Earthbound

Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction initiative, celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress. Discover more cli-fi collections. Or sign up for email updates to get new stories in your inbox.

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Delivered July 7 2094 1 PM.

June, 
The evacuation alarm went off last night, and I almost slept through it. I must have been having a really good dream. Now I can’t stop thinking about what it would have been like if I didn’t wake up in time. I imagined it peaceful. I have this vision of me lying in bed while the noise and heat of the fire gets closer and closer, the flames licking up my parents’ quilted comforter. 

Remember the summer of 2088 when we stayed to defend the house? We fought about it because I wanted to stay and you wanted to leave. Those giant water hoses felt like wrestling with a python. By the third day we were both exhausted and covered in grit, every breath tasting like smoke. I remember you bandaged that long burn on my arm from a falling branch, hot and angry. You were spitting black for a week from all the smoke. I know that’s when you decided you wanted to leave, looking out at that fire and it looking back at you. 

Did you know the Nisenan used to burn this land on purpose? It was sacred to them, but it also kept the fires smaller, less destructive. Past the border in the re-ceded lands, there are big prescribed burns every year. I heard the Karuk have been teaching California how to do fires like that again. 

Anyway, eventually the alarm got through my thick skull and had me out of bed and headed for the grab bag. Don’t worry, the house is ok. 

* * *

Draft saved July 7 1:08 PM. 

Maybe if I had let the house burn we could have stayed down here together. Maybe it would have melted through the hard build up of all our miscommunications and misunderstandings. You know some seeds need fire to germinate? 

* * *

Delivered July 9 2:34 PM.

I have dreams about that fire too. They aren’t always bad ones.

I’m still waiting for them to approve my application. I miss you too. I spent an hour or two trying to fix our drip lines yesterday — the splitter keeps blowing from the pressure — and I wished you were here so badly. You’re so much better at this kind of thing than me, you should have been the one to inherit this old house and everything with it. 

I’m so tired of weeding and irrigation lines. Tell me something about your life up there? How’s the library job going, have you finished scanning all your books yet? I still can’t believe you spent half your weight restrictions on them. Did you get to go in the greenhouse, does it look like it does in the pictures? 

* * *

Delivered July 17 1:37 PM. 

Another heatwave this week. The heat turns everyone a little crazy and a lot mean. I keep jumping into the river just to get a break from it. I’ll lift palmfuls of water to my neck and hair. My hair is longer now, did I tell you that? I stopped shaving it in January when the grid was going in and out from the winter storms and our panels were acting up. I still haven’t gotten around to fixing them. I know I should just call the utility to replace them, but the heat is making me feel lazy, and there’s always something else to do around here.

I’d forgotten what it’s like to have hair. I like sticking my fingers into it and feeling the ends tickling the tops of my ears. Is it funny to imagine your butch girl with long hair? 

Everything is so dried out from the sun, the grass scratches like hay when I lay in it. I’ve been throwing the chickens frozen food scraps, they go crazy over them. And I set up shade cloth for our vegetables but when it’s this hot I don’t see how they’ll make it.  That’s about all I can handle, thank god I’m winding things down here. I don’t know how my parents managed so much land in this heat. 

It’s so hot you can’t catch your breath. After I get out of the river I’ll lay in the sun. It’s hard to appreciate the sun when it’s like this, so I try to close my eyes and feel it while I’m still cold and wet. Does the sun feel the same up there? Can you feel it on your skin, warm like touch? I miss your touch. 

* * *

Delivered July 22 7PM.

Do you remember the Walkers? They’re our closest neighbors to the south. I ran into them in town when I was picking up my chore shift and they were grabbing their food share. I used to play with their kids when I was a kid. They’re leaving, headed up there with you. Everyone is headed up there. I think it was this last heat wave that made up their minds. They said they’re tired of the heat and the smell of smoke from faraway fires. Tired of sweeping up ash from the porch in the morning and listening for evacuation alarms, ready for clean air and climate-controlled rooms. They asked if I wanted some of their things— ground panels, a rain barrel, a pair of old goats. I think they’ll feel better about leaving knowing their stuff is keeping someone down here safe. 

I should have said yes, but I told them I promised to meet you up there. 

* * *

Delivered July 26 2:03 AM.

June, 
I heard about the accident, are you okay? Are you safe? I can’t fall asleep because I’m thinking about you and those poor people. 

What happens when you die up there, where does your body go? Do they just send it out into space? I can’t imagine not going back into the ground in some form. When I was a kid we left all the old animal bones in a dump way past the now-empty fields, by the old trash recycler. Sometimes I’d see a starving coyote slink up, super cautious, to carry away a meal. It smelled like shit, but it was cool to watch how the system fed itself. Nothing ever wasted, nothing ever really gone. 

* * *

Draft saved July 26 2:17 AM.

June, I can’t imagine disappearing into that jeweled sky. 

* * *

Delivered July 26 8:20 AM.

Thank god. I keep going back to how all those people left here thinking they would be safe only to die up there because of a faulty O-ring and bad math. I can’t decide if it’s ironic or just tragic. 

* * *

Delivered August 2 6:20 PM.

June, 
When I was a kid the forest behind our house felt so big and mysterious, like I could trip and find myself in a fairytale or a secret world with heroes and long-lost monsters nesting in the leaf litter. I know it’s really just a clump of trees, but I miss when it felt like anything could happen out there. Did I ever tell you that half of the oaks are fake? My parents got paid by the government to plant synthetic trees years before I was born from some program funded by the Second Reconstruction. They hum if you’re quiet and still. That’s the only way I can tell the difference, although I heard the government stopped planting them maybe thirty years ago. 

Anyway, a fire inspector came by our place today. She said there’s a new defensible space regulation and now the state is supposed to inspect everybody’s land a few times a year. She was the first person I’ve seen all week. It made me think about how I must look with my hair sticking up everywhere and sweat-stained overalls. 

She was nice, though. She’d never seen synthetic trees before, took pictures of them to send back to the office. It’s cooler in the forest shade and we actually talked for a while. I asked if she’s headed up there, but she said no, said she’d never live some place trees can’t. She just moved here to do fire management, before that she was in the Central Valley wetlands tracking the salmon runs and how their population growth is impacting the delta. She was really excited about the rewilding campaigns, forest defenders, all they’ve shaken up. I told her how this forest has survived in spite of a brush with root rot and all the wildfires. Actually when I was eleven or twelve a few trees at the edge of our property burned completely to the ground during the worst fire we’ve seen in the foothills. But their roots must have survived because the next year they sent off new shoots, a tiny forest bursting from each charred stump. My dad cut off all but the strongest suckers and those grew into proud little saplings. Nothing ever really stays dead out here, I guess. 

We found some mushrooms growing from the bark of the synthetic trees and in the soft dirt around their roots. Neither of us had ever seen them before. They’d arrived in their typical, fungal way– all at once in unruly abundance. Mushrooms are nothing like growing crops where you’re seeding and thinning and coaxing. They just appear with no warning, a message from the vast below.

These ones had delicate little caps with fringed edges like seashells, as white as bone on the forest floor. I looked them up afterwards but I couldn’t find them in any of my foraging books. We were both surprised they were coming up now since it hasn’t rained in months and mushrooms need so much moisture to fruit. She was going to go back to the office to ID them and said she’d send me the results. 

I told her how much I used to love this little forest when I was a kid. I’m trying to miss this place while I’m still around. 

* * *

Delivered August 3 8:31 PM.

I’ve been trying to remember a line from this fantasy book I loved as a kid. Maybe you could look for it in your library up there? It had a red dragon on the cover and the line goes something like, “When I die, I’m going to breathe back the breath that made me live, that will be my gift back to the world.” 

How will I breathe back my life up there? Where will my exhaled breath go? What will they do with my bones, do they just send them out into space, cold and breaking down alone? 

* * *

Delivered August 5 11:02 AM.

Sorry I didn’t realize yesterday was the deadline. I started cleaning out the attic looking for a copy of our marriage license and got distracted by how much old shit is up there. I found this old family photo album that I must have shown to you. You would love all the old, yellowing pictures. When I was a kid my grandma sat me down and told me the names of everyone in the album and all the family stories she remembered. I can’t remember most of their names anymore, but here’s one story for you: as far back as we know, my family’s from Tennessee. The last generation to live there was something like my great-great-great-great grandparents, a hundred and fifty years or so ago. They had some land back there but I guess they couldn’t afford the taxes so the government took it back, if you can imagine that. This was before anybody was even talking about reparations so we were pretty poor. I think they were working as sharecroppers — my family’s been farming for a long time. 

Anyway, the story my grandma told me was that her great-grandmother went to the store to try on a dress, and after she did the owner told her she had to buy it because no one would touch a dress a Negro woman had worn. My great-great-great grandmother just ran out of the store, so embarrassed and crying, and she told my great-great-whatever grandfather. And he decided that was it, he was done living in Tennessee. They packed up the car and moved to California the next week, and we’ve been here ever since. 

It seems like a small thing compared to all the stories of violence and hardship from back then, but I guess it really mattered. Maybe it was just the final straw, or maybe it was the indignity of not even being able to go to the store and try on a dress. 

I think about what happened to that dress sometimes, if someone bought it and took good care of it and loved it and patched it when it tore and donated it when it didn’t fit them anymore and someone else found it in a thrift shop one day and loved it even more and wore it until it was threadbare and reused the fabric for something new, a scarf to cover their neck while they worked outside or even a rag to clean up after a good meal. Or if the store really did throw it away after my great-great-something grandmother tried it on and it ended up in the trash, if it’s wedged under hundreds of pounds of garbage decomposing still, waiting to get rediscovered and stuck down a recycler to harvest the fibers. Either way, I guess it’ll eventually become some new thing. If you were here you’d tell me to stop thinking about it because I still need to find our license.

* * *

Delivered August 12 12:12 AM.

We missed you at the Harvest Festival. It finally, finally, cooled down just in time so we could actually enjoy being outside. I took that new mag-train to town and met up with Darra. They were asking about you. They talked about the time we came out to their house after that freak rainstorm and helped haul all their stuff out of their flooded basement and you made them laugh until they cried by making up names for all their furniture. Was that the second or third year we moved back here? 

It was beautiful tonight in the main square with the distant buzzing of the apiary and the string lights illuminating all the garden’s greens: the fragile green of vining bean plants and the yellow-green straw of corn tassels and the silver-veined green of sprawling squash leaves. Everything was humming and alive, and Darra and I got drunk and giggled in the shadow of the sycamore trees. It was nice to remember there are people down here, too.

Although, I didn’t see Charlotte and Stevie coming and got stuck talking to them for what felt like an hour. I don’t think you ever met them, but they’re the sort of people who like to keep a close eye on the town’s givings and takings, gossiping about who took the biggest share of fresh peaches last summer and never made a pie at a communal meal or how Xunde asked everyone to pitch in for a workday to finish his greywater system last month and didn’t even sing a song even though Charlotte was hinting she wanted one and everyone knows Xunde has a great singing voice. People like that are so insistent on keeping a mental tally of sharing I wonder if it would be easier to pay them in the old way.

Anyway, on the train ride home I was reminiscing on when we lived in the city, those long BART rides to disco dance parties and back from queer prom and Ladies’ Night at the Fox Den, resting our heads against the cool glass of the train window, sweaty and covered in glitter and god knows what else. I was thinking about dancing all night, singing at the top of our lungs and our voices getting absorbed into the single voice of the crowd and us disappearing into some great, many-bodied beast. I wish I could have told my 20-year-old self to slow down and enjoy it. I wish I had known you can still dance when you’re 40. 

I danced tonight at the festival, but my mind was on you. I’m getting pulled in two because every time I look up at the sky I miss you so much it hurts. 

* * *

Draft Saved August 12 12:20 AM.

June, I look at this world and it’s beautiful, even when it’s on fire. 

* * *

Draft saved August 12 12:24 AM. 

June, I’m staying. 

* * *

Delivered August 25 4:25 PM.

Thanks for the flower delivery. I did sit with them today. It’s weird, I don’t think about them so much anymore, but sometimes I’ll be in the kitchen making coffee and hear a creak from upstairs and my first thought is still that it’s my mom waking up and I need to go help her down the stairs. God, my dad would be so mad I gave away the herd.

I never told you this, but I was afraid to look at my dad’s body after he died. It didn’t feel like the kind of thing I could say over the phone and to be honest, I was embarrassed that for all my farm-bred toughness I was cowering in the face of real death. But I was really scared. I felt so alone with my mom still sick and just his body left. I couldn’t even look in its direction without imagining some horrible bloated gray thing, not my father, not even a person, just an object. It felt like his body was taunting me with its silence. My dad was never quiet, you know? He was always pointing out native plants and mimicking bird calls. Even when he was sitting still you could hear his wheezing and by the end that awful rattle and the in-out whoosh of the ventilator. Before you ask, yes I’m still wearing a mask on bad smoke days. 

So that’s why I called the funeral home and had them come handle everything and barely said anything about it and told you not to come for the funeral at all. I’m sorry about that. 

It was easier with mom, you were here for that. By then I’d had a few months of sitting out in the forest, sometimes kneeling in the bare, upturned dirt where they dug his grave, silent and still, waiting for some sign of him. It came sure enough after the spring rains when bush poppies and needlegrass and wildrye all pushed up through the disturbed dirt in a riot. 

You saw how when my mom died I kind of went crazy in the other direction and wanted to do everything myself — wash her body and dress her, dig her grave, plant the flowers. I think it was partly to prove to myself that I wasn’t afraid, but it wasn’t just that. I’m still glad I had those last moments with her and her body.

You know you still haven’t answered my question, how do they do it on the station? What happens to your body when you die up there?

* * *

Draft saved August 25 4:37 PM.

Sometimes I resent you because I think moving here was like a big adventure for you, a chance to show everyone you could tough it out here but out here is where I’m from, and this place is the only thing I have left from my family and I love it like I love my family. I love these trees and the river and the sparrows that won’t stop eating my garden, I love them like I love myself. I love it even when it’s hot as shit and I’m itching for better AC. Why could I never find the words to explain to you what this old house and its land and the little forest was for my family … I thought you must have understood because you were so excited to move here with me and ready to dive into the work and you would stand in the sun and soak it up like you loved it here as much as I do. But if you really understood, how could you have left this place so lightly? How could you ask me to leave?

* * *

Delivered August 27 2:46 PM.

The fire inspector called me this morning. She wants to come back here with a photographer and a biologist, no one in her office could identify the mushrooms. They’re all excited because they’ve never been able to study synthetic trees as old as ours, there aren’t that many left. And I guess the forest service has been using mushrooms to decontaminate polluted sites and even regenerate the soil after bad wildfires, so they’re hoping this is a new species for them to study.

Did you know trees talk to each other and pass nutrients through fungal networks underground? Mushrooms are basically the fruit of that huge underground system, roots tendrilling and braiding in the dark. Her office is curious how those fungal networks are interacting with the synthetic trees, if they’re also exchanging resources. I wonder if they’ll have to tear up the ground and disturb all the roots to see what’s going on. That would be a shame. I’m sure they have better technology than that. Maybe that’s just the part of me that thinks the forest should get to keep its secrets. 

* * *

Delivered August 27 7:01 PM.

June, 
It’s funny, after I talked to the fire inspector I fell asleep in the hammock and I had this dream about mushrooms. In the dream I was laying down on the forest floor and it was like I became a part of it because I could hear the forest and the mushrooms talking. I could feel them passing messages back and forth under the ground like I can feel my own pulse now. I could feel their roots all intertwined, and it felt like lying with you in the sticky heat after we have sex, our legs tangled with each other and the blankets, and not being able to tell where my body ends and where yours begins, feeling your heartbeat against my cheek coming again and again, as sure as the sea. 

In my dream I was lying like that and the mushrooms started coming up from my body, sprouting like I was some dead log they were busy decomposing. It sounds scary writing it, but in the dream it was the most amazing thing. It felt like the mushrooms had always had their roots deep inside me, and they’d just been waiting for me to be ready to transform into something new. I could feel the forest pulsing with electric messages underneath me, taking what it needed from me and giving back the things I needed, the whole forest teeming with life. It was alive and I was alive. 

* * *

Delivered August 28 11:08 AM.

That sounds funny. I guess we both have overactive imaginations. 

* * *

Delivered August 31 12:02 PM.

June, 
I was so excited to write this my fingers are tripping over each other, I’ve got to slow myself down and start at the beginning. I was walking through the forest this morning after my usual dip in the river. There was a fire in Mariposa earlier this week and it burned itself out but we’re starting to get the smoke. And of course on my walk back I was thinking about wildfires and smoke, and I remembered this flower called whispering bells whose seeds only germinate in the presence of wood smoke, even if they’re buried deep in the soil. Somehow the little seeds know it’s the right time– the fires clear out bigger plants that would shade a new seedling. 

So I was thinking about all the ways plants know how to survive when I saw the mushrooms from my dream have fruited again, those bone white caps with their scalloped edges. And I realized maybe I’d been thinking about it all wrong. What if they’re fruiting because of the heat and wildfires, not in spite of them? It kind of defies everything I know about mushrooms but it also makes sense because wildfires dump a lot of nutrients back into the soil. What if they’ve adapted to that?

I started running back to the house to call the fire inspector, and when I got her on the phone she said she thinks I’m onto something! She really thinks it must be a new species, or a new way that mushrooms have figured out how to grow even in the absence of rain. And I know it’s just science or nature doing what it does and adapting to new conditions, but it also feels like magic. I can’t help feeling like I willed this to happen, or that at least all the time I spent running around this forest as a kid pretending and wishing so hard to stumble into some magical elsewhere and all the hours I spent kneeling over my parents’ graves, that must have had something to do with it. Like all of my dreams and my imagination and grief and my parents’ bodies are colliding and coming out of the ground as these fragile, persevering mushrooms.

* * *

Delivered August 31 12:26 PM.

I’m not obsessed with death, June. I’m trying to tell you how much I love this place. Why can’t you see that?

* * *

Delivered August 31 12:48 PM.

I’m sorry I can’t fake interest in the lives of a bunch of strangers living in a tin can in space right now. I’m telling you something that could change how we understand forest ecosystems and you’re mad that I’m not leaving fast enough? 

* * *

Delivered August 31 12:54 PM.

Yeah I heard back. It was approved last Tuesday. 

* * *

Delivered August 31 1:03 PM.

I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you would respond like this! You know, I haven’t asked you to come back here because I already know how that conversation would go. Why do I have to be the one to leave everything for you? 

* * *

Delivered August 31 1:14 PM.

You said you wanted to come here, I never asked you to leave the city. Don’t throw it back at me like that was some grand sacrifice.

* * *

Delivered August 31 4:21 PM.

Yeah. I’m sorry too. I guess I’m also tired of this.

* * *

Delivered August 31 4:42 PM.

I feel like we’ve been talking around this thing for the last year. Neither of us wants to touch this bomb we’re orbiting. But you’re right, I can’t leave this place. I thought I could, I wanted to want to. I wanted leaving to be as easy as being with you was in the beginning, an endless joyous dance. 

I’ve been dragging my feet because I haven’t wanted to admit it to you or even myself. But when I looked at those mushrooms I knew something I didn’t before. Maybe if you were here, if you saw them too, you would understand. Maybe not. So I’m just going to say it how it makes sense to me. 

Those mushrooms are a message from this wild and unerasable earth. When I look at them, I see the bold forest defenders standing their ground up north. And I see my parents’ bodies down in the dark earth, swathed in tree roots and fungal threads, decomposing. I think about how the things that made them up have become inseparable from the land, their cells and nutrients fertilizing the grasses and the trees and maybe even making their way to my garden and back to me. And I think about all the things that make up me coming apart until I’m not some distinct, separate body anymore, all the atoms that used to be me becoming a part of something else, and I won’t exist but I also will, I’ll live forever that way.

I’m not afraid of that, June. I want to die here so my bones, my skin, all the things that make me me return to this forest and this land and this dirt. I want my life to give life to some new thing.

* * *

Delivered August 31 5:04 PM.

I’m ok. I’m safe down here. I’m as safe as we can be anywhere. You put your trust in oxygen pumps and gravity stabilizers, and I’ll leave mine with the dirt. 

I love you, but I’m staying here. I’ll keep looking up at that dark sky with you in it. You can look down here and think of me. 

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