Reckoning 7

Reckoning 7

Reckoning 7

Electronic Edition: Winter 2023

Print Edition: Summer 2023

Fiction Editor: Octavia Cade

Nonfiction Editor: Priya Chand

Poetry Editor: Tim Fab-Eme

Reckoning is a communal effort.

Editorial staff, in alphabetical order:

Cécile Cristofari

Michael J. DeLuca

Danika Dinsmore

Joseph Hope

Amanda Ilozumba Otitochukwu

Andrew Kozma

Giselle K. Leeb

Johannes Punkt

Catherine Rockwood

Cover and interior ornament by Elsie Andrewes

Reckoning Press

206 East Flint Street

Lake Orion, MI 48362

www.reckoning.press

distributed by IngramSpark

Contents © 2023 by the authors and artists.

All rights reserved. ISSN 2474-7327

e-ISBN 978-1-955360-08-1

ISBN 978-1-955360-09-8

Cover:

Drua

Elsie Andrewes

Elsie Andrewes. Fiji born artist and illustrator based in Whangārei, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Works span across traditional and digital media, covering portraiture, botanical illustrations and surrealist concepts with inspiration stemming from my heritage.

Most pieces are completed with the Pacific people in mind and for the Pacific people, utilising vibrant colours and traditional design. I’ve been commissioned by the World Bank, Talanoa, Huia Publishers, and Witness Performance. Have also exhibited at Enjoy Contemporary Gallery in Wellington. You’ll find me in a cafe somewhere drinking a flat white or at beach. Vinaka

Photo credit: Vivien Beduya

From the Editors

Priya Chand

Water: what is it good for? Absolutely everything.

(I’m sorry. But also not. I hope that’s stuck in your head now.)

In privileged areas worldwide, access to clean water is never far away. Water is so ubiquitous—and, depending where you live, so seemingly renewable—that, if you are in this population, it’s easy to forget how easily disrupted these systems are, how quickly that convenient tap can go from potable to unsafe, how your recreational or work sites can be shut down or disrupted practically overnight.

I’m excited for all of you to read four perspectives that are as diverse as the challenges facing our water systems today. Each piece brings an environmental issue into stark personal focus. Whether it’s government or paramilitary action, the exploitation of resources far past what can be sustained, or the ever-lurking shadow of global warming, ecosystems are being transformed at unprecedented rates—and the people who inhabit these ecosystems alongside them.

But these are not stories of hopelessness. Part of focusing on the personal—my favorite part—is that it highlights points where individual action does make a difference. It’s easy to look at the challenges today and walk away thinking there is nothing to be done, but that elides the important work that people are doing every single day to protect and restore their communities.

Building resilience matters. If we want to restore natural continuity, we must start by ensuring our spaces—the full ecosystems, including the human elements—are healthy.

Priya Chand is a California transplant living in the Midwest, where she volunteers as a forest steward. Her work is inspired by a background in biology, and has appeared in magazines including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Clarkesworld.

From the Editors

Tim Fab-Eme

We are so used to statistics that many of us rarely bother about the numbers and what they really mean until alarms trigger us to act. We rarely drink the right amounts of water even when we dread heat injuries, cerebral edema, urinary and kidney problems, seizures, and hypovolemic shocks. The poems in this issue are like a sensor for diagnosing water levels and the i mpact not only on our personal body but also on our real body—the Earth.

Human activities are increasingly unsettling water bodies everywhere—the Colorado River recedes revealing remains of the Vegas mob families—the Danube empties unveiling carcasses of World War II German warships—the Tiber falls low, showing the stone supports for Nero’s Bridge—the Po dries up leaving behind World War II tanks—the Elbe ebbs exhibiting an ancient hunger stone with the inscription: if you see me, then weep. And we have seen it and we cannot hide the tears falling as broken pieces of the graveyards, dinosaur footprints, settlements, gardens, and the other artifacts vomited by the waters turning toward other places. Because the amount of water in, on, and above the Earth is constant, changes in climate also mean that other rivers are experiencing more rainfall and flood, like the Amazon, the Nile, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Murray.

These poems portray the precarious state of our waterways—from chemical to oil spills, from radioactive to nuclear waste, from invasive to endangered species—and it is not getting any better. Yet we cannot despair. Let us listen to these songs and reconsider our connectedness with the oceans, aquifers and springs, rivers and streams, wetlands, bays, and estuaries that are a part of us. Our body is fragile, our planet is fragile, and both of them are about two-thirds water. These poets, like physicians, have diagnosed our ailments and are calling us to reconsider our activities and care for our body, earth.

Tim Fab-Eme is an engineer and poet who experiments with poetic forms on environmental and social justice themes. He’s the Issue 7 poetry editor of Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice, and Cove Park’s 2022 funded writer-in-residence on climate action. Tim loves exploring nature, gardening, and fishing in the mangrove swamps of his island home, Egun-Okom (Ogonokom). His work has appeared in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Magma, New Welsh Reader, About Place Journal, Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice, Channel: Ireland’s Environmental Literary Journal; apt, Planet in Crisis Anthology, Deep Wild Journal: Writing from the Backcountry, Land and Territory Anthology, Delmarva Review, FIYAH, The Future of Black: An Afrofuturism & Black Comics Poetry Anthology, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, FU Review, The Maine Review, etc. His other projects center on the lore, myth, and experiences of marginalized folks and communities.

From the Editors

Octavia Cade

I grew up on the coast. That’s not unusual, coming from an island country as I do. Water is part of the daily life of islands, beyond the ways of drinking and planting that are common to all of us. Nearly every week my parents would take my sister and me down to the beach to play in the rock pools. The intertidal zone is something I never grew out of, and the sense memory of salt water and salted rock, the way they felt on my fingertips, is something I can easily call up.

There is something particularly relevant about those rock pools. They’re so easy to influence. All the little crabs and starfish, all the sea lettuce and Neptune’s necklace. My sister and I could have scoured it all out if we wanted to. We could have smashed the sharp-slicing baby mussels that lined the rocks. The pools could be so small that even as children we were large enough to outmatch them. What we didn’t realise, as children, was how tolerant rock pools are. The organisms that live there are adapted to such extremes. Their environment changes in salinity, in temperature, in exposure to sunlight, and in turbulence. There’s so much that they can survive . . . and then there was us, with our buckets and our ice-creams, ready to explore. Ready to shape.

That’s what the stories of this issue do. I think of them as rock pools, as little worlds with their authors standing over them, sunburned and observant. Maybe they don’t have ice-cream or those bright little buckets with them, but they’re still watching, because rock pools are places of wonder and of living with change. If we watch them closely enough, through that clear bright lens of water, we can learn to be adaptive too.

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand speculative fiction writer. She has a PhD in science communication, and a particular interest in climate fiction. She’s the 2023 Ursula Bethell writer in residence at the University of Canterbury, where she’ll be writing a series of creative nonfiction essays about NZ ecology. Her latest book, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, was published in 2021 by Stelliform Press.

The Bright in the Gyre

Nadine Aurora Tabing

Near the end of the last year of her projected life expectancy, Cora knows she shouldn’t be spending any moment on frivolities. Her store of oxygen tanks is depleting. Her body begins wheezing halfway up the stairs to her apartment. Every last breath in her body needs to be spent on work, on microscopes and slideshows and documentation and the full spectrum of mycelium she’s endeavored so hard to engineer.

But instead of thinking about any of this, she, like everyone else, is riveted to her newsfeed. She clings to every eddy of information.

The satellites spot them first at night: lights where there should be none, sparse enough to be mistaken for dead pixels in the ocean’s inky gut. Before long, the lights splatter into a constellation orbiting 32°N and 145°W, and those who know the significance of that migratory path are summoned to interviews that flood every social media feed.

WHAT IS IN THE NORTH PACIFIC GYRE?

There’s speculation, amazement, alarm. Journalists and researchers and influencers livestream their journeys by sea and sky toward the light, cameras panning across the ocean’s seemingly endless blue, and then its seemingly endless heaving crust of bags, bottles, rope. Even that far out from the coast, the currents gleam in rainbow neons from runoff. Telephoto lenses show a reusable straw jabbing skyward like an arm waving for rescue. Snap-lid plastic tubs bob like polygonal turtle shells, one of which is lifted and upturned by a reporter with a waterplane, revealing barnacles fisted underneath, alive, floating: foreshadowing.

"There are people living out here," says the only influencer Cora follows, a girl who speaks in awe through a branded lavender nasal cannula. Self-consciously, Cora adjusts her own, and takes a steadying breath as she zooms her phone camera in on grainy, irregular silhouettes in the ocean’s distance.

Over the next weeks, the extent of the floater colony becomes clear. Boats of all models slung to rafts slung to bridges slung to shelters of all sizes, constructed of plastic bottles stuffed with salt-crusted litter and compressed into bricks. A panoply of desalination vats and solar panels bob alongside, dappled with flags, indicating the floaters’ various origins. They range from disillusioned tech heirs to typhooned refugees floated out to sea alongside the ruins of sub-sea-level cities. At night, the Gyre rekindles the ocean’s horizon, radiating gold and crimson from headlights and lanterns and bulbs on hefty rubber wire.

It’s—inspiring.

The monitor in the lab breakroom remains fixed on Gyre newstreams, for hatewatching.

Cora’s project manager: Do they really think they can stay out there forever?

One of the marketing people: Living the material-free, zero-waste lifestyle on a luxury yacht—

An intern, laughing, eager to fit in: "All that garbage they say they hate so much—where do they think all of it is coming from, now?"

Cora feels the words whirl in her belly, coalescing into a hard, sharp knot. It swells. It hurts.

I don’t know, she wants to say. When a storm washed me out to sea as a child, I think I would have been alright ending up there.

She shuts her eyes.

Focus. Her air is too precious to waste on arguments. She adjusts her cannula, tries to calm down, stares at the news. Overhead, an influencer grimaces and laughs as she rates the output of the Gyre’s pelagic forage: slurry stewed with amphipods netted and flash-sanitized from beneath the ocean’s crusty skin, snails chopped raw with microgreens raised in a greenhousing boat, fish dried on solar-heated racks.

Cora, someone calls. It’s her boss. Let’s do our dry run.

A withdrawal. In the hallway, Cora’s boss starts talking in Tagalog.

You’ve been spending a lot of time on Gyre news, he says, Cora, you need to focus on here and now, and this time, she can’t help her protest.

"But—solar panels—mariculture—housing—"

There’s even more she wants to say: Anyone that makes it out there gets space, and everyone there is sifting the ocean clean, and it’s not just the rich, there are people like me, or people who just didn’t want to pay rent, and scientists, everyone who left the field because they couldn’t find investors but finally have the dedicated community, and actual applications—

But she can’t continue. Those first words were her limit, the only sounds that her deepest breath can inflate. She gags and coughs, and her boss lays a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.

"They’ve—done more good—than we have—in years," Cora forces herself to spit out, and he frowns.

"Our work comes to fruition today, Cora. You’re willing to throw it all away because of a handful of—sea hippies? Cora, he says finally, focus," and it’s these final words that sink into her like lead, sealing her mouth tight behind them.

Focus.

So close to the end, she can’t risk being pulled off this project. The path has been so hard—convincing her boss to have a spot on his team—begging allowance to work from home during flareups—nodding her head in every meeting, holding her head up over office gossip about the tank she rolls with her on bad days. She has no illusions; even with her GPA and degrees and circlet of prestigious scholarships, she’s the kind of person a lab of this caliber and venture backing took only to improve their diversity numbers. It was challenging work—and, Luis scoffed, relentless—but her best chance at getting what she really wanted.

I want to do something with my life, she wrote on her cover letter. I want to be the last to suffer this way. I want to die in peace.

She got the job.

They review the presentation one last time; and then, later that afternoon, in front of the board of directors, Cora’s boss recites points from their slideshow flawlessly. Mycolution’s arsenal of fungi is ready for deployment. Exhaustive experiments and projections show their full set of offerings is capable of digesting over eighty percent of humanity’s most non-degradable waste products, reducing even the most ancient plastics to harmless, reasonably edible mushrooms. Observers can even see the mycelium working: engineered luminescence indicates where hyphae have detected, and are digesting, plastic-based nutrients. Cora displays the diorama on the conference table, three acrylic boxes filled with her best specimen, tweaked and optimized. Each box contains different debris collected from the beach, left with the mycelium for half a year. Someone turns off the lights, for better visibility. Threading through the waste in each box is a lacework of vivid, fervent violet.

This is by far the most impressive demonstration their lab has ever been able to yield—but no one is interested. Cora’s chest tightens as one of the board interrupts the presentation halfway through and spends the remainder of the time on interrogation. The developed fungi varieties are fine, but how would the mycelium be transported to landfills? How could companies select the proper species to digest each dump’s specific stew of pesticides and nurdles and retired polyester clothing? What appeal was there for a company to wait decades before they could advertise having made any meaningful dent on the planet’s health? The costs in time and money and effort were high—there weren’t any subsidies for technology this new—and what would be the psychological cost, of bringing back to public consciousness the existence of a bunch of evacuated wastelands that public relations companies had already successfully hidden from view?

Cora gapes. Are they . . . serious? Just because problems are hidden or take a long time to resolve don’t mean they aren’t affecting anyone. It’s exactly because of companies making decisions like this that she has had to spend her life like this, not just in pain, but just trying to—clean up—

Focus, she tells herself, focus, be calm, focus, but her head is heating, and her chest is tightening, and all at once she dissolves, into coughing so harsh that she loses her balance—pitches into a wall—gasps, her breathing awful, inoutinoutinoutinoutinout.

In the end, her boss looks relieved at her struggling. It’s the perfect excuse to end the meeting.

The next day, she can’t even get up from bed. Her head spins. She fumbles herself together just enough message her boss that she’s too sick to come in, and accepts his immediate return voice call.

I know you’re discouraged, he says. But the mycelium aren’t completely shelved. Let’s do the marketing research, find the money, and try again.

I’ve already done the research, Cora types back. Her eyes are sore with it, with not sleeping, not resting. Everything they mentioned, the zero-waste certifications, the focus group branding. It takes a lot of time. More than I have left.

"None of us will ever see the fruit of our labor, her boss argues. All of this work is always for a future we’ll never see. But he knows what she really means, and adds: I don’t want to hear you sound so hopeless. This place has good coverage. You’ll live as long as anyone else. Just rest, and come back when you’re feeling better, alright?"

The way he says it, he’s forgotten that this is the only day of paid-time-off she reserves for herself shamelessly every year. She was supposed to spend her birthday in celebration of the project taking off; and in relaxation, one final breather before she dedicated herself to assembling all her documentation for whoever would inherit her work. She isn’t supposed to be shuddering nauseous on her couch—dizzy with reviewing PDFs about market and government certifications—nearly collapsing after opening the door for Luis, who arrives with birthday cake. She tries to hold herself together when the candles light, but her tears spatter on the icing. Her body squeaks, struggling to refill after she fails to blow out every candle.

I think, Cora wants to say, that this is it—but she can’t say it, her body judders, inoutinoutinoutinout, and Luis hugs her, holds her face to their chest. They understand.

In the end, Luis’s mother also hadn’t been able to blow out her candles. It all happened fast, after that.

All I—want—is one more—year, Cora sobs between breaths. Just to—to know—that I—

Luis’s arms around her tighten.

Cora, they say. "You’ve done all that you could. Please—please—just let go of the work. If this is really . . . you know I’ll be with you, until the end. But if this is really it . . . I can’t bear to see you spend your last days like this. You’ve done enough."

No. She hadn’t managed even close to enough. But any protest Cora might have then is interrupted by her buzzing phone. A news alert, for the Gyre: another interview, about water purification methods they’re experimenting with. And their new coordinates, near mainland. The alert displays above her boss’s last message, a reiteration: Come back tomorrow when you’re feeling better.

Luis sees the message. "Don’t, they say. Their voice is low with contempt. Let’s just enjoy the time we have left. They don’t deserve your labor, much less you."

They don’t, Cora agrees with a shake of her head. Still, she keeps looking at her phone. Her hand, shaking on her oxygen tubing, fists.

Luis, she says. You—mean it? With me—until—the end?

Luis meets her gaze, trying to understand the turn of her voice. Slowly, they nod.

Okay, Cora says. Then—I think—I’ll go back.

Just one last time.

She met Luis in the university hospital as a teen, back when no one knew the name of what was killing her. She was an orphan, a refugee of Tropical Storm Bagwis, jobless, a student. For her, and for Luis’s mother, the stipend given in exchange for their cooperation was better than nothing, and adhering to experiment protocols was well worth the hope they might one day breathe freely, rather than only in spurts, at times sucking for air like fish out of water.

Doctors barraged them with tests, and chased the symptoms around and down to their roots: the blood vessels that branched and withered over and over again in their lungs, like the boughs of trees in manic seasons. That wild growth and anti-growth was thanks to a frantic pendulum of hormones; and that was thanks to the chemicals leeched into their bloodstreams by plastics, apparently ingested in fatal levels by both Cora and Luis’s mother. They were too numerous and minuscule to extract or neutralize. Luis, who always hated seafood even when it was fried anonymously into bacalaitos, remained unaffected, though it wasn’t obvious from how they cried and hugged their mother and Cora both upon official diagnosis.

The news coined their own name for it, vulgar and catchy: trash lung. An islander’s affliction, carried by superstorm exiles along with whatever baggies of memory cards and soggy photo prints they could keep hold of, adrift, before being scooped up by rescue boats. It felt unfair that the city was where things were safe to eat, with its meat trucked in from toxic mass production facilities. It felt criminal that Cora’s poison was bangús she chose from the market alongside her mother, fried and eaten with rice, plain