Ferguson is the Future: POC Writers Retreat Collaborative Story
September 12, 2015
While we were gathered together, we did a timed writing exercise weaving together science fiction and social justice. First we worked together to generate a scenario – here’s what we created:
our writing scenario:
topics we wanted to weave together:
race, justice, community
violence: environmental, economic, generational, emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual, etc
intraracial erasure of black queer women
violence vs women
movement/barriers to movement
characters!
1. sandra (invoking sandra bland). 13 year old storyteller. an empath who uses art to heal. lost legs as a punishment.
2. joey, the sentient lizard. carries sandra as a symbiotic relationship. receives food and companionship.
3. gbassi. 60 yr old queer woman of color. physicist.
4. kudzu. outsider, stranger, think they are bringing justice. plant based biology. believe mobility is punishment, so them being here means they are likely criminal on home planet.
5. underground superfungus
setting:
– age of punishment is 10 and above
– tech divide (smart houses and symbiotic beasts)
– not seen as dystopic
– structured to stop gathering
– nonlinear parallel earth time
– majority of people think punishment is to make immobile
conflict:
– violence is normalized. sandra’s story challenges that.
– sandra is considered a criminal
– conflict around mobility! sandra vs kudzu, or sandra plus kudzu.
Then, in a total of 25 minutes, with one break for feedback, these stories were generated.
Andrea Hairston
The lizard reared up and dumped Sandra on spongy ground by a garbage swamp and plunged into filthy water. Houseboat engines revved in the distance. Sandra floundered in the dirt, gasping at air. One phantom leg ached, the other itched. Two years after being cut for walking where she shouldn’t, for talking story truth, for being Margot’s love child and them making song together when [[she?]] was almost eleven.
“We have to go!” Sandra finally got a good breath. “Boat be coming. Houseboat. Don’t you hear?”
The lizard was knee deep in muck staring at nothing…nothing Sandra could see. She threw a rock at the lizard’s long neck. “What you doing?” Sandra gestured when the lizard turned to her for a moment.
The lizard made the sign for danger.
“I know. I know,” Sandra gestured and rolled close to the swamp water. “Boat coming.”
Houseboats trolled these lands, catching trespassers, taking a limb or killing them sometimes. “What are you doing?”
The lizard scuttled further into the muck and poked at a red mound of earth that was rising out of the pea green swamp. A horn blew, not so distant now.
“No time to investigate! Houseboat round the bend. This is private forest. We can’t be here, not even lost.”
Sandra was slow talking with her hands. Maybe she said the houseboat was lost. She pounded the ground, whistled and grunted. Joey always came when she use the lizard true name. Running toward Sandra, Joey’s tale waved so quickly in the air, Sandra couldn’t tell what she was saying.
“They’ll take an arm next. If they catch me here.” Sandra threw her arms around Joey’s scaly neck and hauled herself into the saddle seat.
The red mound of earth was at least seven feet tall now and quaked. Joey flicked her tail in Sandra’s face then slowly gestured, “Red earth not from here. Not from now. From then or from to come.”
Sandra groaned. Joey could outrun most everything, but if tangled in a good mystery, she was like a slug. “What do you want us to do?” Sandra peered past the slimy water to the open river that sparkled blue and silver. The houseboat was in sight.
“Wait,” Joey signed. “Just breath and wait.”
Kudzu burst through the red earth, shaking fungus from a leafy head.
Tananarive Due
They took Sandra’s legs when she was ten—her end to running and jumping as she had known it—and yet they still hurt like fire. Not the healed stubs below her once-plump thighs, although the stubs still ache in cold weather, or when she lands too hard on either one in her rush to move from one place to the next. It’s the missing flesh, though, that screams her awake in the middle of the night, when Joey lumbers to her pallet to nudge her with his cold snout to remind her what Gbassi always tells her—The pain isn’t real. Your legs are gone.
Gbassi, her grandmother, tells her to use her phantom pain to feel the pain of others even more deeply, but in truth sometimes the pain is so great that Sandra can’t listen and learn enough to tell the story her listener needs to hear. And of course nothing pains Sandra like a failed story—most will be polite, not even demand that she return the rice or water he [[she?]] was paid with—but the disappointment in the listener’s eyes always haunts her. Sandra’s best stories don’t come from pain anyway, whether they are hers or the listener’s—they come despite pain.
It is just past dawn, and already Sandra is braced for failure. A sleepless night, the waves of pain that did not dissipate with waking, no rain in the sky (or even the memory of rain), and a long journey to meet a stranger she is almost certain she will fail. Sandra’s stories do not thrive in unhappy conditions.
Joey is moving quickly, and she feels the steady undulating of the red-tinged plates of his scales. Her saddle holds her in place, but Joey is careful not to jostle her, perhaps because he remembers her screaming when she work [[worked?]], or perhaps because he is pleased that her clothing so well matches him today. She is wearing her hoop skirt and ribbons and beads and cowrie shells—her full costume, since most story seekers need an illusion of splendor as well as a story. He walks around the pits in the road from the caravans forced to cross the mountains. All she knows is that her story seeker is a castaway, and she will be paid for her story in information—which, next to water, is her people’s greatest commodity.
The story seeker is high enough on the ridge that she can see him from a distance. Or her? Sandra isn’t sure. The seeker is not wearing a dress, but then, few do except as costumes. The seeker is tall. Even from fifty paces, Sandra can sense fear of her.
“Why do they call me if they’re afraid?” Sandra wonders aloud.
Joey makes his mighty mewling sound. Complaint? Agreement? Joey’s species of desert dragon, as they’re called, only makes sounds during mating calls, when the throat flap expands in even more fiery red, but Joey has learned to answer her speech with his own.
Nisi Shawl
Why they have to punish the one who slep [[slept?]] with her as a baby? A baby in her arms? Gbassi asked herself that every morning she tracked her grannydaughter Sandra on the desert’s far side. Was it so wrong what she done?
She looked out the window. She looked in the wagon in the abandoned corral, in the barrel of dirt where Kudzu had planted theyself. She had created the formulae allowing the People of Peace to talk with the Plant Planet. She had negotiated Kudzu’s transfer here. Gone outside the People of Peace consilience to allow this outsider access. When they found out, the People of Peace cut off Sandra’s legs.
Well. That ain’t stop Sandra goin around the world tellin her stories, and that ain’t stop Gbassi followin her. She shut the window shade. She opened the door and walked out and closed it behind her. Goodbye to home. Hello to the wagon and the engine borrowed from neighbors who would never miss it. If they did they knew where to get another.
Kudzu had grown during the night. Gbassi climbed up to the driver seat and had to brush away their newest vines from the floor pedals.
“Whhhere wee go, old sciiienceh?” Kudzu’s voice shushed like wind-ruffled leaves. What it was.
“We go find my child, Sandra.” She pulled the tracker out of her robe pocket. The lozenge on its long top glowed red at one end, gold at the other. Gbassi lined it up with the gold end forward, pressed the pedals down, eased up on the rope handle between her and Kudzu’s barrel, and ground away from her lab with one last backwards glance.
Then they rolled over the valley’s edge and out of sight.
The road to the desert was wide and empty. The People of Peace built roads everywhere, just in case, but no one and nothing had used this road till Sandra and her little lizard friend ran off to change the world. The rest of the world. Leaving Gbassi here with the one she’d tried to change on her own. She had tried. And she had failed.
Rods along the road’s edge would guide the wagon, keep it from running. Gbassi shifted in her seat, facing backwards. She still couldn’t see much. She stood up. Over Kudzu’s barrel and bushy growth, only the road’s other branch, the curve leading back to the towns and manufactories, was visible. The valley, her lab? May as well not exist. They done their job of getting her to give up.
A speaker on a distant crest pulsed with light, rang with sound. “Gbassi Physicist you will return. Gbassi Physicist you will not leave the consilience. You will obey.”
She would not.
She spit over the wagon’s side. Grumbled softly. The People of Peace would hear what she said even if she whispered. “What you do if I not? Cut off my legs this time finally? But they be long away.”
No one got in her way. Roads to two more homeplaces ran off the main way into the desert. At the head of the first a little boy stood solemnly watching her passing till his grannymama called him off.
Shard, his name was. Her knowing the people living nearby wasn’t a problem. Meeting them, sharing meals and work–that was fine. No punishment. Getting everyone together at once though? Chat limit was eight, and getting around that by going face-to-face was forbidden. A big enough group could have blocked the wagon from leaving the consilience, kept her in, kept her safe. But a big enough group would never form. Not among the People of Peace.
#
“And you all live happy the rest of you lives.”
Sandra finished the story before she really knew she was done. She looked out over the crowd of fungus heads. A short silence and they started murmuring in their soft tongue, a language Sandra had never learned. Never needed to. Like they never needed to learn hers to understand the healing stories she could tell.
“Joey!” She gave the high “kekkekkek” her friend made when calling her to wake up in the morning. The fluffy-haired heads gathered around the high stone where Sandra sat parted as he reared to his hind legs and walked through.
Joey had four legs, two hind legs big and strong. When Sandra lost hers–when the People of Peace stole them from her for something she didn’t even do, something that wasn’t even wrong–Joey told her he had enough to use for them both.
With loving forelimbs Joey planted his upper body on the glittering grey rock so Sandra could swing herself into the riding basket and buckle herself in. An uneasy heave and she was up, riding higher above her audience’s must, above the smell of boiling grains and the smoke of their bogmoss fires and the cud breath and droppings of their meat beasts.
Daniel Jose Older
This time it’s suicide.
Whenever Sandra spills tales of suicide, the crowd turns their curious eyes to me. Am I one of the thinking ones, they wonder. Could I have something to do with this innocent faced child giving voice to so many unspoken secrets?
I grunt and slap my tongue out, grasping a hoofly as it bumbles past, make a show of chewing loudly. When their gaze returns to Sandra, their attention back on her story, I spit out the hoofly, watch it stumble off on bruised wings like a tiny drunken helicopter.
Sandra’s story mounts towards a climax, and some of the middle aged folks, the ones that remember the high speed railway, are sobbing quietly. They sob more for their memories than the bad luck of the characters, I think. In the front row, the children are giggling.
Never one to hold back on gooey details, Sandra launches into vivid diatribe explaining exactly how our doomed hero’s skull first fractured then blew apart as the steam engine blasted past. It begins to rain, but the crowd is transfixed. When she finishes, they let a blessed beat of pure silence pass, in which all that can be heard is the soft pitter patter of gray drops splashing in the mud universe around us. Then they explode with wild, unselfconscious cheers.
“Grim one today,” I say when the townspeople have huddled back in their homes.
Sandra nods; I crouch for her to collect her satchel.
“You OK?”
She nods again, a lie.
Lisa Bolekaja
“Will they give you your legs back?”
Sandra shifted her weight on her Aunt Gbassi’s couch. Gbassi saw Sandra’s lips fix themselves into a pout.
“Well,” Gbassi asked, “are your parents going to pay for their return?”
Sandra glanced down at the smooth round sepia brown skin that poked out between her thin blue cotton skirt. The missing legs, cut off just below the knees, were a constant reminder of her crime.
“Mother says the limbs can only be kept alive another six months or so. But I don’t think they can come up with the money, and I refuse to apologize,” said Sandra.
Gbassi sighed, stopped typing into her comm tab, interrupting the flow of her work duties.
“Do you really enjoy riding that thing?” Gbassi said, giving a derisive glance outside her open front door at Ubleek, the slate gray reptile the size of a Shetland pony that Sandra used for mobility. The thirteen–year-old scratched at a phantom itch on her left stump.
“Please Auntie, don’t call Ubleek a thing. They don’t like that. Ubleek’s my friend.”
“Tuh,” Gbassi said. She coughed and reached for a glass of water on her coffee table. Bits of the super fungus that had been living underground in their region for thousands of years was slowly working its way up into their atmosphere and affecting Gbassi’s breathing.
“Don’t be so stupid. Apologize to that trifling mayor and get your legs. Only a fool would hide behind pride at the cost of mobility.”
Ubleek’s loud snort interrupted Gbassi’s words. The creature, bold as brass and sharp as paper cut walked into the house on all four stout legs and reared up on two once it stepped directly in front of Gbassi. With its thick tongue flicking sticky saliva it screeched “U- U-U, bleek, bleek!!” in Gbassi’s face.
“I know this fucker didn’t just walk in my house, tracking dirt on my clean floor and hollering at me! Really?”
“Auntie please…”
Ubleek snorted more sounds.
“Is it cussing me out?”
“Ubleek, go outside. Go! Auntie didn’t mean that.”
Ubleek shifted his neck so that it stretched closer to Gbassi, so it could stare at her with its strange eyes. Slanted perpendicular, it had slits for eyes instead of rounded ones in the smaller of their species.
“U-U-bleek-bleek,” it snapped, chastising Gbassi. It twisted around, dropped back to all four limbs and headed back towards the outside, but not before whipping its tail back and forth in Gbassi’s direction, essentially a “Fuck you!” to her.
Gbassi watched the lizard sit back in front of the house catching the last few rays of sunlight. It would be dark soon and Kudzu would be returning. Kudzu and her disdain for humans and Ubleeks and all the things of this world. Kudzu, the stranger from another planet who could sit in the sun and photosynthesize within her own skin for hours. Kudzu, Gbassi’s lover.
Nalo Hopkinson
“How does it do that?” G’bassi asked Kudzu.
Sandra must have overheard. Before Kudzu could answer, Sandra leaned over, straining at the rope harness that held her legless body onto her joey, and yelled down, “Do what?”
Flat-bodied, four-footed, the joey sidled up the outside wall of their squat with that quick, queasy-making wriggle joey lizards used, being, as they were, snakes with legs. Its long sliver of aquamarine tongue flickered in and out, eagerly tasting the surface. G’bassi forced herself not to look away. Sandra wouldn’t fall. Her joey wouldn’t let her. She shouted back, “How does it climb the wall like that? Why doesn’t it tumble?” The squat’s walls were slick as glass.
Kudzu soughed its viney arms in a passable imitation of a sigh. “Be better to phototrope one’s way up there,” it said to G’bassi. Its roots tossed and thumped against the concrete surface of the yard. Kudzu still wasn’t reconciled to its jail sentence; being forced to locomote, instead of being rooted solidly in a substrate.
Sandra and the joey were up on the roof now. Sandra clicked at the joey, then said, “Seek, girl. Find the ball.”
G’bassi, even as she was asking the question, had been mentally postulating a theory to answer it. Old habits died hard. Strong forces in the microscopic pits that must be in the pads of the joey’s feet, bonding them temporarily at the atomic level with the wall’s surface. Like a gecko. But how would the bonds break so that the reptile could lift its feet to keep climbing?
The joey pounced. Sandra made a noise of triumph. She leaned over, straightened up with their pok-a-tok ball in her hands. Back at the roof’s edge, she said, “Her feet are just, I dunno, sticky.” Sandra had an irritating knack for collapsing complex and multiplex into sweet simplex. She grinned and hammered the ball down towards them. Kudzu caught it in three of its netted limbs.
A slow, vast pulse from below sent a pheromonal whiff of amusement their way. Point Sandra-joey’s, it wafted. Score is 7-2-0. Those two are whipping your asses.
Fucking thousand-tonne fungus. G’bassi eyed the sun. It was getting close to dusk. “Sandra, come down now. It’s almost time for the next flyover.”
Walidah Imarisha
Ardnas closed her eyes and waited to die.
She felt a horrible ache from the place where her legs should be. Even though the procedure had been sanitary and humane — as dictated by the Father Council mandates — Ardnas had felt every moment the laser severed her legs, simultaneously cauterizing, and the sensation echoed in her body still.
“This is what happens to those who will not repent,” the Father Magistrate had intoned as they dumped her body from the hovercart onto the snowdrift. He shifted the collars of his white cloak, the color of justice representatives. He looked like a specter against the snowy background. “Repent, and you may return, rejoin the society and become a productive member of our community. We will rehabilitate you and perhaps, in time, you might even earn enough for prosthetics.”
“I have nothing to repent.” Ardnas’ jaw was almost frozen with cold, but she managed to shove out the words.
He shook his head almost mournfully. “Then your only hope now is that the Kalpek will come for you. Pray that it will be swift and merciful.”
She barked a laugh. “Like you and the Council, you mean?”
He shook his head, and signaled the attendant, who powered up the hovercart. The engine’s heat blast melted a swath through the white landscape. It moved silently back towards the village, whose smart houses were beginning to light themselves up as the light waned.
The Kalpek. Ardnas felt a new thread of fear slither through her. The Kalpek were viewed as both monster and savior by the damned children. Whispers had run through the prison when she awaited punishment. She heard some — the pres — cry out for the Kalpek at night in their sleep in terror, while others — the posts, who had their legs amputated for their crimes — sobbed the name into pillows, begging for release.
Ardnas shook her head slightly, mashing her the halo of curls deeper into the snow. But the Kalpek were nothing but a legend. They could not hurt, or help, her now.
The burning cold was shifting from pain into numbness. She felt nothing at all of her body. Her eyes were becoming heavy, vision darkening around the edges. This was how it would end, and right now Ardnas welcomed it. She would rather die here, than return to town and toil in the factories powered by the posts, where thousands of criminals produced the energy to run the whole village. The posts killed themselves, all for the distant dream of earning enough for the expensive prosthetics that would allow them to become one with the community again.
This was the blessed redemption the Council promised those it condemned. Ardnas started a weak chuckle, but didn’t have the energy to finish. Her eyelids fluttered as the cold seeped into every pore of her.
A snapping twig heaved Ardnas back towards consciousness. Through her hazy vision, she made out a large grey object standing disturbingly close to her. As her eyes scanned up, a reptilian face on a long neck looped gracefully towards her, close enough for her to see the two sets of jagged teeth in its open mouth.
“Kal…. peck,” Ardnas gasped out in equal mix wonder and fear, just as darkness took her.
Rasheedah Phillips
Kudzu’s world, formed long before Sandra’s world, was structured around a plant-based form of consciousness, where events all took place simultaneously – there was no set of discrete events broken down into past-present-future. Rooted into the dirt, into their homes, the people of Kudzu’s world experienced time as a gathering together of all possible configurations of events constantly, continuously acting upon the senses. Gender, by the same standards, was not separated into binaries and ternaries. All beings on Kudzu’s planet contained within themselves all of the characteristics necessary to fulfill any role or function of reproduction. Gender had no apparent social function on Kudzu’s planet, as it did here. Earth, based on Kudzu’s observations, had discrete sections of time that had no real discernible order or rule. Sandra, while imprisoned in the cell next door to Kudzu before their escape with the help of Sandra’s natal guardian Gbassi, regularly received sensations and visions from past and future experiences.
When Sandra, Joey, Gbassi, and Kudzu arrived at the tall, metal gate standing at the mouth of the city of Tiamon, they stopped. A stillness hung thick in the air like a raincloud, with not so much as a leaf stirring or bird chirping. Gbassi signaled to Sandra with her eyes, telling her to keep her weapon sheathed for the moment. Sensitive to the young empath’s fear and excitement, Gbassi did not want Sandra to act brashly at the first sign of danger. Besides, she wanted to inspect their surroundings before they proceeded through the gate.
King Johannes, sympathetic to the plight of the bard class, had sent word by messenger lizard that their group would be protected by his warriors and personally escorted to his chambers, where Sandra would deliver a story to the King’s closest noblemen and confidantes.
But there were no warriors waiting here at the gate now, and no one wanted a repeat of the events from the City of Drojon. Kudzu had nearly been killed there. Sandra, Joey, and Kudzu sat off to the side as Gbassi circled the base of the entrance tower,
It was then that Sandra felt the first wave of memory of a future pain punch through her stomach like a concrete fist. “Ahhhh!” she screamed out, shattering the eerie stillness. The forest surrounding the city was about to come alive.
Sofia Samatar
Stay. The child lies on the bed, her limbs green. Green air, a warmth, a sleepy heat fills everything. Leaves move gently, rustling–I can’t help thinking of them as leaves, although I know they are something from beyond the stars I know.
The child’s eyes glimmer slightly in the dim light of my recorder. “Good morning,” I say, and she whispers: “Is it morning?” I slide my thumb down the recorder, checking the stats I received earlier, her height and weight, temperature, blood pressure, the results of her urinalysis. Thirteen years old, perfectly healthy. She makes a hissing sound, barely audible above the murmur of the alien leaves, the leaves that hold her down on the bed, that are cheaper than any monitor, any restraint, as they live by absorbing her sweat, her breath.
“What?” I say.
She hisses a second time, then whispers: “Where’s Joey?”
“Who’s that?”
“My walker. My friend.”
Then I know she means one of the outmoded prosthetics, the ones that are now being transformed into meat. “I don’t know,” I say.
“When’s he coming back?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know anything about it. Ask the nurse.”
“You’re not a nurse?” she asks.
“No.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a scientist.”
She’s still, so still I can’t tell if the information shocks her. A leaf curls at her lip, its tip needling for her saliva. Marvelous. I snap a photo, record a few notes. At the end I write without thinking: Stay.
“Stay,” whispers the child..
“What’s that?”
She doesn’t repeat the word, just fixes me with her darkly shining gaze.
“Are you–listening to me?” I ask, suddenly realizing I don’t know what her crime was or what she’s capable of. I jot a few furious notes for the program coordinator: if they’re going to pull me away from my work and send me into the prison, they need to ensure that I’ll be protected, that I’m not exposing myself to some kind of invasive empath.
“I could listen to you,” the child says, “but I’m not.”
I don’t like the way she narrows her eyes. I set the recorder down on the table, adjusting the view to take in the whole bed. “I’m going to do a few tests,” I say, opening my kit. There’s a thrum in my blood, an excitement. The alien leaves–how do they work, how well, for how long?
As I bend over her the child says: “I don’t have to listen to you to know what you’re thinking. It’s the only thing you can think when you’re in this place. I think it so much I feel like my brain’s on fire. Stay, stay.”
Her eyes glitter. She has not moved in twenty-seven days.
Nnedi Okorafor
Plantain– because it likes to eat plantain. He’s skittish
Sandra– Avoiding parents, hates stressing them out, about to have a bigger problem
Sentient Fungus Monster– has just grown under the house.
Sandra knew her lizard Plantain hated this particular incense, but she lit it anyway. Its smoke was sweet smelling and colored a soft periwinkle. What Plantain hated about it was the soft meditative popping sound it made as it burned. However, at the moment, Sandra just didn’t care.
She could still hear her parents arguing inside…about her. Better than them shouting directly at her. She loudly sucked her teeth and wiped the tears from her face as she stuck the lit stick of incense in the knob at the front of Plantain’s saddle. The large lizard had been in deep sleep when she’d climbed onto his cool body and strapped herself into her saddle…and she was glad. Plantain hated to see her cry.
As the incense began to burn brighter, its smoke rose around her and she inhaled it deeply. She felt better, it’s lovely color helping her to forget her dismayed parents and the ugliness of the city beyond her parents’ compound. Let them argue, she thought, glancing at the stump on her right where her leg should have been. It’s their fault. Of course, she knew damn well that it wasn’t their fault at all and she ignored the pain she could feel sweating from the house. She held a hand out and let the incense smoke creep around it.
As the stick burned down, she heard the first soft pop. She smiled. Like hard bubbles, their bursting satisfying to her ears as the smell was to her nose. With each pop, she imagined her many troubles decreasing. Beneath her, Plantain shivered with irritation, agitated by the sound. His rough dry skin twitched.
“It’s me, Plantain, relax,” Sandra said with a laugh. “Let me enjoy this a bit; then I will put it out.”
Pop, pop, then there was a particularly sharp POP. Plantain raised his head and looked frantically around, his golden eyes wide and blank. He looked right at Sandra, right through her. Then he hissed. Sandra had only a moment to realize Plantain was still in a nightmare.
“Plantain! Wake up! It’s m-”
Plantain chittered, twitched and then took off across the compound at top speed. His body was long and languid, something Sandra had had to work hard to get used to over the years. But even though Sandra and the lizard moved and sometimes thought as one, Sandra was still a human being; her body could never adapt to the “s” shaped snapping movement of Plantain’s body when he ran at top speed.
“Plantain!” she gasped, but the lizard didn’t stop. She hung on for dear life, unable to reach the harness to control him. They were headed right for the compound wall. When the lizard scaled the wall, his movement was especially violent to Sandra’s body; at this speed, the movement would snap her bones. Sandra could feel her joints already cracking and she was aware of Plantain’s agitation as the lizard roiled in the midst of his nightmare. Sandra blinked as she began to see stars and even glimpsed some of the lizard’s nightmare- Something in the sky; wild creeping plants; restraint restraint RESTRAINT!
Just before they reached the wall, her eye focused on the strange off white mushrooms growing in front of the wall. She had a moment to note that they were puffballs and then Plantain was stomping on them and the air grew full of black spores. Plantain was even more horrified, as he reared and sneezed and kicked.
Finally, Sandra managed to grab Plantain’s harness. She pulled and she screamed, “PLANTAIN! Stop it!” The lizard sneezed and snuffed, but he calmed, looking around and realizing he was awake. The puffball spores settled and both Sandra and Plantain quieted. Sandra leaned flat on his back and stared at the wall, sighing with relief. And that was when a deep voice rumbled from beneath them.
“I have a story for you to tell,” it said. “If you want your family to live, listen and listen well.”
Steven Barnes – The Giving
By Steven Barnes
Joey smelled the stew before she did, and that was good, because Sandra had a cold. Hoped it wouldn’t turn into Dropsy as it so often did. She was too young for that. She hoped. Joey scenting the cookpot was even more remarkable because Joey was an herbivore, and most leaf-eaters shied away from the smell of cooking flesh. Out of love for Sandra, Joey had learned to seek it out.
His powerful forelegs dug into the ground, increasing pace, driving them into the direction of the campfire she could now see, just over the ridge between the battlefields. Joey’s long smooth neck crested the ridge first, and if they hadn’t already been eating, the soldiers might have taken a shot at him, because sauropods were good meat.
Instead, the rag-tag group watched her and Joey with suspicion. Two of them greeted her at the outer ring of firelight.
“What’s your business?” the taller man asked. The woman at his side held the bigger gun. He lacked his right hand, and Sandra wondered if it had been blown off when his weapon misfired. That happened a lot.
“I’m a Bard,” she said. “I come bearing song.” The ritual words that opened the gate. Lying about being a Bard could earn a maiming. Song and story were sacred these days.
“We have meat and beer,” the man said. “You old enough for beer?” He smiled through fresh scars.
It wasn’t a real question. Out here on the Margins Most drink was alcoholic. Only way to kill the bugs.
Yes, thirteen was old enough. She slapped Joey’s neck, and he used his tail to slide her cart off his back, onto the ground where she could use her strong arms to roll herself to the fireside. The veterans, male and female, young and old, made space for her, and there was chatting and sharing of what little they had. This they did until the night grew quiet, and they looked at her with eyes gleaming with expectation.
Sandra’s belly was full. It was her time. She drew her guitar from her back, and sang them a story. It was a simple thing, a tale of her wanderings, back when she had legs. Again and again, the refrain spoke of a time of peace, something just beyond memory, beyond the firelight, before the Uppers in the cloud-scratching towers burned the bridges and sealed the wells.
She sang:
“Trees once grew like towers
The sky once burned with rain
Before we ate the flowers
And watered grass with pain—“
Her voice was rough with the cold (not Dropsy, please), but belly full and armed men and women to watch her back she could find the place inside her that loved this, loved the music, loved telling her tale enough to banish the world first for her and then for them. And tell the tale she did, doing the work, “pulling the plough” as her Daddy had taught her, drawing them back to a time when folks dreamed of building towers, not just defending them from the poor—or convincing those poor folks that fighting over scraps was a good way to die. But she set the hook, and once set, she went from pain to joy, made them laugh, and cry, and hug each other and beg her to sing and say more. This is magic, she thought. This is alchemy.
This is the best thing in life.
And she sang song after song, until the children grew sleepy, and the adults hid their yawns.
And she stopped. One of the children, a red-haired Asian girl came to her, and hugged and thanked her, then shyly asked: “how did you lose your legs?”
“Tell you next time,” Sandra said.
“You’ll be back?”
“I walk the ring,” she said. The ring of camps, and battlefields, and small faires surrounding the towers beyond the burned bridges. Everyone knew what she meant.
That night was quiet. She and Joey camped next to each other, warming each other and just before dawn she awakened, and they continued on their way, Joey having fed on the grass and leaves around the camp, and the brush they brought him.
The fires had died, but she knew they would remember the song.
And in the next camp..? Another song. And maybe she would tell them how many weapons she had seen, and how many fighters, and when how the next battle could be won or lost.
She had paid dearly the last time she’d refused to speak of such things. Her stumps still throbbed in the night, phantom limbs carrying the memory of that inquest.
On the other hand…perhaps she would just keep singing her song, until they sliced away everything but her voice.
Life takes everything, she thought, patting Joey’s side as they went on their way.
Life takes everything…except your songs.
Your songs, you have to give.
adrienne maree brown
Gbassi squatted down on the other side of Joey, her bare legs brushing the smooth surface of the lizard that now served as Sandra’s mobility. They were stealing a moment between Somak and Dida’s houses, outside the fences of each. Everyone was in their own places, no one on the gravel street except for these three, and the Stranger.
“Look girl, I think it could help us. We need help beyond people.”
Sandra sat still on Joey’s bare back, not looking at the Stranger she suspected was listening to them, not looking at her motherteacher’s desperate upturned face, not moving an inch. “How. How could it help?”
Gbassi leaned forward, peeking under the lizard’s storm-gray neck at the stranger. She prayed to the great superfungus every day, but had never tried to communicate with a plant. And the plant-stranger before her was not of this soil – bright green, small eyes in shades of forest, mint and ocean at the end of long leaflike arms that moved in the wind, an upward reaching willow. It had landed here in the middle of everything and taken up residence, growing wild and abundant all over the town square, pontificating at random intervals about the benefits of stillness.
“You not gonna stop telling the story are you?”
Gbassi looked up at Sandra’s young face, black from no shadow, stone with distrust. The girl shook her head, no. “Ok then. Each time you caught tellin that story, we know they gonna take something from you. Right leg, half your left leg already. They not gonna stop. They gonna take your heart, leave Joey here riding around with your mouth still going. But that’s cause they think the worst thing they can do is make you be still. What if you beat them to it? Learn about stillness from that one?”
Sandra’s young eyes met her motherteacher’s. They both felt ancient. These last few months had been a liberating crisis, escalating. Sandra had awakened from a dream knowing something irrefutable, and couldn’t stop saying it, whispering it, promising it to everyone she knew. She told the story of a gathering of people, right here at the heart of town, deciding to pull down all of the fences, deciding to be with each other again.
After telling Gbassi, who had thrown up her hands in a combination of wonder and frustration, Sandra had told the story three more times. Each time she had been punished, because the houses in which she spoke recorded everything, reported everything to the Council.
There was no gathering in Neg because when black people gather they are violent. When black people are isolated they are safe, society is safe, everyone knows this. Everyone has always known this. What she was suggesting with her story was sacrilege.
But Sandra also knew her story felt true, that they needed to gather. And each of the families she’d visited, each glowing heated floor she had sat upon whispering her dream story promise, their eyes had lit up before they turned away from her, knowing that only their rejection of her story would keep them safe.
She needed a way to tell the story. She looked back down at Gbassi, who nodded her head twice at the green stranger. Sandra nodded back and leaned, Joey moving beneath her as if they were, together, one body. His color rippled and changed between her legs as they crossed from the gravel road onto the grassy, empty center square of town. When she looked back, Gbassi was gone.
“It is only when the body remembers it is complete and it is home that the body finds peace. The one place, where is the one place? I seek the one place, we all seek the one place, where we need not run, need not hide, need not fear. Where is your place? I have come to see if this place is my place. I have traveled far from another place that I did not want to leave. But it was also not the right place for me. Where is the right place for me? Where is my one place? Must I bear this torture until I find it?”
Sandra watched this verbose green one, unable to find it’s mouth, feeling doubt, waiting for a pause.
“Excuse me.” Her voice sounded young against the stranger’s, but it heard her. The stranger stopped talking, and it’s body stopped moving like a wind, and slowly it’s eyes – twenty, maybe twenty five – all turned towards her. It seemed to look up and down her, in and out of her. “I have a story to tell you.”