Aaron: Whenever and wherever you are, get hydrated and get hopeful, because it’s the Reckoning Press Podcast! I’m Aaron Kling, audio editor for Reckoning, here to bring you another episode. Hope you’re having a good one, because today we have “It’s In the Blood” from Reckoning 8, written by Susan Kaye Quinn and read by Anna Pele. This is a story about one of my favorite things, guerilla pharmacological research and distribution. Not exactly a common genre, I know, but Susan has put equal parts thought and heart into her world of poisoned livers and singsong façades. Give it a listen! You won’t be disappointed.
When I was little, my parents died trying to reach Lady Luck. My brother Maynard says the journey was hard back then. These days, it’s easier for people to worship at her feet.
What she demands as sacrifice isn’t so straightforward.
“There’s nothing for him in this town.” Maynard’s voice is bitter as he watches Clay skip off to school on his ninth birthday. My nephew is a sweet boy, all shining hazel eyes under a thatch of curly dark hair that reminds us of his late mother. She died when Lady Luck frowned on her, but nobody mentions that. It’s just one of those things.
A few days ago, I tried to show Clay how I wanted to streamline the house’s microfiltration system, but Maynard told me to cut that shit out. Clay is destined for greater things. In two months, the boy will enter the education lottery and then he might be able to get out of here.
“It’s not fair,” Maynard continues. “Getting that bitch Luck to smile ain’t easy for people like me. Not these days.”
My brother lapses into a stony silence. I’m loath to break it. I turn my eyes without moving my head, checking on Gran. She’s blessedly asleep.
Maynard picks up one of my stray models I meant to put away. Wires twist intricately through a pair of oversized buttons, each one representing airflow—the beginnings of an idea I have, if I ever get to design it. Maynard’s broad thumb crushes the delicate thing. Wires bend beyond recognition as he continues to ruminate.
“Clay needs an extra boost,” he declares. “Something to get him through that lottery and into the City, where he’ll have more chances.”
Under the table where my brother can’t see, I let my hands and toes fidget. “A visit to Lady Luck?” I whisper.
“Damn straight.” Maynard bares yellowed teeth in a kind of smile. “We’ll leave in three days.”
We?
Maynard reveals more of his teeth as he preempts my next question. “You’re coming with me, Cassie. Gran, too.”
“What about Clay?” I ask.
“He’ll stay in town. It isn’t a problem finding someone to look after him for a month.”
Once my brother makes a decision, nothing sways him. Fear of the unknown rivets me to the hard plastic chair. But a shiver of excitement lurks underneath.
I’ve always wanted to leave town. There’s nothing for me here, either.
The hours tick down to our departure. I can’t shake my unease. I’ve mapped out our journey a dozen times, tracing the way past other towns all the way to the ocean. Lady Luck lives at the edge of the water, near enough the City to constantly watch over its unmoving houses, high walls, and thick gates.
To get to her, we’ll have to pass perilously near Tilt Town.
Tilter streets are crooked gashes across steep hills, nothing like the neat layout of normal towns. Instead of balancing on treads and wheels, their dwellings cling to the soil any which way they can, because the earth often shifts underneath Tilt Town.
That’s how the place got its name. The inhabitants must constantly be ready to readjust the slant of their living quarters, to recut stilts and shore up bedrooms and kitchens so they can sleep and eat without rolling sideways.
Maynard says the Tilters don’t worship Lady Luck hard enough, even though they practically live at her feet, and that’s why none of them are successful. When I misbehaved as a kid—which was often—he’d threaten to send me there. Now, even though I’m long past the days of overt meltdowns, the thought of Tilt Town makes me shiver.
Across the room, near the driver’s capsule, Gran moans from her recliner. I’m glad for an excuse to fold the map. The house sways slightly on its treads as I fetch a precious measure of water. Maynard says it doesn’t matter at this point if Gran ingests microplastics, so he forbade me to use the house’s inbuilt filtering system for her. Instead, I take out one of my homemade contraptions, decanting a small amount into Gran’s favorite cup. Her lips press against worn enamel. She can barely manage to drink by herself these days.
I wish Gran and I could stay behind with Clay, but Maynard is right. Nobody here would take us in.
I hold Gran’s bony hand and explain our upcoming journey. With her, I always presume competence. I taught Clay to do the same, even though Gran is mostly listless, gazing out the window into our yard, where we manage to cultivate a crop of hardy vegetables.
But when I tell Gran we’re going to see Lady Luck to help Clay get out of here, her filmy blue eyes clear and harden.
“No, Cassie,” she tells me. “No.”
Maynard is dismissive of Gran’s reaction. “She loved Clay and wanted the best for him,” he snaps. “We’re leaving tomorrow, come hell or high water.”
I don’t push, because now that Clay is old enough to be more independent, Maynard gets stressed out by me still living with him. Gran and I, we’re a lot. That’s what he says when he’s fed up.
Maynard is a pillar of the community, a deputy police chief, so his word carries weight around here. But that isn’t enough to guarantee Clay a spot in the City.
Lady Luck must smile on my nephew for that.
In the living room, all my magazines are stacked in order. My precious parts are laid out in perfect lines, ready to be packed for our journey. A graphite filter sits next to a hunk of solar panel I salvaged from the town dump. I have screws, wires, nets, bits of metal, and a box of tools. I make sure to pack everything safely away before Maynard comes in. He hates it when I mess around trying to invent stuff, because then I have less time to clean and look after Gran.
But later, after I’ve read Clay a bedtime story and tucked him in, Maynard pulls me aside. “Do one more check of the house, Cassie. Make sure the engine and treads are good so we’re ready to roll tomorrow.”
I can’t help but smile. He wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t trust my mechanical know-how. Maybe Lady Luck will smile upon me, too.
The morning of our departure dawns hot and bright, a reminder that fire season starts soon. Five years ago, everyone had to drive their houses to the town’s auxiliary parking lot and hunker down to avoid a nearby blaze. That’s the furthest I’ve ever traveled.
Until today.
I make a bet with Clay, wagering that he’ll grow at least half a centimeter while we’re gone. If he doesn’t, he’ll give me his best marble. If he does, I’ll craft him a new toy.
He asks for an airplane, lips turning up in that amazing little smile of his. We rush to measure him against the doorframe once more, and then he heads to school, waving three times at the gate—once for each extra hug I gave him this morning.
I watch him until he’s out of sight.
Maynard makes me pick the vegetables from our garden, even though it’s too early. Half of them are severely underripe, but he says better us getting them than someone else. Then Maynard starts up the house’s engine and we roll out toward the town’s front gate.
I hang out a side window, a kind of freedom blowing through my hair. Even before Gran needed fulltime care, I didn’t get out and about much. I was always the weird girl, the annoyance at the edges who broke the social rules over and over until it was better for me to stay out of sight, out of mind.
Sometimes it feels like I’m not really part of the community anymore, but maybe that’s unavoidable in a town where people prize individualism above all.
Old Ulrich who guards the gates gives me a look I’m used to, somewhere between pity and contempt. His gaze flickers over Gran in her recliner. I watch uneasily as Ulrich’s lips twist.
“May it be enough.” Ulrich nods at Maynard and turns his gaze toward the distance again, watching for interlopers who might try to infiltrate the town, or steal our vegetables, or whatever interlopers do.
The gate shuts behind us, and we’re truly on our way.
We drive west, watched with suspicion by the Ulrich-equivalents at each semi-identical town gate. On day four, we stop to repair one of the house’s treads. Then our sewage filtration system breaks down, but with a little fiddling, I rig up a fix that’ll hold us for the journey.
After two weeks of travel, the towns dwindle until we are surrounded by sere hills whose tan flanks guide us downward until we spot the ocean in the distance. I have never seen so much water in one place, except in pictures. But although the silvery-blue streak on the horizon is alluring, my eyes are drawn toward the jagged skyline of Tilt Town. At night, the town glows with a hellish flame from the pit on its outskirts, the depths burning endlessly. At school, we learned that’s because of an unholy combination of natural gasses and whatever the Tilters throw down there. My classmate Paisley said they threw in babies, and the teacher didn’t correct her.
“Aren’t you happy I didn’t ship your ass to the Tilters when you used to have all those tantrums over stupid crap like food textures and the wrong socks?” Maynard gestures to the wheel. “Take a shift. I need to stretch my legs.”
As I sit, Maynard slams the reinforced door behind him. Because of his job, he got extra security features for his house, so the driver’s capsule is wholly secure, like a commercial airplane’s cockpit of old. Or a panic room.
Later that afternoon, I feed Gran from her favorite cup, but she turns her head at every spoonful. My worry turns into fear. She’s growing weaker.
“Look,” I whisper. “We’re nearly to the ocean. In a few hours, we’ll see Lady Luck.”
Gran raises one bony hand in a weak signal, index finger extended. Maybe she’s trying to sign Go, but her hand splays, and falls, and it turns into more of a No.
We arrive near sunset. Lady Luck towers above us, easily ten times as tall as Maynard. She stands knee-deep in ocean water, the tide lapping at her pearlescent marble skirts. One hand is upraised, as if to offer consecration. The other holds the leash of a giant stone dog, green-hued and brindled with salt. Lady Luck’s thin lips press together, neither smiling nor frowning.
Yet.
I take a few careful steps onto the beach, searching the tideline for washed-up sacrifice. Maynard crunches past, leaving hard, deep footprints in the sand. He has a recent photograph of Clay, the one in which he’s grinning so hard we can see two lost teeth. Maynard stops at the water’s edge.
“See the dog?” he asks. “He and Luck always go hand in hand. He’s called Hard Work. Kind of like you.”
He laughs. I don’t. I have a bad feeling in my stomach, and it isn’t because I’ve been trying to eat the unripe vegetables from our garden.
“Maynard, what are you going to sacrifice?”
My brother kicks off his boots, rolls up his trousers, wades into the water. I want to do the same, to feel the luxury of liquid lapping around my toes, but I’m afraid of Maynard’s stance, and especially of the vicious buck knife he’s produced.
But I still trust him, don’t I?
“Go inside, Cassie. Get Gran ready to move.”
Habit makes me obey immediately. But halfway up the beach, I turn for a second look.
Maynard was the one who convinced Clay’s mother to keep the baby inside her until full-term, even though pregnancy was killing her. It was a necessary sacrifice, Maynard said. Lady Luck smiled on Clay and took his mother in exchange. But surely Maynard doesn’t mean to offer himself to the statue.
I pick up my pace. I rush indoors to shift Gran into her wheeled mobility chair. But she kicks, rocking perilously side to side, and I’m afraid she’ll fall over—so I wedge her into the driver’s capsule between the heavy door and the wall, where she’s safest.
Then I crack open the window and watch Maynard wade up to Lady Luck, to the tiny altar of her skirt.
“Here, have it all!” he shouts, and with movements I don’t understand, he cuts the air nearby with a knife. A multi-colored aura hovers around the outline of his body, as if hesitating to leave.
“Take my dreams!” Maynard demands. “Take my ambitions!”
The aura coalesces and streams toward Lady Luck—a wonder of a moment, even if it isn’t mine to experience. It reaches her marble in a riot of color and settles effervescently into her skirt folds before glowing upward.
When the light reaches her face, Maynard holds up the photo of Clay, and Lady Luck’s stern lips lift into a smile focused at the boy.
I should be happy. This could be enough extra luck for Clay to get into the City. But I think, maybe once your own ambitions are all tied up in other folks, the only thing left to do is enforce them.
And Maynard doesn’t look satisfied.
Sound carries near water, so I hear Maynard mutter, “Forgive me for what I’m about to do.”
I realize, with a cold bolt of certainty, why the townsfolk averted their gazes as we rolled out of town. Why Ulrich pitied me at the gates. Maynard won’t stop at giving up his own dreams and ambitions.
He’ll sacrifice me and Gran, too.
I slam the capsule door shut. Jam my foot onto the pedal. We move at a crawl at first, but it’s enough to soothe Gran’s restlessness. She signs go. Go. Go.
Maynard’s after us, sprinting up the beach, sunset glinting orange off his drawn knife.
I activate the fireproof panels. They creep slowly downward, shooting the house’s fuel economy to hell. But we’re already in hell, so what does it matter?
The weight of Maynard’s body hitting the porch makes the house bounce on its treads. A warning light flashes on the dashboard as one of the panels halts.
My brother wrenches open the unlocked back door with a colossal bang.
He’s already bellowing threats, storming his way to the driving area, fists bashing against metal. He’s thwarted, furious, dangerous. A kind of fury stirs within me, too, something I haven’t been allowed for years. I want the best for Clay. But not at the expense of my own dreams—or Gran’s life.
I steer us uphill. Toward Tilt Town.
“Cassie!” Maynard bawls. “Come out right now!”
Defiance, long dormant, makes me crank the house’s speed to maximum. At the door, Maynard’s fists go ominously quiet. Footsteps creak down the hallway. They return faster than I’d like.
“Cassie,” Maynard says more quietly. “I have an axe. Open up now, or you’ll get hurt.”
When I was Clay’s age, Gran tried to teach me how to tell the difference between bluffing and truth.
“It’s not safe to assume everyone means well,” Gran said back when she could string sentences together coherently. “You’re a vulnerable type, Cassie. You need to be able to sniff out a lie.”
“Lies don’t smell,” I’d told her, and she’d looked up to the ceiling in despair. Then I’d gone back to my books and my inventions, neither of which are in the habit of being sneaky or untruthful.
Still, I didn’t turn out completely naïve.
When I open the capsule door to Maynard, I’m armed with the flare gun he keeps underneath the driver’s seat. Like a lot of things, it’s a relic of a bygone time. But it’ll scorch his face off if I shoot him at close range. Especially since he lied about the axe. He’s only got a hatchet.
“You’re not sacrificing Gran,” I tell him. “Or me.”
My brother scowls, but he backs away, moving to the side to let us pass as we reach the living room. I keep the gun pointed at his face as I bend to grab my box of personal possessions. I take a photo of Clay, too. Maynard sneers as I stow my stuff in the compartment underneath Gran’s mobility chair.
“Your inventions and books won’t keep you alive,” my brother says. “Not in Tilt Town.”
Maybe he’s right. But there are worse fates.
I wheel Gran backward with one hand. Thump her over the threshold, past the slender lines of ink that show Clay’s growth over the years. My throat is tight but my eyes are dry. I keep the flare gun pointed, even when the house begins to move again.
Maynard drives away, abandoning us at the side of the road as night descends.
I wheel Gran upward. There’s nowhere else to go, so we head in the direction of Tilt Town.
This terrifies me, but if I was wrong about my brother, what else could I have been wrong about? Old aspirations stir at the edges of my mind like long-forgotten fever dreams. Maybe I could get a job, a real one—not just cleaning and looking after Clay and Gran.
I used to read job advertisements in the magazines that found their way to us. I’d narrow them down to what a town’s education qualified me for. I wanted to be a research assistant. Anything above that required me to have been lucky enough for a college education. But Maynard told me I shouldn’t apply. People like me talk wrong, act wrong, think wrong. I’d never fit in, so why bother?
The road is steep, and the night is moonless. Far behind, Lady Luck still glimmers with Maynard’s sacrificed dreams. In the hills ahead, the pit casts its orange smolder against distant rooftops. The wheels on Gran’s chair squeak until I have to hum under my breath to balance out the painful sound. There’s no Maynard to scold me for making annoying noises.
But soon, I’m exhausted and dizzy, and Gran is moaning.
I push us onto the road’s shoulder and lift Gran from her chair, making sure her head doesn’t droop forward and block off her windpipe. We sink to the ground and I cradle her to me. She is so weak. Even when I explain what’s going on, she only twirls my hair gently, in a movement that’s somehow both a baby’s questing hand and a mother’s soothing touch.
There’s no point fearing the unknown when death is already in my lap. The chill of the night keeps me from sleeping soundly, but I drop into an occasional doze.
When dawn breaks and I shudder awake for the final time, Gran is dead in my arms, and there’s a group of Tilters staring down at us.
Grief numbs my fear. I cannot speak. All I can do is hold Gran’s cooling hand.
The Tilters don’t look like devils or rapists, like Maynard used to call them. They wear homespun clothes and concerned expressions, and when they help lift Gran’s body into her chair, they’re gentle. We walk slowly into Tilt Town. I keep hold of Gran’s hand, half-expecting it to rise to sign for water, or food, or warmth. It stays still, no matter how I cling.
I’m homeless. No more Gran, no more Clay. I have to recalibrate. But how?
Tilt Town’s steep streets and stationary dwellings prove less threatening than I expect. People eye me curiously from doorsteps, but don’t ask prying questions. There’s no Ulrich equivalent to interrogate me, because there are no gates here.
I still can’t talk, so eventually, people call on someone named Big Joan.
“Come on,” Big Joan says, brooking no argument. She grasps Gran’s chair with hands twice the size of mine, and I follow her broad shoulders toward her residence: a trio of shipping containers loosely welded together. A ramp leads to her living room. Poorly-made pipes run the length of the room, connecting to the bathroom at the far end.
Big Joan pours me half a cup of water through an extremely inefficient filter.
“We get all sorts here, but most of them aren’t dead on arrival,” the woman tells me in a gruff contralto. “I know you’re in shock, but we gotta find a resting place for your loved one. Usually, folks opt to be recycled. Helps crops. Helps others live. Now and then, we get those who wanna be burned or put to the ocean. So, you decide which she would have wanted while I leave you be for a bit.”
Big Joan exits the room. While I think about Gran’s next steps, I reach for the filter. I have to keep my fingers busy. When I was a kid, I used to break things apart one bit at a time, until Gran gave me tools of my own. Then I turned destroying into fixing.
Tears blur my eyes as I lean past Gran to fetch my box of stuff. I need a focus, or I’ll drown in grief. I mend the handle of the portable filter and shore up the gaping left side, where microplastics could leak through. By the time Big Joan returns, I’m wedged under her sink, checking out the house’s rudimentary filtration system, which has major problems.
My fingers explore. My brain calms. Big Joan waits.
“Gran would want to be recycled,” I say when I recover the ability to speak. “She always tried to teach us to help others.”
“What’s your name?” Big Joan asks on the second day.
We sit in front of her living room container, our feet propped in the street. Tilters pass by, and each one nods to us. They don’t keep themselves to themselves here.
I lift my eyes. The town’s arable land lies in the mid distance. Gran’s body will contribute to the crops grown there. I remain silent for a few beats, considering Big Joan’s question. I don’t feel like who I used to be.
“Cass,” I finally say.
An hour ago, I finished my repairs on Big Joan’s house, and now there is no more risk of cross-contamination when the house recycles waste. Previously, she’d had been at high risk of dysentery or cholera. Her filtration system still isn’t perfect, but it’s much safer.
Fixing it kept me busy, but dread settles across my shoulders, weighing me down until I’m surprised the chair I’m perched on doesn’t snap into hundreds of plastic shards. Big Joan told me she often takes in newcomers for a day or two, just until they get on their feet. Now it’s time for her to thank me for my work and send me on my way. To where, I don’t know. I’m too numb to panic. Probably, I’ll find a spot nearby and wait to join Gran. Maynard was right. I have no clue how to live independently.
Then Big Joan speaks, and the chair doesn’t break, and everything in me is suddenly light.
“You’re good at fixing things, and I’m not. I’d like you to stay with me, Cass,” she says. “For as long as you want.”
Living with Big Joan gives me the luxury of my own time and space. The Tilters quickly get into the habit of bringing me City trash, which I occasionally turn into useful treasure.
Water is scarce, but the situation is worse here, because the shortage is exacerbated by position. Any rain the Tilters gets runs swiftly down to the City. I wander between propped-up dwellings and make notes on gradients and groundwater and revel in the fact that people here don’t interrupt my focus by demanding to know what I’m doing, is the house clean, and what’s for supper?
People here constantly rebuild, rejig, reshuffle. In the first month, the ground tilts three times. The movement is somehow both subtle and sudden. One moment, everything is normal. Then, without even seeming to move, the hill slants an extra quarter of a centimeter away from the City—as if the place is weighing down the world, making Tilt Town rise to precarious heights. The pit shifts ever-closer, throwing its light over everything.
At night, from the new balcony I welded to Big Joan’s upper level, I often stare in Lady Luck’s direction. When she glows from recent sacrifice, she lights distant pale walls, lending the City an extra moon’s worth of gentle whiteness. At times like that, her shadow falls across Tilt Town, dampening the constant orange glow of the pit. It’s an uneasy darkness, layered like a series of bloodstains seen only under UV light.
Seasons pass. I wouldn’t bother to count them if it weren’t for Clay.
By now, he’s twelve. When one of the Tilters manages to acquire premium internet, we crowd around a screen and carve up the time into precious minutes. One day, my curiosity becomes too much, and I make myself join in. My fingers fly over the keyboard. Clay’s name pops up almost immediately.
Maynard’s sacrifice was enough. Lady Luck got Clay a spot at a moderately prestigious City school. I move away from the screen, wracked with relief, with guilt, even with jealousy—but above all, I just miss my nephew.
He would have grown that half a centimeter by now. In my spare time, I craft him the airplane I’d promised. Not a flimsy toy, but a display model fit for the teenager he’ll soon become. Maynard always wanted him to like fighter jets or bombers, but Clay’s most treasured models were of commercial airplanes. When I finish, I carve the name of his favorite airline and flight number—one of the last ever flown—into the metal.
Then I wrap it carefully and Big Joan arranges for it to be delivered to his school in the City.
“Do you think he’ll like it?” I ask her.
“No point wondering,” she says from the kitchen, where she’s fixing up a batch of soup for a communal lunch. “You did as much as you have control over.”
Big Joan has people skills but not a ton of book smarts, and I’m basically the opposite. What we have, I tell her, is a symbiotic relationship, and she always makes sure to acknowledge observations like that with a serious nod before asking me if I’ve remembered to stay hydrated. I’m glad for her skills as I help carry bowls and utensils.
Today, we watch the news. Towns like my old one have begun developing slants of their own. There’s lots of talk about how to brace treads and build stronger gates.
It’s not a disaster yet, the talking heads claim. With enough sacrifice, Lady Luck will smile upon their own. Look at the City, they say. It’s slowly sinking, but they’re coping.
We’ll cope too, right?
Except we don’t.
Even my newest inventions cannot get Tilt Town enough water. It hasn’t rained more than a few drops for months. We’re all going thirsty and unwashed. I’ve done everything possible: maximized the efficiency of each wastewater system, rigged up extra nets to collect fog and dew, and set my solar desalinization stations to work overtime processing oceanwater.
We don’t have enough resources to collect our most-needed resource.
What hurts the most is the way people look at me as if I can fix this. In despair one night, I climb to the top of Big Joan’s roof with my telescope. Colonizing Mars is a ship that’s long since sailed, but watching stars reminds me that the universe is composed of more than just us and the City.
After a long time peering through a homemade telescope, I make out lights that aren’t stars. I frown, adjust lenses, and continue observation. The lights turn out to be small, state-of-the-art drones. They circle far above, a glittering, fine mesh stretching between them.
No wonder we’re not getting any water. The City is stealing our rain before it even reaches us.
We’ll all die if we don’t figure out how to change this.
Big Joan calls a meeting. Everyone in Tilt Town comes.
There’s an energy that flows in most humans, one that seems to be several parts sectarianism mixed with a large dash of magical thinking and a varying dose of self-preservation. When I announce that we’ve reached a tipping point, I expect resource-hoarding to commence and for me to be considered a burden again.
But nobody here is overly interested in maintaining the status quo.
So when I’m done explaining, everyone stays quiet. Even stranger, they look to me for a plan.
“I’ve thought a lot about seesaws,” I tell everyone haltingly, encouraged by the way Big Joan stands at my shoulder. “They’re logical, but they also taught me about human nature. When you’re light, and a heavy kid climbs onto the other side, they might fling you toward the stratosphere. That’s what the City’s doing. Maybe they don’t set out to do it, but it’s happening anyway.”
“Then what do we do?” a person shouts from the crowd, which has swollen to a size I never expected. We’ve gotten more town refugees lately.
“What can we do?” someone else mutters. “They can steal anything they like and call it their due.”
Big Joan steps forward before things get frayed. She thumps a fist against her heart.
“Everyone’s got something in them that helps a community. But they aren’t always given a chance to show it.”
People nod and shuffle at her words. This buys me time to talk about my calculations of force and mass. I arm the crowd with hard numbers, and then I tell them, flat out, the only thing that’ll fix this situation.
“It’s time to kill Lady Luck.”
We march toward the ocean, carrying what we need to topple the phenomenon that killed my parents and saved my nephew. I think of Clay a lot these days. I’m not one for magical thinking, but I choose to believe he got the airplane I sent. That he knows I’m still alive. That I love him.
Lady Luck stands thigh-deep in the water when we arrive, her skirts red with recent sacrifice. As a final act of self-preservation, she smiles upon me, and whispers into my mind that the City wants me, has always wanted me, I’m so smart, I’m so incredibly useful—but I’m done with Lady Luck’s foibles.
I gesture, and the Tilters come forward.
We haul Lady Luck off her pedestal, and the tenuous link between the statue and her dog breaks forever. The canine representation of Hard Work stands alone in the swelling tide as we drag Lady Luck up the steep hill, toward the glowing pit beyond. We’re sending her to hell.
By the time we reach the halfway point, we’re sweating and trembling with exertion. Lady Luck tries to work her magic on the hundreds of Tilters at her ropes. It could be you, she whispers in increasing desperation.
“Statistically improbable!” I take to shouting. A few take up the words, like a rallying cry. Others snap back with their own rejoinders.
“It’s never people like me,” my neighbor bellows, thumping marble with a walking aid.
“It should be all of us!” another person yells.
“No more sacrifice!” Big Joan puts her back into pulling.
The pit’s foul miasma hits us, and our breaths turn shallow. The fires below are fueled by City garbage and natural gasses, not Tilter babies like my classmate once claimed. We heave once more. Marble flashes.
A deep groan shudders through the earth as Lady Luck falls headfirst into orange flames.
Lady Luck is dead, and everything changes.
The land underneath Tilt Town begins to sink, levelling out with the City. Because the Tilters are so used to working as a community, we’re quick to save our dwellings. Big Joan rushes from place to place, only pausing when we see what’s happening to the walls over which Luck once smiled.
They shift, slowly but surely. The City’s foundations were never built on level ground to begin with, so its walls sag quickly to one side. People put their hands atop shoulders of children, pointing, saying: you may never see this again in your lifetime.
I know this is right, and I also know this is wrong. Like a seesaw unweighted, the earth underfoot continues to settle, and my thoughts turn to Clay. My sweet nephew with his quick smile. If I hadn’t had his growth to cherish alongside Gran’s slow deterioration and Maynard’s hard words, how would I have managed to keep my own balance for so long?
One Tilter sets up a projector and begins streaming footage. For the City, the world has flipped sideways. Walls are floors and floors are walls, and the gates stand wide open to the outside for the first time in centuries. I clench my hands into fists as I watch people run for their lives. I lean in close to the screen. Searching. Hoping. A drone camera zooms in on a group of students rushing toward the gates. They’re nearly there when a chunk of masonry smashes into their midst. The frontrunners are unscathed, but one of their fellows is trapped, legs waving, screaming for help. My stomach twists.
A sudden patter of rain cuts through our silence. The City’s drones have fallen, and people turn away from the screened drama, scurrying outside with their mouths open, salt-encrusted faces turned to a new sky as stolen, hoarded water falls in fat drops.
But I stay with the projector. Pause it. Rewind. Back to the falling masonry. Back to one student in particular, whose escape was narrow, almost miraculous.
I see the whites of his eyes underneath dark, curly hair. No bag or other possessions. Only a battered model airplane clutched in one hand.
I watch the brief footage over and over. I study the stoop of his shoulders, the direction of his gaze, the bend of his legs, the quick flex of his arm as he turns to look at his fallen fellow. Will he stay and help, or keep running?
The camera cuts away at the crucial point of Clay’s decision.
I rewind, but Big Joan touches my shoulder before I can hit play again.
“Let’s travel down to the gates together,” she says, “so we can aid whoever makes it out.”
This story begins and ends with the X that means both death and hope.
Three Xs, two strikes, one message: Solidarity.
26 November, 2017.
The Australian government would prefer that we forget this crime against humanity, this X in flesh in the air.
It’s a humid, sweaty, overcast day at a protest at Federation Square in the centre of Melbourne. Shen Narayanasamy of the progressive activist group GetUp! tells us that the police are beating with batons the refugee men who have spent 21 days in peaceful protest against their detention on Manus Island, Australia’s refugee detention centre in Papua New Guinea. SHAME read the signs in the square. FOUR YEARS TOO LONG. We’re doing this today at the request of the men, to rise to the dignity of their example. Natasha Blucher of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre tells us whistleblowers’ accounts of the Nauru camp, another offshore Australian refugee detention centre. Amazing locals put themselves at risk to get us, journalists, food, and water into the camp. The smell: There was two weeks’ worth of garbage that the men had tried to collect and contain. Pulling water from a well with an oily film on top. Ingenious fresh-water catchment, bed sheets tied up with bottles at the bottom. Every cubicle in the toilets was full to the brim with diarrhoea. The men were so sick and had serious illnesses from three or four years locked up. Even in that toxic place, the refugees’ culture of hospitality prevailed. We ate biscuits that somebody had baked in the middle of a siege. They brought tea for us and added sugar. They’d saved it for guests. HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE A CRIME spake the signs. STOP VILIFYING REFUGEES. In the crowd I see Hijabi Muslim women of colour, young white guys in shorts, and many seniors holding photos of the refugees who have died in Australian camps. There have been 14 known refugee deaths in offshore detention since 2014, including 7 by suicide. Senior women with purple shirts saying Grandmothers against children in detention.
The crowd is asked to kneel, or sit if we can’t kneel, for four minutes, with our hands crossed above our heads, which is the way that the men of Manus had been protesting for 21 days. We squat or sit with difficulty for four minutes, hearing the words of Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani’s statement, his dignity, his gratitude for our support. There is the hideous dissonance of a Wallace & Gromit exhibition ad in huge letters behind the crowd squatting with their hands crossed. The ad silently blares It’s hard to wipe the smile off your face! Behrooz’s statement is haunting: despite having not enough food themselves, the refugees had been feeding their dogs, and the police had killed one out of spite.
The sun breaks through the clouds and is thanked for it by a grateful speaker. Activists who used to teach at Victoria University speak with admiration of their migrant and refugee students’ resourcefulness. The small moments of humour are some of the most striking. Leading us in the squat, a speaker says It’s okay to sit if you can’t squat, if your knees aren’t, you know, pilates. The crowd chuckles, and I think about those small moments of levity, not because we’re having fun, but because we recognise our shared humanity, our vulnerability.
This X is in flesh in the air, arms crossed in solidarity, the X of the refugee men’s arms iconic of their captivity. The X that represents the deaths from which they flee and to which our policies have driven them. But their X is the hope of protest too, of shackles to be broken, and ours a tribute to their dignity and their deep humanity, unassailable.
Australia’s federal government would prefer that we forget this crime against humanity, this X in flesh in the air. Will you let them?
13 November, 2019.
This X is the target that Aboriginal people have had on them in this colonised country for over 230 years. It is the X in the scope of a gun, too often turned on Black men, women, and gender-diverse people by police in this colony.
It is a grey day at the snap rally Justice for Kumanjayi Walker, a 19-year-old Warlpiri Aboriginal man who was shot by police in his home in Yuendumu, 300 km north-west of Alice Springs, in central Australia, on Saturday 9 November, 2019. A crowd begins to gather at the intersection of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets. A man with a sad expression, lines on his forehead, and a streak of rich red hair licking up from the right of his forehead addresses a circle of orange-and-yellow high-vis supporters. No microphone, but I see him mouth They say it’ll be a rally in the rain, well it’ll rain. Those of you who’ve done this before… A fat Black man with a clipped beard and red Indigenous-design dots across a red sports-style vest leans his face into the chest and over the left shoulder of a thin man in front of him, taking comfort from him. Two little Black girls huddle together under their Aboriginal flag to protect them from the beginning rain. A sign rises over the crowd. THE FUTURE IS BLACK. A chill wind blows down Elizabeth St and through the pillars I stand between at the top of the Bourke St post office steps.
The signs are heartbreaking. I see women looking desolate under hand-written and printed signs KILLED IN CUSTODY, the red and yellow letters stark against the black background. A fierce, articulate Black man gestures with his right hand as a bank of cameras point at him, Terra Nullius is a legal fiction! (Terra Nullius, Latin for “nobody’s land,” was the legal principle used by British settler-colonists to justify stealing the territory of Australia from its Aboriginal Traditional Owners during British colonisation in the late eighteenth century.) A woman with short white hair nods during the speeches, an Aboriginal flag rises above the lowered zip of her open black hoodie. Her mouth wobbles, she bends her head down to her left hand to wipe a tear, never putting down her sign End the brutality! Stop the killings! Justice for Wayne! Her stricken face resonates between the placards and I can’t look away from her grief. The sacred smoke of burning eucalyptus leaves rises over the crowd in a wind that blows down Bourke St. An Aboriginal Elder raises his voice and a smooth dark brown staff and projects to us his name and his Country, and that he is from the Stolen Generations. He raises his hands to the sky and describes the spirits he is connected with—I have been blessed. A ripped cardboard sign rises before me, BLACK LIVES MATTER with strong strokes in yellow and red. The crowd has swelled and fills the tram tracks. I see the kind eyes of Aunty Tanya Day smiling from a poster.
Jaeden Williams, a Yalukit Willam man of the Boon Wurrung people, speaks. My family have been here for 4,000 generations, for 100,000 years. This land has a story that is a lot longer than 150 years. According to the Boon Wurrung, this land was created by Bunjil, who travels as an eagle. He taught us to welcome all friends and guests. Bunjil’s Laws are two promises, and these promises have been the essence of the land since time began. He asks the crowd to speak after him, and we join our voices to say,
We promise
to look after the land
and the water
and we promise
to look after the children
That’s been the spirit of this land, of Melbourne, of my culture, since time began.
A sign, white text on a black background:
16 . 03 . 2019
Veronica Baxter 34
IDENTIFIED AS A WOMAN
THROWN IN A MALE PRISON
FOUND HANGING IN CELL
Does anyone have clapsticks? asks a speaker. The powerful Elder raises his staff and says, I’ve got a weapon of mass destruction! and the crowd laughs along with him. A woman speaker asks us to put a hand over our hearts—Breath in from our ancestors. The crowd is silent, stricken faces, the pulse-pulse of our hands tapping a heartbeat on the cloth over our hearts. After finishing, I think our ancestors heard us. A tram leaves the intersection toward Queen St.
A speaker reads statements from Elders in the area, later published in The Saturday Paper.
From Marly Wells Naparngardi, a Warlpiri woman: We came on Sunday morning to stand together in our grief and were presented with smirking police officers and no answers. Two mounted police attempted to bring their horses closer, an intimidation tactic. Someone requested them to leave and I heard one of the officers say, “If you had any respect for the horse’s life you would stop waving the cardboard in its face. He doesn’t like it. You’re intimidating him.” If you had any respect for human beings, if you had any respect for the Traditional Owners of this land, if you had any respect at all, you would be questioning the systems in place—the systems you benefit from, the systems that keep Aboriginal people down. “SHAME!” breaks out and spreads across the crowd.
A person of colour in a white knit jumper and navy headscarf holds a sign spray-painted on the back, beneath three inverted triangles in the queer anarchist movement’s pink and black,
QUEERS
AGAINST
COLONIAL
-ISM!
A man sings a Warlpiri song, a sad melody, and translates after every line—He’s missing his kids. Signs are held over heads as the rain begins. Police must not investigate police! A woman with a rainbow beanie asks to take a little boy with pale short hair past me down the steps to see the speakers. The crowd cheers a speaker and the boy turns around in his bright giraffe-print coat to give her the thumbs-up. The boy explains to her that he’s giving the thumbs-up to the speakers when the crowd claps to show his support. Use of bush medicine, cultural practices, and Law. Between speakers, a quiet descends over the crowd. A baby cries to my left and a motor idles on Elizabeth St.
The wind changes direction and blows up the steps towards me and I smell the sacred smoke of the eucalyptus. The women behind me are trying to find their friends in the crowd. “He’s running.” “Is he a super fitness nut?” The march begins and I join the back of the crowd and remember the enthusiasm and solidarity. A man and woman’s voices begin the chant behind me, Too many coppers: Not enough justice! A person with short hair and intricate spiderweb and flower tattoos emerging from their sleeves holds a sign lettered in black, yellow, and red,
TELL
THE
TRUTH
The red of TRUTH drips in the rain down their left wrist off the bottom of the sign, ominous. Too many coppers! begins the chant and breaks off into giggles as Too many coppers! rolls back from the front of the crowd and confuses the rhythm. We cross Swanston St and bank up, the roar of the crowd swells. A Black woman with short black curls holding her takeaway dinner with a tiny sauce tub on top rests on a short plinth and smiles, and I recognise her expression—gratitude and pride.
19 . 11 . 2004
MULRUNJI 36
DIED IN CELL WITHOUT TREATMENT
Too many cop-pers! Not enough—the crowd breaks off and a woman in yellow next to me adds hesitantly, Justice?
The crowd banks and turns to the left and a woman behind me asks, Are we stopping here? and it’s because there is a line of police in yellow high-vis in front of the Melbourne East Police Station, the letters of the sign booming towards us in 3D. I realise that the high-vis people I saw at the beginning are there to physically stand between us and the police, to protect us from their potential violence. Our guardians. They wear paper gas masks loose at the side of their necks, just in case, water bottles in their backpacks. The police watch uncomfortably.
We cross Russell St and a woman walking a shopping trolley and carrying a silver walking stick pipes up No justice, no peace! as she walks through the intersection. A woman with braids in a short, fluffy, red-lined jumper wheels her wheelchair with the march in front of us. I see two Eureka flags and the Torres Strait Islands flag flicking in the wind of the intersection ahead. A woman with a cane has an Aldi shopping bag and thongs—her feet look cold! She turns and laughs at her friend, a generous smile that rises from her cheeks under ginger bangs and hair trailing her shoulders and spilling out of a knitted beanie. A man with a sign, “Do ya want some water, Schazz?” “Yes please.” A silver-haired man in a red beanie and a worn leather jacket with a small gum branch tucked over his ear grins and embraces a friend. I see the two rows of guardians bringing up the rear of our march. Water trickles down the tram tracks. I see the boy with the giraffe-print jacket in fluoro pink gumboots at the edge of the crowd.
The crowd banks up at the Parliament steps.
In 2017, Aunty Tanya Day fell asleep on a train after drinking and was woken up and arrested by police under an archaic law for public drunkenness that has been historically disproportionately used to incarcerate Aboriginal people. During her four hours in a cell, she fell and injured her head, unsupervised. When she was discovered, it took an ambulance one hour to arrive. She never awoke and died in hospital.
At the protest, Tanya’s daughter Apryl Watson speaks, her voice struggling from the emotion: We’ve seen again and again deaths in custody, straight-up murder. Her voice is exhausted. Can you tell me how many people went to the Melbourne Cup, got blind drunk—How many whitefellas died in a cell? How many white women had ambulances? They didn’t give a shit about mum. Her voice breaks down at the end of her line. I’ve got my daughter at home, I can’t even have her sitting next to me when I get breathalysed, she’s crying because she doesn’t know what’s gonna happen to me, because she knows what happened to mum.
The sinking sun illuminates the stone-faced pillars and the tiny gold sphere is a dot in the inscrutable sunglassed eyes of every cop on the steps of Parliament.
We hear the righteous anger of a speaker. 12 years ago my nephew was found handcuffed in an alley and do you think anything happened to them police? The look of ’em, looking at us like we’re dickheads. They’re racists, they’re murderers! Every year this is happening! This Victorian government here was the first Constitution—Terra Nullius began here. If we had sovereignty recognised in this country, would we be in their jails? Would they be stealing our children? His voice rises to a sharp growl. They don’t give a fuck about us!
A line of Black women at the front hold up red-painted palms to the police line as we in the crowd chant Blood on your hands! Apryl Watson, her palms reddened, wipes her face with the back of her hand and, looking exhausted, walks down the steps.
Since her death, Aunty Tanya Day’s family fought for the Victorian state public drunkenness law to be abolished, and the law is set to be abolished on Melbourne Cup Day in November 2023.
Constable Zachary Rolfe faced a murder trial for the shooting of Kumanjayi Walker. He was acquitted of all criminal charges by an entirely non-Indigenous jury. It was the first time a Northern Territory police officer was charged with an Aboriginal death in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. There have been at least 517 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the release of the Commission’s report. No Australian police officer has ever been convicted of an Aboriginal death in custody.
9 May, 2018.
This X is the axis along which wages crawl in economic graphs, with productivity and profits soaring upwards together into the corner like a banker’s hollow smile. This X means an early death for those who can no longer afford to live in Australia.
Lots of morning coffee is being clutched at the Australian Council of Trade Union’s first Change the Rules strike. The sun is bright on Lygon St and the crowd smells of aftershave, perfume, and cigarettes. People hand out socialist newspapers reading “Corporate Greed is Bleeding Australia Dry!” I overhear conversation between guys in hoodies and boots, They’re saying $85 billion in tax cuts. The union initialisms on every side—NIW AEU NIMF MUA CFMEU—teachers, nurses, midwives, maritime and construction workers and more. The Greens triangle marches around above the crowd on invisible arms. A woman laughs on the way past, I’ve got the wrong shoes, the wrong shoes. I see fierce veteran Boomer activists with grey-streaked hair. The union’s Eureka flag in Indigenous colours flicks in the wind among the Australian Services Union (clerical workers). Big white blokes welcome each other with big handshakes. How are ya, mate? Where you bin workin’? I hear the growing boom of a helicopter, the first of the day. The socialist red flag flying high atop Trades Hall. An Indigenous man in a knitted beanie wears his nation’s flag proudly as a cape. Luke Hilakari, Trades Hall Secretary, tells us that we are 60,000 people strong on the streets of Melbourne. We do not wanna be a country of the working poor. For so long, big business have been feeding us crumbs, like we’re pigeons. We’re not pigeons. When the 1% have as much as 70%, the system is broken. Inequality is at a 70-year high. It hasn’t been this high since the Great Depression. Luke booms, Do you want equal pay for women? The crowd roars YES!
A speaker introduces Mahani, who is here representing 100,000 farm workers with the National Union of Workers. Overwhelmingly casual. No penalty rates. Paid cash-in-hand well below the legal minimum wage. Mahani introduces herself as a migrant farm worker from Malaysia. She has a high woman’s voice and a Malaysian accent. She sounds a little shrill through the speakers—who doesn’t when they have to project?—but her message is clear. We need work rights! We need better future! Speaking of undocumented migrant workers’ harsh black-market labour conditions, she says, We need amnesty now! White blokes who’d roared their support for Luke now stand around scoffing and laughing, wincing at her voice through the speakers. These moments don’t make it into the press coverage, but they’re some of the most important to remember. I am reminded that solidarity is not a status we achieve, but a horizon we work towards, and that our movements regularly fail people of colour. Mahani, migrant woman of colour, activist and union leader, braves our crowd’s bullshit and our country’s hostility to stand up to speak for 100,000 farm workers being exploited all over Australia.
A speaker booms, What does the government think when they think that they can turn around and tell youse who you can elect as union leaders?I say to all of you, people from all unions, when they came after them, they come for all of us! Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the peak trade union body, tells the crowd that 40% of Australian workers are in insecure work. 732 corporations paid not one cent of tax. 62 people who earned more than $1 million in a year paid not one cent of tax, not even the Medicare levy. Guys giggle about the difficulty of holding signs in the wind. Nah I’m good holding the flag here, might swap when I need a cigarette. Won’t have one yet though, might burn the flag! A tune starts up from a brassy marching band behind us. I first heard the tune as a kid in country Queensland, knowing it by the earlier folk song lyrics, John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave overlaid with the union movement’s 1915 lyrics to become their rallying song, “Solidarity Forever.” But I still hear John Brown’s body in the melody, and it only makes the union’s version more urgent—the failure of the union is a body in the grave.
The National Tertiary Education Union, my crew, in purple shirts and whistles. Education Not Exploitation! Casuals Against Casualisation! There are lots of young women among us. Postgrads and casuals on strike! No more unpaid work! Pink-scarfed, purple-haired, chatty, checking phones. Someone starts up a snare drum. A woman unionist tells us that the stereotype of a unionist is a man with a hard hat, but in Australia but the average unionist is a woman with a degree. Among the union’s contingent at a later rally, I hear Nic Kimberly, a casual academic, address the crowd. The Australian Catholic University threatened Nic with revoking his PhD scholarship for criticising casualisation in progressive national newspaper The Age. His voice gets stronger and more defiant as he says, So what did I do to respond? I became the union branch President! In the crowd, the conversation continues around me. It’s not about someone coming to uni to have that transformative experience anymore. It’s about getting bums on seats, and not long while we’re making money. Elsewhere, I hear, we’ve got a problem with homeless students. A silver-haired union woman waves to kids in the windows on Lygon St. The chilly winds of late Autumn blow down Victoria St as we walk through the intersection. Bystanders bop to the brass band as we slowly march. A first degree shouldn’t cost a mortgage! Onlookers grin, take phone videos. Flyers, flags and protesters have filled the street as far as the eye can see from Swanston to Queen St. A woman of colour wears leopard-print, sunnies and huge heart earrings with Militant in curvy script inside. The other side, I later see, reads Feminist. A flag flicks across the back of my neck, a surprising intimacy. A red-and-black jester-clothed trumpet player is cheered by the crowd. A sign says I’m young and insecure and so is my work! There is a crisp wind from behind and welcome pockets of sunshine and the slow spin of autumn leaves lifted on winds between skyscrapers. Smiling women in office windows wave invisible flags with us in solidarity. Photographers perch on every tram stop and plinth along our way to capture our march’s glorious sprawl.
Flyers paper the fancy cars parked in the middle of Bourke St. A kid in blue gumboots and a Superman shirt is wheeled through the march—despite chants, clappers, trumpets, and drums—completely asleep.
We pick up marchers, chants and energy as we make our way down Swanston St. A guy faceplants on the tram island and is helped by everyone. You right, brother? A voice reads out a news update behind me, City streets shut down as 50,000 march. A grumpy skinny corporate guy in a tight blue suit cuts through the crowd at an intersection. A speaker says, It’s about the young people we work with every day. They are ripped off in their jobs. They’re forced to jump through hoops to access inadequate Newstart (the unemployment welfare payment). We don’t want them to become the working poor of the future. Troy Carter tells the crowd about the Esso (ExxonMobil) workers: Sacked, then offered their jobs back at up to 40% less. It would be 742 days before the strike ended in a deal. Troy speaks about the effect on his family, on his children being bullied at school. My children have forced themselves into a shell to avoid being rejected. When I stood outside UGL (the contractor for Esso), their Payroll Officer yelled, “How’s your kids, Troy?” and laughed. Colin Long speaks, Secretary of the Victorian National Tertiary Education Union: 50% of undergraduate teaching is performed by casuals, many working casually for 5, 10, 15 years. Low super, no leave. It should be a scandal that one of our members found herself unable to leave an abusive relationship because of being totally financially dependent. Our researchers find cures for cancer, we develop renewable energy. We write to chart the course of the history we are living. Are you ready to change the rules? The farm workers’ signs, stark and true: NO PICKERS NO FOOD NO FUTURE.
This X means early death for the workers whose wages have flatlined along the X axes of economics graphs. But while the union movement lives there is always hope for a better future.
15 March, 2019.
It’s a clear day, sunshine, with a cool breeze outside the Old Treasury Building on Spring St as the crowd gathers for the global School Strike 4 Climate. An old woman with a walker, moving slowly, sunnies and a straw hat, makes her way through the intersection, a sign on her walker saying 1.5 to stay alive, stop climate change! Indigenous men in white paint clack clapsticks from atop a plinth, gum branches held to their comrades. A teenage girl’s voice rises above the crowd. My name’s Gaia, I’m a 17-year-old school strikerand I’m here because I want a future on this planet.We acknowledge that we meet on the stolen lands of the Boon Wurrung people and there is no climate justice without First Nations justice. The men raise their arms from the plinth and roar their strength. Two choppers hover over the intersection. Striking for our future, says a sign covered in sparkly writing and kids’ drawings. Stop giving us an excuse to skip school! The speaker continues, Make some noise if this is your first protest! I hear a roar reaching down the hill past Treasury Gardens that warms my heart. Grey-haired activists look on and smile. The sign pun/meme game at this protest is exquisite. My friends see me writing down slogans and make sure that I’ve noted the choicest quotes: There was one earlier, a picture of Tony Abbott (the ultra-conservative former Prime Minister filmed eating a raw onion like an apple), said “No onions on a dead planet.”Kids wouldn’t have to act like politicians if politicians didn’t act like kids!Prime Minister has a pet rock—He’s so coal. A handful of girls and a woman appear on the balcony of the Old Treasury building before being shooed off. A young woman’s voice across the crowd: 20,000 people are here, 20,000! and we roar. An Indigenous speaker says: We need to listen to my Country, to the Law of my ancestors. A sign says, I came here because I hate Melbourne weather. Climate change is not an elective! I hear, There’s a drone! and I see it, tiny creature hovering smoothly with its black legs. Grumpy old man who supports students. Don’t frack the future alongside the Midwives’ Union. Teachers for Climate Justice. A speaker says that 100 companies cause 71% of climate change. An Aboriginal woman is walking with her kids, something written in the elegant rhythms of an Indigenous language over an illustration of the Aboriginal flag and the earth. A translation on the back of the sign says Little faces, powerful hearts, we stand together. I ask her, What language is that? She replies Gunnai! with pride. It’s beautiful. My queer community are here: Gay for Renewables!
We listen to the urgent speeches of teenage girls in the microphone, Everyone who’s an activist and also a student, get everyone at your school, the crowd cheers, whistles and kazoos trumpet from all around. Keep the Earth clean, it’s not Uranus. I see the rainbow sheen of fresh-blown bubbles rising from the corner near the Treasury Gardens and floating away. We cluster in the shade of the buildings at the edge of the crowd. A baby in a sling on her mum’s front is holding a cardboard sign saying Nap strike for climate. Kids are front and centre on the steps of Old Treasury. The crowd is happy, energetic, diverse, loud, and dynamic. Climate change is union business on the black shirt of a charismatic fat lady with red lipstick who’s walking a little girl by the hand. Coal: Drop it coz it’s HOT. Marchers have brought a massive rainbow flag, silky and tall as two people. I notice later that it says WE ARE UNION. Proud teacher! Scared human. Kids’ fresh chalk drawings fade between the tram lines on the street, trees and earth in pinks and greens. Kids in school uniforms sit on the curb, grinning into their milkshakes. I’d rather be at school than telling you to do your job. A sign says My kids are revolting—proud dad. Tourists and businesspeople and shoppers look on happily from the street. I love the way the kids’ use of pop culture fuels their activism. Every disaster movie starts with scientists being ignored.
The crowd has poured into Treasury Gardens, and there are dogs barking, picnics, kids cheering, a speaker announcing solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors. White women in yellow high-vis security vests, Where’s the baaand, Jenny, I thought you said there was gonna be a band?! A speaker passionately exclaims, We are not your enemy! Farming communities are not your enemy! We are the ones being hit worst by climate change. A woman’s voice in the mic: I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who goes home every night who thinks, what is going to happen to my kids when I’m dead and gone? A speaker says My dad is a farmer. His dad is a farmer. I wanted to be a farmer but there won’t be anything left to FARM. The police estimate 50,000 people in Melbourne alone.
Attending the Melbourne protest of Donald Trump’s inauguration on 21 January 2017, a friend asks me, What’s the point? I say, We have to do something, we have to let them know that this is not okay. Critiquing the dismissal of activist events as “preaching to the choir,” Rebecca Solnit writes:
[Researcher Erica Chenoweth] concluded that only around 3.5 percent of a population was needed to successfully resist or even topple a regime non-violently. In other words, to create change, you don’t need everyone to agree with you; you just need some people to agree so passionately that they will donate, campaign, march, risk arrest or injury, possibly prison or death. Their passionate conviction may influence others. Ideas originate at the margins and migrate inwards to succeed; insisting that your idea must have arrived rather than be traveling is to miss how change works.
This X is the death of all life, what awaits us if we do nothing, if we don’t do enough, the X for extinction in the centre of Extinction Rebellion’s hourglass logo. But this X also means hope. Our hope lies in the fight not yet over, in the leadership of young people and Elders who show us the way. The hourglass is not finished, but time is running out.
This story begins and ends with the X that means both death and hope.
Three Xs, two strikes, one message: Solidarity forever.
“The X That Means Both Death and Life” originally appeared in Unlikely Stories in July 2023.
It is with sorrow that this paper announces the passing of one of our town’s greatest treasures, Wendy “Darling” Marszałek. She died on August 18th, 2081, in her early eighties. Contrary to her frequent predictions, she did not die “crushed under a pile of old tech”; she went peacefully, in her sleep, at her home here in Adden, MO, just a few miles from where she was born. I’m afraid I don’t know her exact birth date, since she never told it to me, and there’s no one else to ask. I only know that she was born here in town because she pointed the old hospital building out to me once, when she was giving me a tour of Adden. (She was shocked that no one had done so right when I moved in, and never seemed to understand that it was because there wasn’t much of the town to tour.)
Wendy was predeceased by most of her family and close friends; she never married or had kids, and her older sister, Leah, passed in the heat wave of 2072. As far as anyone knows, Wendy’s great-nephew, Rupert, is alive, but I was unable to contact him. After asking around town, I’ve realized I may be Wendy’s closest living friend—she said we were destined to be friends, since our names went together so well—so I volunteered to take on the obituary, even though I’m just the paper’s photographer and illustrator. (If there’s an afterlife, Wendy is out there boasting right now that a real newspaper reporter wrote her obituary, ignoring the fact that I’m not a writer at all.)
I don’t know how to sum Wendy up, and I feel like there were whole parts of her personality I never got to see. Here are a few things I can tell you about her. Wendy’s house was always a cluttered mess, filled with broken machines, except for her kitchen. Her kitchen she kept spotless, and once a week she’d devote a whole day to covering her counters in dumpling-making materials. She would then eat almost nothing but those dumplings for the rest of the week, until it was time to make more. Wendy tried a different dumpling recipe from a different culture every time, and I never noticed her repeating one.
Wendy always wore steel-toed boots, and she walked with a slight limp. She said the two were connected, but refused to explain why.
She was the Grand Marshal of the Adden pride parade a total of eleven times—five of them in a row. It was the only time I saw her out of her usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, wearing a sharp, custom-made boiler suit sewn in the trans flag colors instead.
Wendy loved to sing while she was working, and she was absolutely terrible at it. One time when she was working on my fridge, it got so bad I had to leave the house.
She was a regular at the town dump, and after a few half-hearted attempts to keep her from trespassing, they just gave up and told her to come by whenever she wanted. She had a great eye for things that could be salvaged, and would rant at length about how people throw everything out, because, “No one knows how to fix anything these days!” She would, however, be the first to admit that no one knows how to fix anything these days because almost nothing’s worth fixing, and most people figure you might as well try to find a new one somewhere.
One time I was walking past her house and heard an explosion; when I looked in to see what had happened, her entire kitchen was covered in her best attempt at homemade wine. She was also covered in it, and when she saw me in the doorway (she never bothered to lock her door) she licked the wine off her lips and said it tasted like shit. I got a bottle of wine from her, labeled “Shit Wine”, for my birthday the next year. It did taste like shit.
Everyone here in Adden has at least one “Wendy story”, so I asked around to get an idea of what to include. I found that just about all of them were a lot like my own experiences, so I thought I would tell all of our readers my own Wendy story.
Sometime in September of 2068, two of our remaining three computers at the paper went out. I don’t remember what problem the desktop was having, but the laptop was acting like it was haunted; the cursor would move on its own, and half the keys on the keyboard didn’t work anymore. As the writers were all busy, and I had some free time, I was tasked with fixing both computers. The internet had been down all that week, and I’m not tech-savvy myself, so I was beating my head against the wall as I restarted them for a third time, hoping that it would magically change something. Then, like a 5’2” vision of an angel in a pair of dirty jeans, Wendy appeared.
I think I just started crying at her, but clearly she picked out enough words in between the blubbering to figure out what was going on. She sat down at the desktop computer, worked some kind of magic, and told me that it was a loss. I started panicking, because we’d been using some knockoff graphic design software to set up the newspaper pages on the desktop—it was the only computer we had left with the power to run the software—and the then twice-a-week paper was supposed to go to print in a few hours. Wendy somehow managed to get the pages off the desktop in a usable file format so we could transfer them to the laptop (which she kept limping along for another year and a half) and we could print the paper.
After that, we here at the newspaper saw a lot more of Wendy. With the desktop out of commission, we had to start getting creative. Luckily, we had this huge old monstrosity of a copy machine that must have been used for something industrial, so we were able to write up articles on the laptop and the tablet, print them out, and glue them to one of the newspaper sheets to make copies to distribute. The laptop and the tablet were much more fragile than the desktop had ever been, and like I said, the laptop gave up the ghost a year and a half later, with Wendy coming in almost every day to nurse it.
“You need to start planning ahead,” she told me on one of those days; she often did that, starting in the middle of a conversation. “For when you don’t have computers anymore.” I had thought about that, briefly, but it was overwhelming; I’ve never been techy and I don’t know where to start. Everyone else at the paper seemed so busy—this was just before I switched over to illustrating articles and became just as busy as the rest of them—and I hadn’t brought it up. Plus, part of me still believed that we could buy new ones that would actually work, instead of breaking down within a few months.
I gaped at Wendy like a fish out of water. “I’ll get you some typewriters,” she said. She eyed our copy machine critically. “And a replacement for that, in the next few years. After that, I’ll have to start asking people to break into museums for the old machines.”
That’s how all the Wendy stories I heard went; she figured out what you needed long before you did. She was a genius at repairing a wide variety of technology (“Except sewing machines, they hate me and the feeling’s mutual”), and if she didn’t know how to fix it, she knew someone who could. Dee Herrera used to live down the street from Wendy. She’s diabetic, and had always found that a somewhat outdated insulin pump worked best for her needs. Well, about twenty years ago, the company that made that pump announced that they would no longer be supporting it or offering repairs; everyone would just have to upgrade. The upgraded pumps would get the finest customer support the company had, naturally, and whenever they broke they would immediately be replaced with the newest model. Which was exactly what Dee didn’t want. Wendy heard Dee fretting about this at a neighborhood party, and before Dee knew it, Wendy had gotten her in contact with an organization of hackers—many diabetic themselves—who were working on keeping that pump model running without the company’s support. Today, Dee uses a new and improved version that was designed by one of those original hackers to mimic her old, discontinued one. If she ever has a problem with it, she can ask a real person what to do, and they’ll give her multiple solutions as soon as they get her message. It’s not an exaggeration, Dee told me, to say that Wendy saved her life.
I can’t possibly list every story that people told me about Wendy, but here are a few people whose lives she touched:
Álvaro Garret, whose severe asthma forces him to stay indoors for the entirety of the dust season, relying on consistent air filtration to keep his environment safe.
Melania Okafor, who needed to keep her ancient computer working so she could stay in touch with her far-flung family.
Leo Tong, the owner of the only restaurant in town, The Bluebird. We’re all very thankful that Wendy kept his kitchen appliances working for so long, and that she was able to find replacements for him when they finally died.
Aiden Wise, whose powerchair broke down in the middle of the sidewalk one day. Luckily, Wendy was just stepping out of the barbershop next door.
Coral Ojeda, who works two towns over, and who refused to get a new car since it would just break down in two years anyway. Wendy kept hers kicking for almost twenty years, and only stopped because Coral got a job in town that she could walk to.
And, of course, myself, and the entire newspaper staff. I think Wendy would be delighted to note that I am currently typing this obituary—after hand-writing it out—on one of the typewriters she procured for the newspaper. At this point, we do all our writing on a pair of solid, old-fashioned typewriters that are older than some of the newspaper employees. (Myself included.) They break down far less than the computers ever did, and with the new copier set up, we’re more efficient than ever.
Even from beyond the grave, Wendy is helping us with a problem that we’d barely started to consider. She was meticulous about keeping her will up-to-date, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that I was in it. Wendy left me a few interesting gadgets, as well as a slip of paper. On it is the contact information for a friend of hers who might know where to obtain some historical newspaper printing machines. “Just in case,” Wendy wrote.
Our Pushcart nominations for 2024 are in! At the very last possible second, as is fast becoming tradition here.
In 2024, we published Reckoning 8, our resistance issue, edited by Knar Gavin and Waverly SM. No editor should ever be forced to single out for praise a mere six of the many beautiful and compelling pieces of writing they’ve had the privilege to champion in a year! But we managed nevertheless.
We’re here again with the Reckoning Press Podcast. I’m Aaron Kling, Reckoning’s new audio editor, the reader and producer for today’s story. How’s it going, everyone? This time we have Ellis Nye’s “The Last Great Repair Tech of the American Midwest” as featured in Reckoning 8. This one’s a fictional obituary, but don’t let that get you down. Since we’re exploring the memory of a woman who held her community together, the way every great technician does, with a creative jury rig here, some duct tape there, and a whole lot of love everywhere else.
Aaron: You’re listening to the Reckoning Press Podcast. I’m Aaron Kling, editor for Reckoning’s audio in general and this story in particular. Glad to be recording another one of these! Today, listeners, we have Monica Wendel’s “A Shape that Has No Name” from Reckoning 8. In this story, we follow a young teacher as she navigates a difficult relationship in a world ravaged by disease and disparity. Give it a listen, and I’m sure you’ll love it too.
Enjoy, everyone!
Monica: Hi, my name is Monica Wendel, and I’ll be reading my story “A Shape that Has No Name”. Thanks for having me!
It’s time for the Reckoning Press podcast. I’m Aaron Kling, Reckoning’s new audio editor, once again reading and producing for today’s story. Hello, everyone. Today, we have Jeff Hewitt’s “Where the Water Came From”, as featured in Reckoning 8. This is a story about distance. From culture, from family, from labor. A man is forced from a stricken earth to colonize a world man has only ever viewed from a telescope. Our protagonist is lost to his loved ones by light years, forced to make a family out among the stars. Ain’t capitalism grand?
