the lives around them. For people that exist on the marsh, and South Carolina Lowcountry in particular, we see those guys all the time. And we know that they’re killing for the thrill of killing–with marine life in particular. Those same types of people are highly likely to be violent with humans in their lives, especially those at a lower power status.
The people who have devalued the lives of others, whether it’s marine life or tree life or marginalized human lives, they’re not going to just do the right thing because we tell them they have to. I think one of the things that happens, once you understand that as an individual, is that you then feel powerless.
Speculative fiction gives us a place where we don’t feel as powerless, a place to explore that systemic upheaval and create the changes we would like to see in our world.
