The fish eagle catches an updraft on its outstretched wings, momentarily becoming invisible in the glare of the sun, before diving to emerge from the glittering sea with a wriggling fish in its talons. The group of tourists collectively gasps at the display, raising phones and squinting at the cloudless sky. Their photos will be overexposed, the majestic alabaster sweep of the raptor’s wing indistinguishable from baby blue sky; the act of preservation distracting them from the bird itself.
Cheng Boon counts the tourists; there are fourteen of them. Fourteen is not a good number; nothing with four is, it sounds like death. Thirteen of them are making noises of appreciation at the wildlife, sweltering under the punishing afternoon glare; one even looks to be unpacking a drone. He sighs and hurries over, the buzz of the drone will frighten the birds. This far from mainland Singapore, with its skyscrapers jousting with the sky, the sounds of humanity are a distant inconvenience for the birds and the crabs of Pulau Semakau. The fourteenth guest catches his eye; the man is about forty, hair prematurely thinning, with the same sun-blasted, salt-scoured complexion that Cheng Boon wears—brown, vellum-like skin that transcended race, all being equal on the sea. The man, like Cheng Boon, is of the tides, even if his faded Metallica t-shirt (a knock-off, the band’s name misspelt) and shorts do not distinguish him from the crowd.
The tourists are corralled to the displays showing the sanitised history of the island, and its glorious role in the city it orbits. Semakau is a landfill, stitched together from two islands, cradled by a diaphanous underwater membrane so that the ash of Singapore’s effluvia doesn’t leach into the sea; against all odds, the birds and the reef creatures have returned. All it cost the country was two villages. Yes, all the villagers moved out and were resettled into government housing, he told an inquisitive teenager. There were a few on this trip, probably doing research for a school project. They nodded at the generosity of the government, the provision of flats with running water and electricity in exchange for the stilted kampung homes in the village of Pulau Semakau. Those new flats were cages of glass, and concrete, and steel. They gently suffocated the spirits of Cheng Boon’s father and grandfather; men of the sea who coaxed a living out of the reefs in the shallow waters about Semakau, and who didn’t care for the open sky replaced by smooth ceilings, or the breath of the South China Sea replaced by the dull whir of a ceiling fan.
He would have told them that the village of his youth was a small and perfect thing, but what is a small and perfect thing compared to the growing appetite of a nascent mega-city? That appetite was all it took for them to murder a village. This is not the story that the groups come here to listen to, not when they have the sparkling sea before them and the shining city behind. No, they want this thread of the story to be pure and clean, to leave with pictures for Facebook and Instagram, and peeling sunburn to show off in their air-conditioned offices and classrooms. Cheng Boon ushers the group back to the waiting boat as a barge comes by with the day’s complement of ash from the incinerators on the mainland. Semakau is an open grave for his boyhood village, and it is still being buried, handful by handful, barge by barge, with funereal ash. He counts the group one last time before he starts the boat. Thirteen. He smiles and leaves a trail of diesel tinted smoke on the water as he returns the group to civilization.
It is forbidden to navigate his small boat between the container ships and tankers plying the southern ports on the southern coast of Singapore. His boat could vanish under the bow of one of those behemoths, be split in two without their crew noticing, be drawn in by the gravity of their mighty propellers and sliced to ribbons. Yet he does it anyway, a minnow amidst whales. In truth, Cheng Boon could have read the waves on a moonless night, feeling the currents merely by the tug on the bow of his tiny boat. Unlike the modern craft he piloted earlier, with its air-conditioned cabin and plush seats, his own boat is a rickety thing of wood, with brittle tires hung around the gunwales to cushion against jetties or other craft. From the jetty, he can see guttering candle flames on the island. Government officials would have tutted, said something about grass fires and handed out a fine from a booklet in triplicate, but Cheng Boon is on no such mission.
Away from the mainland, with the dark of the sea on all sides of the beach, without the glare of electric lights, the sky, with its dusting of stars, felt so close that Cheng Boon could have reached out and touched it. Leaving the mainland for the islands never got old, not for a child of Semakau. He hoists a bag over his shoulder, bottles sweating through the thin canvas, and starts the short hike to the lights on the island.
The man from before has laid out a selection of offerings on sandy ground, illuminated by a semi-circle of candles. Betel nuts, mangoes so sweet and full of juice that there are streaks of sticky fluid dripping from their bases, fragrant flowers and wooden bowls of yellow rice. In the centre, a larger flame on a small metal platter burns, aromatic gum reducing to dark ash.
“I thought I left someone behind,” says Cheng Boon.
“I think you knew you did,” responds the man, bare to the waist now, sweat running down his back.
“I am Cheng Boon,” says Cheng Boon, extending a hand. The stranger takes it. “Affendi,” he says.
Cheng Boon offers Affendi a bottle of water and sits on the ground. The other man takes it gratefully; it has been a long day under the sun.
“There has been no keramat ceremony here in many years. Were you from this island?” asks Cheng Boon.
“No, I am from Johor.”
“Far from home then. Why would you come to respect my village?”
The other man was silent, the light from the candles casting upwards shadows on his face, the heady smoke from the burning gum resin teasing both their noses. He takes a handful of the sandy ground and lets it trickle out of a closed fist and the wind kisses it on its way to the ground, scattering the sand all the way up the beach. “To make the island, your country bought parts of mine, the flat bottomed boards scraped it from the rivers and the beaches next to the sea. Men came to chase us from our kampung, and they took the ground from beneath our houses.”
Cheng Boon nods. The growing city had to be fed, and it ingested man and earth alike. “You are orang laut, then.” Sea people.
“Yes, but after the boats scraped sand from around us, the rivers washed away the mangroves. The whole area habis already.”
“I am sorry for your loss. When I was a child here, we traded with the orang laut from the straits up north. Mud crabs and catfish from the rivers for squid and snapper from the sea. Haiyah, now everything also need passport.”
“Only men need passport,” says Affendi. “Wind and wave no need passport. When men gone already, wind and wave will still be here.”
“Then why you still here?”
Affendi turns to look at the space beyond his small offering ceremony. “Last time when I go back to the old swamps and rivers, our ancestors gone already. Mangrove gone, ancestor gone. My father was the bomoh for our people; no ancestor, no business. At least I go to school, got Form 6. After school, I found the company that owned the boats, company man said the sand was sold to Singapore. I tried the easier places first. Marina. Changi Airport. Now, I’m here.”
Cheng Boon feels an affinity with the spiritualist from Malaysia. They were both people left behind, those who could not get onto the giant unstoppable vehicle of progress, who instead got mangled under its wheels, and in their middle age, could only see it pulling away in the distance, with the rest of the country on its back. “Then our villages died the same way. They moved us from here to flats on the mainland when they needed this island. Our ancestors are here too.”
“Do you want to see?” asks Affendi.
Cheng Boon is confused; there was one child in the village who had the sight, but seeing ghosts had its own costs, and the child was always hollow-eyed and sickly. “I don’t have that skill.”
“I can help, but only for a short while.” Affendi leans towards the candles and burning resin, blowing out the fire on the gum gently and raising a smattering of ash and embers. He presses his thumb into the ash and walks over to where Cheng Boon is seated. There are no night birds or crickets on the island, no sound but the rhythmic lap of waves on sand. Cheng Boon closes his eyes as Affendi smears warm ash over his eyelids, and then another smear on his forehead. When he opens his eyes again, he sees them all.
They glow gently in the dark, the remnants of the village of Pulau Semakau. Cheng Boon can recognize some of them, older aunties and uncles, but echoes of their former lives. He could almost see the village of his youth, houses of wood perched on stilts, with sloped roofs of zinc. The houses were all around the tide line, at times the sea would even lap at the front doors. But the structures were long gone, only the people remained, some aged, some young, neither fully of this world or the next. Here too were strangers from across the sea, dressed in simple sarongs, carrying the tools of fishermen: nets, hooks for boats, traps for crabs. Affendi’s people. His people. Both here on the island, lost spirits. The ghosts are gathered around Affendi’s ceremony, drawn by the sweet smoke and offerings. It is clear to Cheng Boon that despite the circumstances of their lives and deaths, the two groups know each other in the hereafter. They exchange cordial smiles and greetings as they assemble around the only two living people on the island.
“Thank you. For showing me,” says Cheng Boon, and the wind is cooler on his cheeks for the tears that it dries. “It’s been a long time since anybody has offered anything to the spirits here.”
Affendi makes as though to clear off the ceremony, but Cheng Boon stops him. “Let them stay a little longer,” he says. And they sit for a while longer, in the company of spirits.
“You know, Chinese believe that we can burn offerings for the dead, and the riches will be transferred to the afterlife,” says Cheng Boon.
“Some of my people believe that things that are respected and loved have spirits.”
The two of them look to the jetty.
The boat has been in Cheng Boon’s family since before he was born, though little enough remains of the original. Panels have been ripped out and replaced, the engine has been overhauled. But it was his father’s boat, and now it is his. Both men worked to empty a large plastic can of fuel about the deck. The two men stand knee-deep in the calm sea, watching. Cheng Boon should have felt something when he sees the flames licking the deck, spreading along the salt-infused wood and burning blue and green with the flaking paint. The boat is the last thing of his village that he owns. The sole physical link to his youth and roots. But he will continue bringing tourists here, continue telling them the sanctioned history of the island. He glances away from the fire, and looks at the other man, a stranger to him until hours ago, but now siblings in an old, nameless grief. What common name can there be for the depredations of the many on the few?
“Look,” says Affendi. The fire has bitten deep into the boat, the frame is crumbling into itself, and soon it will start taking on water. But there is still a little of the magic of the ash in his eyes, and Cheng Boon can still see the ghosts, both of his villagers and Affendi’s, all the peoples of the sea. Like the two men, the ghosts are knee-deep in the water. There is something happening to the boat, even as it burns and fractures into the water—there is a shadow of it left, a ghost of a boat, and the old spirits are already beginning to clamber aboard.
“We will get into trouble for this tomorrow, you know,” says Cheng Boon.
“So kesian that your old boat caught fire when you came back to check on the island to find a lost tourist, very hardworking,” says Affendi.
“Thank you for letting me see them again.”
“Thank you for the boat. I wonder where the ghosts will go?”
There was no changing the past, not for either village. The present serves too many the way it is. There is no atoning for a past denied. The future, now the future is malleable. There can be peace for the dead, a way for the ghosts to take to the waves again. No restitution without sacrifice; a debt had to be paid. Cheng Boon had never been far from Semakau, neither in his youth nor when he found his job. But he has something new now. A new story, for tomorrow’s tourists, maybe. About a ghost ship, crewed by spirits from Singapore and Malaysia alike, plying the waters. Cheng Boon smiles and waits for the sun to rise on a new day.
Ruth Joffre’s story, “Icediver”, centers on Vira, a mer-human Alaskan who makes her way as a freelance underwater cable repair tech. During a lucrative and dangerously deep gig, Vira encounters a hidden mer community and an opportunity to learn more about her heritage.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
E.C. Barrett: What was your inspiration for this story?
Ruth Joffre: I wanted to write my version of a mermaid story, and I wanted to explore some landscapes that I’ve been learning about for the past couple years doing a lot of work in Alaska via my day job. I started thinking, what would a mermaid or a mer-human hybrid be like in Alaska? What would they do? How would that be politically? What would their life in Alaska entail, when so much of the economy is driven by the tourist season? I say that as somebody who has only ever been to Alaska during the tourist season, though I was there for work.
Alaska has a lot of money coming in for infrastructure projects of various kinds, including the big one of connectivity across the state. The story is set in the Aleutians, where one of these connectivity projects is underway. I wanted to think about what a mer society would look like in the Aleutians to a mer-human hybrid if she were to encounter that society for the first time after not having had access to it for most of her life. So all of these bits and pieces of my life and things that I’ve experienced in Alaska filtered their way into this story.
ECB: I know connectivity is an equity issue for rural and low-income communities, but what are some of the environmental aspects of building out connectivity infrastructure?
RJ: If you’re going to build out facilities, does that mean you have to build a road alongside it? If you’re building a road, are you cutting down trees? Are you destroying wildlife paths and habitats? All of the concerns that come with any development. Somebody has to be able to go out there and service the line–that’s a car or a plane burning fossil fuels to get out there. Once there is connectivity, there’s also more “opportunity” for people to start various businesses and for them to move further out without necessarily losing connection to the systems that we have in place digitally. So yeah, it definitely enables a spread of development that can have a really negative impact on the environment.
The other side is that it is important to close that digital divide because of equity. A big reason why governments step in to assist in building connectivity in remote areas is because businesses won’t bother, because it’s not profitable enough. That’s judging entire communities as not valuable.
ECB: What do you hope readers come away with after reading your story?
RJ: I think one of the core things in this is that finding another society or envisioning another way of living is much easier and more possible than we think. Enacting it is really hard, obviously, as we can see with the abolition movement in the United States and attempts to implement new systems of justice. With this story, I was thinking through what it could mean to be a utopian society. What could it mean to enact fair policies? And what would policy even look like in this case of a mer society in the Aleutian chain, very deep underwater?
It’s hard to make an easy, one-to-one analog to our society, because of all of the uniqueness that comes from being in the Aleutians, but I still think the story presents a way for us to think about how we can do better. And also how we shouldn’t idealize other societies that do some things better, as tends to happen when people in the U.S talk about how much better it would be to live in Europe while ignoring all the things that European countries do poorly.
ECB: What connection do you see between Vira’s search for her heritage and environmental justice?
RJ: Searching for your heritage is connected to the landscapes of your ancestors. I’m the daughter of a Bolivian immigrant, and I have not been back to Bolivia. I have all of these connections to the culture and to my family, but how do I engage with and have those experiences that my family members had with the land and the environment in Bolivia, especially since parts of it are also severely threatened by climate change?
For example, there are plants that are moving higher and higher up mountains, because it’s getting too warm down below and they can’t survive at those altitudes anymore. They’ve lived there for 1000s of years. What does it mean for Bolivians if those plants move higher and higher up and run out of places to go? I think there’s a certain amount of heritage that could become completely inaccessible, because you’ve lost native plants to climate disaster.
ECB: I loved how much this story was also about Vira’s alienation from herself as someone who can do something other than earn just enough money for her and her mom to get by. Is that something you regularly think about in your stories–how these people exist in capitalism?
RJ: Totally. That’s a major theme of the new collection that I’m working on, which includes this story. I’ve been working in capitalism, holding a full-time job, since graduate school, and now that I’ve been in it for a decade I understand it better than I ever possibly could have as an undergrad trying to write about adults. As a student, I didn’t really understand the strain on adult life, your time, and your capacity to think beyond your job or beyond paying the bills.
And that is what the vast majority of people in this world are experiencing–the hustle to try and make ends meet, having multiple jobs or one shitty job and terrible co-workers that you hate, but you have to put up with because you have rent to pay.
The reality is that it’s just getting worse and worse. Rent is getting higher. Salaries are stagnating for a lot of people outside of the tech sector or, you know, senators. It’s kind of impossible to think about adult life without thinking about capitalism. A lot of my fiction now is thinking about how to re-envision society without capitalism or fight against it, to find ways to center your life around other things.
Moving forward, I’m more interested in stories that are questioning whether we really need to live this way and presenting new worlds, because I’ve been working this full-time job plus writing, plus teaching, plus, plus, plus all the things for so long. And I hate that I have to. I think a lot of people hate it. So I’m trying to find ways to express in fiction that other things are possible.
ECB: Are you currently reading anything? Or have you read anything recently related to these sorts of themes that you’d like to share with others?
RJ: On the anti-capitalist theme, I just read Nino Cipri’s Finna, which is a novella about working in a huge, obviously IKEA-inspired, warehouse furniture store. It’s about trying to survive going through a wormhole but also deciding whether you come back and what you come back to. Do you just go back to your capitalist service job in this awful warehouse store? Or do you find something else for your life? So I highly recommend that. It was really fun.
ECB: What role can speculative fiction play in helping us tackle, or at least think about, some of these issues?
RJ: Spec Fic is probably our best way of thinking about new structures and systems that enable other ways of being. Realist fiction–even though it is beautiful and incisive and capable of doing so many things–often gets stuck in a “the world is what it is, and we can’t change it” mentality. Whereas speculative fiction imagines many possible worlds and shows we can change everything; we can imagine whatever we want.
With the climate apocalypse, the aftermath of the Trump administration, and the potential for a second Trump administration, it’s really important to think outside of the current systems, because they’re clearly broken. They’re clearly only designed to help a few people. So the question is: how can we break free of them? How can we pack them with different ways of thinking in order to change them from within, if at all possible? That is really what I’m focused on.
“How often does it happen, lad? You’ll never see another in your lifetime.”
The driver of the cart had not stopped talking since he’d found the boy, hot and alone, on the side of the road. The boy had the impression that he had never actually started talking, that he had been born with words tumbling out of his mouth and evaporating into the desert air.
“Once in a lifetime, that’s what this is. Lucky to see it. Lucky to live it. And what a business opportunity! Lucky, lucky. Born at the right time, you and me.”
The boy tucked his head over his knees and watched the road appear behind them in lurches. It was a new road, only as old as the city itself, but the sand had already been pressed darker than the dunes shifting all around them.
He had a lot of time to study the road. They moved when the cart before them did. They stopped when the cart before them stopped. The sun beat down and made the ground shimmer and crack.
It was cool enough under the cart’s canopy. The driver sat with his feet up, ankles crossed over his front bar. He busied himself eating a fresh fruit, his hand held under his scarf to protect the intimacy of his lips. The boy could hear him slurping at the liquid spilling from the ripe flesh. A spill of words. A slurp of nectar. Repeated again and again.
“You can see the shape of it now, clear as day.” Slurp. “Damn, it’s a young one! I’ve never seen a city this young before.” Slurp. “What a face. Don’t you want to look?”
The boy tucked his marked hand between his knees and watched the road.
It was sunset by the time they drew close to the city. Guards grew from dots of holy red to fully articulated figures, armed and serious. Flashes of orange sparked as the papers they examined caught and reflected the dying sun.
“It’s business approval for me,” the driver told the boy. “Paid a pretty penny to make sure these were all in order. No, we won’t have any trouble getting through with these.” His voice was pink and misty with confidence. “Well, I won’t at least. Better get yours out, son.” He spent the next few moments shuffling, rearranging, checking. His papers pulled off each other with a drier version of the noise his mouth had made over the fruit.
“Can’t get into a city as fresh as this one without good papers.” Strp. “They don’t let in just anyone, you know!” Lick, strp. Then, as they got closer to the guards and the boy still did not move—“You do have papers, don’t you?”
The guards took their time checking over the driver’s stack. “Business papers are often forged,” they explained. “Anything to get into the city.” The scavenging animals circled on the hot drafts overhead.
The driver pulled up his scarf so they could check his likeness against the one he carried. “Sorry, so sorry for the impropriety. You understand.”
“Yes, yes. A city as young as this . . . .”
“What about you, lad?” The guard that asked leaned down to do it. His voice was kind, if tired. He wore an anatomical heart pendant around his neck. There was a black mark on the back of his left hand.
“I picked him up on the roadside,” the driver was quick to say. “I don’t know him.”
The boy revealed his face, offering up a single paper. The guard frowned at the lonely sheet, confused. Then he let out a little gasp. He showed it to the other guard, who began to stare at the boy.
The boy hunched further over his knees.
“It is an honor,” the guard with the pendant said as he handed back the paper. He did not hide the way he stared. The boy pulled his cloth up quickly, trying not to meet the guard’s eyes. “May I be the first to welcome you to this great city.”
“Thank you,” the second guard said, “to you and your family.” The boy could hear it in his voice: sorry, so sorry for the impropriety. The back of his left hand was unmarked.
“What’s this?” the driver asked. “What’s this?” But no one was paying attention to him anymore.
The boy had never been in a city before. Or, rather, he had never been in a city that still lived. He’d had the privilege of living in bones, in a place where the nutrients of a dying city had soaked into the eternal desert and created a rare oasis. He had looked up and seen stars framed in ribs, not endless walls of flesh. His feet had touched grass and sand, not tile and bone. He’d worried about burning his own skin and had never considered the impact of the sun on another.
As a child, he had been fascinated by the idea of the living cities. In school they had been presented as the height of civilization—of technology, of magic, of societal sacrifice. They were what made it possible for humanity to exist.
“Propaganda,” his father told him. “To make people feel better about having to live in those places.” His parents had been wealthy—not so wealthy that they had lived in the green, but wealthy enough that he had grown up knowing what green was, rather than only red and white and whatever color the sand took as the sun flashed against it and blinded you.
“It’s gauche,” his mother would agree. “Living caged in flesh. Can you imagine it?”
“The damn government is all over you in those places. You can’t do this, you have to do that. Regulations, regulations, regulations. No, trust me. You’re lucky to see the sky.”
Still, he had been curious. He and his brother had poured over illustrated books page by page, late into the night, their marked hands crossing over each other as they shared the joy of discovering what else might exist outside of their comfortable home. Under cover of darkness, they had promised each other that, one day, they would see those cities in person.
He was finally here. The boy pulled his hood further over his eyes and fought the urge to vomit.
“Where do you want to go?” They were the first words the driver had spoken since the checkpoint. “Really, it’s no problem. I’m happy to take you wherever you want. The Heart, I’m sure. I’d have to hitch the beasts, but if anyone has a right to skip the lines, it would be—”
“Where are you going?” the boy interrupted.
“I was headed to market. But I’m not sure that you’d . . . . I mean, it’s not very . . . .” The driver trailed off.
There had been markets in the book, filled with still people that shone with gloss as the pages turned. The idea of it had always bored him. What was exciting about a market? There were technological marvels to behold; there were sutures and ribs that divided and returned and the extraction of bones to make homes. Why would he want to look at people when he could look at the way they had learned to take a body and turn it into infrastructure?
Bile rose in his throat. He had to choke it down before he could respond. “I think,” he said, almost as if he were in a dream, “that the market would be best.”
The market smelled like iron.
“You sure you don’t want to go to the Heart?” the driver asked. Again.
“Thank you,” the boy told him, “for the ride.” He held out a small coin.
The driver pulled away, slipping his hands into his pockets and pulling them behind his back. “Oh, no,” he explained. “I really can’t accept that. It wasn’t any trouble.”
As children, the boy and his brother had often played this game. “Oh, no, it was an honor.” “No, the honor was mine,” they would trade, one with hands in pockets behind his back, one with a coin that must be placed in those pockets. It was a dance they mimicked from court proceedings and the dinners their father hosted and attended, one they unconsciously rehearsed so they could take part in it when it mattered.
It mattered now. The boy did not take part. He placed the token on the seat of the cart, turned, and walked away.
There were many, many people in the market. The boy was sure there would be many, many more once the long line out in the desert was sorted through, once permanent vendors found and fought for and won their favorite spots and the loyalty of their customers, once the market visas for visiting shops were allotted. The ministers had been happy to talk about the vibrant commerce of a city, and he had been happy to listen. It was the only part he could follow. It was the only thing that still made sense.
Still, it was one thing to hear a minister say there would be a market and another thing to watch the vendors set up their stalls. The air was thick and strangely wet. Voices caught rather than carried as if even they weren’t sure of their direction in this new city.
An argument caught his ear. He turned towards it without thinking, drawn by the way the sharp conversation cut through the air.
“—my last city,” the man was saying. He looked glum. A drill hung limply in his hand, looking heavier than it had any right to be. “No one complained about it there.”
A small woman stood before him. It was her fury that hung heavy on his drill. “This one is young.” She enunciated every word as if she were speaking to a child. “You’ll hinder his growth. You’ll hurt him.”
“It’s just a shell. Meat and bones. It’s not like it’s alive.”
The small woman snatched the drill from his hands. “I’ll see to it that you lose your license for that.”
“Try it. Take it up in the Heart itself if you have the money or the balls. Better yet, why don’t you—”
A crowd began to gather. The boy moved on.
If the boy had looked up, he would have seen sinew, and muscle, and the honored stitchwork that was needed to hold these things together. He would have seen layers upon layers of homes, then businesses, then homes again, as neighborhoods took shape within the framework of the city’s body. He would have seen the engineers hanging from scaffolding, could have watched them rework the bone and blood until they sustained not only the city body but the city occupants as well.
He did not look up. It was enough—almost too much—to smell the iron in the air, and to feel the way the ground gave way slightly under his feet.
Stepping directly on the city was supposed to be a crime. There were many things that were supposed to be crimes. He had them listed in a small book in his breast pocket, bound in red.
The half-built market only had a small tile path. It was clear that it was meant to act as a temporary footpath until they could build the beautiful, lasting streets that would come. It was also clear that whoever had thought a path a few tiles wide would suffice had never been to a market. Men, burdened and blinded by stacks of product, commandeered the whole track or forwent it completely. Others crisscrossed the open spaces as they built stalls and dismantled carts, porting supplies and instructions to the others who built stalls and dismantled carts. Every time the boy was forced to step off the path onto the soft, forgiving surface of the city itself, he felt as if he might cry.
He caught, suddenly, the smell of meat pies in the thick of the iron and wet. In this overwhelming newness, the familiar scent made him dizzy with nostalgia. He found the shop quickly. It was the only one with smoke churning from its chimney. That was against the rules, too. No chimneys except for the holy kilns. The priests were supposed to enforce this strictly, to maintain air quality and protect the precious lungs. Two priests were leaving the shop, chatting happily as they snacked on fresh pies.
He ducked under the cloth to find a warm space overfull with the smell of pies and the words falling from the shopkeeper’s mouth. She gave a quick nod to the boy, but her attention was on a man cracking open boxes and unloading the contents in the corner. He stood pressed against the wall, trying to find space for leverage in all the clutter.
“—expect me to respect a clean-handed inspector. There are only two types of people who have clean hands. The rich and the ones who think they should be rich. Then again, there are only two types who enter the pool. How many, kid?”
The boy held up two fingers.
“The devout and the desperate.” She shook her head as she popped two steaming pies into a bag. Her large heart pendant swung in time with her movements. “This one is devout. You can tell his family wasn’t starved, can’t you?”
The man unloading boxes tried to wave her words away, his face pinched.
“What? Am I wrong? I don’t know what they were thinking, choosing a kid with this much fat.” She handed the pies to the boy. “Two, huh? Bought one for a lucky girl?”
The boy paid for the pies and ducked out of the door.
His father used to buy them pies. His mother never did. “Not that greasy food again,” she’d complain when he brought them home. “It’s bad for the children.”
“It’s a good thing I bought these all for myself, then,” his father would rib. He would split the pie bag at its seams, spreading it out like a tablecloth. The boys would sit, giggling, giddy with expectation, as they watched him lay the pies out like fine dining. He always made such a show of arranging them as if it were a table for one. “Since no one else wants any.”
Their mother would come to the table, taking a pie from the pile with a huff and look of disdain and then she would proceed to eat more than anybody else. Those were the best days, pie days. They could even get his mother to laugh, sometimes.
His father also used to buy them gifts. Every year when the tax breaks went into effect and the pool bonuses came, so too came a pile of presents for the boy and his brother. They had loved that part of the year.
His mother had not. “They’re not one of your investments!” he’d heard her shout once. He’d been carefully supervising his brother as he played with the brand new horse their father had bought them. It was made out of beautifully painted wood and every joint could be moved independently.
“You two have made me good money this year,” he’d told them, laughing, as they unwrapped the gift. They would tell that to the other boys in school when they bragged about their new toys. We make our father good money. You should enter the pool. The chances of being chosen are so slight, and the tax breaks so great. Things their father had said around them. Things they repeated to each other as they lay on their stomachs and stared at the wonderful images of those civilized, living cities.
The new path the engineers had laid dumped him onto what seemed to be a main street, so he took that. Then he found a small set of stairs that led up and so up he went, first to a platform, then to another, until he was high enough to look down and see the busy mass that was the blossoming market. He clutched the warm bag in his hands. He imagined the grease on his tongue, in his stomach. He had to close his eyes and breathe for a long time before he could continue to climb.
The air around him shuddered noticeably here. If he looked to his left he could have peered through the ribs to see the lungs, working to pump oxygen to the living flesh that kept the ever burning sun at bay. If he looked to the right, he would see that flesh at work, close enough to touch.
He looked at his feet. The stairs were brown tile. The platforms were slightly lighter brown tile. He continued to climb.
He heard the next platform before he saw it. First it was a hum of voices, trickling down the tile steps. Then it became a cascade, the structure shaking with the force of hundreds of feet moving at once.
The steps widened, spilling the boy out onto a platform filled with ornate tiles organized into intricate patterns. He stood in the entranceway, frozen by the sudden pour of noise and population. Throngs of city dwellers, some still in their desert cloaks, most in city clothes more suited to the dark and damp, milled about with a restless intention.
“—long to install the lifts,” he heard a man complain as he passed by. “I know it’s good to thank him, but these damn stairs—”
An energetic child bounced along the path, vibrant offerings in his marked hands. The child was right about the age where he could be chosen to be a city himself. His mother held the back of his shirt tight, knuckles white. The look in her eyes was so protective, so relieved, that the boy turned away.
Dark red robes were common here, so close to the Heart. This was the realm of the venerated engineers and architects who made a body into a city, a city into a home. A group of them passed so close to the boy he could smell the incense clinging to their robes.
“—from the sternum,” one finished.
“I’m worried about integrity,” said another. “The regrowth—”
The intricacies of the city structure were one of the things he had not asked the ministers. They had been hesitant to tell him. He had been hesitant to ask.
“—split that one into two, and then take—” he heard.
“—too hard, I’ve gone through three saws—” he heard.
“—peel the top layer off, and then get to scraping—” he heard.
He stopped listening. He pressed his veil to his face and kept his eyes on the way the tiles seemed to float in space.
A woman found him there, on the edges of the main stairwell, his hand pressed to his mouth, his eyes pressed to the tiles. “Are you alright?”
He shook his head slightly.
“Oh, darling.” She crouched until she came into his view. “Are you lost?”
He shook his head again.
“Ah.” She looked around at where they were. “First time in a living city?”
The boy nodded.
“Poor thing. I was a migrant, too. I remember how overwhelming it can be.” She rubbed his back soothingly. For a moment, she reminded him of his mother. “It helps if you stop thinking of it as a person.”
The boy thanked her and kept climbing.
It was night by the time he found the door leading outside.
It was only work crews up this far. He climbed into a service elevator with some men wearing harnesses and there it was—the pathway to the sky.
He stood and watched the birds drifting over the never-ending desert for a long time. It was never truly dark in the desert, the sand catching onto the light and sending it back into the air like a mist. Far, far away, he could see what looked like a human kneeling on the sand. There would be another if he turned to his right, and another to his left. And if he turned around, he would see the face of this city.
The harnessed crews were already hard at work on the shoulder in front of him, repairing cloth torn by the harsh winds. The city wore beautiful clothes. They were beautiful because he deserved the best, the ministers had told him. They were thick and repaired nightly to protect him from the next day’s sun. The only places that were not covered were his marked hand and his face.
Why would he cover his face? the ministers had told him. He’s family to everyone.
The boy turned. Then he sat down on the shoulder, looking up at the bare profile. The city’s eyes were shut, making him look as if he were asleep. The boy knew that they were sewn that way because the eyeballs had been liquified, that this was done to prevent them from boiling over in the heat. He knew that the stitches were made large as a part of tradition. The ministers had explained it to him in the months after they had chosen the new city. They had told him that these were painless procedures, because the first thing the engineers did was remove the part of his brain that allowed him to feel.
The bareness of the face revealed a small scar—a scar that had once been small, that was now rendered massive, a scar that had once felt personal but now seemed far too public—on the city’s chin. The boy had given him that scar. He had bled. It had hurt him enough to make him cry. It was about the same size as some of the stitches.
Their mother had chided him when she found them, crouched together, blood on their hands as they tried desperately to push back in what had already come out. “You’re the older brother,” she told him. “You need to protect him.”
But his father had only laughed. “Brothers get rough,” he said. “It’s no good to coddle them. This is how family is.”
“Violent?” his mother had snapped.
“Complicated.” Then he’d winked at the boy. “But you’d better be careful. He might just be bigger than you one day.”
The city before him would outlive the boy. Generations would be born within it. They would die in it. They would fall in love, and get married, and build houses and lives in it. This city would teem with life for hundreds of years. His brother would teem with life.
Looking at that familiar smile, at the stitched together eyes, the boy wondered if it was possible for his brother to be alive at all.
He took off his veil. He ripped the pie bag along the seams and laid it out like a tablecloth. He placed both pies on a pile in front of him.
Paved roadways run across my body like a complex system of exposed veins and arteries. Over the years, they’ve carried you from one milestone in life to the next.
By bus or by car.
On bike or on foot.
But our relationship, as it currently stands, is unsustainable. None of this will last forever.
1994: The first time you ever saw snow. Microscopic flakes fell from the sky and melted as soon as they touched your tongue. They melted as soon as they touched me, too.
There’s no way to sugarcoat the truth of what I’m about to say.
I’m drowning. That writing has been on the wall for decades.
You already know. You’ve been watching, wide-eyed, since you were a small child.
1997: A rare ice storm left all of us shivering. School canceled for the day, your parents’ raised voices shaking frozen water from the tree branches outside. By then, you were used to their shouting matches. But that night, you heard glass shattering for the first time. The model ship your uncle once constructed was no longer safe inside its bottle-home.
When the water finally claims every surface of my body, inch by rising inch, I’ll sink further below sea level.
Meanwhile, the ones who remain will slowly adapt the only way they know how.
1999: Your mother drove you to your new school in a Chrysler minivan so old it had racked up more miles than you ever will. She was behind on car payments and your father’s last child support check bounced, but you knew you weren’t supposed to know about that. You also knew that when the two of them fled their homeland after the Vietnam War, this wasn’t exactly the sanctuary they’d been hoping for. In the hallways between classes, everyone joked the world would end on New Year’s Eve. You secretly hoped they were right.
It may take time for evolution to do its thing.
You won’t even notice the changes at first.
But then, as the overflowing bayou envelops you, you’ll realize you’re more than prepared to ride the waves.
2001: The world didn’t end, but middle school did. One week later, the flood Allison left in her wake pulled me under for days. You watched the water creep up to the doorstep, the taste of calamity on your lips.
Survival mode will kick in. Probably sooner than you think.
One day, you’ll discover in amazement that you’ve begun taking on boat-like properties: You have rudders where your ears once were. Your arms are beginning to look suspiciously like oars.
2005: You moved an hour away after graduation, the equivalent of leaving my kneecap for my ribcage. What came next? An Ivy League university. The cheerleading squad. A white boyfriend who bought you beautiful jewelry and always made you laugh. Everything the media had conditioned you to want since you were born. But even then, new storms kept coming ashore.
You’ll adapt, you realize. You’ll evolve. Maybe you’ll sprout sails that billow in the wind like a pair of wings. You’ve always wished you could fly.
But you’re all fools if you think any of this is a viable solution.
2011: I was parched for most of that summer, my normally dewy epidermis brittle and flaky. You went west in search of a graduate degree while fires blazed all around us.
In the future, if you return to visit me, you’ll think how wonderful it must feel to be a submarine. After all, they can still get close to all the familiar landmarks you remember from your childhood.
Look, there’s the state park where you used to hike with your dad, back when you still spoke to him! And isn’t that the pizza parlor you used to frequent with your friends after your parents’ ugly divorce? Oh, and let’s not forget the mall where you were window shopping when you found out you got a full ride to one of the top universities in the country.
It will all be underwater by then, of course, and none of the boats on the surface will see what’s lurking beneath.
2017: Harvey knocked, then forced his way in when I wouldn’t open the door. That was the first time I thought the future might be arriving even more quickly than advertised. You watched in horror from the West Coast, where the weather was bone-dry. Where, in mere seconds, wildfires ate away at trees my brothers and sisters spent years cultivating. And that white boyfriend, the one you married, the one who made you laugh? It turns out he made you cry, too.
The future doesn’t have to be this way.
Our final forms aren’t set in stone. The window is shrinking, but there’s still time to carve out a different tomorrow.
2021: Uri arrived in middle of a global pandemic. My skin no longer glowed. My body literally freezing. So many left powerless. The only accessory your ex gave you that you still wore was a silk ribbon wrap bracelet threaded through an anchor charm, the word unsinkable stamped on the aluminum. It was on your wrist when you finally made contact with your mother two thousand miles away, crying tears of joy with the knowledge that you were both still alive on this planet together, at least for another day.
Naila Francis’s poem, “After encountering the grey whales in El Burbujon, Laguna Ojo de Liebre,” is a rhapsody of connection with nature and letting yourself be moved to action by an ecstatic moment. We spoke of grief and joy and learning to embrace big emotions and vulnerability as fuel for change-making.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
E.C. Barrett: What was the inspiration for your poem?
Naila Francis: For me, whales sort of symbolize the immensity of grief. After my dad died ten years ago, I started having dreams about whales, and I began to associate them with the idea that you can let your grief be as big as a whale, you don’t have to make it smaller. We’re constantly being told to move forward or keep our grief quiet or private or get over it. But your grief can take up as much space as it needs.
I took a trip last year to a very remote part of Baja California Sur in Mexico, where grey whales migrate south from Arctic feeding grounds down to these lagoons to mate and to have their babies. You go to these lagoons and you sit in boats and the whales swim up to interact with you. They’re so curious, they want your attention, they let you pet them. I kissed whales! I honestly did not know that this was something that happened anywhere in the world—that these whales actually crave human touch.
One of the days we were leaving the lagoon, I was watching this whale that had been following our boat. Tears started streaming down my face and I heard the words, “promise me you’ll cherish and protect what I love,” which I didn’t know at the time would be part of this poem. The experience brought up a lot of grief that I didn’t expect. When I came home, I was in tears for a long time after that trip. I would wake up crying; I would sit at my altar and cry; I was very, very emotional.
So often we have these encounters in the natural world, and we’re moved by the beauty on top of this mountain or the amazing animals we’ve encountered, but what do we do when we come home? How do we keep that with us and let it live through us in a way that we remain connected? How do we honor and protect and revere that place, that tree or flower or animal, whatever it is? That’s what I was thinking about.
ECB: You lived in the Caribbean for the first ten years of your life. Did that geography and those experiences influence the way you see and interact with writing, the environment, or issues of environmental justice?
NF: Wow, thank you so much for this question, because I’ve never actually thought of that at all . . . how growing up on the islands as I did, especially St. Lucia, might have influenced my writing or how I feel about the environment. Among the memories of childhood I treasure the most are the times I spent with my grandfather and my cousins on his farm. He would pile us all into the back of his red pickup truck and we’d drive out to the country with him and watch or help as he tended his animals. We’d play in the river, see how copra was made (the dried flesh of the coconut that we get coconut oil from), eat fresh sugar cane and mangos. Those times were so magical to me.
I have a younger brother, and we also spent so many hours outside, swinging from these vines that fell from towering trees along the hill where we lived, clambering over rocks and mounds and remnants of the old barracks from when the British and French fought over the island. And of course, I grew up going to the beach regularly. When we were really young, my mom would take us every day after school.
I think all of those experiences nurtured a love and reverence for and a joy in nature that I’m not sure I would have gotten growing up in the digital world we have now. They also sparked my creativity because we had toys, yes, but imagination was involved in every aspect of our play. Thank you for helping me connect the dots from those years to now, where some of my biggest inspirations for poems come from being in nature.
ECB: What role does creative writing in general and speculative fiction in particular have in the fight for environmental justice?
NF: I can’t remember who said it, maybe multiple people, but words are wands. They have power. In my work as a grief doula I offer a lot of grief writing experiences, and I often think of the quote by Toni Cade Bambara: “Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.” That definitely feels applicable to creative writing and speculative fiction especially in helping us to not only grapple with the many questions and crises at the heart of the environmental justice movement but also in pointing us toward possibilities, for better or for worse, of what could happen next.
I also love the use of radical and strange imagination, whether it’s grounded in reality or not, to help us think about the choices we’re making and how we’re interacting with each other, new and emerging technologies, and the living world.
ECB: Are there any writers you’ve read recently that are helping you think through any of these issues?
NF: Ross Gay’s most recent collection of essays, Inciting Joy, in particular his essays, or incitements, “We Kin” and “Free Fruit for All!”. I also love the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who writes with such exuberance about the natural world. Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow is a grief book I always recommend. He writes about the five gates of grief that we all walk through as humans and one of them is the sorrows of the world, which includes the destruction and diminishment of habitats and species. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to sitting down with How to Live in a Chaotic Climate by Laura Schmidt with Aimee Lewis Reau and Chelsea Rivera.
ECB: What does it mean to be a grief doula? What do you do?
NF: I hold space for people to explore their grief and to transform their relationship with this very universal experience. I do that in one-on-one and group sessions. I’m also part of a collective called Salt Trails, here in Philly, that holds community grief rituals. I’m a grief-tender. In a culture that is grief-phobic and grief-avoidant, I want to normalize that we all grieve and that it doesn’t have to be such an overwhelming, pathologized and isolating experience.
ECB: The last three years have certainly highlighted exactly how grief-avoidant we are. There’s been no real outlet for grieving over the pandemic and the people and ways of life we’ve lost. I’m thinking also about the grief of climate change. I wonder if you could talk to me about your relationship, or the way you see our collective relationship, to grief and climate change.
NF: I think that’s one of the big griefs of our time. And, whether some of us acknowledge it or not, it’s one of the reasons that depression and suicide, sadly, are so high among teenagers. There is this sense of despair about whether we are going to survive this. Every day there’s a story that could bring us to our knees.
I think it’s important to name it. So often people don’t name the thing that’s causing them grief, and it might be they don’t even realize it’s grief, because it isn’t about mourning the death of someone they love. There are so many things we could be grieving because grief is a natural response to any significant loss or change, and that includes climate change.
It can be helpful to really let yourself feel that, don’t resist the emotion, the anger, the sadness, the despair, whatever comes up. Let yourself feel that and, if you can, let yourself feel and process that in community. Then ask yourself: well, what can I do from this place of such tenderness? Such sadness? What am I being called to do? How am I being called to serve in this moment?
It’s easy to be immobilized by feeling like we have to do all the things because we’re concerned about all the things. But what can you do just in your garden, or in your neighborhood or community? I have a friend and she’s transforming this plot of land, in what some might consider a blighted part of Philly, into a community garden and also creating a space for kids to learn and play. That’s such a beautiful project. I think you’ve got to start right where you are. If you can go bigger and deeper and wider, by all means go for it, but you can also just start where you are.
ECB: It strikes me that it requires a lot of trust to be vulnerable enough to grieve publicly and communally, to process grief communally. I wonder if you see cultivating the ability to trust and be vulnerable as a necessity for survival moving forward?
NF: Yes, I do. I also feel that we have to be able to trust our grief and trust opening ourselves up to feel it. If we didn’t feel grief for all that’s happening in the world right now, what would move us forward into inspired action and change? How are we creating space for something new?
Grief honors emptiness, falling apart, breaking down, disappearance, darkness, loss—all these thresholds and reckonings we’re now facing. There needs to be room to acknowledge and honor all of that to—borrowing the last lines of my poem—bless and save what we cherish.
Part of grieving publicly is cultivating that kind of trust together, building containers where it feels safe enough for people to be that vulnerable. I mentioned poet and essayist Ross Gay. I think often of how he writes of sorrow and joy and their entanglement. He’s always inviting us to join together in grieving as a practice of holding and caring for each other, which he says is a kind of joy. I agree with that, that to sorrow in community is one of the ways we bring healing to this world. It’s also how we soften and deepen in compassion for ourselves and each other. It’s powerful work that connects us to our belonging, and when we remember who we are, we can’t help but be called to show up differently in the world.
Fall is the season of memory, or so my mother always told me. Every leaf turns in its delicate dance with death. They beckon us to recall what the world looked like flush with green newness, what it looks like revealing grey emptiness. My mother was scared of the winter, of an infinite dark sky, ashes falling from the clouds.
In the fall, she would instead ask me to remember. Every autumnal equinox, she walked into my room and fed me a fairy tale, something warm to press back against the cold and dark of the night. It would begin like this:
“This is a story about the end of the world.”
And it always was. When I was six, this was the equinox story she told me:
“This is a story about the end of the world. There’s a fault line that runs the length of a state, through the middle of a city. And one day, but I don’t know when, it’s going to split it all down the center. This is a city with buildings that reach to the sky like trembling fingers, and buses crawling its streets like beetles in the garden, and a liveliness, a pulse of history. It’s always raining in the city, I think, and no one dares look towards the precipitous heavens.”
She took my hand then, and I almost lost the thread of the story, distracted by the way her fingernail curved around the tip of her middle finger, hugging close to the dry skin there.
“One day, this fault line shivers. Everyone is looking at the ground, they see the way it ripples below their feet. They look up then, in fear. They look at the person on the sidewalk next to them, at the table to their right, across the aisle on the bus. Their mouths are pressed closed, but their eyes have changed. Their eyes are open now. ‘Did you feel that?’ their eyes ask. Not ‘did you see the way the ground shook.’ Not ‘did you hear the way the earth groaned.’ Did you feel that? Did you feel it, same as I, the way the world felt it too? Did you feel it like a rumbling sadness, or a shaking anger, or something a little like love?
“You know the rest, I’m sure. The world split open like an egg. The streets ripped themselves apart. The cars all fell into the abyss, and the buildings, and the cobblestones, and the sewer grates, and the fire hydrants, and the everything, the all of it, the things that they built and called indestructible. When it was all done falling into the chasm, even some people, I think, the remaining few looked at each other, really looked, and they said, did you feel it, too? Do you know where we go next? And even if they couldn’t answer the question then, they gazed back at each other, and they tried to find an answer in the ruins.
“That’s how the world ends, tonight,” she whispered, and kissed me on the forehead. She turned out the lamp, and stood in my doorway, a silhouette against the light in the hall. She looked over her shoulder in a promise to me—to our home—that she would return, as if she would be gone a long time. The next morning, of course, she opened the door and gently shook me out of the little apocalypses in my dreams.
two.
In the fall of my seventeenth year, the skies greyed and the leaves turned with an urgency I’d never seen before. The world was dry as a bone, the sweet summer humidity sucked away as cleanly as marrow. Life felt empty, empty, empty, but when I stumbled home on the equinox, I was full, so full, of light and laughter and warmth. A little too much liquor. A rose would envy the blooms of my cheeks.
I pressed open the door, ever so quiet, and there she was on the couch. Wrapped in a blanket, gaze fixed on the wall. I was swaying in my too-tall black boots, trying to remember what day it was, when she turned to me, holding out a glass of water. She made me take off my shoes, walked me up the stairs.
She was all sighs and tired eyes, and I didn’t know it then, but there was nothing like disapproval there. There was only joy and reassurance in her heart, even if it didn’t know how to make itself known.
I sat on the bed, toed off my socks, my shoulders readying to flinch against her reprimand. But instead: “This story is about the end of the world,” she said. I tried to stop her, thinking of the personal statements and exam scores and recommendation letters on the hard drive of the downstairs computer.
I don’t need any other stories, I thought. I know my own, and I know how I’ve written it. I know how the rest of the words will write themselves—“And I don’t need to hear the stories you’re going to say.” She looked at me, then, her eyes dark and sorrowed and liquid, and she refused to stop.
“This story is about the end of the world. It started with the birds. They took to the skies, a streak across the blue, a cloud, if a cloud could be angry. Then the deer, crossing the road in front of cars. They were already limping, great lacerations in their haunches, fear in their eyes. And all the people in the town, they only noticed the intricacy of the antlers, not the way that they stared.
“The world was trying to share the most difficult truth in the universe: its heart was broken. When our hearts are broken, we feel like we only know brokenness. Everything that we touch, we think, breaks too. That is the greatest tragedy, that we blind ourselves to reality. Nothing is broken because we have touched it. It is transformed. It is made anew. The world, too, wants to transform, wants to make anew. The world is dry, and searing, and wounded. From there, it’s only a small step to wildfire. The blaze sweeps over our little lives, and its heart, its heart, wants nothing more than to feel warm, to share its warmth, to transform and make anew the coldness that is locked away in each of us. It does make something new, but this story isn’t about that. It’s about the end of the world, the ashes and the smoke and a hand pushing out of the scorched earth and into the steaming air, always, always reaching for the light, and reaching for each other.”
She stood, paused at the door, looked back. “Good night,” she whispered, but I was already falling, the alcohol dulling and dizzying the room. When the lightning bolt moon woke me up before the dawn, I’d already forgotten that she sat on the bed, that she told me a story. The blankets were disarrayed, and there was no impression of her in the mattress.
three.
When I was 27, there was no moon on the equinox. Nothing but silent dark. Earlier, I had stormed into my apartment, my roommate startling at the timbre of my footsteps. “Are you okay?” she asked, the paused TV a glossy reflection on her wide eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, leaning against the counter. “My mom and I got into an argument.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. What mothers and daughters always fight about, I guess. How to survive.” She blinked at me, inviting more explanation, but I had nothing left to give.
Instead, I laid in bed under the moonless sky, looking out at the streetlamp across the road, its brilliant orange Cyclops eye a beacon in the misty dark. What does the light illuminate, and what does it leave in the dark? My mother, in a fluorescent-bright kitchen, all the light in the world, and the shadows spiraling from the man across the scarred wooden table. My voice, inherited from the greatest storyteller I knew. In each exaltation and whisper and pause, in each valley and peak, she was there. All those cadences, and I couldn’t convince her to leave.
Apocalypses abound. The end of the world is unnervingly quiet, static on a telephone wire. Light slanted across my curious eyes, even as they closed, even as I slipped away.
In the morning, a voicemail: “This story is about the end of the world. This time, it happens in a city on a coast, where the ocean hugs the land. The ocean loves too much, if there were such a thing. It loves the timid ground and the blazing skies, but most of all, it loves the moon. But this isn’t a story about the ocean, or the moon, or love. It’s a story about the winter, which threatens to freeze the waters and the people and the everything into something static and immovable. Before all that, though, in this city on the coast, life is good. It’s a city that you can always find a parking spot in. A city that has the best sandwich in the whole world right around the corner. A city that makes your legs ache because you never want to stop walking it. Who lives here? Let me tell you. People who have forgotten what love is, almost. Every night, they look out at the ocean, and they see the way that it crashes on the shore, and it reaches for the moon, and they wonder what it feels like to yearn and to want and to love.
“Until one night, the ocean rises, the wind stirs it into hurricane, and the waters crash against the buildings, they swallow until there’s nothing left, nothing but an I wonder why the ocean moves just so echoing in the empty air. Good night, my love.”
four.
A decade later, I picked up the phone when my mother called. She was living with my estranged brother; we were connected by a straight line interstate, with an impossible ocean of time and space stretching between us. I couldn’t remember what the backs of her hands looked like. When her voice crackled out of the faraway silence, her words were laced with a distress I only heard when she talked about the winter. “Get me out of here,” she said, and it was the only time in my whole life that she had ever called me and told me, exactly, in no uncertain terms, what she wanted.
I crossed two state borders that evening, helped her pack, noticed how the dry skin around her middle finger was peeling even worse than it was twelve years ago, how the fingernail on her left thumb was ridged and distressed. I remembered more than I thought I did. I packed faster, hands folding and compressing and pushing down, the only place I knew how to direct my force.
In the car, speeding against the twilight, we were quiet, only the steady hum of the fan between us. The road stretched out, languid and lazy beyond the windshield. There were too many cars on the highway for an arbitrary Tuesday twilight, and my shoulders were hunched, fingers tight.
A car swerved into the lane ahead of us, close, close, close, like the metal was aching to be touched, even if it meant being destroyed, and I pressed against the brakes with too much force.
The silence between us was tense, after, and I said, “I’m sorry.” She looked at me, and I could feel her eyes on me, in the weighted way that mothers look at daughters, with hope and love and fear. “I know,” she said. A pause. “This is a story about the end of the world.”
five.
At thirty-eight, on the equinox, I don’t understand what she’s saying. Her eyes are as clear and bright as always, but her traitorous tongue speaks words beyond my scope. A language I never learned. The soft rhythms and smooth vowels of her childhood, narratives beyond my grasp, a brief word here or there, but nothing like a story.
And as my confusion grows, her panic becomes more pronounced. Quivering words and shaking hands and a crease between her brows. She takes my fingers in her own, wraps them tightly, tries to press the words between our skin since the air was so inadequate. I hold onto her.
I say:
“This is a story about the end of the world. Imagine a mother and a daughter. Imagine two women, with the darkness of a whole universe pressing against them. Imagine the light between them, the thing that keeps them awake, and alive. The thing that puts them to sleep, without any fear at all.
“Can you picture this? But how is this the end of the world, you wonder? How is this anything except beautiful? It’s the end of the world, you see, because that galaxy between them is gone. The thing that they created together, the landscapes and the oceans and the valleys and the hills and the jungles and the deserts and the trenches and the caves, it’s not there anymore. The world ended. Questions, questions, questions, and not an answer to be found. Fall is the season of memory. Every equinox, you asked me to remember. And I do, I finally do.”
