Family reconciliation near the risen water

March 5, 2022 5:28 AM

"The distance from the Stop & Go to his childhood home is the length of time it took to eat a bag of spicy pork skins and throw the evidence in a neighbor’s garbage can so his mom wouldn’t know he’d been ruining his dinner. But he’d measured it in a teenage boy’s appetite, and the walk seems quicker now. The streets narrower, the telephone poles shorter, the sky closer, everything more squat, and the gritty smell of the marsh clinging on even two blocks up the street." "Babang Luksa" by Nicasio Andres Reed is a short speculative story published last month in Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice.
posted by brainwane (6 comments total)

Thanks for this. Good story, and a solid concept for a publication. I love a good (science) fiction story where the solutions to future problems are presented as they would be, matter of fact. The solutions being a combination of great efforts by people with choices and then smaller ones by people who have no choice. This story captured that perfectly for me.
posted by drowsy at 6:30 AM on March 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thank you for this. I really liked it.

I agree with drowsy. I tend not to read cli-fi because I feel like I don't need someone to cup their hands and shout into my ear THINGS WILL BE BAD. This story doesn't do that, even as it shows exactly why and how things will be bad. It offers hope, although not an unrealistic kind -- just hope that families will go on as they have.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:55 AM on March 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Whew, that's a good one.
posted by BrashTech at 8:55 AM on March 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

That is well done.
posted by Wretch729 at 10:08 AM on March 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Beautiful. Thanks so much.
posted by allthinky at 11:32 AM on March 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

...her voice over the phone, telling him she’d understand if he couldn’t make the trip, like she was forgiving him for disappointing her even before he did it.

Gino wants very much to be someone who doesn’t need to be forgiven. So, up the stairs he goes.

And then the absolution of:

“I’m sorry, Ma.” For leaving, for coming back. For the moment a few days from now when he’ll leave again.

“That’s alright. It’s alright to have things you’re sorry for. Your dad lived a good long life, and he left still sorry for all sorts of things. You go on, be sorry. That’s okay.”

If you have made a life for yourself and it has made caretaking obligations impossible, if you have been caught such that you can't do what you think is The Right Thing because it would grind you into squirmy dust, if the deep wish that the impossible situation hadn't happened is keeping you from being able to accept that you are forgiven for the choice you made, if your anger is keeping you from knowing that they love you and that it's not okay but it's okay that it's not okay, maybe this hit you too.
posted by brainwane at 5:25 AM on March 7, 2022 [3 favorites]