You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories by Octavia Cade

Author:Octavia Cade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: climate change; climate fiction; eco-horror, solarpunk
ISBN: 9781778092657
Publisher: Stelliform Press
Published: 2023-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

The sediment samples I’ve taken contain more than just pollen. They’re assemblages of biological detritus, and when I sift through them I’ll find microscopic bits of algae, of fungi. There’ll be insect fragments and spores and small pieces of plastic, because that’s inescapable now. Plastic’s made its way to the bottom of the oceanic trenches, it will certainly have washed up in the sediments on shore, or have washed down from the rivers. And with the exception of the plastic, it’s useful information, building up an ecological collage that recreates the species of marsh and mudflat, and allows for a closer comparison to the fossilized assemblages of the past.

Pollen fossilizes so easily. There’s a hard outer layer to it, a sheath called sporopollenin that helps fine detail to survive the fossilization process. I think it sounds handy. Not that I intend to fossilize myself — all that soft, shrinking tissue, it wouldn’t work the same — but to be encased so snugly, to be so armored from the world that even the passage of millennia, the process of petrifaction, left so little damage … I can see the appeal. I suppose I should say that damage is welcome, that it’s a good thing that shows proof of life and that retained perfection is only the absence of love, but I can’t. Grief might be the adaptation of love, transformed out of experience — evolved, even — but I know enough of science that evolution is mainly cruel.

When the tide goes out I walk on the mudflats, walk them in bare feet and then I put my boots back on and retrace my steps, walking beside, and for a moment, just for a moment, it looks as if there were two of us here, as if someone was walking beside me. I pretend that it’s you, but it’s a pretense that can’t last because the water is rising through sediment, the ground so soft, so waterlogged, that the footsteps that might have been yours fill up with salt water. They well with it, and the edges of footsteps merge back into sediment and it’s as if the prints were never there at all.

When I look back, my own booted prints are disappearing too. This is a landscape that can’t hold either of us any longer. It has been made too mutable, and if I want my memories to stick in mud and marsh I have to choose another method for flats to retain them.

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