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Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction contest, celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.Discover all the 2024 winners. Orsign up for email updatesto get new stories in your inbox.

You must have not gone too far if you were able to find your way back.

-Kazakh proverb

AulvillageDastarkhandinner table, feastToi FeastBeshparmakCentral Asian dish made from lamb, flat dough, and brothPialaSmall ceramic bowlBalam My childZhuregimMy heartApaAunt, grandmotherApamMy motherAğaUncle, older brotherSeksewilA low thorny tree native in Aral

Six years ago, Madina’s daughter left their home aul, Zholaman, by the North Aral Sea and never came back. In her stead, came a son.

Madina had always known that Aizhan was different. From the moment she had said her first word, she didn’t speak like any girl Madina had known. God plays funny tricks sometimes, doesn’t He? If God had made Aizhan this way, who was Madina to oppose His will?

When her son had returned home, he held his mother close, and she inhaled all the smells of the big city, and of changing times. He then opened his passport, held it up to his mother’s face and said, “My name is Zhan now.” And so Aizhan became Zhan. The moon had set but its soul remained. Madina took her son’s face in her bony, dark hands, and for the first time, she saw how much he looked like his father.

The next day, Madina prepared a dastarkhan to welcome home her son. She made deep-fried baursak, and they slaughtered a sheep to make beshparmak. The smells of meaty broth filled the dry saline air, reminding Madina of the tois their family used to throw, back when Zhan’s father was still alive. When they hadn’t yet buried their eldest son.

“Aren’t you going to invite our friends and neighbors, apam?” Zhan said, while he was stirring the meat in the boiling broth.

“Later, balam,” Madina said, keeping her eyes firmly on the dough she was kneading. “Today, I just want to have a nice meal with my son.”

“But what kind of toi are we going to have if there’s only the two of us?” Zhan said, laughing. “At least let me tell Mergen-ağa that his favorite troublemaker has come home. He’ll bring his wife and grandchildren.”

Wiping the flour off of her hands with her cotton apron, Madina said, “Mergen moved from Zholaman, balam. His son got a new job in Shymkent and took all his family with him.”

If Zhan was shocked or saddened by this news, he didn’t show it. He must have known it. Must have seen the ghostly streets of his home aul when he came back. People have been fleeing Zholaman, abandoning their homes, severing their roots. Madina didn’t blame them. She would’ve gone herself if she were even a decade younger.

There’s an old Kazakh proverb that says, “An onion can be sweeter than honey if it grows in your Motherland.” But in the dried-out basin of the old Aral Sea, honey tasted like salt, and onions tasted of nothing at all. The soil was saturated with salt and pesticides that were left behind as the sea dried out. And as the sea kept dying, so did the fishing auls around it.

Are you ashamed of me? Zhan seemed to be saying as the silence hung thick between them. Was Madina embarrassed to show her son to her friends and neighbors? No. But even as guilt was eating at her in that moment, Madina knew she was only trying to protect her son from evil eyes and venomous tongues. She could already hear the gossip at the regional bazaar, those no-good women like Karashash and Aitkanym spreading rumors about her Zhan, distorting the truth to plant seeds of anger and fear among their neighbors. If Zhan had come here to stay, he would have to face all those sins sooner or later. But today, Madina got her child back, and for this one day, she didn’t want to worry about his safety or his heart.

And yet, the dastarkhan was only half full. The emptiness left by Zhan’s father and brother felt even stronger with Zhan back at the family table, a harsh reminder that it was just the two of them now.

“You need to start looking for a job, balam,” Madina said, pouring the hot broth in her son’s red piala. “My pension is barely enough to feed just one mouth.”

“Don’t you worry about that, apam. I came back to Zholaman with a purpose,” he said, taking the full piala. “I’m going to help save the Aral.”

“Oi bai, zhuregim!” his mother burst out in laughter. “How are you going to do that? God himself couldn’t save the Aral if he wanted to.”

But her son didn’t say anything. He had that look in his eyes he would get when he was up to no good. He came from my flesh, I raised him. Then why does it feel like I don’t know my son at all?

When Zhan was young, he used to gather all the children in the aul and take them to the saline desert that was the shore. The children used to play on the ancient seabed and dig out fossilized mollusk shells from the hot sand, much to their parents’ disapproval. The children inhaled the saline air filled with dangerous remains of the pesticides, not knowing they were cutting their young lives short with each breath. But no amount of threats or punishment could keep them away from that strange barren landscape. “It made us feel like we were exploring an alien planet,” Zhan had explained to his mother once.

The price they had all paid for living so close to the Aral was high. Zhan’s childhood friend Tolganai died of throat cancer when she was 14. When Madina’s niece had her first baby, he died within weeks — killed, as the doctor had explained, by the toxins in his mother’s milk. Zhan’s older brother, Aidar, died the following year, after the pesticides got into his blood, altering his cells so much that they became the enemy to his own body. He was 18. What are you doing here, my boy? Madina thought, looking at her son.

Later that day, drawn by the smells of meat and jusai herb, Aidar’s two old friends came knocking. There was Eset, the grifter who spent most of his days hiding from his wife. And Erbol, who owned the only fishing boat left in the aul.

“What do you want, you devils?” Madina said, holding the door half open.

“Sälemetsyz-be, Madina-apa. How are you doing today?” Eset took off his baseball cap and bowed his big head.

“We heard that Zhan came to visit us yesterday. We just wanted to say hello,” Erbol said, smiling shyly.

But it wasn’t the boys eating all the beshparmak that the old woman was worried about. The very moment she had been putting off was here.

“Look, lads, it’s been a long day, Zhan is tired —”

“Who is it, apam?” Zhan came out into the hallway, and Madina had no choice but to open the door and let the guests in. You can’t hide him in his room forever.

Whatever reaction Madina was expecting, this was not it. Eset and Erbol seemed surprised to see the former object of their boyish fantasies stand before them as a grown man. There was curiosity, excited shouts, and not-so-polite appraisals of Zhan’s new appearance.

“So, you finally did it, you dumbass,” Eset said, shaking his head and patting Zhan on the back. “Took you long enough.”

“For your information, I did it two years ago, but I couldn’t tell you sooner because your mouth never closes.” Zhan laughed, but in those cheerful words was a silent accusation that stung Madina, even if it was unintentional. He had told his friends before telling his own mother. He didn’t want his mother to find out from a gossiping tongue. Who else knew the real Zhan before she did?

“You look very nice,” Erbol said, his eyes lingering on Zhan’s face. “Never pictured you with a beard, though.”

“You call that a beard?” Eset scoffed and pinched Zhan’s stubbled cheek. “You’re gonna have to try a little harder than that, brother.”

“Al, boldy! Dinner’s getting cold,” Madina ushered them back to the kitchen.

At the dastarkhan, Eset retrieved from his denim jacket a carefully concealed bottle of vodka. “So, what are we doing here, mourning the death of our sister or celebrating the birth of our brother?”

“Just pour the damn vodka, you idiot!” Erbol rolled his eyes.

Madina watched the three friends toast and down their shots in a bitter unison. And soon enough, for a brief moment, it did feel like she had her family back; the warmth of the air around the dinner table, the familiar laughter. Years ago, it was Aidar sitting where Zhan was sitting now, and the three childhood friends would spend hours planning their futures and boasting about their romantic escapades.

When Aidar died and Aizhan went to university, their friends were no longer regulars at Madina and her husband’s home, paying only guilty courtesy visits, spurred on by their parents. According to Kazakh tradition, when a family member dies, your friends and relatives must invite you for dinner for a full year. But who would invite Madina when the aul was almost deserted, a proverbial ghost town?

“Apam, we’re going for a walk. I need to walk this meat off.” Zhan kissed his mother on the cheek. “Don’t do the dishes. I’ll do them when I get back.”

But Zhan did not do the dishes when he got back like he promised.

He came home after midnight, drunk, with a feverish blush on his youthful face. So drunk he was that he had to be propped up by his two accomplices, who were not as drunk as their friend but were still laughing loudly and sweating like they’d just run a marathon.

Cursing and lamenting, Madina let the three musketeers in and made them all tea. Some things never change, she swore to herself, remembering when Zhan — still Aizhan then — would stay out late with her friends, driving her mother up the wall with worry. But what could Madina do? She couldn’t control her child any more than she could summon rain.

“What have you hoodlums been up to tonight? My son isn’t back one day, and you’re ruining him for me?” said Madina, unable to truly be angry. She poured strong black tea into four pialas.

“Don’t be mad at us, Madina-apa,” Eset cooed. “We’re so happy to have Zhan back. He’s gonna help us save the sea.”

“Is that so? And how are you going to do that, balam?” She couldn’t help the sarcastic remark.

“He’s going to catch fish with us,” Erbol offered under his breath.

“No, not catch fish. I’m gonna study the population of the sturgeon here in the North Aral,” Zhan slurred.

“That’s right, the professor here is gonna save our fishing industry with science,” Eset said and pounded Zhan on the back, almost making the other man choke on his tea.

“Not save,” Zhan said, wiping the tea from his face. “Study.” He shrugged in an attempt to appear nonchalant but looked much like his father when he would get himself in trouble.

“Why do you need to go out to sea to do your research? Why can’t you do it from land? You’re a scholar, not a fisherman. You’ve never even set your foot on a boat.”

“Please, apam, can we not do this tonight?” Zhan said, wincing. Had Madina not been so upset in that moment she would’ve seen that her son was hurting; that something was weighing on him, and that it wasn’t all the vodka he had been imbibing that evening. But how could Madina see anything besides her husband saying goodbye in the early morning to get to his fishing boat, and her knowing deep down, in the darkest corner of her soul, that he would not be coming back from this trip?

“Madina-apa, you should be happy that Zhan is trying to save the Aral. And we will take good care of him on our boat, I promise,” said Erbol, trying to smooth things over, but the tired old woman had heard enough.

“Boldy! No son of mine is killing himself sailing those polluted waters. Get out, you devils, before I call your wives. Gonna get my child killed with your drunk nonsense. Al, ket!”

After she had slammed the door behind the drunk bastards, she went back to the kitchen fully set on giving her son a piece of her mind, but Zhan was already gone.

“Zhan, balam?” But only the ticking of the clock answered her call.

Sighing, Madina sat back in her creaky old chair, put her hands over her face, and wept.

Dawn came, cold and gray. Eyes puffy and head heavy as if she herself had been drinking all night, Madina went to look for her son.

She found him on the naked shore by the carcass of an old trawler that had gone brown with rust. Zhan was a tall, thin figure standing in the sand, like a stork. That was what he had always reminded her of when he was little — a baby stork. Tall and lanky and awkward, never quite finding himself in his own skin. Madina knew why — now. God had made him this way. Was it God that had given him a restless heart too? Or was it his father’s blood in him, roiling, boiling, drawing him out to sea like an invisible tide? My son, she thought with tears welling up inside her again. My dear, beautiful boy.

She watched on in silence as Zhan, hungover and hurting, was surrendering himself to the saline wind, letting his shoulder-length hair fly. How he must have missed the Aral in all its salty, miserable dryness. He had lived in big cities all around the country and had traveled abroad, and his heart must have ached for the harsh winds of his homeland.

It looked from a distance like he was praying, or meditating, and Madina felt like a criminal intruding on a private moment. But he looked so small, so vulnerable against the vast gray desert, and she wanted to make herself big and stand between him and the toxic waters like a wall — to protect him from the small, vindictive minds that would no doubt try and hurt him.

A gust of wind blew in from the west, almost knocking Madina off her feet. Zhan must have heard her gasp or seen her stumble from the corner of his eye, for he was now running toward her, himself stumbling in the treacherous sand.

“Apam, what are you doing here?” he said, eyes full of unspoken hurt. “You already made it clear how you feel about me going out to sea.” There was a kind of finality in his words that told her that his mind had been made up.

“I just don’t understand, balam,” Madina sighed, dusting the sand off of her dress. “You have traveled all across the world, and you can go anywhere you want. Why come back to Zholaman?” Don’t you know that this place will never be what it once was?

As if having heard her unspoken question, Zhan said, “You don’t turn your back on a loved one because they have been abused. It’s the same with your home. You have seen the Aral in its prime, even if you don’t remember much of it. I haven’t. And I will never see it fully restored in my lifetime, but I have a chance to do something good here.”

Her eyes went over the naked seabed and the dry seksewil that was trembling in the wind, sand and salt stuck in its thorny branches. One of Madina’s earliest memories was of her father coming home from a fishing trip. Standing at the bow of his boat, tall and smelling of fish, he would haul up his daughter on board and she would drown in his strong, sunbaked embrace.

Her father would bring Aral trout and rudd, full nets of them. And sturgeon. Those terrifying fish with scales like dragons both frightened and excited the little girl.

Once the Soviet authorities directed the rivers that fed the Aral from the sea to irrigate the new cotton fields in Uzbekistan, starving the Aral of its life source, the sea began to shrink. Every day, the shoreline was getting farther and farther away from the auls, and the little water that was left became so saline that many fish died out. And each year, Madina’s father would bring home less and less fish, until he hung up his nets for good and started driving the water hauler to feed his family.

But now, some half a century later, things were starting to change. Little by little, the sea was starting to come back. Ever since they had built the Kökaral dike in 2005 in the north, their corner of the Aral Sea was making its slow, timid way home. That was when the first fishing boat sailed from the distant shore for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. It was Erbol’s boat, she remembered, and the young men had come back with sturgeon and rudd. She hadn’t seen this much fish since Aidar was a little boy.

“You have always been too good for this world, son. I don’t know if Zholaman deserves you” — or if I deserve you — “but I don’t want you to meet the same fate as your father.”

“Dad’s death was an accident, apam. It wasn’t the sea that had killed him. If his mate had fixed the engine like he was supposed to, they’d both be alive today.”

As the Aral was drying out, the fishermen of Zholaman had to go farther away from the familiar waters, staying out longer. When Madina had heard that the boat engine had exploded, killing the two-man crew, she didn’t want to believe it. If he had drowned during a storm, at least there’d be no one to blame but God himself. But it wasn’t God that had killed her husband. His death was a result of recklessness and laziness.

Madina also realized that this was the first time the two of them talked about Zhan’s father’s death since the accident. When they had held their final wake, on the one-year anniversary of his death, it felt like they had buried all the pain and grief with him. Madina should have been there for her son, and maybe if she had, he wouldn’t have left in the first place.

“I went to visit dad’s grave yesterday. And Aidar’s too.” Zhan said it so matter-of-factly that Madina didn’t immediately realize what it was he was saying. Women aren’t allowed in a Muslim cemetery, and it hadn’t occurred to Madina that Zhan could now visit his family grave.

“We should have left Zholaman ages ago,” she said, shaking her head, ”before we lost your father. Before your brother got sick.” It felt like a bitter kind of relief saying these words out loud. She had been blaming herself for all the misfortunes in silence, the guilt nestling itself deep inside her marrow. “Your father wanted to leave, but I was too afraid to start over.”

They had been making their way back home, feet sinking into the sand, the sun in their eyes promising them another hot day.

“It wasn’t your fault that Aidar died, apam.” Zhan said it with so much confidence that Madina almost believed him.

She took her son by the arm, half leaning on him for support and half guiding him home, her little stray lamb.

“Do you really think you can help save the Aral?”

“I’m just going to study the fish population, apam. All I can do is research, and hope that this research will help us understand how we can heal these waters. You know, there’s a theory that the Aral has always been growing and receding, because it depended on the rivers feeding it. But when the Soviets bled it dry to grow their cotton, they disrupted this natural cycle.”

“Can it … I don’t know, resume this natural cycle?”

“I don’t know. Maybe too much time has passed. Maybe too much damage has been done. And maybe the North and the South Aral will never be one again.” He bent down, picked up a white seashell from the ground, and blew sand from it. “And maybe we’re not meant to try and make it the way it was. With this new dike they built and with our research, we’re helping the Aral — helping ourselves transition to a state that is natural to the sea, and to us. One that is more true to who we are now.” He started laughing, and rubbed his neck, “I’m sorry, apam, I sound like a boring lecturer.”

Madina liked it when he talked about the sea and about them as if they were part of the Aral. She had lived in Zholaman her whole life. She had grown blind to its beauty, seeing only the seksewil and the dry sand. But Zhan, with his science, and his intuition, he was able to see something in this land that was worth saving, worth dedicating your life to. And if Zhan thought the Aral was worth saving, who was she to disagree with him?

Nothing is created fully formed, Madina thought to herself. Every living thing is in a constant process of change, transforming from one state to another. Zhan was right, the sea would probably never come back to what it once was and reclaim all its stolen territories. But it could still be something good. With a little help and a little love, it could come closer to its new true self.

Dinara Tengri (she/her) is a Kazakh-Swedish author, podcaster, and digital creator who lives in Malmö. Her short stories have been published in a Swedish anthology (Arkipelag) and Support for Indie Authors. Her record time for completing Prince of Persia 1989 is 29 minutes. She would like to dedicate this story to her old writing partner, Melissa Judson.

Molly Mendoza is an artist living in Portland, Oregon. Through their work, they explore the complex emotions of interpersonal relationships and self-love with a focus on layered visual storytelling, mark-making, and color. They write stories, they paint murals, they teach students, and they draw.

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• A Seder in Siberia

  The arrival of a surprise visitor at a family’s Passover celebration reveals the true story of how they came to be climate exiles.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gifts We Give to the Sea on Jan 22, 2024.

Categories: H. Green News

Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction contest, celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.Discover all the 2024 winners. Orsign up for email updatesto get new stories in your inbox.

Lærke’s first word was wing.

She lay cradled between the moss and her mama, watching the branches cut the sky in precise patterns. Her poor ma Suzume had fallen asleep after chasing the child around the farm, trying to keep Lærke’s tongue out of the beehive. The city’s colorful turbine balloons hovered high in the atmosphere, silently harvesting wind — and look there, the giggle of a single cumulonimbus in an otherwise blue sky.

Little Lærke’s developing mind observed the canopy overhead, babbling her wordless song above the comforting thunder of her mother’s snores. Then the word took shape on her lips and flew. Wing. Out into the world.

Auntie Cade looked up from the sacred text her needle had been working, the folds of fabric bunched in her lap. She’d been humming the ballad as she stitched those lessons of the living land, quietly harmonizing with the baby’s joyful yoller, but fell silent when she heard the word. The child’s first!

She followed Lærke’s gaze up to the sky, expecting to identify which dot in the kaleidoscope of community kites had caught the child’s attention, then eased herself down beside the babe to see from her perspective. Which of those turbine balloons or spinning kites and whipping dragontails in the skies had teased the first word from the baby’s lips …?

Maybe that one? One of the neighbor’s blimp turbine designs had dual blades that flashed like hummingbird wings — not the most efficient design, but since when has creativity been overly concerned with efficiency? It was certainly eye-catching.

Instead, as Auntie Cade nestled back close to the baby, cheek-to-cheek, Lærke showed her auntie a butterfly wing swirling dust motes ignited by the sunlight.

“That’s right, wing,” Auntie Cade affirmed, and pulled The Field Guide blanket up over the three of them. They snuggled in under the weight of wisdoms passed from auntie to auntie — woven, crafted, compiled — while Lærke and her auntie watched the butterfly dance in the golden pollen.

We always say a child’s first word is a gift.

And look at that.

…

You’re … hm. You’re not watching the butterfly. Look …

The blue of the butterfly wing is not a pigment, the color is formed by a delicate structure that refracts light itself, much like the blue of the sky. No real surprise that the beauty of chaos has been represented in the motion of—

You seem distracted. What are you looking for? Me? You’re wondering who this person is, telling you to look here and there. You want to know who’s telling the story? Fine.

I am a storyteller. The storyteller. This story’s teller.

There’s no use scanning the edges of the scene trying to find me. I’m not perched on a boulder beside these three as they’re experiencing this intimate, poignant moment on this lovely day. You think I’m up in a tree looking down on the scene? With these knees? Please.

I’m omniscient, but I’m not a creeper.

You can most often find me in the Tangle, the place in the city where paths converge. I don’t have to be present at every moment to know what’s going on. People tell me things. I have a trustworthy face.

Step closer. Let me get a good look at you. Knowing who we’re telling the story to is part of the craft: “The storyteller assesses their audience.” Watches the people as they mingle in the Tangle. Notes the dress of the passerby, their manner. A storyteller wouldn’t tell the same story to the lonely child seeking solace in the storyteller’s lap as they would to the bawdy crowd on their way to a fertility show.

Or at least, I wouldn’t tell it in the same way.

Any decent storyteller has this skill, it’s the same observations about character that we weave into our tales. Is the listener in a rush? Are they looking for escape? Do they need a single golden spiderweb thread to sew together something frayed inside?

Some storytellers tailor their tales to what their listeners want. My training taught me to look for the story the listener didn’t know they needed.

And you. A reader from the tail end of the blip era, what story do you need from me? Am I even able to tell you a story you will understand? You’re most likely steeped in the narrative techniques of the settler literatures of the time. Tricky … but difficult things are not impossible, and I wouldn’t be a storyteller if I didn’t like a challenge. Besides, you’re in luck. Though the story trends popular in the 21st century have long gone out of style, I just so happen to enjoy experimenting with this outdated form. I’m afraid that most current storytellers have found that the simplistic structures you’re familiar with often fail to capture our children’s imaginations so they’ve largely been left for archival scholars to catalog as a hobby. I have a friend who does this. Winslowe. He finds it relaxing. Hero goes on a journey or A stranger comes to town. His husband Jibril finds it tedious, but I admire people who are passionate about their passions! Whatever makes him happy, we agree.

Let me tell you about their son, Ben.

Aunties aren’t supposed to have favorites, and they don’t. Hierarchical thinking isn’t actually natural to human cognition, and there isn’t any scarcity of resources to compete over. Especially in regards to a person’s capacity for love.

If you ask Auntie Cade though, and I have (storytellers ask the most impertinent questions, get used to it), she was uniquely grateful for Ben. We all were, but part of that was due to Auntie Cade’s … interpretations … as she decoded the intricacies of his language. It turned out to not be a private language, like maybe his parents and peers, cousins, siblings, storytellers, neighbors, and neithers assumed. Ben was in communication with all the unheard and mostly unseen, outside the spectrum of general human understanding.

I don’t want to make this telling of a slight, autistic Black boy to sound unnecessarily mystical or mythical. He’s a person. But sometimes one’s love for a person embellishes their qualities — they swell with our regard, inflating like a generator-blimp before we hoist them high. Once a storyteller gets their hands on a person, they make the character appear larger-than-life. Is this the mark of fine craftsmanship or a rookie mistake? (You can tell me, it won’t hurt my feelings.) Why shouldn’t the loving renderings of an artist’s brush caress a child, stroke his cheek, and tickle his armpits?

Ben would hate it, so that’s one reason not to. And the only reason we need.

Of all the children she’d taught and inspired, nurtured and guided and delighted in, Auntie Cade recognized that she’d learned the most from Ben. She told us that Ben showed her things; he’d shown them to all of us, but sometimes it required an auntie’s attention to understand a child.

Our culture puts a lot of weight on a baby’s first word. (See above.) Not so much what the baby says, mostly that the baby says. That they’ve arrived at a phase of language acquisition which marks their inclusion in the community conversation.

Feral cats don’t meow. Or so the story goes.

We talk about everything. People do. The ASL sign for a hearing person is the same as the sign for TALKING. We’re always talking. Especially the people I know. It varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, culture to culture. But for the most part, we’ve evolved, especially since your time — those blip generations when decisions were made by might, hierarchical decree, or just not made at all — we’ve learned how to talk things out.

Feral cats don’t meow. Or so the story goes.

When there is a problem, we gather. And talk. Not to be heard, but to discuss. We approach the discussion acknowledging that there is a problem, and that the solution is not yet known, because if any one person knew how to solve that problem, it wouldn’t be an issue, now, would it? If it were a problem easily solved, we would’ve made quick work of ensuring it wasn’t a problem. We would instead be off braiding bread or rinsing the vegetable inks from the pages of a library book and searching the catalog for a new one to print — living our lives. No, if we’re there in that room, in that clearing, filling that field, meeting in a sports arena — then we have a problem so tricky that it needs everyone’s input. Children as young as six years old have contributed to civic matters. Do voices get raised? Sure. Do men burst into tears? Quite often. Do passions drown out reasoned accounts? Eh, not as often as you fear. Our children learn to listen at a young age and become adept in the skill as adults. I see it straining your imagination, stranger-comes-to-town, that the opinions of each individual in a mob could be worthy of respect. Do not feel bad about your disability, we see it as a failure of education … one of the many things lost in the blip generations, along with the 83 percent loss of biodiversity in the sixth mass extinction event you are currently living through.

But we were talking about Ben. How could a culture of loudmouths appreciate a quiet kid? Who grew to be a silent adult?

Because, unlike the “domesticated” cat, most of the wild creatures we share a planet with didn’t go out of their way to try and learn our language. To vocalize their need, to pitch their voices like a baby’s cry, to trigger a physiological response that requires immediate attention from people who hear it. Feral cats are silent because they don’t want to attract attention to themselves or communicate with people. They want to be left the hell alone.

Animals have rich languages of scents and gestures and vocalization patterns. Able to communicate between themselves and with each other, and very few of us have gone out of our way to understand the linguistic complexities of our fellows. Not with the same determination of the cats, at least. “But could those things really be considered language?” I hear one of you say. Your white sciences change the definitions and shift the goal posts every time a community of creatures approximates those arbitrary markers for intelligence, sentience, life. Every time. To ensure that only human people stand in the circle — and terrifyingly often, it’s only the people with similar qualities of those enforcing the definitions who are allowed in. Personally, I tend to wonder if that culture built on exclusion, exhausting itself to enforce artificial borders (or otherwise centering a single person’s narrative thread, consequently relegating the rest to less important supporting characters and background greenery) may have led to the worldview that brought your generation so close to ending the ever-generating world.

So yes, I say language.

Listen to birdsong as you walk through a place with birds … I was going to say “the woods” but that might be difficult for you to find, presently. Things were dire at the tail end of the blip era, as I understand it, you were so very successful in excluding everything unlike your kind … Anyway, walk among birds. Listen to their trilling call-and-response. You can be sure that they are talking, and I guarantee they are talking about you. You are big news in the woods. They are not quite sure what to make of you. Are you a predator? What have you done to assure the birds that you are not a threat? It’s easy enough to show them. Their birdsong is asking. They are waiting for a reply.

Ben’s first “word” was a reply. Our culture has a parallel language system of gestures; yours might, too. A thumbs-up, a corny salute. A peace sign, a f*ck you. Our neighborhood has a gesture of gratitude — two fingers pressed to one’s own lips. Thank you. And one to express a wordless need — hands cupped into an empty bowl. You would probably try to find the words for this feeling … general malaise, vague disappointment, unfulfilled desire, a soft sense of regret. You know the feeling … it’s just a nameless funk. Instead of trying to locate the feeling, to understand it — or jerkily act out in desperation to feel anything else — our people tend to just signal the inner turmoil we’re experiencing by cupping our hands into an empty bowl. Close to the body if we want to be left alone with the feeling, extended out from the body if we need someone to pull us out of it. It’s useful. Easy to communicate. Both for one’s self and to others. The prevalence of tragic instances of ill-advised bang-cutting in our society has diminished, at least.

When Ben was maybe 3 — long past the age most expect to welcome their children through the rites of their first word — Auntie Cade was walking alongside Ben during their daily route through the Tangle. She would follow where he led, always close enough should he need her, but never insisting on holding his hand in the crowded public space. He didn’t like for his hand to be held and it’s easy enough to allow small children their autonomy generally, Ben in particular. His morning routine was sacred to him and he was never at risk of running off.

On this day, Auntie Cade witnessed Ben making his quiet wander to his favorite places. He watched the glassblower turn sand into exquisite shapes — mesmerized by the lava blobs birthed in fire and brought to life with breath. The glassblower was a small man with thinning hair and a quiet voice. He did his work, seemingly indifferent to Ben’s constant presence — a feat, since people are otherwise hyper-aware of a 3-year-old in the vicinity of molten stoves and display shelves of delicate glassworks. But the glassblower had come to an agreement with Ben, an arrangement. Each day, the glassmaker dropped a single glass marble into a large, wide bowl just as Ben was ready to leave … in gratitude for the child’s attention and as thanks for him not touching all his stuff or breaking anything.

Ben listened to the smooth, nearly frictionless vibrations as the marble rolled in a path up the sides of the bowl and around. Ben’s eyes followed the lazy arcs and parabolas, and when it tinkled to a stop in the center, Ben reached in with his small fingers and picked it up. He examined the color and the finish of the marble, weighed it in his hand, and, satisfied after his appraisal, placed the marble he’d carried around all the previous day onto the rim of the bowl and let it circle to rest at the center. Then he left the workshop with the new marble nestled in his palm.

I’d asked the glassblower about this ritual, and about the day it changed. I had to tease the story out of him, slowly, like the expanding bubble of glass. He told me it started as a simple token, the kind he often gave children in gratitude for not touching any of the fragile wares. The first one was rather large — Ben was still small and there were no assurances that he wouldn’t put it in his mouth. (Auntie Cade assures me that he never did, which she found odd, since he put everything else in his mouth at that time — except for a variety of foods she hoped he would like.) Ben carried the fistful of smooth glass cupped in his chubby hand the whole day, and when the glassmaker presented him with a new one the next day, baby Ben deposited the old one and clutched the new. That was what intrigued the glassmaker, he’d assumed Ben would collect them like other children often did. He’d meant for the baby to have both. All of them.

We don’t like to use words like exchange or trade … they’re so rooted in blip characterizations of transactional relationships that we just … find more accurate words. But Ben started this ritual, and each morning, the child plucked the new gift from the bowl, examined it, then returned the one from yesterday before accepting the new one. Until one day, Ben picked up the day’s marble, and for whichever reason, preferred to keep hold of the one he had, and let the new one slide back into the bowl.

The glassmaker was startled, curious, and after the boy left, he picked up the marble and examined it. It was of the same quality as all the other marbles. What inspired the child’s preference for the previous? “There were no imperfections,” the glassblower told me while clipping a molten blob of glass, it curled in on itself like a living larva. “But there was some quality that displeased him, or at least persuaded Ben to keep holding on to the one in his hand.” Here I had to wait some time for the glassblower to roll his rod and use gravity to temper and shape the glob that would become a kind of vase. “That’s when it started. It went from a game, to a challenge, to …” He stared thoughtfully at the fires. “An inspiration. I am so grateful to Ben. His careful regard has inspired the development of my craft to a degree that … no one else would probably notice, but I know that he notices. Propelled by the urge to please him, my craft has been elevated to art and then to an act of devotion. I’m still not sure what the boy is looking for when he makes his assessments. It’s not perfection. Perfection is easy compared to this. I just want to make something that makes him happy. Something he wants to carry around with him each day, every day.”

I’d asked the glassblower if he’d ever felt offended. Refusing a gift can be a sensitive matter. The glassblower was startled, “It never occurred to me to be offended. You know Ben. The social rules of the gift don’t apply. It’s just him and me and the day’s marble.”

Perfection is easy compared to this.

I later learned that on the day I’m taking my sweet time in telling you about, the moment that Ben joined the extended family of the living world, Ben had been holding on to the same marble for two ten-days. That marble was blue, with cloudy swirls of white and flecks of green-brown. The glassblower had presented him with 20 examples of his refined craft — some vibrantly colored and particularly large or remarkably small, since the glassblower was getting kind of desperate to create something that would win the boy’s favor — and none of them satisfied Ben’s internal matrices of color, feel, and weight that made a gift a pleasure to hold.

“I still have no idea what it was about that one that appealed to the kid,” he let his sigh shape glass. “It was even slightly misshapen, with a bit of a bulge around the equator. Not at all my best work.”

But this was the one Ben didn’t want to let go of. Come, let’s go catch up with him. You’ll soon realize why I spent a seemingly disproportionate amount of time imbuing so much meaning into a smooth chunk of glass a 3-year-old carried clutched in his grasp. There he is. He’s moved on from the glassblower’s workshop to watch the rivermen unload their shares on the Main Stream docks, with Auntie Cade shadowing alongside him.

The crew rolled barrels onto shore, tilted them upright in a row. Ben watched them pop the tops off the barrels and plunge their hands elbows-deep into the watery contents. They wrestled strands of kelp from inside and strung them, glistening, up on a line, so the sunshine glinted off the slick surfaces, highlighting the variety of each. The exquisite variations in colors and textures and shapes.

Red sea kelp, which eases digestion processes in ruminants … decreases the methane content of cow farts — and can also fry up crisp and salty like bacon. Tasty. Exotic sugar kelp harvested from Nordic shores, alongside eelgrass gleaned from local seagrass meadows. Ben silently regarded the hanging kelp strands glittering like festive garlands, their home-waters draining back into the barrels beneath, while people stopped to admire and inquire.

“Pretty big haul today,” Jibril’s voice boomed out, and he rested his big dad hand on Ben’s back. Ben flinched away from the touch. “Oh, sorry, Benevolence.” Jibril apologized and glanced at Auntie Cade.

She admonished him with a twitch of the corner of her mouth, and nodded encouragement.

Jibril knelt beside his son and lowered his voice. “I thought I’d find you by the boats. You like the boats?”

Ben didn’t answer or meet his eyes. He poked at one of the slimy air bladders bobbing on the surface in the sea barrel.

Jibril joined him in pinching and stroking the glistening seaweed, and started to make conversation with the rivermen.

“These specimens are a delight,” Jibril said. “I don’t think I’ve seen sugar kelp available for some time. Rough seas?”

“No more than usual,” a riverman shrugged as she ladled more seawater on the strung-up strands to keep them glistening and hydrated. “Hydrofoil yacht pirates are always trying to take more than their share, but these beauties came through from the kelp farms of Sør-Trøndelag.”

“They’ve come so far!” Jibril exclaimed, “Ben, this seawater is from the far seas. Incredible.”

Ben continued to poke the air bladders, obviously sharing his dad’s fascination with the seaweed, though maybe not for the same reasons.

Everyone called Winslowe “Ben’s dad” and Jibril “Ben’s big dad” (Ben, of course, didn’t refer to them at all). Jibril was, yes, a hulk of a man, but it was his outgoing personality that gave him his “big dad” stature. He and his mama Kerime kept a community tavern attached to the Archives, where he and Winslowe and Ben had a small living space above the library. “You’re off-loading?” Jibril made note of the number of barrels.

“Most of it. We talked to Lis, who said salvage crew approved a rebuild of the generator serving East Bear cluster, so when needs are met here, we’re taking the river algae to the technicians. They can use their mysterious chemistries to extract materials for self-repairing sail production. You want anything today?”

“No need, no need. Only when I saw you had so much, it inspired me. I have an idea for a new recipe I wouldn’t mind serving up at the tavern today …”

Ben wandered off to his next stop at the witchcrafters while his big dad invited the rivermen over for a hearty meal, whether or not they had sugar kelp to spare. Auntie Cade followed the boy, sure he was eager to play with the puppies Auntie Owen had been bringing to the circle while they all talked story and swapped dyeing methods and stitch techniques. But Auntie Cade soon realized that she’d lost sight of the boy. He had veered off from his usual route and she searched the crowd at knee height, looking for him, fighting back a strange shame — an auntie never loses sight of their child. (Though Auntie Cade is quite extreme in her sense of responsibilities. She doesn’t permit herself to make mistakes, when everyone else knows that aunties are only human.)

Then she saw him. Tottering over to a man she didn’t recognize. Not a neighbor, perhaps a neither. That’s what we call people who we don’t yet have a named relationship with. You call them strangers, which … rude. But the man was sitting crouched off to the side with his head down and his cupped hands held out. Ben had noticed him, probably glimpsed between the legs of passersby, and had left his prescribed route to answer him.

Ben slipped his tiny hand into the man’s empty cupped ones.

The man looked up, startled, and opened his hands to find that Ben had placed the glassmaker’s marble there. The colorful work of magic. The cold miniature world.

Tears streamed down Auntie Cade’s cheeks when she saw Ben take the man’s hand, urge him to his feet and lead him over to the puppies. She knew how Ben felt about holding hands, that he endured his own discomfort to give comfort to another. She hurried the few steps back to Jibril and tearfully recounted what had just happened. How Ben had recognized the man’s need, and he had responded. This was unmistakably a word. Ben’s first.

They embraced and laughed and wove through the crowds to the witchcrafters’ circle. They found Ben silently introducing the man to the squirmy puppies, even then showing his abilities to be attuned to the nonverbal needs of creatures, human and otherwise.

I’m sure you know that’s not the end. How could a first word ever be?

But you didn’t need a story about an ending. I saw that right away, the first time we met there in the beginning. Saw how I would have to unspool my narrative thread into loose loops and coils to ensnare you. My needle sharp and glinting to repair the tears. It’s a story, I hope, that will hold to bridge the short century between us. A tightrope that will help you find your way back here.

Even now, you’re wondering how a storyteller from the future could be telling you all this. The, like … mechanics of the thing. See, storytellers are time travelers. Always have been. Or at least they could be, if they understood their true relationship with time. I’m not sure the blip storytellers were able to do this. The records of their stories would read differently if they could … though maybe the ones who understood the weavings of time didn’t get the opportunity to leave records. (I’ll have to talk with Winslowe about that one — archivists aren’t wrong all the time.)

I’m not predicting the future. I’m just telling you what I’ve seen and been told. So the next time you find yourself holding on to an imperfect blue marble, you might have a few ideas about what to do with it.

Rae Mariz (she/her) is a Portuguese-Hawaiian speculative fiction storyteller, artist, translator, and cultural critic with roots in the Big Island, Bay Area, and Pacific Northwest. She’s the author of the Utopia Award-nominated climate fantasy Weird Fishes and cofounder of Toxoplasma Press. Her short fiction has appeared in khōréō magazine and made the shortlist for 2023 IAFA Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden with her long-term collaborator and their best collaboration yet.

Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor (she/her) is an illustrator from Bogotá, Colombia.

More from the 2024 Imagine 2200 contest

• Accensa Domo Proximi

  At a live art show in the bustling city, a cook grapples with the coastal home he lost.

• Gifts We Give to the Sea

  A mother must come to terms with her child’s identity, her husband’s passing, and the changing landscape of their community.

• To Labor for the Hive

  A beekeeper finds a new sense of purpose and community after helping to develop a warning system for floods.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Imperfect Blue Marble on Jan 22, 2024.

Categories: H. Green News

Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction contest, celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.Discover all the 2024 winners. Orsign up for email updatesto get new stories in your inbox.

April 5, 2022

I got my first glimpse of the place today. Drove out there by myself and knelt in the dirt and ran my hands through the dry clods. Nobody else out there, save a few crows picking over some years-old corn.

I don’t think the seller will be a problem. That land gave all it could give and it won’t give any more. The ground is all hard and rocky, rutted out with old furrows and bits of crabgrass here and there. I’ve seen parking lots with more life.

It’s the only piece in that area that butts up to Stanton Forest. The guy across the road seems to be going strong, but not too many other nearby farms are. It’s perfect.

I found this old notebook in a desk drawer at home and started writing about all this. We’ll see what happens.

April 30, 2022

Everything’s signed. Me, at the age of 58 and only ever worked in the city, now the owner of 94 acres of south Ohio cropland. Or what used to be cropland, at any rate.

She’d be proud of me and that made me smile on the drive home from the seller’s office. She was always going on about how we needed to give stuff back to nature. “We have so much,” she’d say, “so, so much. We have to give it back, Daddy. We gotta find a way.”

“Sure, sure,” I’d always nod. And now she’s gone and I never gave her an answer.

Well, Firefly, here goes nothing.

May 6, 2022

When I stand next to the road, the trees at Stanton are a green row on the horizon. Behind me is the neighbor. To the left and right my land stretches out for about a half mile.

Neighbor’s name is Brett. He came by in his truck when I was out there today. “Howdy, neighbor,” he said like a cowboy with his head sticking out the window.

“What are you growing?” he asked.

“A forest, if I can.”

He looked confused but tried not to show it.

“Soy prices aren’t bad these days,” he said. “A hell of a lot more in soy than trees. And quicker.”

“I’m not gonna cut it down.”

He shook his head.

“Well, it’s your place,” he said and then took off.

May 16, 2022

I’ve been reading. This land used to be a forest, one of the biggest in the world. Stretched from where the swampland ended in south Georgia all the way up to the tundra in Canada. There were wolves and bears and chestnut trees that showered so many nuts you had to wade through them.

Most of what’s left of that forest is in the beams of the old Victorians on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland or in Palmer Woods in Detroit. The rest got burned or blighted and then we plowed it under and grew corn and soy until we couldn’t anymore. It’s gone, save a few patches here and there.

One of those is the Smokies down in Tennessee. We went when Sadie was 8. I thought she’d want to see a bear, but she talked about birds the whole way down — 245 species there, she said. We walked all over and I could tell that this was a different sort of woods. Deeper, darker. Smelled like old leather and life.

Sadie wanted to camp in the park, but I didn’t care to sleep on the ground. Still don’t, actually. I woke up in our hotel room to find her on the balcony, staring off at the mountains, her little hands gripped tight on the railing.

We can’t do the Smokies here. Sorry, dear, we gotta crawl before we walk. We’re gonna start with grassland and then trees. We could just let it go, let nature take her course. But we’d probably just end up with a haphazard field of soy plants. So, grass. And water. And these people over in England think pigs are a good idea. So maybe pigs, too.

June 4, 2022

I don’t know where she got it from. It wasn’t from me. I grew up in the Columbus suburbs. Lived in the Columbus suburbs. Ran the dealership in the Columbus suburbs after Dad died. My idea of interacting with nature is one of those documentaries with the British guy talking about starfish and antelopes.

But there was a little creek behind our cul-de-sac and she’d spend hours down there, looking at bugs and toads and building dams with rocks. Come back all muddy and I’d hose her down in the backyard, with her screaming and trying to dodge the water.

“Why do we have all this grass and nothing else?” she asked me once as we walked through our neighborhood. “What are the animals supposed to eat?”

Which brings me to the pigs. The pigs can help because they root around and turn up the hard soil. Then they sh*t everywhere and help fertilize the ground for other plants. Or that’s what this guy I called in England said.

But right now my land is like those lawns, nothing for the pigs to eat. And that’s saying something, because I’ve learned pigs will eat about anything, even roadkill. So I gotta plant grasses and berry bushes and other plants to create a first layer of food.

I’ll also build a few ponds to try to attract birds and create a different type of habitat. And I gotta do it all before winter gets here.

June 15, 2022

It’s not much of a pond, but it will do. Rented a backhoe and dug out a pond at the base of where the land slopes slightly down to the south. It’s about the size of the neighborhood swimming pool by the place Sadie grew up.

Then I ran a pipe up from the water main and filled it. It won’t stay, but I’m hoping the fall rains will keep it filled just a bit.

Today, I seeded half the place with grass, wandering the whole place with a bag of seeds over my shoulder, tossing them everywhere. It took all day, out in the heat, no shade. A few birds swooped in to eat some seeds, but it was lonely otherwise. I’ll come back tomorrow and do the rest.

I went with a mix of big bluestem, switchgrass, and prairie dropseed, which are all tall grasses native to this area. Big bluestem will be shoulder height in a few years. And I did red clover and buckwheat, which are lower grasses. The clover apparently will restore some of the chemicals we need to grow in the soil.

Next week, I’ll do wildflowers and shrubs, like black-eyed Susans, butterfly weed, sunflowers, and elderberry bushes. Those will shoot their roots into the dry and compacted soil and break it up, allowing for water and worms and nutrients to get in.

And next to the pond, I planted a few cattails that I dug up from the stream behind the house. They’ll probably die in a week, but it felt good to have something Sadie would have touched on the land.

August 25, 2022

The most magical thing happened today. I went out to the land and was walking around like I always do. There’s some green shoots all over from the grass I planted, plus I saw a few flowers that I didn’t.

Ever since I planted the grass, I’ve been seeing mice scurrying around eating the seeds I threw down. I was near the pond, watching a mouse maybe thirty feet away dip in and out of my sight as it hurried up and down the old furrows.

And then, wham, a red-tailed hawk shot from the sky and grabbed the mouse in its talons. I was so close I could hear the mouse scream. The hawk swiveled his head, looked at me for the briefest moment and then took off again, heading toward Stanton Forest.

It all happened so fast that I didn’t realize I was holding my breath.

October 14, 2022

Fall’s here, and I’m worried. We haven’t had much rain, and not much of the grass has rooted in. The pond is just a muddy puddle. The cattails are still there, thankfully, but I haven’t seen as many ducks as I saw at first.

I’m afraid I didn’t get things in quickly enough and winter will kill off everything that’s been growing. But I dearly hope it all makes it through winter alright. I could say the same for me.

I drive by the spot where she hit the black ice on my way to work. Even in the summer, I find my foot hitting the brake a little early. In the winter, I go through it so slow cars behind me hit their horns every now and again.

The tree she hit still has the scar, this unholy blotch of black. I thought it might kill the tree when I first saw it two years ago. But it’s still hanging in, that old oak. I get a real good look at it in the winter.

March 16, 2023

I didn’t go out there much this winter, so there wasn’t much to write about. Just twice, both times all frozen over and snow on the ground, the grass brown and the cattails shivering in the wind. A desolate place, really.

But now, spring, and melt. And disappointment. Even this early, there’s buds on trees and low lines of green in some of the fields along the road on the drive out there. My place is mostly dirt and mostly empty.

There’s some tufts of grass, but it’s hard to say what I put there and what the wind did. I must have planted things too late. Or the rains didn’t come. Or something else. The upshot is it’s no closer to being a forest than I am to being a raven.

Makes me wonder what I’m doing out here. Maybe I’ll just sell the place.

March 19, 2023

I couldn’t stand the thought of her trapped in the ground. Her mother and I hadn’t talked in a few weeks when we both went out to the river that ran about two miles from our house with the urn. It was spring, a few months after the wreck, and the water was a swirl of snowmelt.

The stream behind our house ran into this river. Sadie had it all drawn out on a map in her room, otherwise I wouldn’t have known. A summer project, mapping our watershed. She had decided by then that she was going to either be a freshwater ecologist or a zoologist.

We poured the ashes in the river and watched them float away, just a small patch of gray in a sweeping current of brown.

March 22, 2023

I was out all day today with my seed sack, getting grass down all over again. By the end my boots were so caked with mud they felt like cement blocks. Too tired to write more.

March 26, 2023

Today I brought my pigs out. Eight of them, full grown and snorting. The guy I bought them from brought them here in a trailer and everything.

“You got a place to put them?” he asked when he pulled up.

“Anywhere is good.”

Guy shook his head and undid the latch and the eight of them trampled out onto the mud. They were all old sows, done producing piglets and set for slaughter when I got them. $150 a piece, a steal, the guy had said.

I’ll be putting corn out for them to eat, but the idea is that they’ll be able to find their own food by the summer.

With them out there, I’ll have more reason to come back. I’m excited about that.

April 5, 2023

I woke up this morning with a voicemail from Brett. We’d exchanged numbers last fall when we were both looking for a lost dog from the neighbors further down the road.

Apparently, some of the pigs had gotten into his soybeans and rooted up a few plants. He didn’t sound too happy about it. “Those pigs are feral. If I see them on my land again, I’ll shoot ’em.”

Fair enough. I ordered a couple movable fences today. Instead of having them roaming, I’ll keep them on an acre or so then move them in a week or so.

But already, I’m seeing more grass, more blooms. When I was out there most recently, there was a whole flock of finches singing and hopping among the green shoots.

July 15, 2023

Full summer, as of a few weeks ago. My Lord. I’ve got grass and sunflowers up to my knees. There’s a couple of geese that seem to have taken up residence in the pond. I saw my first deer a few days ago.

The pigs are basically magic. Anywhere I’ve put them, a few weeks later, it explodes with life.

For the first time, when I stand on the road with my land on one side and Brett’s on the other, I can really tell a difference. His is all these ordered rows. Mine is haphazard. His is all green. I’ve got yellows from sunflowers and black-eyed Susans, greens in the grass, some orange and red from flowers that I have no idea what they are, and browns where nothing is growing yet.

It feels like mine, this stretch of land. I don’t know what to call it. It’s not a farm. It’s not a forest. It’s still in that long in-between. But it makes me smile, looking out onto my misshapen kingdom, a kind of patchwork quilt knit by no one in particular.

August 24, 2023

The letter came in the mail to my home address. It was all dressed up and on legal letterhead. McCovey and Haines, it said at the top.

“To Mr. Gregory Elroy, the owner of property located at 501 E. Larson Road,

We write to you regarding the nuisance you have created on your property at the above address. Our Client, Mr. Brett Tubbs, of 400 E. Larson Road, has noticed a considerable uptick of deer, squirrels, birds, and other nuisance animals entering his property and disrupting his planting, seeding, and growing of crops.

Having farmed this land for 17 years, Our Client has never been so disrupted in his labor. We urge you to cease from all activities related to your “re-wilding” of the property at 501 E. Larson Road including the planting of wild grasses, trees, shrubs, and other flora and fauna and the additional lack of maintenance that might further disrupt Our Client’s legitimate farming operations.

If you do not, we will have no choice but to pursue legal action to remedy this situation in a court of law.

Sincerely,

Mike McCovey, Attorney at Law”

Rewilding. It’s funny they used that word. Brett had driven by a few weeks back and we’d talked about the weather and the Reds. He seemed over the pigs thing.

I told him the word for what I was doing was “rewilding,” which I’d only just learned from some YouTube videos. He’d shrugged. “As long as it don’t bother me,” he said.

It must have.

My second thought came unbidden. It’s working, I thought. It’s working.

August 29, 2023

After a long time thinking, I decided to ignore the letter. What could they really do? I owned the land outright. If they wanted to come and take it from me or sue me over a few deer wandering into Brett’s fields, they could go right ahead.

I got a call from one of the principals at school when Sadie was 12. Apparently she’d found a baby squirrel on the playground and had been keeping it in her front pocket and feeding it Gatorade with an eyedropper in class. Her teacher had heard it squeaking.

“If I don’t have it in my pocket, it’s gonna die, Dad,” she said over the phone, her voice panicked and teary. “It won’t stay warm enough anywhere else.”

I begged the principal to let her take it home and we’d take care of it here. I found a shoe box and hooked up a light to keep it warm.

“That won’t keep it warm enough. It’s gonna die,” she said. “When it’s that little it’s supposed to be next to its brothers and sisters and mother almost all the time.”

I had to drag her to school and we left the squirrel at home. I don’t know what happened, but when we got home the light had gone out and the baby squirrel wasn’t moving much. It died a day later.

She didn’t talk to me for a week, just slamming doors and scowling. Any time I walked in a room where she was, she’d screw up her face and yell, “Murderer!” And then storm out.

Look what I’m doing now, Firefly. The opposite of murder.

September 25, 2023

I got another letter. Said similar stuff but then asked for a meeting at the lawyer’s office, and I went a few days later. The letter said I should bring a lawyer with me, but I don’t know any lawyers and didn’t feel like calling one.

The office was downtown, with lots of wood paneling and leather chairs. Brett was there, in the guy’s office who sent the letter. He just nodded when I came in.

“Mr. Elroy, you have been in violation of the county’s land-use regulations,” the lawyer said, his voice oiled and smooth.

“Your land is intended for use in agriculture, and you seem to be doing nothing of the sort. As a result of your negligence to your land, my client has suffered damages from the excessive wildlife disturbing his crops.”

There was a silence, as I thought about it.

“What do you mean by excessive wildlife?” I said.

“There’s deer out there every morning,” Brett broke in. “They’re eating my seedlings. And the birds, too. So many damn birds. I just had my lowest yield in 15 years.”

I shook my head.

“But it’s my land,” I said.

The lawyer smiled a thin smile.

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean you can do anything you want with it. And the law says that parcel is to be used for agricultural use. I hope you understand.”

I didn’t understand. But I didn’t get angry until I was driving home. I looked out the window and at the strip malls and fast food chains and parking lots with little bits of grass and trees in between. And beyond it, for miles, more asphalt and concrete with little bits of green in between. All the way to the ocean in either direction.

As we walked out of the office, Brett had said, “It’s because of you environmentalists that people like me can’t make a decent living anymore.”

I never thought of myself as an environmentalist. But Sadie was right. We did have too much. But, apparently, it was illegal to give any of it back.

October 17, 2023

I went out to the land today and just walked around. I wouldn’t say it’s pretty, especially now that it’s fall and the flowers have gone for months. The grasses are all scruffy and brown. The pigs are all brown and muddy and old.

I think maybe what’s scary to some people is that I’m just letting it go. Brett is out there every day on his tractor, tilling or planting. I’m not. I’m just letting it be. I really don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Maybe that’s a little scary to be next to.

On the night she died, Sadie was at my place for the week. Her mother and I had just bought her her first car, a used 2014 Honda Civic, after she’d spent a few months learning to drive on ours. Simple, easy to drive. Safe. Good gas mileage. I thought she’d love it. But she didn’t.

“I don’t want a car, Dad. I only learned to drive so I wouldn’t hurt your feelings. Do you even know what cars are doing to the earth?” she told me when I first showed it to her a week or two before.

It’d been sitting in the driveway ever since, the keys still on the counter where she’d put them. Her mother had dropped her at my place.

And she’d been sulking all week. She’d get like this in the winter. Couldn’t go outside except to tramp around the block in her snow boots. Plus, you know, being a teenager.

I thought I might take her to the movies or something. She was sitting on the couch, lookin’ out the window.

“Firefly, you want to go —”

“You call me that, but did you even know that fireflies are going extinct?” she snapped.

I balked. I didn’t know that.

“’Cause there’s no more woods for them to live in. They can’t just live on sidewalks and front yards. But that’s all there is around here.”

“Well, can’t we do something about —”

“Sure, we could. But people like you never will. I’m not your firefly, Dad.”

With that, she stormed out of the room. I sank back into the couch. I heard a car start up in the driveway a minute later. Huh, I thought, maybe she wants that thing after all.

The phone rang twenty minutes later.

October 30, 2023

When I pulled up to the land this morning, there was a sheriff’s car in the rut where I usually park. He got out as I pulled in, and he was holding a brown packet in his hand. His name tag said Lt. Briggs.

“Morning,” he said, as we approached each other, like we were friends. I nodded.

“I’m guessing you probably know what this is,” he said, handing me the packet. I nodded again.

I took the packet and could feel the heavy pages inside of it. This must be how all this ended. We stood there for a second, him looking off in the distance, me listening to the breeze.

“You know, I’ve been driving by here for as long as you’ve been doing this,” Briggs finally said.

“You think I’m crazy too, probably,” I said.

He shook his head and crossed his arms and looked out over my scraggly land.

“I don’t. I truly don’t,” he said after a while. “My family’s lived around here for five generations. My great-great-grandfather was one of the men who cut down these woods and tilled the first farms. I used to take a lot of pride in that.”

“But you don’t now?” I said.

“Oh, I do. But, my kids, they lose their minds when they see a deer. They don’t know anything about anything wilder than our backyard.”

I looked out on the land. I couldn’t say it was much wilder than a backyard, but just then, three ducks took off from the pond and beat their wings over our heads.

“Well, not everyone agrees,” I said, holding up the brown packet.

Briggs laughed.

“No, clearly not,” he said. “But have you talked to the land trust? Or the people at Stanton?”

I shook my head.

“I haven’t been talking to much of anyone recently. Just been out here where it’s quiet.”

He laughed again, a deep, throaty laugh.

“Well, maybe you should give them a call. They might be able to help you more than the birds and deer.”

With that, he tipped his hat and strode back to his car, leaving me with the packet in my hand and the wind blowing in my ears.

February 19, 2024

Well, it’s settled then. The land is now a nature preserve. And it’s being absorbed by Stanton State Forest.

The people at the land trust straightened it all out rather quickly. They paid me one dollar for the land. Then they transferred it to the state’s control. But not before they helped me secure the right to live and traverse the land for me and my ancestors for all time.

That last part was their lawyer’s words, not mine. But I like it. For all time.

I’m building a cabin out there. It might be ready in a year. Maybe one day I’ll move out there. And I’m finally going to get around to the other pond once the freeze breaks.

Then, trees. It’s time to plant trees. We’ll have our forest yet, Firefly. Oaks, hickories, maples, dogwoods. I can just see the saplings shivering in the spring air. It’s beautiful.

And the fence. I’m helping Brett build a fence around his land. It was part of the condition of the agreement for them to drop the lawsuit. It’ll be tall enough to keep out most of the deer.

I don’t blame him. The fact is, there’s no way for the wild to co-exist next to his rows and rows of soybeans. We wave to each other again.

And the people at the state agreed to one more condition. They’re going to call this little patch the Sadie Elroy Preserve.

August 4, 2031

I watched the sun go down from my little porch in my little forest. The birds were singing: sparrows, mockingbirds, an owl a little later.

The trees aren’t high or thick enough to block the view and cast much shadow yet, but one day they’ll tower over this place and it’ll be in shade all day long.

There’s water striders on the pond, and birds dipping through to catch them. I saw two raccoons drinking from the other pond yesterday. A few turtles too, years and years after I’d introduced them. Day before that, it was a flash of fox fur in some of the low bushes. The soil, when I kneel down and cup it in my hands, is soft and loamy. Some nights, there are even fireflies.

I walk the trails most mornings as the sun comes up and see what I can see. Every day, it’s something. I walk a lot slower these days, but that’s okay.

Some days, in the quiet of the morning, when my mind is focused on a deer track or a birdsong, I can hear her laughing, off in the distance.

Andrew Kenneson (he/him) works with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy in Cleveland, Ohio on urban green space projects. He’s previously written for local newspapers in Georgia and Alaska.

Molly Mendoza is an artist living in Portland, Oregon. Through their work, they explore the complex emotions of interpersonal relationships and self-love with a focus on layered visual storytelling, mark-making, and color. They write stories, they paint murals, they teach students, and they draw.

More from the 2024 Imagine 2200 contest

• To Labor for the Hive

  A beekeeper finds a new sense of purpose and community after helping to develop a warning system for floods.

• Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Long In-Between on Jan 22, 2024.

Categories: H. Green News

Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction contest, celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.Discover all the 2024 winners. Orsign up for email updatesto get new stories in your inbox.

An alarm buzzed, yanking Benny’s gaze away from his bank of video feeds from the underwater observation drones.

Someone’s left a baby in the Safe Haven Box.

Torn, his attention wavered. Two of the drones still floated freely, not yet stowed safely beneath the Mission — and a hurricane loomed mere miles off Old Louisiana’s coast.

Hurricane’s not quite made landfall. That baby is more important than docking drones.

Rising winds lent him urgency. Benny keyed in the auto-dock on drone #18 and sprinted down the hall. For the most part, ballast kept the Kateri Mission floating steady, her sea anchors holding her in place. But storm surge was already hitting her broadside in waves. It wouldn’t be long before it drove them beneath the surface of Timbalier Bay for safety.

Lazare, as usual, beat him to the receiving chamber. He shifted impatiently from hand to hand, waiting for Benny to open the box and retrieve the surrendered infant.

“How the heck do you run so fast?” Benny glanced down. The kid wasn’t wearing his leg prosthetics. Again.

“How do you run so slow, old man?” The boy shot back, grinning as he plumped his torso on the floor and crossed his arms.

Not a boy — a young man of 16. But a young man who will never have an adolescent growth spurt. His body will always be too small for that big personality.

The thought saddened him.

Benny knuckled Lazare’s head. “Hey — I’m only nine years older than you.”

Between seminary and engineering at the Mission, “Deacon Benoit Naquin” feels like he’s 100 already. Just wait ’til I make the Priesthood. He laughed at himself.

I’d do anything for kids like Lazare.

Hydraulics groaned as the Box’s exterior door finished sealing. Outside the Mission, rising winds made their supply airship’s docking mast vibrate. Its thin wail pierced the foam-crete walls.

Uh-oh. Winds have reached Category 1, over 74 miles an hour.

Uneasy at the thought, he glanced out the window. Water churned against the plexiglass: dirty water in Nature’s washing machine, debris flying sideways, white foam lashing clear to the second floor.

“I saw no sign of a boat when I got here.” Lazare, too, sounded worried.

Benny spared a small prayer for the infant’s mother. He couldn’t imagine how someone from the bayous crossed the open waters paddling a pirogue. Not in this ouragan.

The sound of hydraulics ceased, and the indicator light blinked green. Benny thumbed the lock, and the Box door released. Water dripped through the hinge, moisture darkening the wall as it opened.

Inside the compartment lay a small bundle, swaddled in a wet blanket.

“Someone got you here safe and sound. Let’s see who the storm brought us, then.” He cooed as he reached for the crying infant and peeled down the wet swaddling.

A full head of dark hair crowned the infant. A starfish hand waved fitfully in midair. Benny slid his finger into its grasp, touching the palm. Like the tendrils of coral anemones, tiny fingers wrapped around his finger.

The child huffed and settled.

“Let’s see who the storm brought us, then.”

Perfect little torso, perfect chubby arms, the fine thread of a pulse tangible to his touch. But below the navel, what should have been two legs tapered into a single, narrow column ending in twisted flipper-like feet.

And also the wide-set eyes, broad nasal bridge, and epicanthic folds of Potter’s Syndrome. Another sirenomeliac, poor little thing. Another victim of oil’s heavy metals. It’s poisoned our waters since the Time of Hungry Ghosts.

“You’ve got a sweet little sister,” Benny said.

“What is she — my 30-second sibling now?” Lazare scoffed as he scuttled over to see, his empty shorts dangling under his half-body.

“Settle down, and you can hold her while I lock up.” Benny slipped her into the kid’s eager arms. Once the Box sealed shut, the ballast pumps could engage, pulling the Mission underwater, safely beneath the gale.

Lazare drew a finger down the girl’s fused legs, to her twisted flipper feet. “Just like me,” he said, his tone wistful.

Like so many, born without viable kidneys, unable to survive without the Mission’s care. Always needing life support, never to live lives of purpose. We’ve saved them, but is that enough?

Benny straightened. The girl needed surgery to integrate her with a life support unit. Thank Bon Dieu the Church has deep pockets. And a guilty conscience.

A loud crash shook the chamber. Shock shot through Benny’s veins like hot whiskey. His gaze flew to the source of the sound.

A large, gutted fish battered against the plexiglass window, water churning ever higher as the storm strengthened. His heart skipped a beat in his chest.

“A busted observation drone,” he said. One I didn’t stow away. Number 19 or 20.

Modeled after a yellowfin tuna, its fish-shaped silicone exterior had ripped wide open, exposing a disjointed carbon-fiber spine inside. Electropolymer muscles had torn loose, dangling freely in the water. The head carrying sensory electronics dangled by a wire, banging against the window with the motion of the waves.

“La Sirène is not happy with us,” Lazare said. “She’s throwing our fish back in our faces.”

La Sirène. Mami Wata. Blessed Mary, Star of the Sea. She of many names, many faces: the lighthouse that guards, the guiding star that brings a sailor home through storm — or kidnapper of babies to raise them undersea, the mermaid that drowns men in her embrace.

The pitch of the wind rose, the Mission’s sensor mast vibrating with the harmonics, an eerie, tonal wailing. They’d have to withdraw beneath the surface soon. Without sun, batteries would see them through the worst of the storm, but if the winds kept them under the surface more than two days, they’d have to ration power.

“La Sirène calls to us,” Benny said. With the most beautiful voice of all the loa.

He sighed, torn between two worlds, and shook off his frustration. “I’d best get her to surgery.”

Lazare looked up. “What should we name her?”

Benny spared a last glance at the wreckage of the drone. Electronics gone, its gutted silicone body thrashed against the window, storm surge lending it the semblance of life.

“Nola,” he replied. “After the city that drowned a hundred years ago. New Orleans.”

“Nola.” Lazare nodded his approval as Benny took the child from him. “Stormborn.”

Benny studied the small, still form in the regen-tank.

The charge nurse, Sister Cecely Couteau — Cece—wiped sweat from her hairline with a forearm. “Surgery went well,” she said. Cat-like satisfaction stole across her face.

Nola’s tiny body hung suspended in the tank, supported by an inflatable, petal-like float that kept her face above the straw-colored fluid. The bottom of her torso ended in a neatly bandaged bulb, connected to the life-support unit via flexible tubing and wire cables.

“Little froggy on a lily pad,” Lazare chanted, his nose pressed to the glass.

Nola’s arms twitched.

Benny glanced up sharply.

Cece read the monitors as she gestured to the baby. “EEG shows the electro-stim is working. You can see the neural link has stabilized.”

“Good.” The stim would keep her muscles from a state of atrophy.

Benny relaxed too-tight shoulders and exhaled a long sigh of relief.

Waiting in surgery always leaves me such a mess.

Named after the Patron Saint of Ecology, the Kateri Mission’s initial purpose was coastal wetlands restoration — a task which came to mean salvaging the lives of sirenomeliacs as well, lives that otherwise would be lost.

But that isn’t always easy, or even possible.

As Benny watched Nola sleep, his old anger bubbled up. Children wouldn’t suffer like this if Mother Church hadn’t spent two millennia promoting ecocide in the name of dominion over the earth. It’s taken her too damn long to come to her senses.

His feelings must have shown on his face. Cece patted his hand. “We won this one. Take the win, Benny. She’s not going anywhere.” She gently guided him toward the rocker in the corner of the recovery room. “How long has it been since you slept? By the look of you, not since God wore knickers. Get some shut-eye.”

“I’ll watch her for you,” Lazare said. His fingers made the sign of the cross, lips moving with his own silent prayers.

He sees himself in babies like Nola. They make him less lonely.

“Come get me if anything changes.” Benny said. He eased back against the worn cushions, letting the bubbling sounds of the tank soothe him as he halfheartedly rocked.

He rested tired eyes on the many invocational banners hung on the walls. Their brightly colored satins, sequins, and glass beads depicted guardian Saints and Vodou healing spirits. Saint Patrick/Damballah the Rainbow Serpent, Saint Claire/Ayizan the purifier, an old woman in white and surrounded by palm trees — each one an emanation of Bon Dieu, the good God.

Cece had even drawn a vèvè — a Vodou religious symbol — on Nola’s tank with a white marker. The curlicue lines, stars, and two snakes facing each other invoked the protection of Saint Patrick/Damballah.

She’d also cleaned away bad energy with Florida Water. Its pungent, limey scent bit the back of Benny’s nose. Beside him, on an altar, candles flickered at the feet of a sculpture of Mary, Star of the Sea. Bowls of roses at her feet emitted a cloud of sweet perfume.

Phrases of her votive mass washed through the back of Benny’s mind.

… Mary, shine forth as the Star of the Sea and protectress for us who are tossed about on the stormy waves …

The sacred memory soothed him. For the first time in what felt like days, Benny closed his eyes, merely listening. No wailing skies. Only the faint pulse of the pumps felt through the soles of his feet — the Mission’s heartbeat.

Benny let himself drift. He’d had a tough day punctuated by frantic rushing, then the long, tense wait as the storm raged overhead.

The smell of rose grew thicker, sweeter. The soft cloud of scent reminded him of the Mary shrine back home in Houma City.

“You did well bringing her here.”

Cece’s voice — or is it? Benny drifted too deeply to care. He felt her gentle hand on his shoulder, and raised his own to cover it.

“But you need to let them come to me.” Fingers dug into his shoulder.

His eyelids felt as if they’d been glued shut. Benny struggled to open them, to see who pinched him.

“The world is not your plaything, to be used and discarded at whim.”

A face blurred before him: Cece? No — this woman’s café-au-lait skin was dappled with fine traces of scales, her body nude to the waist. And below? An iridescent blue-green fish tail. It coiled beneath her like the body of a snake, lacework fins twitching as she balanced upright upon a bed of seagrass that waved beneath aquamarine waters.

“La Sirène …” Benny murmured, not quite able to form a coherent thought.

How am I breathing underwater?

“I come to tell you, Benoit Naquin —” her words tumbled out in the patois of the deep bayou, the sound of water tumbling across a broken reef, “— that your little fake fish do not satisfy me. No hero can conquer me. No man alive has the power to control the sea.”

La Sirène undulated seductively, balancing atop her snake-like tail. “Your children will be mine, for I will take them back into my bosom.” Her grip released him, fingers snapping into a fist in front of his nose.

Benny jerked, tipping the rocker backwards.

He swung it forward again. “I won’t let your storms and tantrums imperil our children.”

Candles flickered, the flames growing higher, casting the sea floor with bars of light and darkness. Howling winds became the wail of an infant, forlorn, bereft.

La Sirène tossed her head in fury, dusky blond braids flying like sea wrack. “You are no savior, stopping up your ears, deaf to our cries,” she roared. “The world is not your plaything, to be used and discarded at whim. They suffer —” she flung out an arm, water splashing from her fingertips onto Nola’s tank, “— because of men like you. It is your arrogance that wounds them.”

She speaks truly. If only men listened, when the seabed wept oil, and the land begged for water. “What must I do?” Benny whispered, aghast.

Her gaze narrowed. “Suffer the children to come to me,” La Sirène replied. Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes. “Let me rock my babies in my waters. I will care for them, and they will become strong.”

Like a tempest swirling around the eye of the storm, her mood shifted. “If you do not give them to me, I will take them,” she thundered.

Benny’s head spun, the roaring of her voice overwhelming him. A terrifying vertigo threatened to pluck him from his body. He cried out as he pitched from the rocker, sprawling on the cold, concrete floor.

“Wake up, Benny.” Someone shook his shoulder. Benny heard the sound of water dripping. His shoulder was shaken harder.

“C’mon, dammit.”

It’s Cece. Cece calls me.

“Storm surge broke open a section of the oyster reef,” Cece said, her voice tight with worry. “You’ve gotta get an ROV out there and repair it. Before salt water destroys the freshwater marsh.”

“It’s not that simple, Cece.” Benny had massaged his temples, trying to shake the last vestiges of dizziness. “Yes, a Remote Operated Vehicle maybe could tow out an artificial reef for oysters to grow on. But sediments have likely clogged the beds by now, choking them out. We’ll have to use the filter barge to clear the water so they can grow back and fix the reef.”

And that barge cannot be deployed until the storm dies down.

“Damn.” Her shoulders sagged. “Technology’s never been the answer, has it?”

Benny could only shake his head in agreement.

Back in his workshop, Benny showed Lazare how to read the satellite weather feeds, the kid all but wiggling out of the chair as he tried to concentrate. So much energy. He should be doing something physical.

He still couldn’t shake the conversation with Cece.

There should not be so many sick infants abandoned by their mothers. Or surviving kids like Lazare, tied to life support. A hundred-fifty years of environmental damage proved anthropocentrism leads only to destruction.

“We still haven’t learned our lesson, have we …” Benny murmured as he studied the broken drone, now retrieved and lying on his workbench.

Observation drones were shaped like the fish they observed — but demanded a human operator to keep them safe. Filter barges — couldn’t work in current conditions. ROVs — too limited in range and motion to plant mangroves or tend oyster beds.

We’re still standing apart, applying our heroic measures to “fix” Nature. And it’s not working.

Frustrated, disgusted at his limitations, Benny began to pace.

“Lazare, what was that you said about La Sirène and fish when this showed up?”

“That she was throwing ours back in our faces. Why?” Lazare looked puzzled.

She doesn’t want to be “managed” by drones. She wants mutuality. A co-equal relationship, man and sea. She even mentioned “her” babies — the sirenomeliacs?

As Benny fingered the drone’s dangling electronics, Lazare hauled himself up onto the workbench, shifting position as he sat.

To avoid disturbing his bio-ports.

Benny looked down at the cabling in his hand, and back to Lazare. A clear image presented itself — the perfect solution, wedding a small person to a very mobile, low profile prosthetic, one able to work freely underwater.

His heart lifted, spirits buoyed as he sensed the possibilities.

It’ll open the world to Lazare. Give him a real purpose, a job that only he can do.

And make La Sirène happy.

Father Superior Xavier de Charlevoix, head of the Kateri Mission, inspected the jury-rigged prosthetic taped to Lazare’s torso.

Benny fingered his rosary. Will he greenlight this project? Give the kids a real chance to make a difference?

Lazare tweaked the manual controls. The drone’s tail flopped back and forth behind him, mimicking the motions of a fish.

“You say this will enable him to swim?” Doubt wreathed Xavier’s careworn face.

“It should. But it will work far better once I mate the data module from the prosthetic —” yes, call it that, not a “tail,” “— to Lazare’s neural port.”

The Father closed his eyes, and scratched his forehead. Sighed. Jittered one foot.

“I can’t countenance this. I want to. But no.”

“Why?”

Father Xavier spread his hands. “Quite simply, Archbishop Raimondo will pull our funding. He’s already on the fence about supporting our work. Raimondo still refuses to acknowledge that contamination of air, land, and water are ecological sins that the Church has a responsibility to remediate.”

Shocked, Benny fumbled for words. “That’s a throwback to the Age of Hungry Ghosts, isn’t it? Back in the day of carbon fuels, when the unity of man and nature was said to be heresy?”

Xavier nodded. “Yes, but the traditionalists still believe eco-theology is mere paganism. And this —” he indicated Lazare’s prosthetic tail, “— all Raimondo would see is dissolution of the sanctioned boundary separating Man and Nature. He would not look kindly upon it — nor your candidacy for the Priesthood.”

“But —” Benny floundered. Hurricane-churned waters aren’t nearly as treacherous as politics. “Wasn’t the issue of ecological sin determined by the Pope in 2015, and ratified by Vatican III?”

Xavier shook his head sadly. “For us, yes. For the prelate who holds our Mission’s purse strings — no. Raimondo barely tolerates our multicultural expressions of faith. I don’t want to push him further.”

Father Superior has made his position clear. Further pursuit not only risks my future vocation as a priest, but risks the children’s well-being.

Xavier patted Benny on the shoulder with a warm, consoling hand. “Think of it this way, son. The Church is like an old supertanker — it has a lot of moving parts and enormous momentum, making it tough to turn. Set this project aside, and we’ll say no more.”

The thought of blind obedience — against his clear discernment of a higher good — left Benny with a hollow ache in his chest.

But for the sake of les innocents, he folded his arms and bowed his head.

Obedience does not mean blind subservience. There has to be a way.

Father Xavier stood behind him, watching the video feed as Benny panned the air-drone’s camera across the Mission’s roof. Thankfully, they’d survived the initial blow. Now was their golden moment of calm as the eye of the hurricane passed overhead. They could surface for inspection.

The camera revealed a roof dripping with seaweed, its paint scoured by debris from the churning water and spattered with small black blobs.

More tar-balls. A nasty mix of old oil and sand, churned up by the storm.

“Looks like just the mast was damaged,” Benny said. The three-story pole dangled askew, hanging from the central peak of the roof by its cables.

“Can you repair it?” Father Xavier asked. Not only was it a mooring mast for the supply air-ships, it was also the radio tower and location beacon for this sector of the coast.

Benny shook his head. “We’ll have to cut it loose before the storm surge on the other side of the eye beats it against the roof.”

“Is there time?” Xavier asked, his voice thin with tension.

“It’ll be close.”

The external hatch clanged open and crew scurried aloft, up the rails secured to the outside of the clamshell roof. One attached a marker buoy to the mast, while another cut the remaining wires.

The Timbalier barrier reef will not be so easy to fix. Rough seas had pounded open a channel through which wind-driven seawater surged. The surf broke down the marshland’s soft mats of grasses, strewing dead plants and mud. Sixteen feet of surge eroded new channels in the marshland, salt water flowing in, threatening the lives of freshwater species.

So much wetlands remediation wasted. Benny seethed. Was that La Sirène’s satisfaction I heard in the voice of the tempest?

“It’s free,” the repair chief announced over the comm. The mast slid down the slope of the clamshell roof, and toppled into debris strewn water, the buoy marking its location for later retrieval.

Winds began to pick up, waves chopping the surface of the bay. The cloudbank to the southwest loomed darkly.

Their work done, repair crews scrambled back inside and dogged down the roof hatch.

“They’re in. We can be under before the back wall of the eye strikes us.” Benny engaged the ballast pumps. Down on this level, their low pulsing throbbed through his feet.

Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

Thra-thrum. The rhythm stuttered, split. Thra-thrum.

A groaning shudder ran beneath his feet. Benny glanced at the window. The line of water marking their descent slanted. The Mission is tilting. Benny checked the readout on the ballast pumps. Both drew power. But only Pump One drew water onboard, pulling them down to safety. Either Pump Two cracked … or the intake got clogged.

He turned them both off, then on again. They powered up, sensors responded — but readouts showed no water flowing through Pump Two.

Benny pressed the comm. “Ballast Pump Two is down,” he announced. “Prepare for a rough ride.” Without full ballast to pull it under, the Mission must ride out the rest of the storm above the surface.

Not good.

“Can you fix it from inside?” Xavier asked.

Benny shook his head. “It’s likely debris blocking the intake. Sending out an ROV to remove it.” Its remote operated arms and hand-like clamps were designed to handle external repairs. The smaller arm would fit up the 3-inch pipe — a familiar task.

Oil mixed with sand; ancient sin made manifest.

Xavier’s sigh puffed out his cheeks. To his credit, he said not a word … just prayed under his breath.

Benny was more than aware that 18 adults and 33 children risked death if the rear eye-wall of the hurricane struck the Mission while above the surface. He felt the tension rise, as if the entire facility crackled with electricity.

Saint Raphael, keep the gulf quiet … He’d better find the problem, and fast.

Cameras showed increasingly murky water as the ROV dropped down the chute toward the bayou floor.

“… and now we see through a glass darkly …” Xavier intoned.

Benny guided the undersea drone with small ticks of his fingers on the joystick. Clumps of seagrass struck the ROV’s camera lens as it followed the underside of the Mission, the long strands tumbling, whipping against the lens. Twin cones of light from the headlamps barely pierced the murk. He angled the lights upward, revealing the oval of ballast intake port #2.

Covering it — a thick, black tar-mat, oil mixed with sand; ancient sin made manifest.

The pump’s suction must have drawn it up. Benny manipulated the waldo controls, tele-maneuvering the ROV’s hand to grip the tar. Its claws broke through the sandy crust and sank into the gooey mass. He eased the gripper downward, hoping to pull the tar away from the intake.

Instead, a long string of goop stretched downward. When it sagged and broke, viscosity pulled most of it back into the mat.

Benny opened the gripper, to release the tar he’d managed to pull away.

The hand jammed. He could feel the grinding through the haptic feedback. “Poo-yi-yi that is stuck, stuck,” Benny growled. “Sand in the gears. And I can only imagine how gummed up the ballast filter is.”

“What now?”

Benny shook his head. “It’d take too long to reach the filters from inside. It’ll have to be cleared manually, outside. But a diver’s hand won’t fit up that little opening.”

An adult’s hand won’t fit. But a boy’s?

They both looked at the radar feed on the weather monitor. The eye wall was almost upon them.

What’s the point of obedience, if it kills us all?

Benny shot Xavier a look from under lowered brows, then thumbed the comm. “Lazare, come back to the workshop.”

Benny watched Cece wrap waterproof skin tape around Lazare until he was thoroughly bound to the finny end of Observation Drone #19.

Looks good. The drone’s tracer is still live. If worse comes to worst, the ROV can pull him out.

Cece eyeballed her handiwork, her mouth set in a grim line. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked.

Lazare squeezed the manual controls, waggling his silvery “tail” at her while grinning from ear to ear. He held up the other skinny little hand, his expression grown serious. “I want to clear the tar,” Lazare said. “For my siblings. For us all.”

In that moment, Benny saw the man that Lazare might become, if only given the chance.

Capable. Determined. Brave.

Sea and sky merged into a roaring, raging torrent. Battered by 130-mile-an-hour winds, the Mission shuddered and groaned. Her clamshell shape deflected some of the blow, but not enough. She bucked and shrieked as the sea anchors tore loose, dragging them along the lakebed.

The drone Benny sent with Lazare had spun out of control in the currents. Shortly after Lazare dropped through the hatch, the ROV’s camera lost sight of him. The last Benny had seen was the tiny cone of light from Lazare’s headlamp receding as he maneuvered from hand-hold to hand-hold across the Mission’s underside.

Benny prayed for what felt like hours as he kept a forlorn watch on Lazare’s tracer signal, his heart gripped with shame and terror. … O Virgin, Star of the Sea, Our beloved Mother, we live in the shadow of a danger over which we have no control; the Gulf, like a provoked and angry giant, spreads chaos and disaster. During this hurricane season, we turn to You …

He prayed until a head popped through the hatch, the dark curls dripping water. “It’s clear,” Lazare coughed. “Start the pumps.”

Benny rushed to pull the cold, exhausted youth the rest of the way through the hatch. Lazare flopped limply onto the floor in a tangle of debris.

“She helped me,” he gasped, his chest heaving with great breaths.

Benny noticed Lazare wore no scuba mask, carried no air-tank on his back.

“Where’s your gear?”

“She took it.” The young man looked up at him, his eyes wide with wonder. “Said as I was half fish, I didn’t need it. Then she helped me pull out the tar.”

How can that be? Was he really down there without air for over a half hour … The hair on the back of Benny’s neck rose. “She?” he asked.

“La Sirène,” Lazare replied.

Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. Benny felt the low pulse of two pumps through his feet.

Father Superior Xavier de Charlevoix sat next to Benny on the Mission’s airboat. Strings of Mardi Gras beads from the boat parade still hung from the canopy above them. The beads swayed gently as the airboat rocked in the wavelets, the big propulsive fan behind them silent as they observed the children playing in the sunlit bay.

Lazare towed a line of children wearing floats, his silvery tail flashing in the sunlight. No more skin tape, no more kludged prosthetic: Lazare’s new tail was designed for purpose, a perfect fusion of biotech and boy.

With one outstanding flaw: It still lacks a brain/computer interface. But I’ve pushed this as far as I can, without outright rebellion.

“Congratulations on the new design.” Xavier favored Benny with a sidelong look.

Benny sensed the judgment coming and thumbed the turtle beads of his rosary. “It’s still a work in progress. There’s more to do integrating haptic feedback so Lazare ‘feels’ his tail.”

The neural link. Benny couldn’t help but walk where angels feared to tread.

“I see,” Xavier hummed. “And the artificial kidney?”

“That’s all Cece — ’twas her idea to miniaturize life support systems, fit them in the tail.”

The youngsters squealed with glee, arms splashing. Soon, Lazare would be able to teach them to swim. If Benny got the financial support to build them all prosthetics. If he could build and miniaturize neural links, so the tails functioned naturally for young children.

Cece slipped off the air-boat’s deck into the water, Nola in her arms.

“And what will they do as they grow up?”

Much more than they would tethered to life support units. Benny bit back the retort.

“I hope to engage them in wetlands restoration projects. Replanting seagrass, rebuilding barrier reefs, bio-remediation. Bon Dieu knows we need all the hands we can get.”

“Hmm.” Xavier snorted. “I see.”

Father Superior shifted in his seat to face Benny, his expression grave. “You probably know I can no longer, in good faith, recommend you for the priesthood,” he said.

Benny’s heart sank as he watched Nola grab at the water, splashing Cece. He couldn’t imagine leaving the Mission, his work. The children.

“Disobedience cannot be rewarded. I have discerned your path has diverged. Therefore I’ve sent recommendation to Father General —”

Benny swallowed back tears.

“— that you continue with us on the path to ordination as a lay Brother, in charge of the Mission’s new Sirenomeliac program. Its utility is undeniable. Permission has been given and funding secured to develop that neural interface of yours.”

Benny tried to keep his cool. He really did. “Raimondo’s footing the bill?” His voice cracked.

“No,” a slow grin spread across the Father Superior’s face. “You’ll be answering to a higher power now, son.” Xavier leaned forward, his voice a low, conspiratorial whisper.

“Rome.”

Karen Engelsen (she/her) is a neurodiverse Norwegian-American, raised in the wilds by Transcendentalists. She is a fiber artist and emerging writer, living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her partner and two mini-panthers, Archer and T’Pring.

Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor (she/her) is an illustrator from Bogotá, Colombia.

More from the 2024 Imagine 2200 contest

• The Imperfect Blue Marble

  In a culture where a child’s first word takes on great meaning, a nonverbal child shows his compassion beyond words.

• Accensa Domo Proximi

  At a live art show in the bustling city, a cook grapples with the coastal home he lost.

• To Labor for the Hive

  A beekeeper finds a new sense of purpose and community after helping to develop a warning system for floods.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline La Sirène on Jan 22, 2024.

Categories: H. Green News

Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction contest, celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.Discover all the 2024 winners. Orsign up for email updatesto get new stories in your inbox.

My friends sent me their best wishes with hugs and honey-drenched sweets. My parents hovered anxiously as the droids walked them through their scientific methodology twice and then a third time just for good measure. They held my hands tightly until the lead droid politely informed them that the procedure could not actually proceed while they were present. I will be stuck in this muted, sterile clinic room by myself for the next few days.

“It will be uncomfortable,” says the lead droid, “but it will work.”

I nod and shiver. It puts a silicon palm on my forehead to calm me, though I realize later it was likely only taking my temperature. My room is gray and has a tall window cut into one side which frames the desert and her sky intersecting at purple mountains off in the distance. The droid sees me watching and smiles.

“Only a few more days,” it says as it attaches a few sensors to my arms and neck. It leaves me to get undressed.

It is one week until March, and my mother and father have almost finished packing up the house. Everything worth taking has been tied up in neat parcels and then loaded onto caravans the size of small houses. Outside, the tarps and colorful clothes that shade our streets have been folded away and tied over doors and windows to keep the dust out. The sun will bake the roads and blind those who leave the comfort of their homes in these last few days. The city will be resting and drinking in anticipation.

I remove my clothes and watch as sand and small rocks that have accumulated in my pockets tumble out and onto the clinic floor. I take my time shuffling the pile of dirt into a corner of the room with my feet. I run oil through my hair with a comb and plait it into four horns curling against my head. I wipe off the dust that seems to permanently reside in the creases of my elbows and on my eyebrows. On the days when my siblings and I come home from spending all day outside, my mother will call us her dust bunnies or her desert hares. My father will say we are walking geological monuments and will shoo us towards the bathroom.

There is a thick, white robe on my bed in which I wrap myself. It clings to my body with a comforting pressure. When the droid returns, it is holding a tray of disgusting-looking pills. It begins reciting origins. “The substance you are about to take contains spores nurtured in our city of Xayma by 16th-generation maroon descendants. It contains ground powder from an unnamed plant grown on land managed by the Tepoles sustained by six liters of irrigated water. Sugarcane grown in Onyx by the Guardian Collective …” The droid continues listing substances and their origins for what feels like another five minutes. I stare out the window, imagining the long journey some of these substances have taken, imagining the hands that wrested a living thing from the earth and the water condensing into raindrops to feed their growth. This is no small thing they’ve made for me.

The droid finishes its recitation with: “Do you honor this?” I nod. “Say it,” it commands. I’ve heard this query and response repeated so many times that the frequency of its use has diminished its meaning for me. Today, though, I need this to work.

“I honor this,” I say, willing as much reverence as I can into three words. The droid hands me the pills and I swallow them dry. It watches them slide down my throat and then ensures my robe is completely around me, covering my feet and pulling the hood over my head until I am fully swaddled. It takes one last glance towards my vitals before leaving me in my clean little room. I settle into my cocooning robe and wait anxiously for some sign that my body is changing.

Metamorphosis is somewhat of a superpower. Most of us believe that metamorphosis is the latest step in the long evolution of our ancestors’ survival. First there was the bitter perversion of biological discrimination, then the precision of oligarchy, and of course now, the rather poetic chaos of ecological feedback loops nudged too far in one direction. Always, we have survived, bobbing, weaving, and sometimes forcing our way into a brighter and more joyful existence.

For my family and the rest of my city, metamorphosis is an easy process. They take one pill a day for a week, and their metabolisms shift unnoticeably under sun-burnished skin. By the end of the week, they are ready for Road March. Without metamorphosis, the shadeless, water-scarce journey from desert to sea and back again would be almost impossible. With metamorphosis, for those few weeks of Road March, moisture becomes abundant, pulled out of dry air. Marathons of miles become leisurely, and the heat of the sun feels like velvet on skin. Our city transforms from a quiet splotch in the middle of a quieter desert into a loud line of traveling carnival for two weeks, and then once arrived, back into a quiet dot, this time by the sea. We sleep head to toe and breathe each other’s air. We paint our faces the color of jewels and smear blue, green, and yellow on brown skin. We hang gold metal from soft earlobes. Shells from our sea that have been carefully stored from our last return trip are retrieved from their wrapping and gently nestled into clouds and braided rows of our hair.

But the best is the music. Steel drums will sing out something that bubbles in my chest, while the bass will call to whatever beast is sleeping under our feet. Sometimes the rhythm teases our heels and toes as they graze the ground in time. Sometimes there will be only the bass of the drums between our footsteps and exhaustion. By the time we reach the sea, bodies will have faded back into homeostasis.

I cannot remember the last time I had this luxury. I had been just leaving my years of awkward self-consciousness and was finally learning how to catch a rhythm when my body decided to reject the drugs that were supposed to save us. As such, I have had the distinct pleasure of spending what should be a euphoric two-week journey in a state of severe dehydration and painful delirium. I stay stubbornly hot-blooded and water-dependent, while everyone else is dancing in the desert heat like little sun gods.

Outside, the sun is setting a violent orange, a warning of the impending dust storms spinning in our direction. Back at home, my father will be rising from his late afternoon nap to scrounge up something that will resemble dinner. My mother will be lounging on the couch with heavy eyelids and a cup of steaming tea. My siblings will be asleep until the fragrance of dinner calls them to the kitchen. It is a calm week. No hallucinogens, no wine, no liquor during metamorphosis week.

I do not remember falling asleep, but when I wake, my muscles are cramping painfully, and I am nauseous to the point of vomiting. My limbs are contorted against my body and I feel as though I am being slammed against something again and again. I twist around in my robe until I find an opening through which I can peek out. I scream, but no sound leaves my throat.

I have been thrown over the shoulder of a well-muscled human back the color of rich soil. Legs are striding across the ground at a quick pace.

“Hello?” I shriek, but my voice is caught in my throat. The head turns to look down at me to reveal a sculpted cheekbone and an onyx orb where an eye should be, and locks piled regally on a slender neck. I open my mouth to scream again and kick at her back in a panic. She is impossibly large for a human. I see her mouth curve up the cheekbone in a smirk as she shifts my weight so that my kicks no longer connect.

“Where are you taking me?” I gasp. This time my voice works.

She shrugs. They were doing it wrong. Her voice reverberates painfully. She hasn’t opened her mouth to speak, nor can I feel the vibration of air in her lungs.

To be fair, they did everything right. Sometimes you just need a little boost. She chuckles. The sky above her is shocking blue, and I can see a fragment of the mountain against which Xayma is nestled.

“Where are you taking me?” I ask again. “Put me down!”

No. You’re in the middle of a metamorphosis. The significance of this barely registers, as I am still panicking and attempting to twist myself out of my robe and onto the ground. Hush now. I don’t want to drop you.

I realize we have been walking across the roof of the clinic, and my stomach unclenches a bit as I realize we are still in Xayma. It clenches back again as we reach the point where the clinic roof meets the mountain face. She adjusts me so that she can tie my robe around her chest and begins climbing at a terrifying speed. I am frozen with fear. Below me, I see the city sprawled out like a miniature map. I see the caravans lined up at the city’s edge and a lazy river of humans flowing around them. Toward the center, the flea market still boasts a mosaic of colorful tarps. It is always the last place to be packed up before the March. To the north glints the glass of the greenhouses and the large round domes where the water pumps and recycling stations are located. The city ends abruptly at the line where the mountain’s shade ends in the afternoon sun.

“Where are we going? I ask again. Not far. Relax

That is a tall order, given that I am still uncomfortable, jumbled in my robe-turned-carrying-sack. The climbing finally stops when she pulls herself up into an opening in the side of the mountain. We are standing in a cool, dark cave, and our journey shifts from vertical to horizontal.

I don’t know for how long we are walking, but it feels long enough that we must have crossed to the other side of the mountain. The light from the cave opening has long disappeared, and I am blind in the darkness. The tunnel tapers and her immensely large body must crawl to make it through. She swings me around so that I am hanging from her chest. Several times I must turn my face into her body to avoid grazing my face against the rock floor below us.

At one point, the temperature begins to change. There is a warm breeze of fresh air carrying a smell I have only encountered a few times before on school field trips in grade school. Verdant. That is the smell.

It becomes stronger as we emerge into a light- and greenery-filled cavern. I stare open-mouthed. She places me gently on the dark earth and stands to her full height. She must be maybe 10 feet tall. Alright. Let’s get to work. Tattoos the color of flame dance across her face. She is wearing a loose blue tunic that bares her arms and legs, all of which are deeply muscled. I try to avoid staring at her eyes. Dig, she commands. I open my mouth to protest.

The hum of the droid opening and closing the door pulls me back into my room. It places a meal on the table next to me (yams from Xayma greenhouses, collards from Xayma greenhouses. Do you honor this? Yes, I honor this). The stars are out now, and based on their position I think I have five or so hours until sunrise.

Soon after my meal, my nausea starts up again. I brace myself to meet the tall woman again, but there is no such relief. I feel as though I am being whipped around the periphery of the room like a centrifuge. I am separated into water, carbon, and whatever else fills my interstitial spaces. I don’t know where my edges are, but I do know that I am no longer contained by skin cracked from desert aridity. Whatever holds me is soft, putrid, and dissolving. I cannot see or breathe, but I am not afraid. I have been this much of nothingness, and I remember how to pull myself back together. I stay there in a puddle with only my cocooning robe to outline my shape. Then I begin to define myself. I build my legs strong and long. I make my capillaries taut and elastic. I divide cells and direct them in infinite directions. I stretch tendons, cushion bones with cartilage, and then I wait. I have done this before.

The cavern is still filled with light and lush greenery, but my 10-foot carrier is nowhere to be seen. I am covered in rich soil that sticks to me with much more persistence than the orange dust I am used to. I find my legs are working, so I rise and find myself staring into her endless orbs. She is no longer 10 feet, but my height. The orbs shift as though she is looking me over. She smiles. Well done. I cannot tell if she is talking to herself or to me.

Then I am back in my room in the clinic, still safely cocooned. I let the sterile smells of the clinic and the cool of my room wash back over me.

“You are complete.” The droid is standing over me, checking my temperature and my vitals.

I pull myself up to a seat so quickly I see stars. “I’m ready? It worked?” It gently guides me back down to a horizontal position.

“Yes, we knew it would work. We have much data to review.” I hear a tinge of excitement in the droid’s voice. It leans over me to untuck my robe and begin removing the sensors.

I want to cry with relief, but my body refuses to waste the water.

“The March begins tomorrow morning.” It gestures to my newly cleaned clothes at the foot of my bed.

I look down at myself. For all the shifting and spinning that has taken place inside me, I look very much the same. My mole on my right wrist is in the same place, there are still some grains of dust under my fingernails that I could not clean out. My heart pumps emphatically, and I have rich elastic skin which feels impenetrable. I turn to the droid.

“Thank you.”

“You’re most welcome. We will be following up remotely during your journey to confirm success.” It whirs out of the room for the last time.

Outside my window, it is dark. The city lights glitter orange below me, and beyond it the desert stretches dark and endless. I pull out my four braids and comb them out to frame my face. I rub oil over my skin, which is stretched over newly defined muscles. I feel ripe and thick like a fruit in the summer.

The sky is starting to brighten when I finally step out of the clinic into the night’s heat. I shoulder the pack my mother left for me and break into a light jog toward the road. My muscles no longer ache, and my brain feels fresh and sharp. I can taste what little moisture there is in the air as it is drawn into my lungs.

At the city’s edge, a crowd is growing around the line of caravans. Their wind sails are splayed on the ground in front of them, waiting to catch the desert winds. Solar wings are tucked neatly away, waiting for the imminent onslaught of photons.

I join the crowd, moving through the throng on my newly strong legs. A few familiar bodies reach out to grasp my arms in congratulations. They know that I have been waiting anxiously to join the March. I know they have been waiting anxiously to see if our gift of metamorphosis had been rescinded. I smile and see the relief on their faces.

I find my mother at our caravan. Her face is contorted with worry, but it breaks into a wide smile as soon as she sees me. Both my parents smother me into an embrace.

“You look brilliant, my dear,” says my father.

“Come,” says my mother, giggling. She is giddy with relief. She pulls paint from her pack and paints me gold and yellow. Her fingers press into my cheeks to confirm I am here. When she is finished, the day is about to break, and we turn with the crowd to face our rising sun.

I blink, and then it happens almost as if by my command. Rays burst across the horizon, illuminating our city and the surrounding desert with the flare and gravitas of a thing that knows it is the center of our universe. Around me, there are cheers over the rumbling bass of the drums. My irises contract, and my face lifts to greet the morning. Later, my mother will tell me that it looks like there are sun flares ringing my pupils. Later, someone will tell me that I look like the golden hour before the sun sets. Later, I will realize just how deep this metamorphosis runs and that I will likely not change back. The droids will call me an “unpredictable outcome.” My mother will call me her little flame.

The horns of the caravan sound in the morning light, drowning out our city of several hundred thousand people. The sails are lifted, and solar wings unfold. Then the drums pick up a rhythm that lifts my feet, and the March begins.

Lovinia Summer (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based climate nerd excited about imagining a just regenerative future. She works in renewable energy and writes cli-fi stories to bring that future into reality.

Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor (she/her) is an illustrator from Bogotá, Colombia.

More from the 2024 Imagine 2200 contest

• The Imperfect Blue Marble

  In a culture where a child’s first word takes on great meaning, a nonverbal child shows his compassion beyond words.

• A Gift of Coconuts

  A family races against time to prepare their coconut farm for a massive storm surge.

• La Sirène

  On a submarine housing children born with a genetic mutation, people of faith wrestle with the sin of causing an ecological disaster.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Stasis on Jan 22, 2024.

Categories: H. Green News

Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction contest, celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.Discover all the 2024 winners. Orsign up for email updatesto get new stories in your inbox.

This is Grist’s third year publishing an Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest. Each year, as we prepare to release 12 new stories depicting hopeful, intersectional climate futures, I find myself thinking back on what this initiative has meant to me personally. We hope these stories kick-start readers on a journey of rediscovering hope for what the world could be, and jump-starting imaginations about what our future could look like. For me, that journey has been profound.

When I first started working on Imagine 2200, back in 2020, I was skeptical of the value of hopeful stories. After all, the seeds of this initiative were taking root at the beginning of the pandemic, in the middle of the rise of far-right extremism, and during an uprising that was challenging systemic racism. Things felt bleak. Here I had been charged with developing and leading an initiative grounded in hope and solutions, but I myself was angry, slightly depressed, and starting to believe that we are all doomed.

Through working at Grist I started to read, discuss, and be in community with folk who were reporting on people working to build a better future. They had hope, they were invested in solutions, and they were pushing back against the status quo. Grist’s reporting and focus on climate, justice, and solutions became sort of a balm. Something in me took root. I started to find my old self. I realized that hopeful stories are not about ignoring the problems we face. Instead, they are about imagining a better future, and giving us the courage to fight for it.

During the pandemic I sought out work by Afrofuturists, Indigenous futurists, Latinx futurists, Asian futurists, disabled futurists, feminist futurists, queer futurists, hopepunks, and solarpunks. These movements are creating stories that imagine futures free from oppression, extraction, and colonial systems of harm, and often the most potent weapon the characters in these stories have is their community and hope. These movements and genres offered me a glimpse of a better future, and helped me find the part of myself that was slipping away and turning toward pessimism and darkness.

We are not doomed. It’s fatalistic to think so. It is not too late for our species and all the other creatures on Earth. There is still a chance to avert the worst effects of climate change if we take action now, and climate fiction and climate storytelling are necessary tools in our toolbox of solutions. Humans need stories. Stories are central to building community, communicating, and visioning. Hopeful visions and narratives of the future help motivate us to take action and build a better future.

These are the values that guided Imagine 2200, and that keep driving the contest each year. I know firsthand the power that stories have to rewire our thinking, because they were part of that journey for me.

This year’s collection of stories features a diverse range of characters and perspectives, from beekeepers and cooks to families and communities. But they all share a common thread: a belief in the power of hope to overcome even the most daunting challenges.

In one story, a beekeeper finds a new sense of purpose after helping to develop a warning system for floods. [Read: To Labor for the Hive]

In another, an art show forces a cook to reflect on the importance of community in the face of disaster. [Read: Accensa Domo Proximi]

These stories are not afraid to explore the challenges ahead. But they still offer us a glimpse of a brighter future, where we are working together to build a more sustainable and just world.

They also show us many cultures existing in that future world, drawing from authentic experiences to craft rich characters deeply embedded in place and tradition.

Culturally authentic stories can help us to see the world through different lenses and to imagine new possibilities. They help us to build empathy and understanding for different cultures and perspectives, while also making space for everyone to see themselves in visions for the future. Science fiction and futurism often leave behind or deemphasize our world’s cultures. Imagine 2200 is offering a different type of futurism, where cultures are emphasized and celebrated.

As the artist and cultural producer Alisha B. Wormsley has stated, and emblazoned on a billboard in Pittsburgh, “There are Black people in the future.”

Climate change is a global crisis, but it does not affect everyone equally. Marginalized communities, such as Indigenous communities, Black communities, queer folk, and people with disabilities, are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Climate fiction and climate storytelling needs to center the voices and depictions of marginalized communities. We also believe that intersectional characters are more relatable and believable. When we see characters who are complex and multidimensional, we are more likely to connect with them and their stories.

That authenticity, representation, and richness is something we hope you find in this year’s collection. From “Cabbage Koora” to “A Seder in Siberia” and “To Labor for the Hive,” many of these stories show a future where our diverse cultures not only survive but thrive.

I hope the three finalists and nine runners-up published in this year’s Imagine collection help you find inspiration in climate futures, and reignite your journey toward hope and empowerment.

Read the full collection now: Imagine 2200, the 2024 collection

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The power of climate fiction and the ethos of Imagine 2200 on Jan 22, 2024.

Categories: H. Green News

Audubon Society - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 19:11

Categories: G3. Big Green

Lock the Gate Alliance - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 18:27

Categories: G2. Local Greens

Resource Recycling News - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 16:44

Study finds rising risk of lithium-ion fires

The National Waste and Recycling Association estimates that more than 5,000 fires occur annually at recycling facilities, and it recently warned many were likely linked to lithium-ion batteries. “Increasingly, these facilities experience catastrophic fires due to lithium-ion batteries erroneously placed …

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The post Study finds rising risk of lithium-ion fires appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Resource Recycling News - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 16:43

Ottawa grocers, other partners plan reusable packaging pilot

Major grocery retailers and other foodservice businesses in Ottawa, Ontario will start selling foods in reusable, returnable containers later this year through a first-of-its-kind pilot program to help reduce single-use plastic packaging, according to a press release from the pilot’s …

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The post Ottawa grocers, other partners plan reusable packaging pilot appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Resource Recycling News - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 16:43

EPR, bans and repeals: Bills introduced in 2024 legislatures

The 2024 legislative season is already picking up speed, with more than 60 bills filed on recycling across the nation.

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The post EPR, bans and repeals: Bills introduced in 2024 legislatures appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Resource Recycling News - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 16:42

Recycled paper mill closes its doors in Vermont

Putney Paper, a Northeast U.S. mill that took in post-consumer recovered fiber and converted it into recycled tissue, napkins and towels, closed its doors last week, with company leadership citing rising energy costs contributing to the closure.

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The post Recycled paper mill closes its doors in Vermont appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Audubon Society - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 16:32

Categories: G3. Big Green

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
CONTACT
Jeff Ruch (510) 213-7028 jruch@peer.org
Kyla Bennett (508) 230-9933 kbennett@peer.org

EPA’s Latest Scientific Integrity Plan – Big Hat, No CattleNo Implementing Rules to Enforce or Administer Lofty Rhetorical Standards

Washington, DC — After years of development, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has produced a new version of its scientific integrity policy, but, unfortunately, it offers few discernible improvements, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The draft policy repeatedly declares its intent to prevent political suppression of scientific information, ensure prompt and full investigation of misconduct allegations, and protect scientists offering differing scientific opinions, but it lacks any concrete rules or procedures to accomplish these goals.

Instead, the draft policy says agency officials will “expeditiously draft…necessary procedures including those on addressing scientific integrity concerns, addressing DSOs [Differing Scientific Opinions], and others such as clearance of scientific product … as needed.”

Notably, these are all issues for which EPA has never drafted implementing rules, even though it has had a scientific integrity policy since 2012. By contrast, some agencies, such as the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, have long had implementing procedures in place for running a scientific integrity program, while EPA has yet to make any observable progress.

“A scientific integrity policy without enforcement mechanisms is just a bunch of hot air,” stated Pacific PEER Director Jeff Ruch, noting the draft does not specify any penalty for violators and even attempts to block disclosure of offenders’ names. “If EPA has been unable to promulgate these rules in a dozen years, why would we expect they will be completed anytime soon?”

At the same time, EPA’s Office of Inspector General (IG) now regards promoting scientific integrity as among the top five management challenges facing EPA under President Biden. In addition, the IG has issued scathing assessments of EPA’s scientific integrity program. However, nothing in the latest EPA draft policy would address these criticisms.

“Impartial science must be the backbone of all EPA decisions,” added PEER Science Policy Director Kyla Bennett, a scientist and attorney formerly with EPA. “EPA’s systemic scientific integrity failures are a growing threat to public health,” notes Bennett, pointing to the burgeoning IG investigations into numerous reports by scientists about improper alteration of chemical risk assessments by EPA managers.

The draft is now open for comments by EPA employees through January 31st. After that phase, it is supposed to be made available for public comment. However, if these specific rules are not included, it is unclear whether or when employees or the public can comment on them.

EPA’s action is the latest phase of a government-wide effort launched by President Biden three years ago to Trump-proof federal science by strengthening all agency scientific integrity policies. EPA is the fourth federal agency (after Health & Human Service, the National Institutes of Health, and the Consumer Products Safety Commission) to produce draft policies. However, none of these drafts appear to pose any meaningful check against future political interventions.

One good aspect of EPA’s draft is its limit on a restriction placed on scientists in the other three draft policies forbidding any “statements that might be construed as being judgments of, or recommendations on” any federal policy. EPA would apply this prohibition only when a scientist is “speaking or writing on behalf of EPA.” This caveat significantly narrows this otherwise overbroad constraint on scientific discussion. PEER and allied groups are urging other agencies, especially those who have published draft policies, to follow EPA’s lead on this issue.

###

See EPA’s new draft scientific integrity policy

Look at a list of policy’s missing pieces

View failure of EPA’s scientific integrity program

Examine IG identifying scientific integrity as among top 5 management challenges

Read latest IG report taking the scientific integrity program to task

Examine expansive gag rule in other agency draft policies

The post EPA’s Latest Scientific Integrity Plan – Big Hat, No Cattle appeared first on PEER.org.

Categories: A2. Green Unionism

Global Tapestry of Alternatives - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 15:52

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Global Tapestry of Alternatives - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 15:41

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Lock the Gate Alliance - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 15:27

Categories: G2. Local Greens

Green Energy Times - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 15:11

You Are Invited!

Renewable Energy Seminar, CUNY City College Campus and Online

Thursday, February 08, 2024
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm (New York Time/EDT)
Free, in person and online, registration optional (below)

Civil Engineering Department conference room, Steinman Hall Room 105

Dr. Richard Perez*, Sr. Researcher, Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, University at Albany, will present his latest on renewable energy at CUNY in Manhattan.

Dr. Richard Perez directs applied research and teaches in solar radiation, solar energy applications and daylighting.

To register, click here (an online link will be provided to registered attendees)

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Solar Industry Magazine - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 15:08

Nexamp has announced that its Chicago office will serve as the company’s second national headquarters, planning to add an additional 50 team members there by 2026.

The expansion is part of more than $2 billion in planned Illinois investments through the company’s existing and in-development projects.

“We began our work in Illinois in 2018 in response to the Future Energy Jobs Act, which created the state’s first community solar program and sought to accelerate Illinois’ decarbonization efforts,” says Nexamp CEO Zaid Ashai.

“Thanks to Governor Pritzker’s leadership in securing the passage of the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act in 2021, Illinois is our fastest growing market. But the state is far more than just an attractive market for solar generation. For Nexamp, it’s a state which shares our vision of a cleaner, more equitable energy future powered by a diverse, equitable, and skilled workforce. As we sought a location for a second headquarters, Illinois was the natural choice because of our mutual interest in seeing clean energy work for, and do right by, everyone.”

Nexamp’s first Chicago office opened in 2019 and has since grown from five to 80 team members. The company has roughly 75 projects in operation or under development in the state that it estimates will generate close to 300 MW.

The post Nexamp Sets Second Headquarters in Chicago in Midwest Focus appeared first on Solar Industry.

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Resource Recycling News - Mon, 01/22/2024 - 15:00

Measuring Impact

This article appeared in the November 2023 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content. Although there is always an element of change in the electronics industry, one trend that has seemingly taken on a life …

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The post Measuring Impact appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition