“Dramatic Exit?” the man in the gray suit asks, pointing to the stingray leather menu as I shake a cocktail longer than necessary, fingers numb from frost fuzzing up the steel. Turquoise light ripples across his face from the water above us, the sun a lazy disco ball far above the dome.
Behind him, Onda watches us from her floor-to-ceiling saltwater tank in the center of the room, her sideways pupils narrowed. Neon circles light the nanoglass column as she presses her suckers to hidden pads, sculpting eerie soundwaves. What I wouldn’t give for a cheesy pop song.
I strain the drink into a coupe, its stem a crystal tentacle. The scent of vanilla poached from endangered orchids wafts from the glass. Nothing synthetic here at Brine & Dine, the second most exclusive restaurant under the sea.
I gesture towards Onda and lean forward as if I’m telling the man a secret, rather than something I tell all the men in expensive suits. “When an octopus wants to escape a predator, it can distract them by releasing a puff of ink resembling itself . . . a shadow of misdirection.”
He watches closely as I squirt a dropper into the glass, suspending a blue-black cloud inside it. We used to use octopus’ ink, but my manager Fernando decided squid ink was prettier—so I no longer feel the need to mouth “sorry” to Onda when I prep this drink, as if she may be offended by it.
The scent of fish lingers in the air for a moment. Nobody cares what the cocktails taste like here, only how many critically threatened or otherwise taboo ingredients we can squeeze into each one. Octopus and squid are especially popular after being declared sentient almost everywhere but international waters.
I put the coupe on my coworker Miguel’s waiting tray, while he points at an imaginary watch on his wrist. If he’s going to show up an hour late for his shift and make snide remarks about my trailer park past, he can surely wait an extra minute. Most people see my cochlear buds and assume I can’t understand them if they whisper, but I can pick up the faintest mutter of contempt from across this cavernous room.
The droning music in the bar is broken up by sax-like squeals as Miguel sashays past Onda’s tank. Miguel hisses at her, and she swells her arms into an eight-point star, billowing in sulky silence before returning to her song. Bumps shimmer across her copper skin like angry fairy lights.
“What are you doing after work?” Gray Suit asks the gap between the buttons on my blouse.
“Janitorial service. No such thing as after work in this economy.” I smile sweetly, but I can’t stop myself from adding, “If there was, I’d find the most remote desert on the surface, with nothing but tumbleweeds for company.”
“No such thing as remote places either,” he says, failing to take a hint. “Below the ocean’s as remote as you can get, with ten billion people up there—so smile, gorgeous.” He raises his seahorse infused martini to me and I wipe down the bar, ignoring the command.
Fernando beckons to me from the other end of the bar. “Maya, a moment?”
Something resembling a tuba note blasts from the speakers as I skulk my way to the far ice well. I can feel Onda watching me again as she plucks through dissonant synth tones. “Oh, shut up,” I mumble in her direction. “I’ve got my own problems, Onda.”
Fernando shakes his head at me. “What the Hell has gotten into you today? This isn’t your honkytonk dive back home—get your shit together and be nice.”
I take a deep breath, but before I can tell him how much I hate his pompous mustache, shouts erupt from the dining area.
Miguel is crouched on the floor, picking up his tray, and two women are standing up at a table, yelling at each other across it.
“I saw the look you gave him,” one of them is shouting over the avant-garde static and bleeps from the speakers. “You think I don’t notice?”
“Oh, get over it!” The other one slams a fist on the table. “I’ve had enough with your constant insecurities, and your loud chewing.”
“You know what?” Miguel swipes the rest of their dishes onto the floor. “I’ve had enough of both of you.”
The shorter woman takes a swing at Miguel, and he blocks it with his drink tray. I look to Fernando for guidance, but he’s busy tugging his shirt off as if it’s been strangling him.
Gray Suit’s barstool is empty. He’s now pacing back and forth, shuddering strangely and shouting into his phone, “I’m gonna do what I want—from now on, I’m the hero of my own goddamn story!”
Near the restroom door, two men are circling each other. One spits on the floor.
I don’t know why, but I feel like running. Not running to or from anything—I wish I could run up the walls of the dome and scream until I’m hoarse. My knuckles are white on the edge of the bar and my teeth are grinding in rhythm with the bass notes thumping from the speakers.
The bass notes. Onda swishes gracefully around her tank, turning multiple knobs at a time with coiled arms. Watching our reactions.
“Fernando!” I find him huddled shirtless behind the host station, tearing up credit card receipts. “What’s the frequency range of these speakers?”
He blinks up at me, looking insulted. “No expense was spared. These are custom.”
More shouts from the dining area, where a tangle of multiple bodies has formed on the floor. A deep, minor chord rumbles through the room and vibrates my stomach.
I rip out my hearing aids.
Fernando’s mouth is moving, Miguel is pushing tables over, and bowls of shark fin soup are crashing to the floor, but the whole world is silent.
I know I should help them. I should find the volume control for the sound system and turn it down—but I just stand there, watching Onda dance as the room grows oddly dark.
The thing is, I have always been a traitor.
Until now, I’ve been a traitor to what I know is right—it’s hard not to be, in this world. I’ve seen Onda’s suffering, her loneliness. I know what it’s like to feel trapped, separated from your own kind.
To feel with all your soul that where you are is wrong.
Gray Suit shakes my arm and points up at the ceiling. Swirls of black ink are forming above us in the water, blocking out the sun. Ripples of white glitter through the dark like stars, and then they all blink out.
Fernando puts his hands to his ears and doubles over. Miguel and the brawling guests detangle into fetal positions, clutching their heads. On the bar in front of me, a pint glass shatters silently.
A crack is etching itself into the dome, branching out like a bleached piece of coral where Onda’s tank meets the ceiling.
No expense spared, my ass.
Onda jets to the top of her tank, the hero of her own story, a whirl of arms twisting into a bullet.
“Forfeit 280” draws attention to how Monsanto committed 30 misdemeanor crimes related to a pesticide called Forfeit 280. Monsanto used the product in 2020 on corn fields in Oahu, Hawaii and allowed workers to enter the fields after it was applied despite a six-day restriction to enter.1 In addition to environmental injustices that farm workers experience, the drawing calls attention to genetic engineering by companies such as Monsanto. The plants in the drawing appear corn-like, but also unnatural to suggest genetic engineering. The mirrored image creates a hideous monster to demonstrate how such injustice has ripple effects.
Alone on a lonely beach, Júlia watched the Atlantic Ocean spit out the world’s richest man.
Júlia knew who the man was even before the sea placed the body at her feet. She knelt before him and stared into his empty orbits and sought the corals. She saw none.
“Of course,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”
Now our work begins, she imagined the corals telling her, in their language of loss, the blanched dreams they shared with her every night.
She pulled the body into the sand and took a picture and shared it on her socials. She tagged the media.
“Josiah Burke is dead. This is his body,” she wrote. With a shaking finger, she added, “This is a good thing.” Only a few minutes later did she call the authorities.
The snoopers arrived before the media. The media arrived before the police. Blue sirens swam through a flash flood of phone cameras.
Before Josiah Burke washed ashore on the coast of Portugal, he set out to sea for a bit of peace and quiet. He sailed on his smallest, least luxurious superyacht, the Jaundiced Outlook. A cultured name for a cultured man. A cultured man alone at sea.
“I would feel more comfortable if you took shelter inside, Mr. Burke,” Captain Natua said to the multi-billionaire at the prow.
Dark clouds gathered over the dark waters. Sailors busied in preparation for the coming storm. Rain fell like a promise.
“What kind of car do you drive, captain?” Burke asked.
“A Honda Civic.”
“Gasoline? Diesel?”
“Gasoline.”
“That’s going to get very expensive for you, very soon.”
Natua said nothing. Burke was a pleasant enough man, but Natua hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the meandering, condescending way he spoke to those he saw as inferior. And Burke saw everyone as inferior. It was so natural to him he wasn’t even aware. It wasn’t even malicious.
“What do you make of the reefs?” Burke continued.
“I’m not a marine biologist, sir,” Natua replied. Just about missed it, he thought. He had dropped out of his Biology degree on his fourth year. He had been unable to cope with the dead things in the water. The dives between extinctions.
“I’m not asking for your scientific opinion. I’m asking if you’re happy with what’s happening. A lot of people seem to be.”
A lot of poor people, Natua imagined he meant.
“It’s going to cause a lot of trouble,” Natua said.
Burke didn’t catch his purposeful ambiguity: “You’re goddamn right it will. Like it or not, the world needs fossil fuels. Let’s see how people react when their AC stops working, when gas becomes too expensive, when your electricity bill goes through the roof . . . .” He sighed. “I’m sorry, captain.”
“That’s okay.”
Truth was, Natua indeed was happy, when the news showed the first footage of an oil platform getting overrun by corals. More than happy. He was gleeful almost to the point of mania at the first omen of this beautiful revanchism, this strange phenomenon of oil platforms ‘getting sick with corals’, as one publication had called it.
Sick. As if the inert could get sick with life. Corals making homes in the undersea portions of rigs, making wombs of umbilical connections, sputtering out and out and out, lining pumps, loosening drills, leaning over railings as if to say to other corals undersea, “Look, I breathe, I breathe, I breathe.”
Burke shook his head at the darkening horizon. “They shouldn’t be happy. Because I’m not going to hurt. They are. My life will go on, as it always has. I won’t feel it on my skin. Those people will.”
It was a surprisingly sober thing to hear from the world’s richest man, oil baron and tech bro all in one, but Natua couldn’t help but linger on two simple words: ‘Those people’. Always that separation from others. As if being rich had transformed Burke into something nonhuman. As if he had so much money he didn’t need to eat, shit, love, cum, cry, and dream anymore.
‘Those people’, meaning Natua, and his husband, and their daughters, and these sailors here, braving the wrath of a scorned sea so a butcher in a suit could have some respite from the reporters, the jokes, the jokes on the fucking internet. Pity the world’s richest man. He’s not as loved as he wants to be.
“A storm is brewing,” Burke said, in some mocking accent he probably thought sounded nautical. “What a weird expression. Brewing a storm. Like it’s something a person could make.”
“It is something a person can make,” Natua pointed out, before he could stop himself. We’re brewing them more and more, month after month, he thought. Brewing storms and spilling them all over the shop.
Burke tilted his head. He smiled. “Hm. I guess you’re right.”
He sounded almost proud.
A wave loomed on the horizon. A shadow from sea to sky. Burke faced it, tall and straight, as if he could rise above it.
Júlia had met Vicente at 1.5 degrees of warming, ten years before the corals. They fell in love the way tired people do, slowly and carefully. Vicente had come to Portugal as a teenager, a climate refugee from Cape Verde. He had studied English and German at uni and become a translator, and was now freshly unemployed by LLMs. Júlia was a biochemist researching plastic-eating enzymes. It was going nowhere.
The first time they saw each other, they were both wearing ski masks. They belonged to the same underground activist group, which didn’t embrace the term ‘ecoterrorists’, but didn’t much mind that the media branded them as that either.
The first time they spoke was while monkey wrenching the same golf cart, in a golf course in Coimbra that had been built during a nationwide drought. A ‘hi’ and a ‘hi’, which made them both laugh, while Júlia broke the steering wheel and Vicente slashed the tyres.
The first time Júlia cried in front of Vicente was years later, when the evening news showed images of yet another hurricane in Cape Verde. Drone footage of a thin man wading through chest-high water, looking for his son in a lake of floating bodies.
“How aren’t you angry?” Júlia asked. She didn’t mean it as an accusation, but by then it was easy for Vicente to see it as such. The years had mellowed him, while Júlia had only grown angrier. “It’s your home.”
Vicente pulled her close, as if Júlia was the one who needed support. “I don’t know. I guess I’m too used to it.”
Júlia pulled back. “You can’t be. You can’t ever get used to it. That’s how they win.”
That’s how they win, making you numb. Distilling tragedy in small doses. Filtering it through the liminal light of phone screens. Scroll past burned forests, scroll past record inequality, scroll past floating dead bodies, scroll past the slow corruption of your life, of all life, a planet in perpetual torture, birds thirsting mid-air, toppling in their millions under the trails of private jets.
Scroll past it all. Scroll because there’s nothing you can do, or nothing you want to do, because you’re too tired and overworked and overwhelmed and what does it matter, anyway? What can you do? What can you hope for? You already lost.
(You could have had a good life. You could have worked so much less. You could have ridden electric trams in forested cities. You could have walked in the shade of canopies, birds flying from home to home above your head. You could have breathed clean air. You could have had time, so much time to do what you love, be with who you love, become who you wanted to be.)
Vicente smiled at her, in the half-gloom. “We haven’t lost, Júlia. Not yet. There’s still hope.”
Júlia shivered. It suddenly terrified her how much she loved him, this man who could stand on a sinking ship and say, “I do love a good swim.”
They couldn’t do this to him. She couldn’t bear that they would do this to him.
But he wasn’t wrong. There was hope. Only Júlia did not believe hope and wrath were antithetical. In fact, to her, hope was premised on the idea of fighting back.
Maybe that was why the corals had chosen her, years later.
The first among many.
When you’re rich enough, wealth stops having a practical effect. Your life doesn’t change in any meaningful way between a million and a hundred million in the bank. Life becomes an arcade game. Increase the high score. All about the numbers. The lords of money loved numbers.
These are numbers: In 2017, before the earth achieved 1.5 degrees of warming, fires burned 520 000 hectares of forest in Portugal, nearly 60% of the total burned area in the EU for that year.
These are numbers: 66 people died in total. 47 of those burned to death inside their cars, in a little stretch of road between two little towns nobody ever thought about.
60 km away, a seventeen-year-old Júlia sat at an outdoor café with her friends. In silence, they watched the skies burn to copper. Flakes of ashes landed on her coffee.
(That’s what had radicalised her. Not the numbers—people don’t comprehend numbers—the vision of ash flakes in a coffee, under a sky of rust. And yet she didn’t see herself as a radical. There is nothing radical about human survival. Nor is there anything radical about believing in the worth of the nonhuman.)
These too are numbers: uncountable plants immobile as the flames laced up their stalks. Uncountable little critters cowering in holes in the dirt. Badgers, boars, waterfowls, foxes. Uncountable, unnamed, unmourned.
They are homeless in this world. This world is for people. This world is for people who are good at accruing numbers. Animals can’t count. Animals don’t count.
“Corals release their eggs in perfect synchronicity,” a small, bespectacled scientist was saying on the news. “This occurs due to a confluence of multiple factors, like sea temperature, and even the phases of the moon.”
“But this is different, isn’t it?” the elegant reporter asked him.
“Yes it is. Very different. We don’t know how this species of corals spawned all at the same time, all over the globe. We don’t even know how they survive above the surface. And we definitely don’t know why they’re targeting fossil-fuel infrastructure.”
“Let’s talk about Josiah Burke.”
“Why? It’s been a month. He’s dead. He doesn’t matter.”
The words hung in the air like sacrilege. But the reporter was good. She didn’t miss a beat:
“But some are saying this is because of him. Before his death, the corals only seemed to target oil platforms. Experts are saying this was likely a behaviour of adaptation, because oil rigs make for good artificial reefs. However, the fact that Josiah Burke was the only victim of the storm that hit the Jaundiced Outlook . . . .”
The scientist sighed. “I’m tired of that conspiracy. No, I don’t believe Captain Natua, or any of the sailors, was responsible for the death of Josiah Burke.”
“That’s not what I want to talk about. Although, one of the sailors was found to have been infected with coral polyps . . . .”
“You want the other conspiracy, then.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s bioterrorism. First, the corals targeted only offshore oil platforms. Then, after the death of Josiah Burke, they began to spread to the infrastructure of other high-emission industries, even those unrelated to fossil fuels, even those far inland. Like logging stations in the Amazon.”
“What do you think? Do you think these are biochemical attacks by ecoterrorist groups?”
The scientist shrugged. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“It’s certainly more plausible than sentient corals targeting high-emission industries.”
“Sure.”
Finding a dead end in the scientist’s small smile, the reporter changed the subject: “Let’s talk about the economy.”
The scientist laughed. “Of course. Let’s.”
“The IMF has warned of an impending economic crisis, the kind we haven’t seen since The Great Depression. Exxon and Shell are pressuring governments to intervene. Shell estimates that the damages to the fossil fuel industry as a whole are already in the orders—”
“It’s marvellous, isn’t it?”
“Pardon?”
The scientist was all teeth. “It’s marvellous. It’s magical.”
After he got home, the scientist tucked his kids in bed, climbed into the shower, and marvelled at the colours surfacing on the polyps under his skin. They had appeared the night after Júlia Oliveira shared the picture of Josiah Burke. Zooxanthellae swimming alongside his red cells.
“We’ll only be here a while,” he imagined them saying. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
“Stay as long as you want,” he said, smiling as the water fell on him, warm as tropical rain.
The lords of money reacted to their losses the way they always do, by transferring them onto the little people and expecting them to bear it with resignation. They predicted that, at best, there would be a lot of complaining online. Maybe a couple protests here and there. A tiny handout from the odd government.
This was more or less what began to happen. Until Júlia Oliveira shared the picture of Josiah Burke’s corpse, green-hued and sea-buffeted at her feet.
‘This is a good thing.’
The picture was quickly censored. Júlia’s profile was deleted. During the following days, she received many visits from government suits. They carried questions. They somehow sounded both insistent and uninterested. They left cordially and dissatisfied.
She received many visits from company suits, too. They carried demands and promises. Just keep quiet, just do nothing, they said, with so many words and polite smiles. When they try to make you a face of a movement, do nothing, and we will allow you to win this game we are forcing you to play. We will eliminate all quotidian worries. Rent, health, work. Where do you want to work? We can arrange it. You can help people. It will be fulfilling.
To her silence, they pulled out documents. Intimidation written in legalise. We can make sure you never work again. You will lose the game. We will eliminate peace and silence.
It was strange that this faceless force could not see that she was beautifully unimportant. Even if she wanted to, there was nothing she could do. Like coral spawning, the sentiment spread everywhere all at once. The world’s richest man was dead.
It was a good thing.
The day after the death of Josiah Burke, fifteen more oil platforms were reconquered by corals. The week after, Cargill had to cease most of its logging operations in the Amazon after their fleets of trucks sputtered to a stop. Corals were found in the gas tanks. The lords of money counter-attacked with austerity. But this time, the little people fought back. Protests grew like forest fires. The names of fossil-fuel lobbyists were circulated online. Their safe anonymity crumbled. Their homes were vandalised. On the streets, crowds encircled them like injured, but eager predators.
This wasn’t an organised movement with concrete demands. This was chaos, frustration, the abused lashing out. Violence seemed inevitable.
“Violence is necessary,” Júlia said to Vicente, one night, watching on the evening news Molotovs exploding against an SUV.
“Why are you doing this?” Vicente said. Correcting himself: “How are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Don’t play me for a fool, Júlia. I’ve noticed those . . . those things under your skin. And I’ve noticed them in other people, too. Today, the CEO of Exxon was attacked on the street. He’s in critical condition now. Yesterday, you were whispering his name in your sleep.”
There were bags under his eyes and a slur to his speech. While she whispered in her dreams, he was hardly getting any sleep at all. It was not because of the death threats, she sensed, or the resulting, disquieting presence of a cop car outside, for their protection. It was because he thought she was becoming something else. The symbol was overtaking the person.
“The people who attacked him, their leader was like you,” he continued. “The news are saying that . . . there are corals in her body.”
Júlia laughed. “What are you accusing me of? Controlling people with psychic powers?”
Without a word more, Vicente left the room. Júlia could feel she was losing him. But what could she do? Her love for him was endless, but that was all the more reason to fight on. She would rather lose him to a healed world than have him in a diseased future.
Besides, he was wrong. The corals spoke to all who had let them in. She had just been the first to accept them, on that beautiful rainy day under the waters of Albufeira, when she had found a mysterious reef while on a recreational dive.
To the day of her death, it would be the most beautiful thing she would ever see. A fortress of life, schools of fish swimming amid forests of kelp and polyps. When she swam towards it, the corals greeted with an explosion of luminous gametes, like stars whirling in dark space, lighting the way to the shores of a new world.
The lords of money went to war. They took samples of the corals and studied them in high-rise labs with tall windows. They studied ways to murder them. They sent their murderers out to sea. They murdered new and old reefs alike. “Best to be sure,” they meant. “There’s a lot of money at stake here.”
Those who dreamed of the corals shifted in their beds. By now, the dreamers numbered in the hundreds of thousands, all over the world. No one knew how the corals had spread into their bodies.
They are killing us, the corals said to the dreamers, in a dream. Help us.
“How can we help?”
We need only a ride.
Júlia slid out of bed, dreams of dying corals roiling in her head. In the dark, Vicente watched her go. He said nothing.
Júlia got in her small Opel Corsa and drove into the night. She headed out of town. She drove through dark roads. On either side of her, endless eucalyptuses. The lords of money had brought them in a long time ago. Profitable parasites, drying soils and spreading fires. Nothing else lived in there.
Júlia arrived at the refinery of Sines just before dawn. Six other people had arrived before her. Other dreamers. They stood outside the fence, gazing at the labyrinthine structure. Inside, a crowd of security guards. New hires. Men usually amenable to violence, now made timid by the eerie, almost sleepy serenity of the dreamers.
In silence, the dreamers held hands. Their skin began to tingle. Their pores enlarged. Fertilised coral eggs began to emanate from them like pollen. The security guards watched the eggs float over their heads into the refinery.
The cops arrived soon after. They did what the guards could not and took the dreamers away. They locked them in cramped rooms and asked them question after question. They didn’t much seem to care about the answers.
“What’s my crime?” Júlia asked, sitting in handcuffs. “Standing there?”
“I know you,” the cop said. “You’re the woman who shared the picture of Josiah Burke.”
Júlia said nothing.
“Your car was impounded. We’ll let you know when you can come get it.”
“If they can’t charge me for terrorism, they’ll always have illegal parking,” Júlia said, while he uncuffed her.
She took a taxi to the bus station. The driver kept stealing glances at her through the rearview mirror.
“Yes. I’m the woman from the internet,” Júlia said, wearily.
“I don’t go on the internet, miss,” the driver said. “I was just wondering if we could take a detour. You see, there’s a cattle farm not far from here . . . .”
Júlia smiled. The driver smiled back and turned off the meter.
The light of corals flashed under his skin.
All over the world, dreamers headed to the peripheries of coal-fired power stations, petrol-guzzling trucks, hydrofracking rigs. The corals floated out of their bodies. They crawled into crevices in the metal, encumbered hinges and clogged pipes. They preyed on petrochemicals, on pollution. They died as they did it, just to be born again, untiring, undaunted, undefeated.
The eyes never left Júlia, after that day. The eyes in the streets, the eyes in vans with tinted windows, the eyes in her computer, her phone, even her fucking smart fridge. The eyes were just waiting for a glimpse, a confirmation that she was the leader of the movement, a biochemist genius behind weaponised corals.
The eyes distressed her. Not because she was worried for herself, but because Vicente was aware of them too. She could tell he resented her for this. She also knew he would never admit that. Not to her, nor to himself.
She wanted to be out in the streets. She wanted to be more than the face of a faceless movement. She wanted to be more than the patient zero of a beautiful pandemic. The mother of coral dreams.
At night, she shivered with anguish. She couldn’t even ask Vicente for comfort. There was an infinite space between their bodies. He would accept her, if she tried. But she knew he didn’t want her to try.
And then, ever so softly, as her consciousness began to melt, the corals spoke to her.
This will pass, they said. A beautiful tomorrow is waiting for you both.
On the day of his death, Josiah Burke laughed at a gathering storm.
He didn’t know why he was laughing. Or, for that matter, why he was crying.
Natua knocked on his door. Josiah Burke wiped his nose and eyes and straightened his shirt.
“It’s going to hit us directly,” the captain said. Behind him, sailors buzzed about, securing loose objects and turning off electronics and rigging lines.
“What happens now?” Burke asked.
“We can’t outrun it. All we can do is weather it.”
“But how bad is it?”
Natua paused. “It’s a hurricane. A very bad one.”
“Christ, man. Just tell me how worried I should be.”
Natua tightened his mouth. “We should all be worried. Not just you.”
The lords of money had no emotional attachment to oil, or gas, or crypto, or data, or beef. Those were just weapons in their crusade.
Week by week, the corals attacked their revenue, so eventually the lords of money just adapted. They diversified their portfolios and pledged to transition into a greener economy and we’re all in this together.
They walked over a population ravaged by soaring prices, food shortages, stranded in cities with underdeveloped public transportation. But they did it. (What else could they do?) They transitioned into solar, hydro, vegetable proteins. “Fine, you won,” they said. “Now pay us.”
It was better than before.
‘Better’ didn’t cut it anymore. The little people marched on. Overcharging landlords came home to ripped off floorboards, vandalised water lines. There were strikes, by everyone, everywhere. The lords of money tried to bust them, but there were too many. Too many moving bodies. Endless little revolts.
Governments started doing the right thing. Some because they believed in it, most because the alternative was dangerous for them. Working hours were reduced, wages were increased. The victims of technological unemployment, or simply those looking for something meaningful to do, were put to work on humankind’s transition into a green world.
They cleaned beaches. They planted trees. They installed solar panels. They burrowed animal crossings in every little stretch of road. They built railways. They gave freely. Homes and food and time.
Corals began to live in the architecture.
On the day of his death, despite Natua’s insistence that he shelter in his cabin, Josiah Burke went out to see the hurricane. Later, Natua told his husband he thought that must have been how Burke coped with fear. Try to intimidate it, establish dominance, as if the hurricane knew or cared that he was the world’s richest man. As if capital was immortal, unsinkable.
Some of the sailors saw Burke go overboard. They followed procedure, yelling ‘man overboard!’ and pointing at his shape in the water, throwing floating objects after him while the rescuers suited up.
They were all interrogated to exhaustion. But none spoke of what really happened. How Natua was the first to watch Burke fall into the water. How Natua didn’t point. How, for a long time, he just stared at Burke, a tiny figure in the distance, battered by wind and waves.
How he called off the rescue.
They probed Natua, more than anybody else. They scanned each inch of his mind and skin. (They didn’t find a single coral.)
He told the media he had done everything he could. The rescuers had risked their lives to rescue Burke from a sea in storm, but they had been too late.
He told his friends he would never have traded the lives of his crew for a chance at rescuing Burke.
He told his husband, and only his husband, that in the distance, bobbing helpless in the storm, Burke looked like a plastic bottle.
Just trash in the ocean.
Vicente stayed.
“I was wrong,” he said to Júlia, while she worked on their garden, half a year after the death of Josiah Burke. It was a sweltering summer day, the kind Portugal would have to learn how to live with for centuries to come. “I’m sorry, Júlia. I’m so sorry.”
Júlia didn’t look at him. She felt a savage urge to cry. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she began to sob. He hugged her back as she let it all out, the hurt and the anguish and the wrath, floating away like gametes in a mysterious reef, in a lonely shore, in a day not so long ago.
“Let’s go inside,” he said.
He apologised to her so many times. Her tears dried up and she began to laugh and then she led him to the bedroom, and they made love like everything was alright. Maybe everything would be alright.
There were no eyes on her anymore, except for his.
She would wake to a better tomorrow. Then another, then another, then another.
She would begin to live a good life. She would work so much less. She would ride electric trams in verdant streets. There would be trees all over the city. There would be trees everywhere. Wildlife fleeting below shaded canopies. Everything would be slower. She would forget the smell of exhaust pipes. She would see fireflies again. (She hadn’t seen them since she was a child.)
She would have so much time. So much time for gardening, reading, learning Icelandic, which she had never done before because it was just not profitable. She would begin to learn the unprofitable.
She would spend time with Vicente. She would stop thinking of it as “spending”. She would stop thinking so much. She would start sleeping more, better. She would stop dreaming of corals. They would all stop dreaming of corals.
Reckoning 9 comes to you from a year of reading and discussion—from intervals of not quite thinking we knew what this unthemed issue should look like to flurries of activity, enthusiasm and advocacy. Then, in a slow pull-back at the end of the submission window, everyone on the editorial team started to say okay, yes. Together with the writers, thanks to them and to each other, we are starting to have done the work to make this issue happen.
It’s a remarkable one. I’m tempted to say the individual pieces of writing started talking to each other early and knew what they were collectively about well before the editors did. As C.G. has said, there’s a tremendous amount of grief here. There’s also a repeated witness of tenacity and urgent acts of preservation and restoration. We remember or learn of “six dolphins/safe in a hotel swimming pool” via Allison Whittenberg’s brief, luminous “Katrina.” If the young daughter in Ellen K. Fee’s “baby’s breath” is born into a world that’s losing its flowers, she may yet make something new with the stalks left behind, “begin anything with a bundle of sticks.” Leah Bobet’s “Klamath River Hymn” reminds us, in the leaping of wild salmon, that while our desire for environmental restoration is powerful and can work in tandem with natural forces, repair itself is not a quick process. That we must have patience for the process of mending, wherever it begins.
We’re glad you’re joining with us to read, to mourn, to consider, to plan, to create. May these stories, poems, and essays accompany you well in the coming year.
How does Twitter’s collapse relate to the climate crisis?
I’m far from alone in retreating from global social media to more private spaces—shared interests, affinities, locality. The most pertinent one here is my forest stewardship community. Even the solitary act of cutting up an invasive tree—mitigating centuries of damage caused by settlers to a formerly well-managed landscape—becomes communal quickly. Nature can never be fully reduced to a guidebook, and there will always be a behavior to surprise us, as with the elephants of Purbasha Roy’s childhood.
Sharing space, whether virtual or physical, inevitably results in shared experiences. Many of these are found in Reckoning 9: both the comfort of finding shared purpose, as in Siobhon Rumurang’s “Cloud, Cloud”, an act of anticolonial resistance, and the darker side—shared beliefs that contradict one’s lived experience, as for the narrator of E.L. Mellor’s debut story, “Blue Speck”. No space can fully escape a dialogue with its own history or marginalized present.
Ultimately we are reminded that community is essential, inevitable, and coalesced around some shared quality. We can shout into the void, but it’s the people next to us who will hear, understand, and, hopefully, spread the word.
When we decided to leave Reckoning 9 without a theme, I wasn’t certain what to expect. Speculative fiction brings to environmental justice writing endless possibilities. Within speculative fiction, we explore difficult topics like climate change, pollution, and human displacement from the comfortable frames of comic sci-fi, cozy fantasy, and solarpunk. “No theme” could have well meant chaos, but even as the submissions for this issue spanned genres and galaxies and uncertain futures, I found an oft repeating thread: we are all grieving.
Some of us are grieving for the lives of loved ones lost. Some of us are grieving the loss of our homes and livelihoods to climate change. Some of us are grieving the countless ecosystems lost or nearly lost to environmental destruction and degradation. Many of us are grieving the loss of community, of connection, with each other and with our planet. For some, this grief is new. For far too many, it is generational, an historic truth with consequences immediate and future-reaching, as the essays of Marianna Ariel ColesCurtis and Jacqueline St. Pierre so rightly remind us.
It is an immense privilege to grieve with you, to not only hold space for such profound losses, but to lift the voices and hearts of those whose grief has gone too long ignored or silenced. In the way of comfort, there is little that I can say that others, many collected here, have not said better. I can only offer, through their works, the power of resistance, the strength of community, and the persistence of nature, of which we humans are still very much a part.
I hope you’ll take what you need and share what you can.
21 December 2024
From the traditional border of Tuscarora and Siouan territory.
