Heirloom

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There’s no choice but to hold themselves together. She can feel Kai’s eyes staring at her. Their look is wide and wild with intense questions. Yet, Dru remains cool. She offers not a single hint of her omission. 

Dru listens to the rain’s rhythm, its steady assuredness grounds her in this determined silence. She and Kai are so far from how their day began. They awakened to the downpour. The birds that normally sing alongside the morning were hidden and quiet. From their bedroom window, Ola’s birch hillside became a mystical, misty, fantasy of floating ferns. The water catchment resounded a slow river as their fingers flowed, flirted, and luxuriated in exploration of one another.

Kai had wanted to skip the morning meeting entirely. Stay in bed. Keep making love. Dru wishes they had done that. 

She shakes off regret and focuses on surviving the current situation. Her breathing calms as she tells herself, It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s OK. Her tongue is drowning in her own saliva but Dru doesn’t swallow for fear of visibly gulping. She just has to make it to the end of this meeting as if her mind isn’t collapsing into chaos.

Everyone else on the screen seems riveted. Teba Okojie-Chen pauses her briefing in order to create anticipation for her next instructional array. It doesn’t take much effort to cast drama. Teba is adored and respected. Her title is Ola’s Chief Council Biodiversity Lead, but her purpose-driven life as an engineer, educator, and author inspired half the citizenry to make their pilgrimage to the haven. 

She continues running the meeting, “This is crucial, folks. I can’t emphasize this enough. We need it from the mid-20th century. That sounds impossible. As we all know, the Earth reclaimed most of it either through methane gas, compost, climate … or it was seized and destroyed during the Artifact Bans. This is a real longshot.”

The group looks a bit lost. No one has any information to contribute. As far as Dru can assess, she’s the only person holding back. 

Teba’s voice gets heavier. Her almond-shaped eyes that normally dance with mischief and mission get narrow and exacting. “We went through the entire Registry. No one in Ola listed an organic antiquity like this on their mandatory manifests. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something stashed away in this city.”

Dru feels the corner of her mouth trying to twitch from that last statement. 

“If you have anything that can help or know someone who does, now is the time to come forward. No questions asked. Finding this fiber is all that matters. This is the key to unlocking an entire lost ecosystem. An ecosystem that can reveal our future.” 

Different people among the fifty-or-so on the meeting call chime in about reaching out to other collectives and neighboring havens. Evan, Dru’s advisor and confidante, mentions a possible piece of something at his dad’s house that might be what they seek. Dru keeps still. She admits nothing. 

Everyone nods with understanding.

Dru nods, too.

Dru waves goodbye as everyone else waves goodbye.

Dru thanks Teba for the breakdown of their new collective goal as everyone else gives thanks and exits the virtual space.

She speeds through the gravity of her choice. Dru is officially hiding an unregistered antiquity from a member of the Chief Council. Glorious Teba. Scientific visionary. An icon with which she’s still building rapport. The goddess Dru prayed to as she pursued becoming an engineer. The person whose book on biofabrication encouraged Dru to look at the intelligence of spider silk as a guide toward creating her neural repair suit. The suit that led to her nomination and acceptance into the Ola collective.

The Ola collective, where she and Kai have amassed a life. A life in a city-state that coheres through alignment with Pachamama, with anima mundi, with a world alive. A collective of creative spirits pledging to steward an Earth-common home for all life. A shared mission that knows the planet — and everything the environment holds — has rights, too. 

This is huge. It’s time to freak out. Dru and Kai lock eyes. Kai is already on their feet and away from their desk. Dru watches Kai instinctively start playing music, then turn it up super loud. This precaution invites lots of paranoid thoughts inside Dru such as, Are they listening? and, Have they been spying on us this whole time? 

She glances around their warm, intimate home of meaningful minimalism. She looks at the sofa covered in fabric grown in her lab, the hammock of seeded fibers she wove for their atrium, and the light fixture Kai made that holds algae and waterbear tardigrades. Kai’s dad did the painting hanging in their entryway. Dru’s mom made the pillow tucked in their window seat. All these lovely objects normally make her smile but now they present stress. Any of it could be hiding spyware. 

* * *

Dru decides to exit the common area altogether. She motions her head toward their soundproof/tech-proof room, which helps Kai flip out a bit more because now they know that she also thinks the Chief Council might be listening. They leave their comms on the kitchen counter. The two race into the tiny space and seal it shut.

“What are you thinking?” Kai is relieved to finally be able to verbalize their questions. 

“I don’t know. I need a minute.” Dru paces in the small room. Kai leans back on the soft wall, cushioned with mushroom foam. Another result of Dru’s ingenuity. The texture calms their nerves. They think about how nice this room is. They haven’t used this room to record music in months. Kai finds themself hoping to change that, soon.

Dru continues, “Do they already know? I felt like Teba was talking to me.” 

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“What was I supposed to say? Oh, hey y’all, it turns out that I have a 500 year old unbelievable antique that I neglected to mention on the manifest when we registered … Kai, are we criminals? Are they going to arrest us?”

Humanity survived so much loss: Entire families, neighborhoods, nations, borders, ideologies, and glorified separatism. Climate grief overwhelmed some while it led others to fixate on what was left. What still matters.

In this little home they have caressed into existence in a corner of the renewing world, Kai and Dru speak about old ways they don’t actually know firsthand. The two have only ever lived in a care economy. Fledgling though it may be, what remained of societies and populations came together to collaborate and stay alive. It takes real effort to be a bonafide criminal nowadays. And their systems are less about permanent ostracism and more about contrition and healing what caused the violations. 

Kai searches for a memory of anyone even being arrested by the Guardians in the three years they’ve been living in Ola. That one couple that kept stealing got sent to Dovru for therapy and rehabilitation, but no arrests. “If anything, they’ll kick us out.” The exactness of Kai’s statement makes Dru’s heart drop. She can’t imagine being exiled from this city; waking up each day in Ola helps her dream. 

Again, Dru is regretting not staying in bed with Kai, getting lost in their dreamy eyelashes, dark wavy hair, and seductive creativity. She lets her head collapse on their left shoulder. Kai reassures her, “Love, we can leave right now. Never look back.”

“I want to stay. Unless we’re in danger. Are we in danger?”

“I don’t think so. Teba said no questions.”

“Yeah, but she said it scary.”

Kai decides to talk past that truth. “I think they’ll just be amazed to have something that they themselves doubt exists.” Kai can’t imagine growing up with something this ancient in one’s family. Their dad’s side, the Ramans, has 150-year-old wedding jewelry and that’s mindblowing. “I mean, you couldn’t write this. It’s ridiculous.”

They both start laughing, nervously but freely. The coincidence is remarkable. But the shock of the city-sanctioned quest isn’t what prompted Dru to clam up. Even fear of punishment is, at best, twenty percent of what’s troubling her. Kai glides their fingers to the nape of her neck, letting them gently brace her head. They rub her freckled cheek with their thumb. They bring comfort into the moment, because it is obviously complex.

* * *

What Dru possesses isn’t an artifact. It isn’t antiquated. It’s her heirloom. And it’s magic. Actual magic. Dru has been convinced of this as a fact since she was 12 years old. That’s when her mom, CeCe, first revealed the most beautiful clothing Dru had ever seen.

The heirloom is a garden party dress made circa 1956 by her ancestor, Helene Hightower. She was, as Dru came to understand through the story, of the North Carolina Hightowers on CeCe’s side of the family. Although Helene was renowned as a seamstress, CeCe suspected she was also a conjure woman. She could walk between worlds. 

CeCe’s only evidence was the dress. 

It isn’t just that Helene had handknit the dazzling cotton lace that covers the dress’s muslin sheath. Or that the cotton she used for the lace is now extinct. Or that the extinct cotton has its own legend declaring it so fickle, it can only be woven by mermaids or pixies. Or that the lace pattern displays a phantasmagoric scene of luna moths with elongated, scalloped wings sweeping towards the earth, towards the heavens, and towards the unknown. Or that the luna moth, revered for signaling rebirth and new beginnings, seemed to be Helene’s familiar. It is all of that, combined with the dress’s inexplicable survival. 

Helene had sewn the dress for pure enjoyment. It was and still is a pleasure garment. It is a habitat of leisure that Helene created during days known as Jim Crow. 

Dru’s ancestor was demoted to legalized second-class citizenship throughout what was once her native United States. Helene’s environment was the polar opposite of a care economy. Signs enforced separatism everywhere she went. Her world tried to dictate where she could urinate, drink water, swim, eat, and it all had to be away from where the white-bodied people enjoyed themselves. The only way Helene and others of her skin color could be close to whiteness was through servitude to it.

Helene was unruly during a dangerous time for unruly black-bodied women. In an act of radical self-love, she handmade herself a party dress. It is now yellowing with pulls and rips throughout the fabric. The zipper doesn’t work right and the bodice is evaporating, but Dru still envisions Helene dazzling inside it. She sees her standing in perfectly cut grass, giggling as a zephyr breezes through the gossamer tendrils. Sipping cocktails. Carefree. Finding exhilaration inside her body. Momentarily forgetting that someone who looks like her was possibly being lynched and that hundreds of white-bodied folks gathered for the lynching to sing hymnals and take pictures during the murder.

North Carolina is now covered by the waters, lost to Dru’s time as much as Atlantis was lost to Helene. Yet, Helene’s party dress stayed with Dru’s family through floods, droughts, and landslides. When CeCe’s grandmother, Shia, had to flee the Great Fires as a girl, the heirloom was almost lost. Shia’s mom had severe climate depression that developed into early dementia. She had hoarded and hidden keepsakes throughout their pod. The night they fled, Shia heard a gentle humming lead her to a crowded corner where she reached into the dense pill and pulled out the dress. It had been shoved into an old plastic grocery bag. The right side still has heavy smoke damage. 

CeCe’s mothers, Selene and Alana, smuggled the dress and young CeCe out of Carther a few months before the Artifact Bans began there. They didn’t have to watch the district’s archives, which were the largest left on the planet, be burned. Their home didn’t get searched and nothing precious got obliterated before their eyes. Instead, CeCe and her moms settled in Anyox. That’s where Dru grew up exposed to circular systems, interbeauty, biodynamic wisdom, and a deepened sense of what is indigenous to her lineage. 

On Dru’s twelfth birthday, CeCe shared the heirloom with her for the first time. It was battleworn and bewitching. Its amazing thread count was still soft to the touch. The suppleness birthed a universe inside Dru. She became obsessed with how things are made, where beauty resides, and how to use the body as a bridge to bring the immaterial into the material realm.

On her twentieth birthday, she had the gumption to try the dress on. To her delight and amazement, it fit her frame. She realized she could drape herself in her ancestor’s memory, dreams, and courage. She felt Helene moving through time. Then, something magical happened.

Dru whispers to Kai as if they aren’t alone in their tech-proof room. “When I put the dress on, I see Helene. I can talk to her. She comes to me. Or, I travel to her. The dress is a portal.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’ve had inflection points in my adult life where I turned to Helene. I put that dress on and visited with her for guidance.” Long before Dru knew of Teba Okojie-Chen, Helene Hightower was the first goddess she had prayed to. Dru was happy to be her lady-in-waiting, griot, and acolyte. 

She never abuses the portal. She only uses it during times of extreme doubt. When she second-guessed accepting the residency at the algae farm that led to her meeting Kai. When she doubted if she could make that neural repair suit. When she worried about leaving her aging mother in Anyox. Helene held Dru through all those hesitations. She helps her remember that the in-between overflows with promise, not just danger.

* * *

Kai is a believer. They agree aloud that a piece of clothing as special as that dress probably does hold some type of magic. Helene probably left her energy on the fibers, wove the lace with a combination of will and skill. 

They reminisce about the time they discovered Dru in the dress, several months before they moved to Ola. How she was barefoot, spinning on the floor, her spirit dancing, her coily hair defying gravity as she kept turning. She had never looked so divine. 

“I hardly have any family left. We’ve lost so much. And I know everyone has lost so much. And I understand that the collective is trying to resurrect an entire ecosystem through an extinct fabric, and that is nothing short of wondrous. But this is my bloodline’s oldest heirloom. This is a birthright that everything imaginable tried to snatch from us and somehow it’s here with me. I’m supposed to keep it safe.” 

“My love, why are we in Ola? We brought our trust, our truth, and our treasures here. We took a pledge. What does that mean to you right now?”

It is an inquiry that gives everything form and shape. Kai and Dru harnessed their coupled vision for a livable world. They share an inextricable devotion to tenderness as a healing modality, as a spiritual language between the soul and the body. They believe in art, connectedness, and the beauty of wildways. Parts of the planet are so hot that one can only survive being outside while wearing a thermal suit. These two fantasize about the potential within the suit itself, the human wearing it, and the uninhabitable land to self-determine. They have philosophical discussions about biophilic design.

While some of their classmates have decided to focus on interstellar living and the new planets that will become new colonies for humanity, Dru and Kai turned their talents to Earth. Their home world. When Ola became an option, they jumped at the chance to live in a place that knows how to dream with its eyes open. 

Its landscape unfurls in soft architecture, soft infrastructure, and greenspace that practically levitates in the sky. Buildings are grown from the soil, not built. Nature guides the design of dwellings and technology. In squares and gathering spots, there is a decided lack of separatism. Spaces are agile and formed by memory. Billowing planters hang in towered tiers all over the city. The plants filter pollutants and soak up rainwater as they offer microclimates for those in the sun or shade. There are also bees. Real bees that still dance direction. Bats. Wild cherries. Two persimmon trees in the park by their house. These are just some of the reasons Ola is a haven city. Dru doesn’t need to detail any of this to Kai. They already know.

Instead, she mentions how CeCe never got to see Ola but believed in its mission. She instructed Dru to take the heirloom dress with her when she and Kai moved. Dru didn’t resist since it felt right to have it close. A few months later, CeCe collapsed in her library and never woke up again. She died in a bed of books, which must have been her heaven. 

Kai hears what Dru doesn’t have to say. This miraculous dress feels like all the mama she has left in this lifetime. And now, the city of her dreams is asking her to hand it over in the name of research and new world building. “You should talk to Helene about this. Decide with her.”

In a day brimming with such doubt, their suggestion lands. She stands in their bedroom. The rain coaxes her into meditation. She reaches into the back of her closet and opens the container she specially crafted for her keepsake. During her guardianship of the garment, Dru has gently cleaned it, restored it, and kept it smelling more like bright sunlight than centuries’ old smoke damage. 

She gently slides into the dress then takes a moment to view herself in the bedroom mirror. Its energy. She still feels it. Dru stretches out on the bed while listening to the water hit the roof and balcony. She listens until she becomes water.

* * *

A slight pressure on the mattress moves Dru’s foot. She looks down her body to see Helene sitting beside her toes. Her ancestor is a stunner. Perfect red lips. Her hair is curled and controlled, yet slightly tousled. Helene is also wearing the party dress but her version is composed of starlight regalia shaped like luna moths and floating bubbles of light. Dru is grateful to see her.

“Why are you sad, huney?” Helene leans in to pay attention to Dru’s response.

“I’m scared I’m going to lose you, and lose myself. Erase my own history.” It upsets Dru to state it aloud. She runs through the events of the day and lists out her fears. She recalls how she pledged to give the collective mission her all, but it never occurred to her that she might have to give all she has. Where does sacrifice end? 

This garment has been her secret space, her heritage, her sacred connection, her compass when she felt tossed to the winds. One decision rips it from her and gives it to the world, to use and possibly abuse. She might end up with nothing left of it. Not even enough of a corner to blow her nose with.

“Commitments aren’t supposed to be convenient.”

Dru is a bit stunned. Helene feels almost flippant about an object that has been carried by one descendant after another through some of the most terrifying times in human history. “Am I right about your dress? Is it magic?”

“Of course it is, huney, I made it.” Helene nods in agreement with herself and utters a gentle, “Mm hmm,” because the answer is obvious. “The thing about sacrifice is that you get to put something sacred into something else so that that thing can become sacred. Is this place truly your home?”

“Yes.” Dru means that home is her body with all its cellular history, Kai’s arms, this house, Ola, Earth, the cosmos. This place is her home.

“Then use everything you have and everything you are to seize your life.” 

“I never wanted this dress to become known for its usefulness. It was made in the production of joy. I don’t want it to be transformed by utility.”

“Then invite this production of joy into your shared destiny.” Helene leans closer and keeps speaking. “We are more than what we create. I don’t exist in these threads. I’m not lace. That’s not where you carry me. I think you know this.” Dru looks away because she doesn’t want to let go.

Helene places her curled forefinger under Dru’s chin and turns her attention back. “Think about what kind of ancestor you want to be, and then become that. That’s what magic is.”

Helene keeps going. “You’re right, I did cast a spell. For you. For Cece and Selene and Shia. For ancestors you can’t even name and for descendants you will know when they call upon you. Through you, I am my own ancestor. I put hope, impossible dreams, and futures I lacked the vision to conceive into this dress. I turned it into a fuel cell, a battery, for you to use as needed. You were supposed to bring this dress to this precious place so that you can claim the present. You’re giving us a future by nurturing your stake in this world.” 

Dru realizes she had made her decision during the morning briefing. This day has been a liminal space between willingness and willful action, between fantasizing her life and actually feeling it. “I’ll always pour libations for you. Will you come visit me in other ways?” 

“Always. In all ways.” A shimmering moth from her predecessor’s dress glides to Dru and lands on the back of her hand. When Dru looks back up, Helene is gone.

* * *

Dru has now left the heirloom on a hanger balanced atop the bedroom mirror. Kai is in the kitchen making  them both some tea. She grabs her comms and leaves Teba’s office a message. “I think I have what we need.” 

From here, it is a matter of time. She knows she is in the bittersweet, that she will mourn a loss. Grief will come and go. She considers the possibility of being part of the team that harvests the cellular structure of the dress, scans its fibers and composition. She imagines that the dress will be cataloged in the archives, labeled with her family name, a background on Helene, and Dru’s name listed as the Scientist of Record. She wonders if a child will one day see her heirloom and have a universe break forth within them, too. Be given a direction they didn’t know was previously possible. 

She turns to the kitchen window and sees something unexpected. It seems a luna moth, of all beings, is resting beyond the glass pane. Dru has never seen one in Ola before this moment. Habitat loss led to them mostly living in bedtime stories. This city seems to shelter so many conduits of rebirth. The large, light transparent green wings relax flatly against the outer wall. 

The sight makes Dru laugh the slightest laugh. She feels just fine. She is exactly where she needs to be and exactly when she needs to be. She is her path.

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