Flowering and throwing out seeds
/It has been an overwhelming month.
I completed my MFA thesis—the first half of a speculative novel entitled Scent of the Open Sky about a woman with ocular albinism living in a climate-adapted, sealed city in 2083 where everything in your life is determined by your status in an instant social rating system
My 15-year-old got hit in the face with a baseball going 86 miles per hour. He has a shattered cheek bone and yet another concussion. He’ll need reconstructive surgery and titanium plates and screws in his face.
I graduated from the MFA, was told by a healthcare provider that I likely have autism, got rejected from a major literary fellowship I was really hopeful for, applied for six more, had a huge argument with a family member I usually really mesh with, and got my first short fiction published in a literary magazine.
Like I said, it’s been a lot.
So, I’m pretty much just here to say “Happy Full Moon!” And here’s the link to that story I got published—my first fiction published by someone other than me. Warning: It’s about climate refugees. It’s pretty intense. The little bit of resilience and hope is pretty gritty. But it’s a hot summer. You should totally read it. Here’s the first few lines as a teaser:
Image of a wildflower meadow on pumpkin ridge in tones of yellow and purple with a line of dark green pines at the edge - image by arie farnam
He was a child born at the wrong time.
His mother was pursuing a career and his father didn’t stay. The flooding came in his sixth summer as the seawall failed, and they fled inland, driving his uncle’s electric Nissan through ankle deep water to get out of Los Angeles—his aunt and uncle and their kids, plus the boy and his mom piled in the back. His mom’s newer mini-electric stood in deeper water and wouldn’t start.
There was no work to be had inland. No jobs for legal assistants or marketing specialists or even for wireless technicians, like Uncle Derek. They had to show up at dawn in Walmart parking lots to compete for day labor.
Then, the California grape orchards succumbed to the relentless drought and the blistering heat. Burned-out cars as well as cars that had just stopped running under the hammer of the sun lined the freeways.
Michael was the eldest of the children. His cousins were three and a newborn when they fled the drowning--yet simultaneously water-desperate--city. Eventually, they resigned themselves to a government camp in the desert. Relocation was promised month after month and then year after year. But instead more people came, and the heat got worse until people died of it, faces red and swollen, then gray and sunken with dehydration, even when there was water to drink.
They moved from one camp to another over the next four years, until they reached Boise, Idaho when he was ten. They camped near a garbage dump for several nights. It was an illegal camp, people shifting around, not officially supposed to be there. But that was where he found the canteen.
It was dingy green and had a broken strap that hung off the back. The front had the faded script “U.S. Army.” The heat-softened plastic was no longer flat on the bottom so that it couldn’t stand up and the cap was missing.
But Michael loved to look at the letters. When they first went into the camps, there had been military vehicles and soldiers who looked at him kindly and even gave him candy called “Skittles.”
