Parable of the Sower

Parable of the

Sower

by Octavia Butler

The odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025; the place is California, where small walled comunities must protect themselves from desperate hordes of scangers and roaming bands of drug addicts.

When one such community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18-year-old black woman, sets off on foot, moving north along the dangerous coastal highways. Lauren is a “sharer,” one who suffers from hyperempathy — the ability to feel others’ pain as well as her own.

“Butler’s spare, vivid prose style invites comparison with the likes of Kate

Wilhelm and Ursula Le Guin.” —Kirkus “Moving, frightening, funny and eerily beautiful.” —The Washington Post

General Fiction Science Fiction

2024

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment.

Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

by Lauren Oya Olamina

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Parable of the Sower

1

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, JULY 20, 2024

I had my recurring dream last night. I guess I should have expected it. It comes to me when I struggle-when I twist on my own personal hook and try to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. It comes to me when I try to be my father’s daughter.

Today is our birthday— my fifteenth and my father’s fifty-fifth. Tomorrow, I’ll try to please him— him and the community and God. So last night, I dreamed a reminder that it’s all a lie. I think I need to write about the dream because this particular lie bothers me so much.

I’m learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson. Not a very subtle image, but a persistent one. I’ve had many lessons, and I’m better at flying than I used to be. I trust my ability more now, but I’m still afraid. I can’t quite control my directions yet.

I lean forward toward the doorway. It’s a doorway like the one between my room and the hall. It seems to be a long way from me, but I lean toward it.

Holding my body stiff and tense, I let go of whatever I’m grasping, whatever has kept me from rising or falling so far. And I lean into the air, straining upward, not moving upward, but not quite falling down either. Then I do begin to move, as though to slide on the air drifting a few feet above the floor, caught between terror and joy.

I drift toward the doorway. Cool, pale light glows from it. Then I slide a little to the right; and a little more. I can see that I’m going to miss the door and hit the wall beside it, but I can’t stop or turn. I drift away from the door, away from the cool glow into another light.

The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me. The fire spreads. I drift into it. It blazes up around me. I thrash and scramble and try to swim back out of it, grabbing handfuls of air and fire, kicking, burning! Darkness.

Perhaps I awake a little. I do sometimes when the fire swallows me. That’s bad. When I wake up all the way, I can’t get back to sleep. I try, but I’ve never been able to.

This time I don’t wake up all the way. I fade into the second part of the dream— the part that’s ordinary and real, the part that did happen years ago when I was little, though at the time it didn’t seem to matter.

Darkness.

Darkness brightening.

Stars.

Stars casting their cool, pale, glinting light.

“We couldn’t see so many stars when I was little,”

my stepmother says to me. She speaks in Spanish, her own first language. She stands still and small, looking up at the broad sweep of the Milky Way. She and I have gone out after dark to take the washing down from the clothesline. The day has been hot, as usual, and we both like the cool darkness of early night. There’s no moon, but we can see very well.

The sky is full of stars.

The neighborhood wall is a massive, looming presence nearby. I see it as a crouching animal, perhaps about to spring, more threatening than protective. But my stepmother is there, and she isn’t afraid. I stay close to her. I’m seven years old.

I look up at the stars and the deep, black sky. “Why couldn’t you see the stars?” I ask her. “Everyone can see them.” I speak in Spanish, too, as she’s taught me. It’s an intimacy somehow.

“City lights,” she says. “Lights, progress, growth, all those things we’re too hot and too poor to bother with anymore.” She pauses. “When I was your age, my mother told me that the stars— the few stars we could see— were windows into heaven. Windows for God to look through to keep an eye on us. I believed her for almost a year.” My stepmother hands me an armload of my youngest brother’s diapers. I take them, walk back toward the house where she has left her big wicker laundry basket, and pile the diapers atop the rest of the clothes. The basket is full. I look to see that my stepmother is not watching me, then let myself fall backward onto the soft mound of stiff, clean clothes. For a moment, the fall is like floating.

I lie there, looking up at the stars. I pick out some of the constellations and name the stars that make them up. I’ve learned them from an astronomy book that belonged to my father’s mother.

I see the sudden light streak of a meteor flashing westward across the sky. I stare after it, hoping to see another. Then my stepmother calls me and I go back to her.

“There are city lights now,” I say to her. “They don’t hide the stars.”

She shakes her head. “There aren’t anywhere near as many as there were. Kids today have no idea what a blaze of light cities used to be— and not that long ago.”

“I’d rather have the stars,” I say.

“The stars are free.” She shrugs. “I’d rather have the city lights back myself, the sooner the better. But we can afford the stars.”

2

A gift of God

May sear unready fingers.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SUNDAY, JULY 21, 2024

At least three years ago, my father’s God stopped being my God. His church stopped being my church.

And yet, today, because I’m a coward, I let myself be initiated into that church. I let my father baptize me in all three names of that God who isn’t mine any more.

My God has another name.

We got up early this morning because we had to go across town to church. Most Sundays, Dad holds church services in our front rooms. He’s a Baptist minister, and even though not all of the people who live within our neighborhood walls are Baptists, those who feel the need to go to church are glad to come to us. That way they don’t have to risk going outside where things are so dangerous and crazy.

It’s bad enough that some people— my father for one— have to go out to work at least once a week.

None of us goes out to school any more. Adults get nervous about kids going outside.

But today was special. For today, my father made arrangements with another minister— a friend of his who still had a real church building with a real baptistery.

Dad once had a church just a few blocks outside our wall. He began it before there were so many walls.

But after it had been slept in by the homeless, robbed, and vandalized several times, someone poured gasoline in and around it and burned it down.

Seven of the homeless people sleeping inside on that last night burned with it.

But somehow, Dad’s friend Reverend Robinson has managed to keep his church from being destroyed.

We rode our bikes to it this morning— me, two of my brothers, four other neighborhood kids who were ready to be baptized, plus my father and some other neighborhood adults riding shotgun. All the adults were armed. That’s the rule. Go out in a bunch, and go armed.

The alternative was to be baptized in the bathtub at home. That would have been cheaper and safer and fine with me. I said so, but no one paid any attention to me. To the adults, going outside to a real church was like stepping back into the good old days when there were churches all over the place and too many lights and gasoline was for fueling cars and trucks instead of for torching things. They never miss a chance to relive the good old days or to tell kids how great it’s going to be when the country gets back on its feet and good times come back.

Yeah.

To us kids— most of us— the trip was just an adventure, an excuse to go outside the wall. We would be baptized out of duty or as a kind of insurance, but most of us aren’t that much concerned with religion. I am, but then I have a different religion.

“Why take chances,” Silvia Dunn said to me a few days ago. “Maybe there’s something to all this religion stuff.” Her parents thought there was, so she was with us.

My brother Keith who was also with us didn’t share any of my beliefs. He just didn’t care. Dad wanted him to be baptized, so what the hell. There wasn’t much that Keith did care about. He liked to hang out with his friends and pretend to be grown up, dodge work and dodge school and dodge church. He’s only twelve, the oldest of my three brothers. I don’t like him much, but he’s my stepmother’s favorite. Three smart sons and one dumb one, and it’s the dumb one she loves best.

Keith looked around more than anyone as we rode.

His ambition, if you could call it that, is to get out of the neighborhood and go to Los Angeles. He’s never too clear about what he’ll do there. He just wants to go to the big city and make big money. According to my father, the big city is a carcass covered with too many maggots. I think he’s right, though not all the maggots are in L.A. They’re here, too.

But maggots tend not to be early-morning types. We rode past people stretched out, sleeping on the sidewalks, and a few just waking up, but they paid no attention to us. I saw at least three people who weren’t going to wake up again, ever. One of them was headless. I caught myself looking around for the head. After that, I tried not to look around at all.

A woman, young, naked, and filthy stumbled along past us. I got a look at her slack expression and realized that she was dazed or drunk or something.

Maybe she had been raped so much that she was crazy. I’d heard stories of that happening. Or maybe she was just high on drugs. The boys in our group almost fell off their bikes, staring at her. What wonderful religious thoughts they would be having for a while.

The naked woman never looked at us. I glanced back after we’d passed her and saw that she had settled down in the weeds against someone else’s neighborhood wall.

A lot of our ride was along one neighborhood wall after another; some a block long, some two blocks, some five… . Up toward the hills there were walled estates— one big house and a lot of shacky little dependencies where the servants lived. We didn’t pass anything like that today. In fact we passed a couple of neighborhoods so poor that their walls were made up of unmortared rocks, chunks of concrete, and trash. Then there were the pitiful, unwalled residential areas. A lot of the houses were trashed— burned, vandalized, infested with drunks or druggies or squatted-in by homeless families with their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children. Their kids were wide awake and watching us this morning. I feel sorry for the little ones, but the ones my age and older make me nervous. We ride down the middle of the cracked street, and the kids come out and stand along the curb to stare at us. They just stand and stare. I think if there were only one or two of us, or if they couldn’t see our guns, they might try to pull us down and steal our bikes, our clothes, our shoes, whatever. Then what? Rape? Murder? We could wind up like that naked woman, stumbling along, dazed, maybe hurt, sure to attract dangerous attention unless she could steal some clothing. I wish we could have given her something.

My stepmother says she and my father stopped to help an injured woman once, and the guys who had injured her jumped out from behind a wall and almost killed them.

And we’re in Robledo— 20 miles from Los Angeles, and, according to Dad, once a rich, green, unwalled little city that he had been eager to abandon when he was a young man. Like Keith, he had wanted to escape the dullness of Robledo for big city excitement. L.A. was better then— less lethal. He lived there for 21 years. Then in 2010, his parents were murdered and he inherited their house.

Whoever killed them had robbed the house and smashed up the furniture, but they didn’t torch anything. There was no neighborhood wall back then.

Crazy to live without a wall to protect you. Even in Robledo, most of the street poor— squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general— are dangerous. They’re desperate or crazy or both.

That’s enough to make anyone dangerous.

Worse for me, they often have things wrong with them. They cut off each other’s ears, arms, legs… .

They carry untreated diseases and festering wounds. They have no money to spend on water to wash with so even the unwounded have sores. They don’t get enough to eat so they’re malnourished— or they eat bad food and poison themselves. As I rode, I tried not to look around at them, but I couldn’t help seeing— collecting— some of their general misery.

I can take a lot of pain without falling apart. I’ve had to learn to do that. But it was hard, today, to keep pedaling and keep up with the others when just about everyone I saw made me feel worse and worse.

My father glanced back at me every now and then.

He tells me, “You can beat this thing. You don’t have to give in to it.” He has always pretended, or perhaps believed, that my hyperempathy syndrome was something I could shake off and forget about.

The sharing isn’t real, after all. It isn’t some magic or ESP that allows me to share the pain or the pleasure of other people. It’s delusional. Even I admit that. My brother Keith used to pretend to be hurt just to trick me into sharing his supposed pain. Once he used red ink as fake blood to make me bleed. I was eleven then, and I still bled through the skin when I saw someone else bleeding. I couldn’t help doing it, and I always worried that it would give me away to people outside the family.

I haven’t shared bleeding with anyone since I was twelve and got my first period. What a relief that was. I just wish all the rest of it had gone away, too.

Keith only tricked me into bleeding that once, and I beat the hell out of him for it. I didn’t fight much when I was little because it hurt me so. I felt every blow that I struck, just as though I’d hit myself. So when I did decide that I had to fight, I set out to hurt the other kid more than kids usually hurt one another. I broke Michael Talcott’s arm and Rubin Quintanilla’s nose. I knocked out four of Silvia Dunn’s teeth. They all earned what I did to them two or three times over.

I got punished every time, and I resented it. It was double punishment, after all, and my father and stepmother knew it. But knowing didn’t stop them. I think they did it to satisfy the other kids’ parents. But when I beat up Keith, I knew that Cory or Dad or both of them would punish me for it— my poor little brother, after all. So I had to see that my poor little brother paid in advance. What I did to him had to be worthwhile in spite of what they would do to me.

It was.

We both got it later from Dad— me for hurting a younger kid and Keith for risking putting “family business” into the street. Dad is big on privacy and “family business.” There’s a whole range of things we never even hint about outside the family. First among these is anything about my mother, my hyperempathy, and how the two are connected. To my father, the whole business is shameful. He’s a preacher and a professor and a dean. A first wife who was a drug addict and a daughter who is drug damaged is not something he wants to boast about.

Lucky for me. Being the most vulnerable person I know is damned sure not something I want to boast about.

I can’t do a thing about my hyperempathy, no matter what Dad thinks or wants or wishes. I feel what I see others feeling or what I believe they feel.

Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an “organic delusional syndrome.” Big shit. It hurts, that’s all I know. Thanks to Paracetco, the smart pill, the Einstein powder, the particular drug my mother chose to abuse before my birth killed her, I’m crazy. I get a lot of grief that doesn’t belong to me, and that isn’t real. But it hurts.

I’m supposed to share pleasure and pain, but there isn’t much pleasure around these days. About the only pleasure I’ve found that I enjoy sharing is sex. I get the guy’s good feeling and my own. I almost wish I didn’t. I live in a tiny, walled fish-bowl cul-de-sac community, and I’m the preacher’s daughter. There’s a real limit to what I can do as far as sex goes.

Anyway, my neurotransmitters are scrambled and they’re going to stay scrambled. But I can do okay as long as other people don’t know about me. Inside our neighborhood walls I do fine. Our rides today, though, were hell. Going and coming, they were all the worst things I’ve ever felt— shadows and ghosts, twists and jabs of unexpected pain.

If I don’t look too long at old injuries, they don’t hurt me too much. There was a naked little boy whose skin was a mass of big red sores; a man with a huge scab over the stump where his right hand used to be; a little girl, naked, maybe seven years old with blood running down her bare thighs. A woman with a swollen, bloody, beaten face… .

I must have seemed jumpy. I glanced around like a bird, not letting my gaze rest on anyone longer than it took me to see that they weren’t coming in my direction or aiming anything at me.

Dad may have read something of what I was feeling in my expression. I try not to let my face show anything, but he’s good at reading me. Sometimes people say I look grim or angry. Better to have them think that than know the truth. Better to have them think anything than let them know just how easy it is to hurt me.

Dad had insisted on fresh, clean, potable water for the baptism. He couldn’t afford it, of course. Who could? That was the other reason for the four extra kids:

Silvia Dunn, Hector Quintanilla, Curtis Talcott, and Drew Balter, along with my brothers Keith and Marcus. The other kids’ parents had helped with costs. They thought a proper baptism was important enough to spend some money and take some risks.

I was the oldest by about two months. Curtis was next. As much as I hated being there, I hated even more that Curtis was there. I care about him more than I want to. I care what he thinks of me. I worry that I’ll fall apart in public some day and he’ll see.

But not today.

By the time we reached the fortress-church, my jaw-muscles hurt from clinching and unclinching my teeth, and overall, I was exhausted.

There were only five or six dozen people at the service — enough to fill up our front rooms at home and look like a big crowd. At the church, though, with its surrounding wall and its security bars and Lazor wire and its huge hollowness inside, and its armed guards, the crowd seemed a tiny scattering of people. That was all right. The last thing I wanted was a big audience to maybe trip me up with pain.

The baptism went just as planned. They sent us kids off to the bathrooms (“men’s,” “women’s,” “please do not put paper of any kind into toilets,” “water for washing in bucket at left… .”) to undress and put on white gowns. When we were ready, Curtis’s father took us to an anteroom where we could hear the preaching— from the first chapter of Saint John and the second chapter of The Acts— and wait our turns.

My turn came last. I assume that was my father’s idea. First the neighbor kids, then my brothers, then me. For reasons that don’t make a lot of sense to me, Dad thinks I need more humility. I think my particular biological humility— or humiliation— is more than enough.

What the hell? Someone had to be last. I just wish I could have been courageous enough to skip the thing altogether.

So, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost… .”

Catholics get this stuff over with when they’re babies. I wish Baptists did. I almost wish I could believe it was important the way a lot of people seem to, the way my father seems to. Failing that, I wish I didn’t care.

But I do. The idea of God is much on my mind these days. I’ve been paying attention to what other people believe— whether they believe, and if so what kind of God they believe in. Keith says God is just the adults’ way of trying to scare you into doing what they want. He doesn’t say that around Dad, but he says it. He believes in what he sees, and no matter what’s in front of him, he doesn’t see much. I suppose Dad would say that about me if he knew what I believe. Maybe he’d be right. But it wouldn’t stop me from seeing what I see.

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of.

Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality.

Ask seven people what all of that means and you’ll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?

There’s a big, early-season storm blowing itself out in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s bounced around the Gulf, killing people from Florida to Texas and down into Mexico. There are over 700 known dead so far. One hurricane. And how many people has it hurt? How many are going to starve later because of destroyed crops? That’s nature. Is it God? Most of the dead are the street poor who have nowhere to go and who don’t hear the warnings until it’s too late for their feet to take them to safety. Where’s safety for them, anyway? Is it a sin against God to be poor? We’re almost poor ourselves. There are fewer and fewer jobs among us, more of us being born, more kids growing up with nothing to look forward to. One way or another, we’ll all be poor some day. The adults say things will get better, but they never have. How will God— my father’s God— behave toward us when we’re poor?

Is there a God? If there is, does he (she? it?) care about us? Deists like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson believed God was something that made us, then left us on our own.

“Misguided,” Dad said when I asked him about Deists. “They should have had more faith in what their Bibles told them.”

I wonder if the people on the Gulf Coast still have faith. People have had faith through horrible disasters before. I read a lot about that kind of thing.

I read a lot period. My favorite book of the Bible is Job. I think it says more about my father’s God in particular and gods in general than anything else I’ve ever read.

In the book of Job, God says he made everything and he knows everything so no one has any right to question what he does with any of it. Okay. That works. That Old Testament God doesn’t violate the way things are now. But that God sounds a lot like Zeus— a super-powerful man, playing with his toys the way my youngest brothers play with toy soldiers.

Bang, bang! Seven toys fall dead. If they’re yours, you make the rules. Who cares what the toys think.

Wipe out a toy’s family, then give it a brand new family. Toy children, like Job’s children, are interchangeable.

Maybe God is a kind of big kid, playing with his toys.

If he is, what difference does it make if 700 people get killed in a hurricane— or if seven kids go to church and get dipped in a big tank of expensive water?

But what if all that is wrong? What if God is something else altogether?

3

We do not worship God.

We perceive and attend God.

We learn from God.

With forethought and work,

We shape God.

In the end, we yield to God.

We adapt and endure,

For we are Earthseed,

And God is Change.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2024

One of the astronauts on the latest Mars mission has been killed. Something went wrong with her protective suit and the rest of her team couldn’t get her back to the shelter in time to save her. People here in the neighborhood are saying she had no business going to Mars, anyway. All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter.

The cost of water has gone up again. And I heard on the news today that more water peddlers are being killed. Peddlers sell water to squatters and the street poor— and to people who’ve managed to hold on to their homes, but not to pay their utility bills. Peddlers are being found with their throats cut and their money and their handtrucks stolen. Dad says water now costs several times as much as gasoline. But, except for arsonists and the rich, most people have given up buying gasoline. No one I know uses a gaspowered car, truck, or cycle. Vehicles like that are rusting in driveways and being cannibalized for metal and plastic.

It’s a lot harder to give up water.

Fashion helps. You’re supposed to be dirty now. If you’re clean, you make a target of yourself. People think you’re showing off, trying to be better than they are. Among the younger kids, being clean is a great way to start a fight. Cory won’t let us stay dirty here in the neighborhood, but we all have filthy clothes to wear outside the walls. Even inside, my brothers throw dirt on themselves as soon as they get away from the house. It’s better than getting beaten up all the time.

Tonight the last big Window Wall television in the neighborhood went dark for good. We saw the dead astronaut with all of red, rocky Mars around her. We saw a dust-dry reservoir and three dead water peddlers with their dirty-blue armbands and their heads cut halfway off. And we saw whole blocks of boarded up buildings burning in Los Angeles. Of course, no one would waste water trying to put such fires out.

Then the Window went dark. The sound had flickered up and down for months, but the picture was always as promised— like looking through a vast, open window.

The Yannis family has made a business of having people in to look through their Window. Dad says that kind of unlicensed business isn’t legal, but he let us go to watch sometimes because he didn’t see any harm in it, and it helped the Yannises. A lot of small businesses are illegal, even though they don’t hurt anyone, and they keep a household or two alive. The Yannis Window is about as old as I am. It covers the long west wall of their living room. They must have had plenty of money back when they bought it. For the past couple of years, though, they’ve been charging admission— only letting in people from the neighborhood— and selling fruit, fruit juice, acorn bread, or walnuts. Whatever they had too much of in their garden, they found a way to sell.

They showed movies from their library and let us watch news and whatever else was broadcast. They couldn’t afford to subscribe to any of the new multisensory stuff, and their old Window couldn’t have received most of it, anyway.

They had no reality vests, no touchrings, and no headsets. Their setup was just a plain, thin-screened Window.

All we have left now are three small, ancient, murky little TV sets scattered around the neighborhood, a couple of computers used for work, and radios.

Every household still has at least one working radio.

A lot of our everyday news is from radio.

I wonder what Mrs. Yannis will do now. Her two sisters have moved in with her, and they’re working so maybe it will be all right. One is a pharmacist and the other is a nurse. They don’t earn much, but Mrs.

Yannis owns the house free and clear. It was her parents’ house.

All three sisters are widows and between them they have twelve kids, all younger than I am. Two years ago, Mr. Yannis, a dentist, was killed while riding his electric cycle home from the walled, guarded clinic where he worked. Mrs. Yannis says he was caught in a crossfire, hit from two directions, then shot once more at close range. His bike was stolen. The police investigated, collected their fee, and couldn’t find a thing. People get killed like that all the time. Unless it happens in front of a police station, there are never any witnesses.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 2024

The dead astronaut is going to be brought back to Earth. She wanted to be buried on Mars. She said that when she realized she was dying. She said Mars was the one thing she had wanted all her life, and now she would be part of it forever.

But the Secretary of Astronautics says no. He says her body might be a contaminant. Idiot.

Can he believe that any microorganism living in or on her body would have a prayer of surviving and going native in that cold, thin, lethal ghost of an atmosphere? Maybe he can. Secretaries of Astronautics don’t have to know much about science. They have to know about politics. Theirs is the youngest Cabinet department, and already it’s fighting for its life. Christopher Morpeth Donner, one of the men running for President this year, has promised to abolish it if he’s elected. My father agrees with Donner.

“Bread and circuses,” my father says when there’s space news on the radio. “Politicians and big corporations get the bread, and we get the circuses.”

“Space could be our future,” I say. I believe that. As far as I’m concerned, space exploration and colonization are among the few things left over from the last century that can help us more than they hurt us. It’s hard to get anyone to see that, though, when there’s so much suffering going on just outside our walls.

Dad just looks at me and shakes his head. “You don’t understand,” he says. “You don’t have any idea what a criminal waste of time and money that so-called space program is.” He’s going to vote for Donner. He’s the only person I know who’s going to vote at all. Most people have given up on politicians.

After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century every since I can remember. That’s what the space program is about these days, at least for politicians. Hey, we can run a space station, a station on the moon, and soon, a colony on Mars.

That proves we’re still a great, forward-looking, powerful nation, right?

Yeah.

Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet.

And I’m sorry that astronaut will be brought back from her own chosen heaven. Her name was Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal. She was a chemist. I intend to remember her. I think she can be a kind of model for me. She spent her life heading for Mars-preparing herself, becoming an astronaut, getting on a Mars crew, going to Mars, beginning to figure out how to terraform Mars, beginning to create sheltered places where people can live and work now… .

Mars is a rock— cold, empty, almost airless, dead.

Yet it’s heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world, but too nearby, too close within the reach of the people who’ve made such a hell of life here on Earth.

MONDAY, AUGUST 12, 2024

Mrs. Sims shot herself today— or rather, she shot herself a few days ago, and Cory and Dad found her today. Cory went a little crazy for a while afterward.

Poor, sanctimonious, old Mrs. Sims. She used to sit in our front-room church every Sunday, large-print Bible in hand, and shout out her responses: “Yes, Lord!” “Hallelujah!” “Thank you, Jesus!” “Amen!”

During the rest of the week she sewed, made baskets, took care of her garden, sold what she could from it, took care of pre-school children, and talked about everyone who wasn’t as holy as she thought she was.

She was the only person I’ve ever known who lived alone. She had a whole big house to herself because she and the wife of her only son hated each other. Her son and his family were poor, but they wouldn’t live with her. Too bad.

Different people frightened her in some deep, hard, ugly way. She didn’t like the Hsu family because they were Chinese and Hispanic, and the older Chinese generation is still Buddhist. She’s lived a couple of doors up from them for longer than I’ve been alive, but they were still from Saturn as far as she was concerned.

“Idolaters,” she would call them if none of them were around. At least she cared enough about neighborly relations to do her talking about them behind their backs. They brought her peaches and figs and a length of good cotton cloth last month when she was robbed.

That robbery was Mrs. Sims’s first major tragedy.

Three men climbed over the neighborhood wall, cutting through the strands of barbed wire and Lazor wire on top. Lazor wire is terrible stuff. It’s so fine and sharp that it slices into the wings or feet of birds who either don’t see it or see it and try to settle on it.

People, though, can always find a way over, under, or through.

Everyone brought Mrs. Sims things after the robbery, in spite of the way she is. Was. Food, clothing, money… . We took up collections for her at church. The thieves had tied her up and left her-after one of them raped her. An old lady like that!

They grabbed all her food, her jewelry that had once belonged to her mother, her clothes, and worst of all, her supply of cash. It turns out she kept that— all of it— in a blue plastic mixing bowl high up in her kitchen cabinet. Poor, crazy old lady. She came to my father, crying and carrying on after the robbery because now she couldn’t buy the extra food she needed to supplement what she grew. She couldn’t pay her utility bills or her upcoming property taxes.

She would be thrown out of her house into the street! She would starve!

Dad told her over and over that the church would never let that happen, but she didn’t believe him.

She talked on and on about having to be a beggar now, while Dad and Cory tried to reassure her. The funny thing is, she didn’t like us either because Dad had gone and married “that Mexican woman Cory-ah-zan.” It just isn’t that hard to say “Corazon”

if that’s what you choose to call her. Most people just call her Cory or Mrs. Olamina.

Cory never let on that she was offended. She and Mrs. Sims were sugary sweet to one another. A little more hypocrisy to keep the peace.

Last week Mrs. Sims’s son, his five kids, his wife, her brother, and her brother’s three kids all died in a house fire— an arson fire. The son’s house had been in an unwalled area north and east of us, closer to the foothills. It wasn’t a bad area, but it was poor.

Naked. One night someone torched the house.

Maybe it was a vengeance fire set by some enemy of a family member or maybe some crazy just set it for fun. I’ve heard there’s a new illegal drug that makes people want to set fires.

Anyway, no one knows who did it to the Sims/Boyer families. No one saw anything, of course.

And no one got out of the house. Odd, that. Eleven people, and no one got out.

So about three days ago, Mrs. Sims shot herself.

Dad said he’d heard from the cops that it was about three days ago. That would have been just two days after she heard about her son’s death. Dad went to see her this morning because she missed church yesterday. Cory forced herself to go along because she thought she should. I wish she hadn’t. To me, dead bodies are disgusting. They stink, and if they’re old enough, there are maggots. But what the hell?

They’re dead. They aren’t suffering, and if you didn’t like them when they were alive, why get so upset about their being dead? Cory gets upset. She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.

I began writing this about Mrs. Sims because she killed herself. That’s what’s upset me. She believed, like Dad, that if you kill yourself, you go to hell and burn forever. She believed in a literal acceptance of everything in the Bible. Yet, when things got to be too much for her, she decided to trade pain now for eternal pain in the hereafter.

How could she do that?

Did she really believe in anything at all? Was it all hypocrisy?

Or maybe she just went crazy because her God was demanding too much of her. She was no Job. In real life, how many people are?

SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 2024

I can’t get Mrs. Sims out of my mind. Somehow, she and her suicide have gotten tangled up with the astronaut and her death and her expulsion from heaven. I need to write about what I believe. I need to begin to put together the scattered verses that I’ve been writing about God since I was twelve. Most of them aren’t much good. They say what I need to say, but they don’t say it very well. A few are the way they should be. They press on me, too, like the two deaths. I try to hide in all the work there is to do here for the household, for my father’s church, and for the school Cory keeps to teach the neighborhood kids.

The truth is, I don’t care about any of those things, but they keep me busy and make me tired, and most of the time, I sleep without dreaming. And Dad beams when people tell him how smart and industrious I am.

I love him. He’s the best person I know, and I care what he thinks. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

For whatever it’s worth, here’s what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right-just the way it has to be. In the past year, it’s gone through twenty-five or thirty lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the right one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to:

God is Power—

Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

Indifferent.

And yet, God is Pliable—

Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay.

God exists to be shaped.

God is Change.

This is the literal truth.

God can’t be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to.

Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person’s resolve. If they’re used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us. God is power, and in the end, God prevails.

But we can rig the game in our own favor if we understand that God exists to be shaped, and will be shaped, with or without our forethought, with or without our intent.

That’s what I know. That’s some of it anyway. I’m not like Mrs. Sims. I’m not some kind of potential Job, long suffering, stiff necked, then, at last, either humble before an all-knowing almighty, or destroyed. My God doesn’t love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.

Maybe I’ll be more like Alicia Leal, the astronaut.

Like her, I believe in something that I think my dying, denying, backward-looking people need. I don’t have all of it yet. I don’t even know how to pass on what I do have. I’ve got to learn to do that. It scares me how many things I’ve got to learn. How will I learn them?

Is any of this real?

Dangerous question. Sometimes I don’t know the answer. I doubt myself. I doubt what I think I know. I try to forget about it. After all, if it’s real, why doesn’t anyone else know about it. Everyone knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season… . “), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it.

We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough. Then we go on to create super-people— super-parents, super-kings and queens, super-cops— to be our gods and to look after us— to stand between us and God. Yet God has been here all along, shaping us and being shaped by us in no particular way or in too many ways at once like an amoeba— or like a cancer.

Chaos.

Even so, why can’t I do what others have done-ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world.

But this thing (This idea? Philosophy? New religion?) won’t let me alone, won’t let me forget it, won’t let me go. Maybe… . Maybe it’s like my sharing: One more weirdness; one more crazy, deep-rooted delusion that I’m stuck with. I am stuck with it. And in time, I’ll have to do something about it. In spite of what my father will say or do to me, in spite of the poisonous rottenness outside the wall where I might be exiled, I’ll have to do something about it.

That reality scares me to death.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2024

President William Turner Smith lost yesterday’s election. Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner is our new President— President-elect. So what are we in for? Donner has already said that as soon as possible after his inauguration next year, he’ll begin to dismantle the “wasteful, pointless, unnecessary”

moon and Mars programs. Near space programs dealing with communications and experimentation will be privatized— sold off.

Also, Donner has a plan for putting people back to work. He hopes to get laws changed, suspend “overly restrictive” minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws for those employers willing to take on homeless employees and provide them with training and adequate room and board.

What’s adequate, I wonder: A house or apartment?

A room? A bed in a shared room? A barracks bed?

Space on a floor? Space on the ground? And what about people with big families? Won’t they be seen as bad investments? Won’t it make much more sense for companies to hire single people, childless couples, or, at most, people with only one or two kids? I wonder.

And what about those suspended laws? Will it be legal to poison, mutilate, or infect people— as long as you provide them with food, water, and space to die?

Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.

2025

Intelligence is ongoing, individualadaptability. Adaptations that anintelligent species may make in asinge generation, other speciesmake over many generations ofselective breeding and selectivedying. Yet intelligence isdemanding. If it is misdirected byaccident or by intent, it can fosterits own orgies of breeding anddying.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

by Lauren Oya Olamina

A victim of God may,

Through learning adaption,

Become a partner of God.

A victim of God may,

Through forethought and planning,

Become a shaper of God.

Or a victim of God may,

Through shortsightedness and fear,

Remain God’s victim,

God’s plaything,

God’s prey.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2025

We had a fire today. People worry so much about fire, but the little kids will play with it if they can. We were lucky with this fire. Amy Dunn, three years old, managed to start it in her family’s garage.

Once the fire began to crawl up the wall, Amy got scared and ran into the house. She knew she had done something bad, so she didn’t tell anyone. She hid under her grandmother’s bed.

Out back, the dry wood of the garage burned fast and hot. Robin Balter saw the smoke and rang the emergency bell on the island in our street. Robin’s only ten, but she’s a bright little kid— one of my stepmother’s star students. She keeps her head. If she hadn’t alerted people as soon as she saw the smoke, the fire could have spread.

I heard the bell and ran out like everyone else to see what was wrong. The Dunns live across the street from us, so I couldn’t miss the smoke.

The fire plan worked the way it was supposed to.

The adult men and women put the fire out with garden hoses, shovels, wet towels and blankets.

Those without hoses beat at the edges of the fire and smothered them with dirt. Kids my age helped out where we were needed and put out any new fires started by flying embers. We brought buckets to fill with water, and shovels, blankets, and towels of our own. There were a lot of us, and we kept our eyes open. The very old people watched the little kids and kept them out of the way and out of trouble.

No one missed Amy. No one had seen her in the Dunn back yard, so no one thought about her. Her grandmother found her much later and got the truth out of her.

The garage was a total loss. Edwin Dunn salvaged some of his garden and carpentry equipment, but not much. The grapefruit tree next to the garage and the two peach trees behind it were half-burned, too, but they might survive. The carrot, squash, collard, and potato plants were a trampled mess.

Of course, no one called the fire department. No one would take on fire service fees just to save an unoccupied garage. Most of our households couldn’t afford another big bill, anyway. The water wasted on putting out the fire was going to be hard enough to pay for.

What will happen, I wonder, to poor little Amy Dunn.

No one cares about her. Her family feeds her and, now and then, cleans her up, but they don’t love her or even like her. Her mother Tracy is only a year older than I am. She was 13 when Amy was born.

She was 12 when her 27-year-old uncle who had been raping her for years managed to make her pregnant.

Problem: Uncle Derek was a big, blond, handsome guy, funny and bright and well-liked. Tracy was, is, dull and homely, sulky and dirty-looking. Even when she’s clean, she looks splotchy, dirty. Some of her problems might have come from being raped by Uncle Derek for years. Uncle Derek was Tracy’s mother’s youngest brother, her favorite brother, but when people realized what he had been doing, the neighborhood men got together and suggested he go live somewhere else. People didn’t want him around their daughters. Irrational as usual, Tracy’s mother blamed Tracy for his exile, and for her own embarrassment. Not many girls in the neighborhood have babies before they drag some boy to my father and have him unite them in holy matrimony. But there was no one to marry Tracy, and no money for prenatal care or an abortion. And poor Amy, as she grew, looked more and more like Tracy: scrawny and splochy with sparse, stringy hair. I don’t think she’ll ever be pretty.

Tracy’s maternal instincts didn’t kick in, and I doubt that her mother Christmas Dunn has any. The Dunn family has a reputation for craziness. There are sixteen of them living in the Dunn house, and at least a third are nuts. Amy isn’t crazy, though. Not yet. She’s neglected and lonely, and like any little kid left on her own too much, she finds ways to amuse herself.

I’ve never seen anyone hit Amy or curse her or anything like that. The Dunns do care what people think of them. But no one pays any attention to her, either. She spends most of her time playing alone in the dirt. She also eats the dirt and whatever she finds in it, including bugs. But not long ago, just out of curiosity, I took her to our house, sponged her off, taught her the alphabet, and showed her how to write her name. She loved it. She’s got a hungry, able little mind, and she loves attention.

Tonight I asked Cory if Amy could start school early.

Cory doesn’t take kids until they’re five or close to five, but she said she’d let Amy in if I would take charge of her. I expected that, though I don’t like it. I help with the five and six year olds, anyway. I’ve been taking care of little kids since I was one, and I’m tired of it. I think, though, that if someone doesn’t help Amy now, someday she’ll do something a lot worse than burning down her family’s garage.

Problem: Uncle Derek was a big, blond, handsome guy, funny and bright and well-liked. Tracy was, is, dull and homely, sulky and dirty-looking. Even when she’s clean, she looks splotchy, dirty. Some of her problems might have come from being raped by Uncle Derek for years. Uncle Derek was Tracy’s mother’s youngest brother, her favorite brother, but when people realized what he had been doing, the neighborhood men got together and suggested he go live somewhere else. People didn’t want him around their daughters. Irrational as usual, Tracy’s mother blamed Tracy for his exile, and for her own embarrassment. Not many girls in the neighborhood have babies before they drag some boy to my father and have him unite them in holy matrimony. But there was no one to marry Tracy, and no money for prenatal care or an abortion. And poor Amy, as she grew, looked more and more like Tracy: scrawny and splochy with sparse, stringy hair. I don’t think she’ll ever be pretty.

Tracy’s maternal instincts didn’t kick in, and I doubt that her mother Christmas Dunn has any. The Dunn family has a reputation for craziness. There are sixteen of them living in the Dunn house, and at least a third are nuts. Amy isn’t crazy, though. Not yet. She’s neglected and lonely, and like any little kid left on her own too much, she finds ways to amuse herself.

I’ve never seen anyone hit Amy or curse her or anything like that. The Dunns do care what people think of them. But no one pays any attention to her, either. She spends most of her time playing alone in the dirt. She also eats the dirt and whatever she finds in it, including bugs. But not long ago, just out of curiosity, I took her to our house, sponged her off, taught her the alphabet, and showed her how to write her name. She loved it. She’s got a hungry, able little mind, and she loves attention.

Tonight I asked Cory if Amy could start school early.

Cory doesn’t take kids until they’re five or close to five, but she said she’d let Amy in if I would take charge of her. I expected that, though I don’t like it. I help with the five and six year olds, anyway. I’ve been taking care of little kids since I was one, and I’m tired of it. I think, though, that if someone doesn’t help Amy now, someday she’ll do something a lot worse than burning down her family’s garage.

.

Parable of the Sower

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19,

2025

Some cousins of old Mrs. Sims have inherited her house. They’re lucky there’s still a house to inherit. If it weren’t for our wall, the house would have been gutted, taken over by squatters, or torched as soon as it was empty. As it was, all people did was take back things they had given to Mrs. Sims after she was robbed, and take whatever food she had in the house. No sense letting it rot. We didn’t take her furniture or her rugs or her appliances. We could have, but we didn’t. We aren’t thieves.

Wardell Parrish and Rosalee Payne think otherwise.

They’re both small, rust-brown, sour-looking people like Mrs. Sims. They’re the children of a first cousin that Mrs. Sims had managed to keep contact and good relations with. He’s a widower twice over, no kids, and she’s been widowed once, seven kids.

They’re not only brother and sister, but twins. Maybe that helps them get along with each other. They damn sure won’t get along with anyone else.

They’re moving in today. They’ve been here a couple of times before to look the place over, and I guess they must have liked it better than their parents’ house. They shared that with 18 other people. I was busy in the den with my class of younger school kids, so I didn’t meet them until today, though I’ve heard Dad talking to them— heard them sit in our living room and insinuate that we had cleaned out Mrs. Sims’s house before they arrived.

Dad kept his temper. “You know she was robbed during the month before she died,” he said. “You can check with the police about that— if you haven’t already. Since then the community has protected the house. We haven’t used it or stripped it. If you choose to live among us, you should understand that. We help each other, and we don’t steal.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to say you did,” Wardell Parrish muttered.

His sister jumped in before he could say more.

“We’re not accusing anyone of anything,” she lied.

“We just wondered… . We knew Cousin Marjorie had some nice things— jewelry that she inherited from her mother… Very valuable… .

“Check with the police,” my father said.

“Well, yes, I know, but… .”

“This is a small community,” my father said. “We all know each other here. We depend on each other.”

There was a silence. Perhaps the twins were getting the message.

“We’re not very social,” Wardell Parrish said. “We mind our own business.”

Again his sister jumped in before he could go on.

“I’m sure everything will be all right,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”

I didn’t like them when I heard them. I liked them even less when I met them. They look at us as though we smell and they don’t. Of course, it doesn’t matter whether I like them or not. There are other people in the neighborhood whom I don’t like. But I don’t trust the Payne-Parrishes. The kids seem all right, but the adults… . I wouldn’t want to have to depend on them. Not even for little things.

Payne and Parrish. What perfect names they have.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2025

We ran into a pack of feral dogs today. We went to the hills today for target practice— me, my father, Joanne Garfield, her cousin and boyfriend Harold-Harry—

Balter, my boyfriend Curtis Talcott, his brother Michael, Aura Moss and her brother Peter.

Our other adult guardian was Joanne’s father Jay.

He’s a good guy and a good shot. Dad likes to work with him, although sometimes there are problems.

The Garfields and the Balters are white, and the rest of us are black. That can be dangerous these days.

On the street, people are expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind, but with all of us armed and watchful, people stared, but they let us alone.

Our neighborhood is too small for us to play those kinds of games.

Everything went as usual at first. The Talcotts got into an argument first with each other, then with the Mosses. The Mosses are always blaming other people for whatever they do wrong, so they tend to have disputes outstanding with most of us. Peter Moss is the worst because he’s always trying to be like his father, and his father is a total shit. His father has three wives. All at once. Karen, Natalie, and Zahra. They’ve all got kids by him, though so far, Zahra, the youngest and prettiest, only has one.

Karen is the one with the marriage license, but she let him get away with bringing in first one, then another new woman into the house and calling them his wives. I guess the way things are, she didn’t think she could make it on her own with three kids when he brought in Natalie and five by the time he found Zahra.

The Mosses don’t come to church. Richard Moss has put together his own religion— a combination of the Old Testament and historical West African practices. He claims that God wants men to be patriarchs, rulers and protectors of women, and fathers of as many children as possible. He’s an engineer for one of the big commercial water companies, so he can afford to pick up beautiful, young homeless women and live with them in polygynous relationships. He could pick up twenty women like that if he could afford to feed them. I hear there’s a lot of that kind of thing going on in other neighborhoods. Some middle class men prove they’re men by having a lot of wives in temporary or permanent relationships. Some upper class men prove they’re men by having one wife and a lot of beautiful, disposable young servant girls. Nasty.

When the girls get pregnant, if their rich employers won’t protect them, the employers’ wives throw them out to starve.

Is that the way it’s going to be, I wonder? Is that the future: Large numbers of people stuck in either President-elect Donner’s version of slavery or Richard Moss’s.

We rode our bikes to the top of River Street past the last neighborhood walls, past the last ragged, unwalled houses, past the last stretch of broken asphalt and rag and stick shacks of squatters and street poor who stare at us in their horrible, empty way, and then higher into the hills along a dirt road.

At last we dismounted and walked our bikes down the narrow trail into one of the canyons that we and others use for target practice. It looked all right this time, but we always have to be careful. People use canyons for a lot of things. If we find corpses in one, we stay away from it for a while. Dad tries to shield us from what goes on in the world, but he can’t.

Knowing that, he also tries to teach us to shield ourselves.

Most of us have practiced at home with BB guns on homemade targets or on squirrel and bird targets.

I’ve done all that. My aim is good, but I don’t like it with the birds and squirrels. Dad was the one who insisted on my learning to shoot them. He said moving targets would be good for my aim. I think there was more to it than that. I think he wanted to see whether or not I could do it— whether shooting a bird or a squirrel would trigger my hyperempathy.

It didn’t, quite. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t painful. It felt like a big, soft, strange ghost blow, like getting hit with a huge ball of air, but with no coolness, no feeling of wind. The blow, though still soft, was a little harder with squirrels and sometimes rats than with birds. All three had to be killed, though. They ate our food or ruined it. Tree-crops were their special victims: Peaches, plums, figs, persimmons, nuts… . And crops like strawberries, blackberries, grapes… . Whatever we planted, if they could get at it, they would. Birds are particular pests because they can fly in, yet I like them. I envy their ability to fly. Sometimes I get up and go out at dawn just so I can watch them without anyone scaring them or shooting them. Now that I’m old enough to go target shooting on Saturdays, I don’t intend to shoot any more birds, no matter what Dad says. Besides, just because I can shoot a bird or a squirrel doesn’t mean I could shoot a person— a thief like the ones who robbed Mrs. Sims. I don’t know whether I could do that. And if I did it, I don’t know what would happen to me. Would I die?

It’s my father’s fault that we pay so much attention to guns and shooting. He carries a nine millimeter automatic pistol whenever he leaves the neighborhood. He carries it on his hip where people can see it. He says that discourages mistakes.

Armed people do get killed— most often in crossfires or by snipers— but unarmed people get killed a lot more often.

Dad also has a silenced nine millimeter submachine gun. It stays at home with Cory in case something happens there while he’s away. Both guns are German— Heckler & Koch. Dad has never said where he got the submachine gun. It’s illegal, of course, so I don’t blame him. It must have cost a hell of a lot. He’s only had it away from home a few times so he, Cory, and I could get the feel of it. He’ll do the same for the boys when they’re older.

Cory has an old Smith & Wesson .38 revolver that she’s good with. She’s had it since before she married Dad. She loaned that one to me today. Ours aren’t the best or the newest guns in the neighborhood, but they all work. Dad and Cory keep them in good condition. I have to help with that now.

And they spend the necessary time on practice and money on ammunition.

At neighborhood association meetings, Dad used to push the adults of every household to own weapons, maintain them, and know how to use them. “Know how to use them so well,” he’s said more than once, “that you’re as able to defend yourself at two a.m. as you are at two p.m.”

At first there were a few neighbors who didn’t like that— older ones who said it was the job of the police to protect them, younger ones who worried that their little children would find their guns, and religious ones who didn’t think a minister of the gospel should need guns. This was several years ago.

“The police,” my father told them, “may be able to avenge you, but they can’t protect you. Things are getting worse. And as for your children… . Well, yes, there is risk. But you can put your guns out of their reach while they’re very young, and train them as they grow older. That’s what I mean to do. I believe they’ll have a better chance of growing up if you can protect them.” He paused, stared at the people, then went on. “I have a wife and five children,” he said. “I will pray for them all. I’ll also see to it that they know how to defend themselves.

And for as long as I can, I will stand between my family and any intruder.” He paused again. “Now that’s what I have to do. You all do what you have to do.”

By now there are at least two guns in every household. Dad says he suspects that some of them are so well hidden— like Mrs. Sims’s gun— that they wouldn’t be available in an emergency. He’s working on that.

All the kids who attend school at our house get gun handling instruction. Once they’ve passed that and turned fifteen, two or three of the neighborhood adults begin taking them to the hills for target practice. It’s a kind of rite of passage for us. My brother Keith has been whining to go along whenever someone gets a shooting group together, but the age rule is firm.

I worry about the way Keith wants to get his hands on the guns. Dad doesn’t seem to worry, but I do.

There are always a few groups of homeless people and packs of feral dogs living out beyond the last hillside shacks. People and dogs hunt rabbits, possums, squirrels, and each other. Both scavenge whatever dies. The dogs used to belong to people-or their ancestors did. But dogs eat meat. These days, no poor or middle class person who had an edible piece of meat would give it to a dog. Rich people still keep dogs, either because they like them or because they use them to guard estates, enclaves, and businesses. The rich have plenty of other security devices, but the dogs are extra insurance. Dogs scare people.

I did some shooting today, and I was leaning against a boulder, watching others shoot, when I realized there was a dog nearby, watching me. Just one dog— male, yellow-brown, sharp-eared, short-haired.

He wasn’t big enough to make a meal of me, and I still had the Smith & Wesson, so while he was looking me over, I took a good look at him. He was lean, but he didn’t look starved. He looked alert and curious. He sniffed the air, and I remembered that dogs were supposed to be oriented more toward scent than sight.

“Look at that,” I said to Joanne Garfield who was standing nearby.

She turned, gasped, and jerked her gun up to aim at the dog. The dog vanished into the dry brush and boulders. Turning, Joanne tried to look everywhere as though she expected to see more dogs stalking us, but there was nothing. She was shaking.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you were afraid of them.”

She drew a deep breath and looked at the place where the dog had been. “I didn’t know I was either,”

she whispered. “I’ve never been so close to one before. I… I wish I had gotten a better look at it.”

At that moment, Aura Moss screamed and fired her father’s Llama automatic.

I pushed away from the boulder and turned to see Aura pointing her gun toward some rocks and babbling.

“It was over there!” she said, her words tumbling over one another. “It was some kind of animal— dirty yellow with big teeth. It had its mouth open. It was huge!”

“You stupid bitch, you almost shot me!” Michael Talcott shouted. I could see now that he had ducked down behind a boulder. He would have been in Aura’s line of fire, but he didn’t seem to be hurt.

“Put your gun away, Aura,” my father said. He kept his voice low, but he was angry. I could see that, whether Aura could or not.

“It was an animal,” she insisted. “A big one. It might still be around.”

“Aura!” My father raised his voice and hardened it.

Aura looked at him, then seemed to realize that she had more than a dog to worry about. She looked at the gun in her hand, frowned, fumbled it safe, and put it back into her holster.

“Mike?” my father said.

“I’m okay,” Michael Talcott said. “No thanks to her!”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Aura said, right on cue. “There was an animal. It could have killed you! It was sneaking up on us!”

“I think it was just a dog,” I said. “There was one watching us over here. Joanne moved and it ran away.”

“You should have killed it,” Peter Moss said. “What do you want to do? Wait until it jumps someone.”

“What was it doing?” Jay Garfield asked. “Just watching?”

“That’s all,” I said. “It didn’t look sick or starved. It wasn’t very big. I don’t think it was a danger to anyone here. There are too many of us, and we’re all too big.”

“The thing I saw was huge,” Aura insisted. “It had its mouth open!”

I went over to her because I’d had a sudden thought.

“It was panting,” I said. “They pant when they’re hot.

It doesn’t mean they’re angry or hungry.” I hesitated, watching her. “You’ve never seen one before, have you?”

She shook her head.

“They’re bold, but they’re not dangerous to a group like this. You don’t have to worry.”

She didn’t look as though she quite believed me, but she seemed to relax a little. The Moss girls were both bullied and sheltered. They were almost never allowed to leave the walls of the neighborhood. They were educated at home by their mothers according to the religion their father had assembled, and they were warned away from the sin and contamination of the rest of the world. I’m surprised that Aura was allowed to come to us for gun handling instruction and target practice. I hope it will be good for her-and I hope the rest of us will survive.

“All of you stay where you are,” Dad said. He glanced at Jay Garfield, then went a short way up among the rocks and scrub oaks to see whether Aura had shot anything. He kept his gun in his hand and the safety off. He was out of our sight for no more than a minute.

He came back with a look on his face that I couldn’t read. “Put your guns away,” he said. “We’re going home.”

“Did I kill it?” Aura demanded.

“No. Get your bikes.” He and Jay Garfield whispered together for a moment, and Jay Garfield sighed.

Joanne and I watched them, wondering, knowing we wouldn’t hear anything from them until they were ready to tell us.

“This is not about a dead dog,” Harold Balter said behind us. Joanne moved back to stand beside him.

“It’s about either a dog pack or a human pack,” I said, “or maybe it’s a corpse.”

It was, as I found out later, a family of corpses: A woman, a little boy of about four years, and a just-born infant, all partly eaten. But Dad didn’t tell me that until we got home. At the canyon, all we knew was that he was upset.

“If there were a corpse around here, we would have smelled it,” Harry said.

“Not if it were fresh,” I countered.

Joanne looked at me and sighed the way her father sighs. “If it’s that, I wonder where we’ll go shooting next time. I wonder when there’ll be a next time.”

Peter Moss and the Talcott brothers had gotten into an argument over whose fault it was that Aura had almost shot Michael, and Dad had to break it up.

Then Dad checked with Aura to see that she was all right. He said a few things to her that I couldn’t hear, and I saw a tear slide down her face. She cries easily. She always has.

Dad walked away from her looking harassed. He led us up the path out of the canyon. We walked our bikes, and we all kept looking around. We could see now that there were other dogs nearby. We were being watched by a big pack. Jay Garfield brought up the rear, guarding our backs.

“He said we should stick together,” Joanne told me.

She had seen me looking back at her father.

“You and I?”

“Yeah, and Harry. He said we should lookout for one another.”

“I don’t think these dogs are stupid enough or hungry enough to attack us in daylight. They’ll go after some lone street person tonight.”

“Shut up, for godsake.”

The road was narrow going up and out of the canyon. It would have been a bad place to have to fight off dogs. Someone could trip and step off the crumbling edge. Someone could be knocked off the edge by a dog or by one of us. That would mean falling several hundred feet.

Down below, I could hear dogs fighting now. We may have been close to their dens or whatever they lived in. I thought maybe we were just close to what they were feeding on.

“If they come,” my father said in a quiet, even voice, “Freeze, aim, and fire. That will save you. Nothing else will. Freeze, aim, and fire. Keep your eyes open and stay calm.”

I replayed the words in my mind as we went up the switchbacks. No doubt Dad wanted us to replay them. I could see that Aura was still leaking tears and smearing and streaking her face with dirt like a little kid. She was too wrapped up in her own misery and fear to be of much use.

We got almost to the top before anything happened.

We were beginning to relax, I think. I hadn’t seen a dog for a while. Then, from the front of our line, we heard three shots.

We all froze, most of us unable to see what had happened.

“Keep moving,” my father called. “It’s all right. It was just one dog getting too close.”

“Are you okay?” I called.

“Yes,” he said. “Just come on and keep your eyes open.”

One by one, we came abreast of the dog that had been shot and walked past it. It was a bigger, grayer animal than the one I had seen. There was a beauty to it. It looked like pictures I had seen of wolves. It was wedged against a hanging boulder just a few steps up the steep canyon wall from us.

It moved.

I saw its bloody wounds as it twisted. I bit my tongue as the pain I knew it must feel became my pain.

What to do? Keep walking? I couldn’t. One more step and I would fall and lie in the dirt, helpless against the pain. Or I might fall into the canyon.

“It’s still alive,” Joanne said behind me. “It’s moving.”

Its forefeet were making little running motions, its claws scraping against the rock.

I thought I would throw up. My belly hurt more and more until I felt skewered through the middle. I leaned on my bike with my left arm. With my right hand, I drew the Smith & Wesson, aimed, and shot the beautiful dog through its head.

I felt the impact of the bullet as a hard, solid blow-something beyond pain. Then I felt the dog die. I saw it jerk, shudder, stretch its body long, then freeze. I saw it die. I felt it die. It went out like a match in a sudden vanishing of pain. Its life flared up, then went out. I went a little numb. Without the bike, I would have collapsed.

People had crowded close before and behind me. I heard them before I could see them clearly.

“It’s dead,” I heard Joanne say. “Poor thing.”

“What?” my father demanded. “Another one?”

I managed to focus on him. He must have skirted close to the cliff-edge of the road to have gotten all the way back to us. And he must have run.

“The same one,” I said, managing to straighten up.

“It wasn’t dead. We saw it moving.”

“I put three bullets into it,” he said.

“It was moving, Reverend Olamina,” Joanne insisted. “It was suffering. If Lauren hadn’t shot it, someone else would have had to.”

Dad sighed. “Well, it isn’t suffering now. Let’s get out of here.” Then he seemed to realize what Joanne had said. He looked at me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. I don’t know how I looked. No one was reacting to me as though I looked odd, so I must not have shown much of what I had gone through. I think only Harry Balter, Curtis Talcott, and Joanne had seen me shoot the dog. I looked at them and Curtis grinned at me. He leaned against his bike and in a slow, lazy motion, he drew an imaginary gun, took careful aim at the dead dog, and fired an imaginary shot.

“Pow,” he said. “Just like she does stuff like that every day. Pow!”

“Let’s go,” My father said.

We began walking up the path again. We left the canyon and made our way down to the street. There were no more dogs.

I walked, then rode in a daze, still not quite free of the dog I had killed. I had felt it die, and yet I had not died. I had felt its pain as though it were a human being. I had felt its life flare and go out, and I was still alive.

Pow.

5

Belief

Initiates and guides action-Or

it does nothing.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SUNDAY, MARCH 2, 2025

It’s raining.

We heard last night on the radio that there was a storm sweeping in from the Pacific, but most people didn’t believe it. “We’ll have wind,” Cory said. “Wind and maybe a few drops of rain, or maybe just a little cool weather. That would be welcome. It’s all we’ll get.”

That’s all there has been for six years. I can remember the rain six years ago, water swirling around the back porch, not high enough to come into the house, but high enough to attract my brothers who wanted to play in it. Cory, forever worried about infection, wouldn’t let them. She said they’d be splashing around in a soup of all the waste-water germs we’d been watering our gardens with for years. Maybe she was right, but kids all over the neighborhood covered themselves with mud and earthworms that day, and nothing terrible happened to them.

But that storm was almost tropical— a quick, hard, warm, September rain, the edge of a hurricane that hit Mexico’s Pacific coast. This is a colder, winter storm. It began this morning as people were coming to church.

In the choir we sang rousing old hymns accompanied by Cory’s piano playing and lightning and thunder from outside. It was wonderful. Some people missed part of the sermon, though, because they went home to put out all the barrels, buckets, tubs, and pots they could find to catch the free water. Others went home to put pots and buckets inside where there were leaks in the roof.

I can’t remember when any of us have had a roof repaired by a professional. We all have Spanish tile roofs, and that’s good. A tile roof is, I suspect, more secure and lasting than wood or asphalt shingles.

But time, wind, and earthquakes have taken a toll.

Tree limbs have done some damage, too. Yet no one has extra money for anything as nonessential as roof repair. At best, some of the neighborhood men go up with whatever materials they can scavenge and create makeshift patches. No one’s even done that for a while. If it only rains once every six or seven years, why bother?

Our roof is all right so far, and the barrels and things we put out after services this morning are full or filling. Good, clean, free water from the sky. If only it came more often.

MONDAY, MARCH 3, 2025

Still raining.

No thunder today, though there was some last night.

Steady drizzle, and occasional, heavy showers all day. All day. So different and beautiful. I’ve never felt so overwhelmed by water. I went out and walked in the rain until I was soaked. Cory didn’t want me to, but I did it anyway. It was so wonderful. How can she not understand that? It was so incredible and wonderful.

TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2025

Amy Dunn is dead.

Three years old, unloved, and dead. That doesn’t seem reasonable or even possible. She could read simple words and count to thirty. I taught her. She so much loved getting attention that she stuck to me during school hours and drove me crazy. Didn’t want me to go to the bathroom without her.

Dead.

I had gotten to like her, even though she was a pest.

Today I walked her home after class. I had gotten into the habit of walking her home because the Dunns wouldn’t send anyone for her.

“She knows the way,” Christmas said. “Just send her over. She’ll get here all right.”

I didn’t doubt that she could have. She could look across the street, and across the center island, and see her house from ours, but Amy had a tendency to wander. Sent home alone, she might get there or she might wind up in the Montoya garden, grazing, or in the Moss rabbit house, trying to let the rabbits out. So I walked her across, glad for an excuse to get out in the rain again. Amy loved it, too, and we lingered for a moment under the big avocado tree on the island. There was a navel orange tree at the back end of the island, and I picked a pair of ripe oranges— one for Amy and one for me. I peeled both of them, and we ate them while the rain plastered Amy’s scant colorless hair against her head and made her look bald.

I took her to her door and left her in the care of her mother.

“You didn’t have to get her so wet,” Tracy complained.

“Might as well enjoy the rain while it lasts,” I said, and I left them.

I saw Tracy take Amy into the house and shut the door. Yet somehow Amy wound up outside again, wound up near the front gate, just opposite the Garfield/Balter/Dory house. Jay Garfield found her there when he came out to investigate what he thought was another bundle that someone had thrown over the gate. People toss us things sometimes— gifts of envy and hate: A maggoty, dead animal, a bag of shit, even an occasional severed human limb or a dead child. Dead adults have been left lying just beyond our wall. But these were all outsiders. Amy was one of us.

Someone shot Amy right through the metal gate. It had to be an accidental hit because you can’t see through our gate from the outside. The shooter either fired at someone who was in front of the gate or fired at the gate itself, at the neighborhood, at us and our supposed wealth and privilege. Most bullets wouldn’t have gotten through the gate. It’s supposed to be bulletproof. But it’s been penetrated a couple of times before, high up, near the top. Now we have six new bullet holes in the lower portion— six holes and a seventh dent, a long, smooth gauge where a bullet had glanced off without breaking through.

We hear so much gunfire, day and night, single shots and odd bursts of automatic weapons fire, even occasional blasts from heavy artillery or explosions from grenades or bigger bombs. We worry most about those last things, but they’re rare.

It’s harder to steal big weapons, and not many people around here can afford to buy the illegal ones— or that’s what Dad says. The thing is, we hear gunfire so much that we don’t hear it. A couple of the Balter kids said they heard shooting, but as usual, they paid no attention to it. It was outside, beyond the wall, after all. Most of us heard nothing except the rain.

Amy was going to turn four in a couple of weeks. I had planned to give her a little party with my kindergartners.

God, I hate this place.

I mean, I love it. It’s home. These are my people. But I hate it. It’s like an island surrounded by sharks-except that sharks don’t bother you unless you go in the water. But our land sharks are on their way in.

It’s just a matter of how long it takes for them to get hungry enough.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2025

I walked in the rain again this morning. It was cold, but good. Amy has already been cremated. I wonder if her mother is relieved. She doesn’t look relieved.

She never liked Amy, but now she cries. I don’t think she’s faking. The family has spent money it could not afford to get the police involved to try to find the killer. I suspect that the only good this will do will be to chase away the people who live on the sidewalks and streets nearest to our wall. Is that good? The street poor will be back, and they won’t love us for sicking the cops on them. It’s illegal to camp out on the street the way they do— the way they must— so the cops knock them around, rob them if they have anything worth stealing, then order them away or jail them. The miserable will be made even more miserable. None of that can help Amy. I suppose, though, that it will make the Dunns feel better about the way they treated her.

On Saturday, Dad will preach Amy’s funeral. I wish I didn’t have to be there. Funerals have never bothered me before, but this one does.

“You cared about Amy,” Joanne Garfield said to me when I complained to her. We had lunch together today. We ate in my bedroom because it’s still raining off and on, and the rest of the house was full of all the kids who hadn’t gone home to eat lunch.

But my room is still mine. It’s the one place in the world where I can go and not be followed by anyone I don’t invite in. I’m the only person I know who has a bedroom to herself. These days, even Dad and Cory knock before they open my door. That’s one of the best things about being the only daughter in the family. I have to kick my brothers out of here all the time, but at least I can kick them out. Joanne is an only child, but she shares a room with three younger girl cousins— whiny Lisa, always demanding and complaining, smart, giggly Robin with her near-genius I.Q., and invisible Jessica who whispers and stares at her feet and cries if you give her a dirty look. All three are Balters— Harry’s sisters and the children of Joanne’s mother’s sister. The two adult sisters, their husbands, their eight children, and their parents Mr. and Mrs. Dory are all squeezed into one five-bedroom house. It isn’t the most crowded house in the neighborhood, but I’m glad I don’t have to live like that.

“Almost no one cared about Amy,” Joanne said. “But you did.”

“After the fire, I did,” I said. “I got scared for her then.

Before that, I ignored her like everyone else.”

“So now you’re feeling guilty?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are.”

I looked at her, surprised. “I mean it. No. I hate that she’s dead, and I miss her, but I didn’t cause her death. I just can’t deny what all this says about us.”

“What?”

I felt on the verge of talking to her about things I hadn’t talked about before. I’d written about them.

Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about.

But Joanne is a friend. She knows me better than most people, and she has a brain. Why not talk to her? Sooner or later, I have to talk to someone.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. She had opened a plastic container of bean salad. Now she put it down on my night table.

“Don’t you ever wonder if maybe Amy and Mrs. Sims are the lucky ones?” I asked. “I mean, don’t you ever wonder what’s going to happen to the rest of us.”

There was a clap of dull, muffled thunder, and a sudden heavy shower. Radio weather reports say today’s rain will be the last of the four-day series of storms. I hope not.

“Sure I think about it,” Joanne said. “With people shooting little kids, how can I not think about it?”

“People have been killing little kids since there’ve been people,” I said.

“Not in here, they haven’t. Not until now.”

“Yes, that’s it, isn’t it. We got a wake-up call. Another one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Amy was the first of us to be killed like that. She won’t be the last.”

Joanne sighed, and there was a little shudder in the sigh. “So you think so, too.”

“I do. But I didn’t know you thought about it at all.”

“Rape, robbery, and now murder. Of course I think about it. Everyone thinks about it. Everyone worries.

I wish I could get out of here.”

“Where would you go?”

“That’s it, isn’t it? There’s nowhere to go.”

“There might be.”

“Not if you don’t have money. Not if all you know how to do is take care of babies and cook.”

I shook my head. “You know much more than that.”

“Maybe, but none of it matters. I won’t be able to afford college. I won’t be able to get a job or move out of my parents’ house because no job I could get would support me and there are no safe places to move. Hell, my parents are still living with their parents.”

“I know,” I said. “And as bad as that is, there’s

more.”

“Who needs more? That’s enough!” She began to eat the bean salad. It looked good, but I thought I might be about to ruin it for her.

“There’s cholera spreading in southern Mississippi and Louisiana,” I said. “I heard about it on the radio yesterday. There are too many poor people-illiterate, jobless, homeless, without decent

sanitation or clean water. They have plenty of water down there, but a lot of it is polluted. And you know that drug that makes people want to set fires?”

She nodded, chewing.

“It’s spreading again. It was on the east coast. Now it’s in Chicago. The reports say that it makes watching a fire better than sex. I don’t know whether the reporters are condemning it or advertising it.” I drew a deep breath. “Tornadoes are smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there’s a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people. In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people.

Measles!”

“I heard about the measles,” Joanne said. “Strange.

Even if people can’t afford immunizations, measles shouldn’t kill.”

“Those people are half dead already,” I told her.

“They’ve come through the winter cold, hungry, already sick with other diseases. And, no, of course they can’t afford immunizations. We’re lucky our parents found the money to pay for all our immunizations. If we have kids, I don’t see how we’ll be able to do even that for them.

“I know, I know.” She sounded almost bored.

“Things are bad. My mother is hoping this new guy, President Donner, will start to get us back to normal.”

“Normal,” I muttered. “I wonder what that is. Do you agree with your mother?”

“No. Donner hasn’t got a chance. I think he would fix things if he could, but Harry says his ideas are scary.

Harry says he’ll set the country back a hundred years.”

“My father says something like that. I’m surprised that Harry agrees.”

“He would. His own father thinks Donner is God.

Harry wouldn’t agree with him on anything.”

I laughed, distracted, thinking about Harry’s battles with his father. Neighborhood fireworks— plenty of flash, but no real fire.

“Why do you want to talk about this stuff,” Joanne asked, bringing me back to the real fire. “We can’t do anything about it.”

“We have to.”

“Have to what? We’re 15! What can we do?”

“We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now.

Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!”

She just stared at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I was rolling— too fast, maybe. “I’m talking about this place, Jo, this cul-de-sac with a wall around it. I’m talking about the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people outside decide to come in.

I’m talking about what we’ve got to do before that happens so that we can survive and rebuild— or at least survive and escape to be something other than beggars.”

“Someone’s going to just smash in our wall and come in?”

“More likely blast it down, or blast the gate open. It’s going to happen some day. You know that as well as I do.”

“Oh, no I don’t,” she protested. She sat up straight, almost stiff, her lunch forgotten for the moment. I bit into a piece of acorn bread that was full of dried fruit and nuts. It’s a favorite of mine, but I managed to chew and swallow without tasting it.

“Jo, we’re in for trouble. You’ve already admitted that.”

“Sure,” she said. “More shootings, more breakins.

That’s what I meant.”

“And that’s what will happen for a while. I wish I could guess how long. We’ll be hit and hit and hit, then the big hit will come. And if we’re not ready for it, it will be like Jericho.”

She held herself rigid, rejecting. “You don’t know that! You can’t read the future. No one can.”

“You can,” I said, “if you want to. It’s scary, but once you get past the fear, it’s easy. In L.A. some walled communities bigger and stronger than this one just aren’t there any more. Nothing left but ruins, rats, and squatters. What happened to them can happen to us. We’ll die in here unless we get busy now and work out ways to survive.”

“If you think that, why don’t you tell your parents?

Warn them and see what they say.”

“I intend to as soon as I think of a way to do it that will reach them. Besides… . I think they already know. I think my father does, anyway. I think most of the adults know. They don’t want to know, but they do.”

“My mother could be right about Donner. He really could do some good.”

“No. No, Donner’s just a kind of human banister.”

“A what?”

“I mean he’s like…like a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we’re pushed into the future. He’s nothing. No substance. But having him there, the latest in a two-and-a-half-century-long line of American presidents makes people feel that the country, the culture that they grew up with is still here— that we’ll get through these bad times and back to normal.”

“We could,” she said. “We might. I think someday we will. ” No, she didn’t. She was too bright to take anything but the most superficial comfort from her denial. But even superficial comfort is better than none, I guess. I tried another tactic.

“Did you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?” I asked.

She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. “A lot of the continent was depopulated,” she said. “Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end.”

“Yes, but once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.”

“What’s your point?”

“The changes.” I thought for a moment. “They were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.”

“So?”

“Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”

“Your father says he doesn’t believe people changed the climate in spite of what scientists say. He says only God could change the world in such an important way.”

“Do you believe him?”

She opened her mouth, looked at me, then closed it again. After a while, she said, “I don’t know.”

“My father has his blind spots,” I said. “He’s the best person I know, but even he has his blind spots.”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “We can’t make the climate change back, no matter why it changed in the first place. You and I can’t. The neighborhood can’t. We can’t do anything.”

I lost patience. “Then let’s kill ourselves now and be done with it!”

She frowned, her round, too serious face almost angry. She tore bits of peel from a small navel orange. “What then?” she demanded. “What can we do?”

I put the last bite of my acorn bread down and went around her to my night table. I took several books from the deep bottom drawer and showed them to her. “This is what I’ve been doing— reading and studying these over the past few months. These books are old like all the books in this house. I’ve also been using Dad’s computer when he lets me-to get new stuff.”

Frowning, she looked them over. Three books on survival in the wilderness, three on guns and shooting, two each on handling medical emergencies, California native and naturalized plants and their uses, and basic living: log cabin-building, livestock raising, plant cultivation, soap making— that kind of thing. Joanne caught on at once.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “Trying to learn to live off the land?”

“I’m trying to learn whatever I can that might help me survive out there. I think we should all study books like these. I think we should bury money and other necessities in the ground where thieves won’t find them. I think we should make emergency packs-grab and run packs— in case we have to get out of here in a hurry. Money, food, clothing, matches, a blanket… . I think we should fix places outside where we can meet in case we get separated. Hell, I think a lot of things. And I know— I know!— that no matter how many things I think of, they won’t be enough. Every time I go outside, I try to imagine what it might be like to live out there without walls, and I realize I don’t know anything.”

“Then why— ”

“I intend to survive.”

She just stared.

“I mean to learn everything I can while I can,” I said.

“If I find myself outside, maybe what I’ve learned will help me live long enough to learn more.”

She gave me a nervous smile. “You’ve been reading too many adventure stories,” she said.

I frowned. How could I reach her. “This isn’t a joke, Jo.”

“What is it then?” She ate the last section of her orange. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to be serious. I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

I looked out for a moment at the rain, calming myself.

“Okay. Okay, what are you doing?”

She looked uncomfortable. “I’m still not sure we can really do anything.”

“Jo!”

“Tell me what I can do that won’t get me in trouble or make everyone think I’m crazy. Just tell me something.”

At last. “Have you read all your family’s books?”

“Some of them. Not all. They aren’t all worth reading.

Books aren’t going to save us.”

“Nothing is going to save us. If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead. Now use your imagination. Is there anything on your family bookshelves that might help you if you were stuck outside?”

“No.”

“You answer too fast. Go home and look again. And like I said, use your imagination. Any kind of survival information from encyclopedias, biographies, anything that helps you learn to live off the land and defend ourselves. Even some fiction might be useful.”

She gave me a sidelong glance. “I’ll bet,” she said.

“Jo, if you never need this information, it won’t do

you any harm. You’ll just know a little more than you did before. So what? By the way, do you take notes when you read?”

Guarded look. “Sometimes.”

“Read this.” I handed her one of the plant books.

This one was about California Indians, the plants they used, and how they used them— an interesting, entertaining little book. She would be surprised.

There was nothing in it to scare her or threaten her or push her. I thought I had already done enough of that.

“Take notes,” I told her. “You’ll remember better if you do.”

“I still don’t believe you,” she said. “Things don’t have to be as bad as you say they are.”

I put the book into her hands. “Hang on to your notes,” I said. “Pay special attention to the plants that grow between here and the coast and between here and Oregon along the coast. I’ve marked them.”

“I said I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.”

She looked down at the book, ran her hands over the black cloth-and-cardboard binding. “So we learn to eat grass and live in the bushes,” she muttered.

“We learn to survive,” I said. “It’s a good book. Take care of it. You know how my father is about his books.”

THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 2025

The rain stopped. My windows are on the north side of the house, and I can see the clouds breaking up.

They’re being blown over the mountains toward the desert. Surprising how fast they can move. The wind is strong and cold now. It might cost us a few trees.

I wonder how many years it will be before we see rain again.

6

Drowning people

Sometimes die

Fighting their rescuers.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 2025

Joanne told.

She told her mother who told her father who told my father who had one of those serious talks with me.

Damn her. Damn her!

I saw her today at the service we had for Amy and yesterday at school. She didn’t say a word about what she had done. It turns out she told her mother on Thursday. Maybe it was supposed to be a secret between them or something. But, oh, Phillida Garfield was so concerned for me, so worried. And she didn’t like my scaring Joanne. Was Joanne scared? Not scared enough to use her brain, it seems. Joanne always seemed so sensible. Did she think getting me into trouble would make the danger go away? No, that’s not it. This is just more denial: A dumb little game of “If we don’t talk about bad things, maybe they won’t happen.” Idiot! I’ll never be able to tell her anything important again.

What if I’d been more open. What if I’d talked religion with her? I’d wanted to. How will I ever be able to talk to anyone about that?

What I did say worked its way back to me tonight.

Mr. Garfield talked to Dad after the funeral. It was like the whispering game that little kids play. The message went all the way from, “We’re in danger here and we’re going to have to work hard to save ourselves.” to “Lauren is talking about running away because she’s afraid that outsiders are going to riot and tear down the walls and kill us all.”

Well, I had said some of that, and Joanne had made it clear that she didn’t agree with me. But I hadn’t just let the bad predictions stand alone: “We’re going to die, boo-hoo.” What would be the point of that? Still, only the negative stuff came home to me.

“Lauren, what did you say to Joanne?” my father demanded. He came to my room after dinner when he should have been doing his final work on tomorrow’s sermon. He sat down on my one chair and stared at me in a way that meant, “Where is your mind, girl? What’s the matter with you?” That look plus Joanne’s name told me what had happened, what this was about. My friend Joanne.

Damn her!

I sat on my bed and looked back at him. “I told her we were in for some bad, dangerous times,” I said. “I warned her we ought to learn what we could now so we could survive.”

That was when he told me how upset Joanne’s mother was, how upset Joanne was, and how they both thought I needed to “talk to someone,” because I thought our world was coming to an end.

“Do you think our world is coming to an end?” Dad asked, and with no warning at all, I almost started crying. I had all I could do to hold it back. What I thought was, “No, I think your world is coming to an end, and maybe you with it.” That was terrible. I hadn’t thought about it in such a personal way before. I turned and looked out a window until I felt calmer. When I faced him again, I said. “Yes. Don’t you?”

He frowned. I don’t think he expected me to say that.

“You’re fifteen,” he said. “You don’t really understand what’s going on here. The problems we have now have been building since long before you were born.”

“I know.”

He was still frowning. I wondered what he wanted me to say. “What were you doing, then?” he asked.

“Why did you say those things to Joanne?”

I decided to go on telling the truth for as long as I could. I hate to lie to him. “What I said was true,” I insisted.

“You don’t have to say everything you think you know,” he said. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Joanne and I were friends,” I said. “I thought I could talk to her.”

He shook his head. “These things frighten people.

It’s best not to talk about them.”

“But, Dad, that’s like…like ignoring a fire in the living room because we’re all in the kitchen, and, besides, house fires are too scary to talk about.”

“Don’t warn Joanne or any of your other friends,” he said. “Not now. I know you think you’re right, but you’re not doing anyone any good. You’re just panicking people.”

I managed to suppress a surge of anger by shifting the subject a little. Sometimes the way to move Dad is to go at him from several directions.

“Did Mr. Garfield give you back your book?” I asked.

“What book?”

“I loaned Joanne a book about California plants and the way Indians used them. It was one of your books. I’m sorry I loaned it to her. It’s so neutral, I didn’t think it could cause trouble. But I guess it has.”

He looked startled, then he almost smiled. “Yes, I will have to have that one back, all right. You wouldn’t have the acorn bread you like so much without that one— not to mention a few other things we take for granted.”

“Acorn bread… ?”

He nodded. “Most of the people in this country don’t eat acorns, you know. They have no tradition of eating them, they don’t know how to prepare them, and for some reason, they find the idea of eating them disgusting. Some of our neighbors wanted to cut down all our big live oak trees and plant something useful. You wouldn’t believe the time I had changing their minds.”

“What did people eat before?”

“Bread made of wheat and other grains— corn, rye, oats…things like that.”

“Too expensive!”

“Didn’t use to be. You get that book back from Joanne.” He drew a deep breath. “Now, let’s get off the side track and back onto the main track. What were you planning? Did you try to talk Joanne into running away?”

Then I sighed. “Of course not.”

“Her father says you did.”

“He’s wrong. This was about staying alive, learning to live outside so that we’d be able to if we ever had to.”

He watched me as though he could read the truth in my mind. When I was little, I used to think he could.

“All right,” he said. “You may have meant well, but no more scare talk.”

I thought he would yell at me or punish me. His voice had had that warning edge to it that my brothers and I had come to call the rattle— as in a rattlesnake’s warning sound. If you pushed him past the rattle, you were in trouble. If he called you “son” or “daughter” you were close to trouble.

“Why?” I insisted.

“Because you don’t have any idea what you’re doing,” he said. He frowned and rubbed his forehead. When he spoke again, the edge went out of his voice. “It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.” His mouth crooked into a little smile. “It’s interesting that you chose to begin your efforts with the book you lent to Joanne. Did you ever think of teaching from that book?”

“Teaching…my kindergartners?”

“Why not. Get them started on the right foot. You could even put together a class for older kids and adults. Something like Mr. Ibarra’s wood carving class, Mrs. Balter’s needlework classes, and young Robert Hsu’s astronomy lectures. People are bored.

They wouldn’t mind another informal class now that they’ve lost the Yannis television. If you can think of ways to entertain them and teach them at the same time, you’ll get your information out. And all without making anyone look down.”

“Look down…?”

“Into the abyss, Daughter,” But I wasn’t in trouble any more. Not at the moment. “You’ve just noticed the abyss,” he continued. “The adults in this community have been balancing at the edge of it for more years than you’ve been alive.”

I got up, went over to him and took his hand. “It’s getting worse, Dad.”

“I know.”

“Maybe it’s time to look down. Time to look for some hand and foot holds before we just get pushed in.”

“That’s why we have target practice every week and Lazor wire and our emergency bell. Your idea for emergency packs is a good one. Some people already have them. For earthquakes. Some will assemble them if I suggest it. And, of course, some won’t do anything at all. There are always people who won’t do anything.”

“Will you suggest it?”

“Yes. At the next neighborhood association meeting.”

“What else can we do? None of this is fast enough.”

“It will have to be.” He stood up, a tall, broad wall of a man. “Why don’t you ask around, see if anyone in the neighborhoods knows anything about martial arts. You need more than a book or two to learn good dependable unarmed combat.”

I blinked. “Okay.”

“Check with old Mr. Hsu and Mr. and Mrs. Montoya.”

“Mr. and Mrs.?”

“I think so. Talk to them about classes, not about Armageddon.”

I looked up at him, and he looked more like a wall than ever, standing and waiting. And he had offered me a lot— all I would get, I suspected. I sighed.

“Okay, Dad, I promise. I’ll try not to scare anyone else. I just hope things hold together long enough for us to do it your way.”

And he echoed my sigh. “At last. Good. Now come out back with me. There are some important things buried in the yard in sealed containers. It’s time for you to know where they are— just in case.”

SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2025

Today, Dad preached from Genesis six, Noah and the ark: “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts and of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”

And then, of course, later God says to Noah, “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.”

Dad focused on the two-part nature of this situation.

God decides to destroy everything except Noah, his family, and some animals. But if Noah is going to be saved, he has plenty of hard work to do.

Joanne came to me after church and said she was sorry for all the craziness.

“Okay,” I said.

“Still friends?” she asked.

And I hedged: “Not enemies, anyway. Get my father’s book back to me. He wants it.”

“My mother took it. I didn’t know she’d get so upset.”

“It isn’t hers. Get it back to me. Or have your dad give it to mine. I don’t care. But he wants his book.”

“All right.”

I watched her leave the house. She looks so trustworthy — tall and straight and serious and intelligent— I still feel inclined to trust her. But I can’t.

I don’t. She has no idea how much she could have hurt me if I had given her just a few more words to use against me. I don’t think I’ll ever trust her again, and I hate that. She was my best friend. Now she isn’t.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 2025

Garden thieves got in last night. They stripped citrus trees of fruit in the Hsu yard and the Talcott yard. In the process, they trampled what was left of winter gardens and much of the spring planting.

Dad says we have to set up a regular watch. He tried to call a neighborhood association meeting for tonight, but it’s a work night for some people, including Gary Hsu who sleeps over at his job whenever he has to report in person. We’re supposed to get together for a meeting on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Dad got Jay Garfield, Wyatt and Kayla Talcott, Alex Montoya, and Edwin Dunn together to patrol the neighborhood in shifts in armed pairs. That meant that except for the Talcotts who are already a pair (and who are so angry about their garden that I pity any thief who gets in their way), the others have to find partners among the other adults of the neighborhood.

“Find someone you trust to protect your back,” I heard Dad tell the little group. Each pair was to patrol for two hours from just before dark to just after dawn. The first patrol, walking through or looking into all the back yards would get people used to the idea of watchers while they were still awake enough to understand.

“Make sure they see you if you get first watch,” Dad said. “The sight of you will remind them that there will be watchers all through the night. We don’t want any of them mistaking you for thieves.”

Sensible. People go to bed soon after dark to save electricity, but between dinner and darkness they spend time on their porches or in their yards where it isn’t so hot. Some listen to their radio on front or back porches. Now and then people get together to play music, sing, play board games, talk, or get out on the paved part of the street for volleyball, touch football, basketball, or tennis. People used to play baseball, but we just can’t afford what that costs in windows. A few people just find a corner and read a book while there’s still daylight. It’s a good, comfortable, recreational time. What a pity to spoil it with reminders of reality. But it can’t be helped.

“What will you do if you catch a thief?” Cory asked my father before he went out. He was on the second shift, and he and Cory were having a rare cup of coffee together in the kitchen while he waited.

Coffee was for special occasions. I couldn’t miss the good smell of it in my room where I lay awake.

I eavesdrop. I don’t put drinking glasses to walls or crouch with my ear against doors, but I do often lie awake long after dark when we kids are all supposed to be asleep. The kitchen is across the hall from my room, the dining room is nearby at the end of the hall, and my parents’ room is next door.

The house is old and well insulated. If there’s a shut door between me and the conversation, I can’t hear much. But at night with all or most of the lights out, I can leave my door open a crack, and if other doors are also open, I can hear a lot. I learn a lot.

“We’ll chase him off, I hope,” Dad said. “We’ve agreed to that. We’ll give him a good scare and let him know there are easier ways to get a dollar.”

“A dollar… ?”

“Yes, indeed. Our thieves didn’t steal all that food because they were hungry. They stripped those trees— took everything they could.”

“I know,” Cory said. “I took some lemons and grapefruits to both the Hsus and the Wyatts today and told them they could pick from our trees when they needed more. I took them some seed, too.

They both had a lot of young plants trampled, but this early in the season, they should be able to repair the damage.”

“Yes.” My father paused. “But you see my point.

People steal that way for money. They’re not desperate. Just greedy and dangerous. We might be able to scare them into looking for easier pickings.”

“But what if you can’t?” Cory asked, almost whispering. Her voice fell so low that I was afraid I would miss something.

“If you can’t, will you shoot them?”

“Yes,” he said.

“…yes?” she repeated in that same small voice.

“Just…‘yes?’” She was like Joanne all over again—

denial personified. What planet do people like that live on?

“Yes,” my father said.

“Why!”

There was a long silence. When my father spoke again, his own voice had gone very soft. “Baby, if these people steal enough, they’ll force us to spend more than we can afford on food— or go hungry. We live on the edge as it is.” You know how hard things are.”

“But…couldn’t we just call the police?”

“For what? We can’t afford their fees, and anyway, they’re not interested until after a crime has been committed. Even then, if you call them, they won’t show up for hours— maybe not for two or three days.”

“I know.”

“What are you saying then? You want the kids to go hungry? You want thieves coming into the house once they’ve stripped the gardens?”

“But they haven’t done that.”

“Of course they have. Mrs. Sims was only their latest victim.”

“She lived alone. We always said she shouldn’t do that.”

“You want to trust them not to hurt you or the kids just because there are seven of us? Baby, we can’t live by pretending this is still twenty or thirty years ago.”

“But you could go to jail!” She was crying— not sobbing, but speaking with that voice-full-of-tears that she can manage sometimes.

“No,” Dad said. “If we have to shoot someone, we’re together in it. After we’ve shot him we carry him into the nearest house. It’s still legal to shoot housebreakers. After that we do a little damage and get our stories straight.”

Long, long silence. “You could still get in trouble.”

“I’ll risk it.”

Another long silence. “`Thou shalt not kill,’” Cory whispered.

“Nehemiah four,” Dad said. “Verse 14.”

There was nothing more. A few minutes later, I heard Dad leave. I waited until I heard Cory go to her room and shut the door. Then I got up, shut my door, moved my lamp so the light wouldn’t show under the door, then turned it on and opened my grandmother’s Bible. She had had a lot of Bibles and Dad had let me keep this one.

Nehemiah, chapter four, Verse 14: “And I looked and rose up and said unto the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, be not afraid of them: remember the Lord which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives and your houses.”

Interesting. Interesting that Dad had that verse ready, and that Cory recognized it. Maybe they’ve had this conversation before.

SATURDAY, MARCH 15, 2025

It’s official.

Now we have a regular neighborhood watch— a roster of people from every household who are over eighteen, good with guns— their own and others’-and considered responsible by my father and by the people who have already been patrolling the neighborhood. Since none of the watchers have ever been cops or security guards, they’ll go on working in pairs, watching out for each other as well as for the neighborhood. They’ll use whistles to call for help if they need it. Also, they’ll meet once a week to read, discuss, and practice martial arts and shoot-out techniques. The Montoyas will give their martial arts classes, all right, but not at my suggestion. Old Mr. Hsu is having back problems, and he won’t be teaching anything for a while, but the Montoyas seem to be enough. I plan to sit in on the classes as often as I can stand to share everyone’s practice pains.

Dad has collected all his books from me this morning. All I have left are my notes. I don’t mind.

Thanks to the garden thieves, people are preparing themselves for the worst. I feel almost grateful to the thieves.

They haven’t come back, by the way— our thieves.

When they do, we should be able to give them something they don’t expect.

SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 2025

Our thieves paid us another visit last night.

Maybe they weren’t the same ones, but their intentions were the same: To take away what someone else has sweated to grow and very much needs.

This time they were after Richard Moss’s rabbits.

Those rabbits are the neighborhood’s only livestock except for some chickens the Cruz and Montoya families tried to raise a few years ago. Those were stolen as soon as they were old enough to make noise and let outsiders know they were there. The Moss rabbits have been our secret until this year when Richard Moss insisted on selling meat and whatever his wives could make from raw or tanned rabbit hides out beyond the wall. The Mosses had been selling to us all along, of course, meat, hides, fertilizer, everything except live rabbits. Those he hoarded as breeding stock. But now, stubborn, arrogant, and greedy, he had decided he could earn more if he peddled his merchandise outside. So, now the word is out on the street about the damned rabbits, and last night someone came to get them.

The Moss rabbit house is a converted three-car garage added to the property in the 1980s according to Dad. It’s hard to believe any household once had three cars, and gas fueled cars at that. But I remember the old garage before Richard Moss converted it. It was huge with three black oil spots on the floor where three cars had once been housed.

Richard Moss repaired the walls and roof, put in windows for cross ventilation, and in general, made the place almost fit for people to live in. In fact, it’s much better than what a lot of people live in now on the outside. He built rows and tiers of cages-hutches—

and put in more electric lights and ceiling fans. The fans can be made to work on kid power.

He’s hooked them up to an old bicycle frame, and every Moss kid who’s old enough to manage the pedals sooner or later gets drafted into powering the fans. The Moss kids hate it, but they know what they’ll get if they don’t do it.

I don’t know how many rabbits the Mosses have now, but it seems they’re always killing and skinning and doing disgusting things to pelts. Even a little monopoly is worth a lot of trouble.

The two thieves had managed to stuff 13 rabbits into canvas sacks by the time our watchers spotted them. The watchers were Alejandro Montoya and Julia Lincoln, one of Shani Yannis’s sisters. Mrs.

Montoya has two kids sick with flu so she’s off the watch roster for a while.

Mrs. Lincoln and Mr. Montoya followed the plan that the group of watchers had put together at their meetings. Without a word of command or warning, they fired their guns into the air two or three times each, at the same time, blowing their whistles full blast. They kept to cover, but inside the Moss house, someone woke up and turned on the rabbit house lights. That could have been a lethal mistake for the watchers, but they were hidden behind pomegranate bushes.

The two thieves ran like rabbits.

Abandoning sacks, rabbits, pry bars, a long coil of rope, wire cutters, and even an excellent long aluminum ladder, they scrambled up that ladder and over the wall in seconds. Our wall is three meters high and topped off with pieces of broken glass as well as the usual barbed wire and the all but invisible Lazor wire. All the wire had been cut in spite of our efforts. What a pity we couldn’t afford to electrify it or set other traps. But at least the glass— the oldest, simplest of our tricks— had gotten one of them. We found a broad stream of dried blood down the inside of the wall this morning.

We also found a Glock 19 pistol where one of the thieves had dropped it. Mrs. Lincoln and Mr.

Montoya could have been shot. If the thieves hadn’t been scared out of their minds, there could have been a gun battle. Someone in the Moss house or a neighboring house could have been hurt or killed.

Cory went after Dad about that once they were alone in the kitchen tonight.

“I know,” Dad said. He sounded tired and miserable.

“Don’t think we haven’t thought about those things.

That’s why we want to scare the thieves away. Even shooting into the air isn’t safe. Nothing’s safe.”

“They ran away this time, but they won’t always run.”

“I know.”

“So what, then? You protect rabbits or oranges, and maybe get a child killed?”

Silence.

“We can’t live this way!” Cory shouted. I jumped. I’ve never heard her sound like that before.

“We do live this way,” Dad said. There was no anger in his voice, no emotional response at all to her shouting. There was nothing. Weariness. Sadness.

I’ve never heard him sound so tired, so… almost beaten. And yet he had won. His idea had beaten off a pair of armed thieves without our having to hurt anyone. If the thieves had hurt themselves, that was their problem.

Of course they would come back, or others would come. That would happen no matter what. And Cory was right. The next thieves might not lose their guns and run away. So what? Should we lie in our beds and let them take all we had and hope they were content with stripping our gardens? How long does a thief stay content? And what’s it like to starve?

“We couldn’t make it without you,” Cory was saying.

She wasn’t shouting now. “That could have been you out there, facing criminals. Next time it might be you. You could be shot, protecting the neighbors’

rabbits.”

“Did you notice,” Dad said, “that every off-duty watcher answered the whistles last night? They came out to defend their community.”

“I don’t care about them! It’s you I’m worried about!”

“No,” he said. “We can’t think that way any more.

Cory, there’s nobody to help us but God and ourselves. I protect Moss’s place in spite of what I think of him, and he protects mine, no matter what he thinks of me. We all look out for one another.” He paused. “I’ve got plenty of insurance. You and the kids should be able to make it all right if— ”

“No!” Cory said. “Do you think that’s all it is? Money?

Do you think— ?”

“No, Babe. No.” Pause. “I know what it is to be left alone. This is no world to be alone in.”

There was a long silence, and I didn’t think they would say any more. I lay on my bed, wondering if I should get up and shut my door so I could turn on my lamp and write. But there was a little more.

“What are we supposed to do if you die?” she demanded, and I think she was crying. “What do we do if they shoot you over some damn rabbits?”

“Live!” Dad said. “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

That was the end of their talk. I lay in the dark for a long time, thinking about what they had said. Cory was right again. Dad might get hurt. He might get killed. I don’t know how to think about that. I can write about it, but I don’t feel it. On some deep level, I don’t believe it. I guess I’m as good at denial as anyone.

So Cory is right, but it doesn’t matter. And Dad is right, but he doesn’t go far enough. God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But God exists to be shaped. It isn’t enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse. If that’s the shape we give to God, then someday we must become too weak— too poor, too hungry, too sick— to defend ourselves. Then we’ll be wiped out.

There has to be more that we can do, a better destiny that we can shape. Another place. Another way. Something!

7

We are all Godseed, but no more or less so than any other aspect of the universe, Godseed is all there is— all that

Changes. Earthseed is all that spreads Earthlife to new earths. The universe is Godseed. Only we are Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2025

Sometimes naming a thing— giving it a name or discovering its name— helps one to begin to understand it. Knowing the name of a thing and knowing what that thing is for gives me even more of a handle on it.

The particular God-is-Change belief system that seems right to me will be called Earthseed. I’ve tried to name it before. Failing that, I’ve tried to leave it unnamed. Neither effort has made me comfortable.

Name plus purpose equals focus for me.

Well, today, I found the name, found it while I was weeding the back garden and thinking about the way plants seed themselves, windborne, animalborne, waterborne, far from their parent plants. They have no ability at all to travel great distances under their own power, and yet, they do travel. Even they don’t have to just sit in one place and wait to be wiped out. There are islands thousands of miles from anywhere— the Hawaiian Islands, for example, and Easter Island— where plants seeded themselves and grew long before any humans arrived.

Earthseed.

I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we’ll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place.

I’ve never felt that I was making any of this up— not the name, Earthseed, not any of it. I mean, I’ve never felt that it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation. I wish I could believe it was all supernatural, and that I’m getting messages from God. But then, I don’t believe in that kind of God. All I do is observe and take notes, trying to put things down in ways that are as powerful, as simple, and as direct as I feel them. I can never do that. I keep trying, but I can’t. I’m not good enough as a writer or poet or whatever it is I need to be. I don’t know what to do about that. It drives me frantic sometimes. I’m getting better, but so slowly.

The thing is, even with my writing problems, every time I understand a little more, I wonder why it’s taken me so long— why there was ever a time when I didn’t understand a thing so obvious and real and true.

Here’s the only puzzle in it all, the only paradox, or bit of illogic or circular reasoning or whatever it should be called:

Why is the universe?

To shape God.

Why is God?

To shape the universe.

I can’t get rid of it. I’ve tried to change it or dump it, but I can’t. I cannot. It feels like the truest thing I’ve ever written. It’s as mysterious and as obvious as any other explanation of God or the universe that I’ve ever read, except that to me the others feel inadequate, at best.

All the rest of Earthseed is explanation— what God is, what God does, what we are, what we should do, what we can’t help doing… . Consider: Whether you’re a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true.

All that you touch,

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

I’m going to go through my old journals and gather the verses I’ve written into one volume. I’ll put them into one of the exercise notebooks that Cory hands out to the older kids now that there are so few computers in the neighborhood. I’ve written plenty of useless stuff in those books, getting my high school work out of the way. Now I’ll put one to better use.

Then, someday when people are able to pay more attention to what I say than to how old I am, I’ll use these verses to pry them loose from the rotting past, and maybe push them into saving themselves and building a future that makes sense.

That’s if everything will just hold together for a few more years.

SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2025

I’ve finally assembled a small survival pack for myself— a grab-and-run pack. I’ve had to dig some things I need out of the garage and the attic so that no one complains about my taking things they need.

I’ve collected a hatchet, for instance, and two small, light, all-metal pots. There’s plenty of stuff like that around because no one throws anything away that has any possibility of someday being useful or salable.

I packed my few hundred dollars in savings— almost a thousand. It might feed me for two weeks if I’m allowed to keep it, and if I’m very careful what I buy and where I buy it. I’ve kept up with prices, questioning Dad when he and the other neighborhood men do the essential shopping. Food prices are insane, always going up, never down.

Everyone complains about them.

I found an old canteen and a plastic bottle both for water, and I resolved to keep them clean and full. I packed matches, a full change of clothing, including shoes in case I have to get up at night and run, comb, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, tampons, toilet paper, bandages, pins, needles and thread, alcohol, aspirin, a couple of spoons and forks, a can opener, my pocket knife, packets of acorn flour, dried fruit, roasted nuts and edible seeds, dried milk, a little sugar and salt, my survival notes, several plastic storage bags, large and small, a lot of plantable raw seed, my journal, my Earthseed notebook, and lengths of clothesline. I stowed all this in a pair of old pillow cases, one inside the other for strength. I rolled the pillowcases into a blanket pack and tied it with some of the clothesline so that I could grab it and run without losing things, but I made it easy to open at the top so that I could get my journal in and out, change the water to keep it fresh, and less often, change the food and check on the seed. The last thing I wanted to find out was that instead of carrying plantable seed or edible food, I had a load of bugs and worms.

I wish I could take a gun. I don’t own one and Dad won’t let me keep one of his in my room. I mean to try to grab one if trouble comes, but I may not be able to. It would be crazy to wind up outside with nothing but a knife and a scared look, but it could happen. Dad and Wyatt Talcott took us out for target practice today, and afterward I tried to talk Dad into letting me keep one of the guns in my room.

“No,” he said, sitting down, tired and dusty, behind his desk in his cluttered office. “You don’t have anywhere to keep it safe during the day, and the boys are always in and out of your room.”

I hesitated, then told him about the emergency pack that I had put together.

He nodded. “I thought it was a good idea back when you first suggested it,” he said. “But, think, Lauren. It would be like a gift to a burglar. Money, food, water, a gun… . Most burglars don’t find what they want all bundled up and waiting for them. I think we’d better make it a little harder for any burglar who comes here to get hold of a gun.”

“It will just be a rolled up blanket mixed in with some other rolled or folded bed clothes in my closet,” I said. “No one will even notice it.”

“No,” he shook his head. “No, the guns stay where they are.”

And that’s that. I think he’s more worried about the boys snooping around than about burglars. My brothers have been taught how to behave around guns all their lives, but Greg is only eight and Ben is nine. Dad just isn’t ready to put temptation in their paths yet. Marcus at 11 is more trustworthy than a lot of adults, but Keith at almost 13 is a question mark. He wouldn’t steal from Dad. He wouldn’t dare.

But he has stolen from me— only little things so far.

He wants a gun, though, the way thirsty people want water. He wants to be all grown up— yesterday. So maybe Dad’s right. I hate his decision, but maybe he’s right.

“Where would you go?” I asked him, changing the subject. “If we were forced out of here, where would you take us?”

He blew out a breath, puffing up his cheeks for a second. “To the neighbors or to the college,” he said. “The college has temporary emergency accommodations for employees who are burned or driven out of their homes.”

“And then?”

“Rebuilding, fortifying, doing whatever we can do to live and be safe.”

“Would you ever think about leaving here, heading north to where water isn’t such a problem and food is cheaper?”

“No.” He stared into space. “My job down here is as secure as a job can be. There are no jobs up there.

Newcomers work for food if they work at all.

Experience doesn’t matter. Education doesn’t matter. There are just too many desperate people.

They work their lives away for a sack of beans and they live on the streets.”

“I heard it was easier up there,” I said. “Oregon, Washington, Canada.”

“Closed,” he said. “You’ve got to sneak into Oregon if you get in at all. Even harder to sneak into Washington. People get shot every day trying to sneak into Canada. Nobody wants California trash.”

“But people do leave. People are always moving north.”

“They try. They’re desperate and they have nothing to lose. But I do. This is my home. Beyond taxes, I don’t owe a penny on it. You and your brothers have never known a hungry day here, and God willing, you never will.”

In my Earthseed notebook, I’ve written, A tree

Cannot grow

In its parents’ shadows.

Is it necessary to write things like that? Everyone knows them. What do they mean now, anyway?

What does this one mean if you live in a cul-de-sac with a wall around in? What does it mean if you’re damned lucky to live in a cul-de-sac with a wall around it?

SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025

Tomorrow, I’ll be sixteen. Only sixteen. I feel older. I want to be older. I need to be older. I hate being a kid. Time drags!

Tracy Dunn has disappeared. She’s been depressed since Amy was killed. When she talked at all, it was about dying and wanting to die and deserving to die.

Everyone kept hoping she would get over her grief-or her guilt— and get on with her life. Maybe she couldn’t. Dad talked with her several times, and I know he was worried about her. Her crazy family hasn’t been any help. They treat her the way she treated Amy: They ignore her.

The rumor is that she went outside sometime yesterday. A group of Moss and Payne kids say they saw her go out of the gate just after they left school.

No one has seen her since.

SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2025

Here’s the birthday gift that came into my mind this morning as I woke up— just two lines: The Destiny of Earthseed

Is to take root among the stars.

This is what I was reaching for a few days ago when the story of the new planets being discovered caught my attention. It’s true, of course. It’s obvious.

Right now, it’s also impossible. The world is in horrible shape. Even rich countries aren’t doing as well as history says rich countries used to do.

President Donner isn’t the only one breaking up and selling off science and space projects. No one is expanding the kind of exploration that doesn’t earn an immediate profit, or at least promise big future profits. There’s no mood now for doing anything that could be considered unnecessary or wasteful. And yet,

The Destiny of Earthseed

Is to take root among the stars.

I don’t know how it will happen or when it will happen. There’s so much to do before it can even begin. I guess that’s to be expected. There’s always a lot to do before you get to go to heaven.

8

To get along with God,

Consider the consequences of your behavior.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, JULY 26, 2025

Tracy Dunn has not come home and has not been found by the police. I don’t think she will be. She’s only been gone for a week, but a week outside must be like a week in hell. People vanish outside. They go through our gate like Mr. Yannis did, and everyone waits for them, but they never come back-or they come back in an urn. I think Tracy Dunn is dead.

Bianca Montoya is pregnant. It isn’t just gossip, it’s true, and it matters to me, somehow. Bianca is 17, unmarried, and out of her mind about Jorge Iturbe who lives at the Ibarra house and is Yolanda Ibarra’s brother.

Jorge admits to being the father. I don’t know why they didn’t just get married before everything got so public. Jorge is 23, and he, at least, ought to have some sense. Anyway, they’re going to get married now. The Ibarra and Iturbe families have been feuding with the Montoyas for a week over this. So stupid. You’d think they had nothing else to do. At least they’re both Latino. No interracial feud this time. Last year when Craig Dunn who’s white and one of the saner members of the Dunn family was caught making love to Siti Moss who’s black and Richard Moss’s oldest daughter to boot, I thought someone was going to get killed. Crazy.

But my point isn’t who’s sleeping with whom or who’s feuding. My point is— my question is— how in the world can anyone get married and make babies with things the way they are now.

I mean, I know people have always gotten married and had kids, but now… . Now there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. A couple gets married, and if they’re lucky, they get a room or a garage to live in-with no hope of anything better and every reason to expect things to get worse.

Bianca’s chosen life is one of my options. It’s not one that I intend to exercise, but it is pretty much what the neighborhood expects of me— of anyone my age. Grow up a little more, get married, have babies.

Curtis Talcott says the new Iturbe family will get half-a-garage to live in after they marry. Jorge’s sister Celia Iturbe Cruz and her husband and baby have the other half. Two couples, and not one paying job among them. The best they could hope for would be to move into some rich people’s compound as domestic servants and work for room and board. There’s no way to save any money or ever do any better.

And what if they wanted to go north, try for a better life in Oregon or Washington or Canada? It would be much harder to travel with a baby or two, and much more dangerous to try to sneak past hostile guards and over state lines or international boarders with babies.

I don’t know whether Bianca is brave or stupid. She and her sister are busy altering their mother’s old wedding dress, and everyone’s cooking and getting ready for a party as though these were the good old days. How can they?

I like Curtis Talcott a lot. Maybe I love him.

Sometimes I think I do. He says he loves me. But if all I had to look forward to was marriage to him and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I’d kill myself.

Back at home, my brother Keith slipped out of the neighborhood— out through the front gates and away. He stole Cory’s key and took off on his own.

Dad and I didn’t know until we got home. Keith was still gone, and by then Cory knew he must be outside. She had checked with others in the neighborhood and two of the Dunn kids, twins Allison and Marie, age six, said they saw him go out the gate. That was when Cory went home and discovered that her key was gone.

Dad, tired and angry and scared, was going to go right back out to look for him, but Keith got home just as Dad was leaving. Cory, Marcus, and I had gone to the front porch with Dad, all three of us speculating about where Keith had gone, and Marcus and I volunteering to go out with Dad to help search. It was almost dark.

“You get back in that house and stay there,” Dad said. “It’s bad enough to have one of you out there.”

He checked the submachine gun, made sure it was fully loaded.

“Dad, look,” I said. I had spotted something moving three houses down— quick, shadowy movement alongside the Garfield porch. I didn’t know it was Keith. I was attracted by its furtiveness. Someone was sneaking around, trying to hide.

Dad was quick enough to see the movement before it was hidden by the Garfield house. He got up at once, took the gun, and went to check. The rest of us watched and waited.

Moments later Cory said she heard an odd noise in the house. I was too focused on Dad and what was going on outside to hear what she heard, or to pay any attention to her. She went in. Marcus and I were still on the porch when she screamed.

Marcus and I glanced at each other, then at the front door. Marcus lunged for the door. I yelled for Dad.

Dad was out of sight, but I heard him answer my call.

“Come quick,” I shouted, then I ran into the house.

Cory, Marcus, Bennett, and Gregory were in the kitchen, clustered around Keith. Keith was sprawled, panting, on the floor, wearing only his underpants.

He was scraped and bruised, bleeding, and filthy.

Cory knelt beside him, examining him, questioning him, crying.

“What happened to you? Who did this? Why did you go outside? Where are your clothes? What— ?”

“Where’s the key you stole?” Dad cut in. “Did they take it from you?”

Everyone jumped, looked up at Dad, then down at Keith.

“I couldn’t help it,” Keith said, still panting. “I couldn’t, Daddy. There were five guys.”

“So they got the key.”

Keith nodded, careful not to meet Dad’s eyes.

Dad turned and strode out of the house, almost at a run. It was too late now to get George or Brian Hsu to change the gate lock. That would have to be done tomorrow, and new keys made and passed out. I thought Dad must be going out to warn people and

to put more watchers on duty. I wanted to offer to help alert people, but I didn’t. Dad looked too angry to accept help from one of his kids right then. And when he got back, Keith was in for it. Was he ever in for it. A pair of pants gone, and a shirt and a pair of shoes. Cory had never been willing to let us run around barefoot the way a lot of kids did, except in the house. Her definitions of being civilized did not involve dirty, heavily callused feet any more than they involved dirty, diseased skin. Shoes were expensive, and we were always growing out of ours, but Cory insisted. Each of us had at least one pair of wearable shoes, in spite of what they cost, and they cost a lot. Now money would have to be found to get an extra pair for Keith.

Keith curled up on the floor, smudging the tile with blood from his nose and mouth, hugging himself and crying now that Dad was gone. It took Cory two or three minutes to get him up and half carry him to the bathroom. I tried to help her, but she stared at me like I was the one who beat him up, so I let them alone. It wasn’t as though I wanted to help. I just thought I should. Keith was in real pain, and it was hard for me to endure sharing it.

I cleaned up the blood so no one would slip in it or track it around. Then I fixed dinner, ate, fed the three younger boys, and put the rest aside for Dad, Cory, and Keith.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 3, 2025

Keith had to confess what he had done this morning at church. He had to stand up in front of the whole congregation and tell them everything, including what the five thugs had done to him. Then he had to apologize— to God, to his parents, and to the congregation that he had endangered and inconvenienced. Dad made him do that over Cory’s objections.

Dad never hit him, though last night he must have been tempted. “Why would you do such a thing!” he kept demanding. “How could any son of mine be so stupid! Where are your brains, boy? What did you think you were doing? I’m talking to you! Answer me!”

Keith answered and answered and answered, but the answers never seemed to make much sense to Dad. “I ain’t no baby no more,” he wept. Or, “I wanted to show you. Just wanted to show you! You always let Lauren do stuff!” Or, “I’m a man! I shouldn’t be hiding in the house, hiding in the wall; I’m a man!”

It went on and on because Keith refused to admit he had done anything wrong. He wanted to show he was a man, not a scared girl. It wasn’t his fault that a gang of guys jumped him, beat him, robbed him. He didn’t do anything. It wasn’t his fault.

Dad stared at him in utter disgust. “You disobeyed,”

he said. “You stole. You endangered the lives and the property of everyone here, including your mother, your sister, and your little brothers. If you were the man you think you are, I’d beat the hell out of you!”

Keith stared straight ahead. “Bad guys come in even if they don’t have a key,” he muttered. “They come in and steal stuff. It’s not my fault!”

It took Dad two hours to get Keith to admit that it was his fault, no excuses. He’d done wrong. He wouldn’t do it again.

My brother isn’t very smart, but he makes up for it in pure stubbornness. My father is smart and stubborn.

Keith didn’t have a chance, but he made Dad work for his victory. The next morning, Dad had his revenge. I don’t believe he thought of Keith’s forced confession that way, but Keith’s expression told me that he did.

“How do I get out of this family,” Marcus muttered to me as we watched. I sympathized. He had to share a room with Keith, and the two of them, only a year apart in age, fought all the time. Now things would be worse.

Keith is Cory’s favorite. If you asked her, she would say she didn’t have a favorite, but she does. She babies him and lets him get away with skipping chores, a little lying, a little stealing… . Maybe that’s why Keith thinks when he screws up, it’s okay.

This morning’s sermon was on the ten commandments with extra emphasis on “Honor thy father and thy mother,” and “Thou shalt not steal.” I think Dad got rid of a lot of anger and frustration, preaching that sermon. Keith, tall, stone-faced, looking older than his thirteen years, kept his anger.

I could see him keeping it inside, holding it down, choking on it.

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 2025

Dad went out looking for Keith today. He even called in the police. He says he doesn’t know how we’ll afford the fee, but he’s scared. The longer Keith is gone, the more likely he is to get hurt or killed.

Marcus says he thinks Keith went looking for the guys who beat him up. I don’t believe it. Not even Keith would go looking for five guys— or even one guy— with nothing but a BB gun.

Cory’s even more upset than Dad. She’s scared and jumpy and sick to her stomach, and she keeps crying. I talked her into going back to bed, then taught her classes myself. I’ve done that four or five times before when she was sick, so it wasn’t too weird for the kids. I just used Cory’s lesson plans, and during the first part of the day, I partnered the older kids with my kindergartners and let everyone get a taste of teaching or learning from someone different. Some of my students are my age and older, and a couple of these— Aura Moss and Michael Talcott— got up and left. They knew I understood the work. I got the last of my high school work and tests out of the way almost two years ago.

Since then I’ve done uncredited (free) college work with Dad. Michael and Aura know all that, but they’re much too grown up to learn anything from the likes of me. The hell with them. It’s a pity, though, that my Curtis has to have a brother like Michael— not that any of us gets to choose our brothers.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2025

No sign of Keith. I think Cory has gone into mourning for him. I handled classes again today, and Dad went out searching again. He came home looking exhausted tonight, and Cory wept and shouted at him.

“You didn’t try!” she said with me and all three of my brothers looking on. We’d all come to see whether Dad had brought Keith back. “You could have found him if you’d tried!”

Dad tried to go to her, but she backed away, still shouting: “If it were your precious Lauren out there alone, you would have found her by now! You don’t care about Keith.”

She’s never said anything like that before.

I mean, we were always Cory and Lauren. She never asked me to call her “mother,” and I never thought to do it. I always knew she was my stepmother. But still… I always loved her. It mystified me that Keith was her favorite, but it didn’t make me love her any less. I was her kid, but not her kid. Not quite. Not really. But I always thought she loved me.

Dad shooed us all off to bed. He quieted Cory and took her back to their room. A few minutes ago, he came to see me.

“She didn’t mean it,” he said. “She loves you as though you were her daughter, Lauren.”

I just looked at him.

“She wants you to know she’s sorry.”

I nodded, and after a few more assurances, he went.

Is she sorry? I don’t think so.

Did she mean it. She did. Oh, yes, she meant it.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2025

Keith came back last night.

He just walked into the house during dinner, as though he’d been outside playing football instead of gone since Saturday. And this time he looked fine.

Not a mark on him. He was wearing a clean new set of clothing— even new shoes. All of it was of much better quality than he had when he left, and much more expensive than we could have afforded.

He still had the BB gun until Dad took it away from him and smashed it.

Keith wouldn’t say where he’d been or how he’d gotten the new things, so Dad beat him bloody.

I’ve only seen Dad like that once before— when I was 12. Cory tried to stop him, tried to pull him off Keith, screamed at him in English, then in Spanish, then without words.

Gregory threw up on the floor, and Bennett started to cry. Marcus backed away from the whole scene, and slipped out of the house.

Then it was over.

Keith was crying like a two-year-old and Cory was holding him. Dad stood over both of them, looking dazed.

I followed Marcus out the back door and stumbled and almost fell down the back steps. I didn’t know what I was doing. Marcus wasn’t around. I sat on the steps in the warm darkness and let my body shake and hurt and vomit in helpless empathy with Keith.

Then I guess I passed out.

I came to sometime later with Marcus shaking me and whispering my name.

I got up with Marcus hanging on to my arm, trying to steady me, and I got to my bedroom.

“Let me sleep in here,” he whispered once I was sitting on my bed, dazed and still in pain. “I’ll sleep on the floor, I don’t care.”

“All right,” I said, not caring where he slept. I lay down on the bed without taking off even my shoes, and drew my body into a fetal ball on top of the bedclothes. I either fell asleep that way or I passed out again.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2025

Keith came home tonight while Dad was visiting over at the Talcott house. I suspect that Keith hung around and watched the house and waited until Dad left. He had come to see Cory. He brought her a lot of money done up in a fat roll.

She stared at it, then took it, dazed. “So much, Keith,” she whispered. “Where did you get it?”

“It’s for you,” he said. “All for you, not him.”

He took her hand and closed it around the money-and she let him do it, though she had to know it must be stolen money or drug money or worse.

Keith gave Bennett and Gregory big, expensive bars of milk chocolate with peanuts. He just smiled at Marcus and me— an obvious “fuck you” smile. Then, before Dad could come home and find him here, he left again. Cory hadn’t realized that he was leaving again, and she all but screamed and clung to him.

“No! You’ll be killed out there! What’s the matter with you? Stay home!”

“Mama, I won’t let him beat me again,” he said. “I don’t need him hitting me and telling me what to do.

Pretty soon, I’ll be able to make more money in a day than he can in a week— maybe in a month.

“You’ll be killed!”

“No I won’t. I know what I’m doing.” He kissed her, then, with surprising ease, took her arms from around him. “I’ll come back and see you,” he said.

“I’ll bring you presents.

And he vanished out the back door, and was gone.

2026

Civilization is to groups whatintelligence is to individuals. It is ameans of combining theintelligence of many to achieveongoing group adaptation.

Civilization, like intelligence mayserve well, serve adequately, orfail to serve its adaptive function.

When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is actedupon by unifying internal orexternal forces.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

by Lauren Oya Olamina

10

When apparent stability disintegrates, As it mustŃ

God is ChangeŃ

People tend to give in

To fear and depression,

To need and greed.

When no influence is strong enough

To unify people

They divide.

They struggle,

One against one,

Group against group,

For survival, position, power.

They remember old hates and generate new ones, They create chaos and nurture it.

They kill and kill and kill,

Until they are exhausted and destroyed, Until they are conquered by outside forces, Or until one of them becomes

A leader

Most will follow,

Or a tyrant

Most fear.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2026

Keith came home yesterday, bigger than ever, as tall and lean as Dad is tall and broad. He’s not quite 14, but he already looks like the man he wants so much to be. We’re like that, we Olaminas— tall, sturdy, fast growing people. Except for Gregory who is only nine, we all tower over Cory. I’m still the tallest, but my height seems to annoy her these days. She loves Keith’s size, though— her big son. She just hates the fact that he doesn’t live with us anymore.

“I got a room,” he said to me yesterday. We talked, he and I. Cory was with Dorotea Cruz who is one of her best friends and who has just had another baby.

The other boys were playing in the street and on the island. Dad had gone to the college, and would be gone overnight. Now, more than ever, it’s safest to go out just at dawn, and not to try coming home until just at dawn the next morning. That’s if you have to go outside at all, which Dad does about once a week. The worst parasites still prowl at night and sleep late into the morning. Yet Keith lives outside.

“I got a room in a building with some other people,”

he said. Translation: He and his friends were squatting in an abandoned building. Who were his friends? A gang? A flock of prostitutes? A bunch of astronauts, flying high on drugs? A den of thieves?

All of the above? Whenever he came to see us he brought money to Cory and little gifts to Bennett and Gregory.

How could he get money? There’s no honest way.

“Do your friends know how old you are?” I asked.

He grinned. “Hell, no. Why should I tell them that?”

I nodded. “It does help to look older sometimes.

“You want something to eat?”

“You going to cook for me?”

“I’ve cooked for you hundreds of times. Thousands.”

“I know. But you always had to before.”

“Don’t be stupid. You think I couldn’t act the way you did: Skip out on my responsibilities if I felt like it? I don’t feel like it. You want to eat or not?”

“Sure.”

I made rabbit stew and acorn bread— enough for Cory and all the boys when they came in. He hung around and watched me work for a while, then began to talk to me. He’s never done that before.

We’ve never, never liked each other, he and I. But he had information I wanted, and he seemed to want to talk. I must have been the safest person he could talk to. He wasn’t afraid of shocking me. He didn’t much care what I thought. And he wasn’t afraid I’d tell Dad or Cory anything he said. Of course, I wouldn’t. Why cause them pain? I’ve never been much for tattling on people, anyway.

“It’s just a nasty old building on the outside,” he was saying of his new home. “You wouldn’t believe how great it looks once you go in, though.”

“Whorehouse or spaceship?” I asked.

“It’s got stuff like you never saw,” he evaded. “TV

windows you go through instead of just sitting and looking at. Headsets, belts, and touchrings…you see and feel everything, do anything. Anything!

There’s places and things you can get into with that equipment that are in-sane! You don’t ever have to go into the street except to get food.”

“And whoever owns this stuff took you in?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

He looked at me for a long time, then started to laugh. “Because I can read and write,” he said at last. “And none of them can. They’re all older than me, but not one of them can read or write anything.

They stole all this great stuff and they couldn’t even use it. Before I got there they even broke some of it because they couldn’t read the instructions.”

Cory and I had had a hell of a struggle, teaching him to read and write. He had been bored, impatient, anything but eager.

“So you read for a living— help your new friends learn to use their stolen equipment,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“And what else?”

“Nothin’ else.”

What a piss-poor liar he is. Always was. He’s got no

conscience. He just isn’t smart enough to tell convincing lies. “Drugs, Keith?” I asked.

“Prostitution? Robbery?”

“I said nothing else! You always think you know everything.”

I sighed. “You’re not done causing Dad and Cory pain, are you? Not by a long shot.”

He looked as though he wanted to shout back at me or hit me. He might have done one or the other if I hadn’t mentioned Cory.

“I don’t give a shit about him,” he said, his voice low and ugly. He had a man’s voice already. He had everything but a man’s brain. “I do more for her than he does. I bring her money and nice things. And my friends… my friends know she lives here, and they let this place alone. He’s nothing!”

I turned and looked at him and saw my father’s face, lighter-skinned, younger, thinner, but my father’s face, unmistakable. “He’s you,” I whispered. “Every time I look at you, I see him. Every time you look at him, you see yourself.

“Dogshit!”

I shrugged.

It was a long time before he spoke again. At last he said, “Did he ever hit you?”

“Not for about five years.”

“Why’d he hit you— back then?”

I thought about that, and decided to tell him. He was old enough. “He caught me and Rubin Quintanilla in the bushes together.”

Keith shouted with abrupt laughter. “You and Rubin?

Really? You were doing it with him? You’re kidding.”

“We were twelve. What the hell.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get pregnant.”

“I know. Twelve can be a dumb age.”

He looked away. “Bet he didn’t beat you as bad as he beat me!”

“He sent you boys over to play with the Talcotts.” I gave him a glass of cold orange juice and poured one for myself.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“You were nine,” I said. “Nobody was going to tell you what was going on. As I remember, I told you I fell down the back steps.”

He frowned, perhaps remembering. My face had been memorable. Dad hadn’t beaten me as badly as he beat Keith, but I looked worse. He should remember that.

“He ever beat up Mama?”

I shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen any sign of it.

I don’t think he would. He loves her, you know. He really does.”

“Bastard!”

“He’s our father, and he’s the best man I know.”

“Did you think that when he beat you?”

“No. But later when I figured out how stupid I’d been,

I was just glad he was so strict. And back when it happened, I was just glad he didn’t quite kill me.”

He laughed again— twice in just a few minutes, and both times at things I’d said. Maybe he was ready to open up a little now.

“Tell me about the outside,” I said. “How do you live out there?

He drained the last of his second glass of juice. “I told you. I live real good out there.”

“But how did you live when you first went out— when you went to stay.”

He looked at me and smiled. He smiled like that years ago when he used red ink to trick me into bleeding in empathy with a wound he didn’t have. I remember that particular nasty smile.

“You want to go out yourself, don’t you?” he demanded.

“Someday.”

“What, instead of marrying Curtis and having a bunch of babies?”

“Yeah. Instead of that.”

“I wondered why you were being so nice to me.”

The food smelled just about ready, so I got up and took the bread from the oven and bowls from the cupboard. I was tempted to tell him to dish up his own stew, but I knew he would spoon all the meat out of the stew and leave nothing but potatoes and vegetables for the rest of us. So I served him and myself, covered the pot, left it on the lowest possible fire, and put a towel over the bread.

I let him eat in peace for a while, though I thought the boys would be coming in any time now, starving.

Then I was afraid to wait any longer. “Talk to me, Keith,” I said. “I really want to know. How did you survive when you first went out there.”

His smile this time was less evil. Maybe the food had mellowed him. “Slept in a cardboard box for three days and stole food,” he said “I don’t know why I kept going back to that box. Could have slept in any old corner. Some kids carry a piece of cardboard to sleep on— so they won’t be right down on the ground, you know.

“Then I got a sleepsack from an old man. It was new, like he never used it. Then I— ”

“You stole it?”

He gave me a look of scorn. “What you think I was going to do? I didn’t have no money. Just had that gun— Mama’s 38.”

Yes. He had brought it back to her three visits ago, along with two boxes of ammunition. Of course he never said how he got the ammunition— or how he got his replacement gun— a Heckler & Koch nine millimeter just like Dad’s. He just showed up with things and claimed that if you had the money, you could buy anything outside. He had never admitted how he got the money.

“Okay,” I said. “So you stole a sleepsack. And you kept stealing food? It’s a wonder you didn’t get caught.”

“The old guy had some money. I used it to buy food.

Then I started walking toward L.A.”

That old dream of his. For reasons that make sense to him alone, he’s always wanted to go to L.A. Any sane person would be thankful for the twenty miles that separate us from that oozing sore.

“He talked to you. He was friendly to you. And you shot him.”

“What was I supposed to do? Wait for God to come and give me some money? What was I supposed to do?”

“Come home.”

“Shit.”

“Doesn’t it even bother you that you took someone’s life— you killed a man?”

He seemed to think about that for a while. Then he shook his head. “It don’t bother me,” he said. “I was scared at first, but then…after I did it, I didn’t feel nothing. Nobody saw me do it. I just took his stuff and left him there. Besides, maybe he wasn’t dead.

People don’t always die just because you shoot them.”

“You didn’t check?”

“I just wanted his stuff. He was crazy anyway.

Alaska!”

I didn’t say any more to him, didn’t ask any more questions. He talked a little about meeting some guys and joining up with them, then discovering that even though they were all older than he was, none of them could read or write. He was a help to them.

He made their lives pleasanter. Maybe that’s why they didn’t just wait until he was asleep and kill him and take his loot for themselves.

After a while, he noticed that I wasn’t saying anything, and he laughed. “You better marry Curtis and make babies,” he said. “Out there, outside, you wouldn’t last a day. That hyperempathy shit of yours would bring you down even if nobody touched you.”

“You think that,” I said.

“Hey, I saw a guy get both of his eyes gouged out.

After that, they set him on fire and watched him run around and scream and burn. You think you could stand to see that?”

“Your new friends did that?” I asked.

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2026

Keith came to see me today just before dark. He found me walking home from the Talcott house where Curtis had been wishing me a very happy birthday. We’ve been very careful, Curtis and I, but from somewhere or other, he’s gotten a supply of condoms. They’re old fashioned, but they work. And there’s an unused darkroom in a corner of the Talcott garage.

Keith scared me out of a very sweet mood. He came from behind two houses without making a sound. He had almost reached me before I realized someone was there and turned to face him.

He raised his hands, smiling. “Brought you a birthday present,” he said. He put something into my left hand. Money.

“Keith, no, give it to Cory.”

“You give it to her. You want her to have it, you give it to her. I gave it to you.”

I walked him to the gate, concerned that one of the watchers might spot him and shoot him. He was that much taller than he had been when he stopped living with us. Dad was home so he wouldn’t come in. I thanked him for the money and told him I would give it to Cory. I wanted him to know that because I didn’t want him to bring me anything else, ever.

He seemed not to mind. He kissed the side of my face said, “Happy birthday,” and went out. He still had Cory’s key, and although Dad knew he had it, he hadn’t had the lock changed again.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26, 2026

Today, my parents had to go downtown to identify the body of my brother Keith.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 2026

I haven’t been able to write a word since Wednesday. I don’t know what to write. The body was Keith’s. I never saw it, of course. Dad said he tried to keep Cory from seeing it. The things someone had done to Keith before he died… .I don’t want to write about this, but I need to.

Sometimes writing about a thing makes it easier to stand.

Someone had cut and burned away most of my brother’s skin. Everywhere except his face. They burned out his eyes, but left the rest of his face intact— like they wanted him to be recognized. They cut and they cauterized and they cut and they cauterized… . Some of the wounds were days old.

Someone had an endless hatred of my brother.

Dad got us all together and described to us what had been done. He told it in a flat, dead monotone.

He wanted to scare us, to scare Marcus, Bennett, and Gregory in particular. He wanted us to understand just how dangerous the outside is.

The police said drug dealers torture people the way Keith was tortured. They torture people who steal from them and people who compete with them. We don’t know whether Keith was doing either of these things. We just know he’s dead. His body was dumped across town from here in front of a burned out old building that was once a nursing home. It was dumped on the broken concrete and abandoned several hours after Keith died. It could have been dumped in one of the canyons and only the dogs would have found it. But someone wanted it to be found, wanted it to be recognized. Had one of his victims’ relatives or friends managed to get even at last?

The police seemed to think we should know who killed him. I got the feeling from their questions that they would have been happy to arrest Dad or Cory or both of them. But they both lead very public lives, and neither had any unexplained absences or other breaks in routine. Dozens of people could give them alibis. Of course, I said nothing about what Keith had told me he had been doing. What good would that do? He was dead, and in a horrible way. By accident or by intent, all his victIms were avenged.

Wardell Parrish felt called upon to tell the police about the big fight Dad and Keith had had last year.

He’d heard it, of course. Half the neighborhood had heard it. Family fights are neighborhood theater-and Dad, the minister, after all!

I know Wardell Parrish was the one who told the cops. His youngest niece Tanya let that much slip.

“Uncle Ward said he hated to mention it but… .”

Oh, I’ll bet he hated to mention it. Damned bastard!

But nobody backed him up. The cops went nosing around the neighborhood, but no one else admitted knowing anything about a fight. After all, they knew Dad didn’t kill Keith. And they knew the cops liked to solve cases by “discovering” evidence against whomever they decided must be guilty. Best to give them nothing. They never helped when people called for help. They came later, and more often than not, made a bad situation worse.

We had the service today. Dad asked his friend Reverend Robinson to take care of it. Dad just sat with Cory and the rest of us and looked bent and old. So old.

Cory cried all day, most of the time without making a sound. She’s been crying off and on since Wednesday. Marcus and Dad tried to comfort her.

Even I tried, though the way she looked at me…as though I had had something to do with Keith’s death, as though she almost hated me. I keep reaching out to her. I don’t know what else to do. Maybe in time, she’ll be able to forgive me for not being her daughter, for being alive when her son is dead, for being Dad’s daughter by someone else… ? I don’t know.

Dad never shed a tear. I’ve never seen him cry in my life. Today, I wish he would. I wish he could.

Curtis Talcott sort of hung around with me today, and we talked and talked. I guess I needed to talk, and Curtis was willing to put up with me.

11

Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.

Seek them out.

Any Change may bear seeds of harm.

Beware.

God is infinitely malleable.

God is Change.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2026

We are coming apart.

The community, the families, individual family members… .We’re a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.

There was another robbery last night— or an attempted robbery. I wish that was all. No garden theft this time. Three guys came over the wall and crowbarred their way into the Cruz house. The Cruz family, of course, has loud burglar alarms, barred windows, and security gates at all the doors just like the rest of us, but that doesn’t seem to matter. When people want to come in, they come in. The thieves used simple hand tools— crowbars, hydraulic jacks, things anyone can get. I don’t know how they disabled the burglar alarm. I know they cut the electrical and phone lines to the house. That shouldn’t have mattered since the alarm had back-up batteries. Whatever else they did, or whatever went wrong, the alarm didn’t go off. And after the thieves used the crowbar on the door, they walked into the kitchen and used it on Dorotea Cruz’s seventy-five-year-old grandmother. The old lady was a light sleeper and had gotten into the habit of getting up at night and brewing herself a cup of lemon grass tea. Her family says that’s what she was coming into the kitchen to do when the thieves broke in.

Then Dorotea’s brothers Hector and Rubin Quintanilla, came running, guns in hand. They had the bedroom nearest to the kitchen and they heard all the noise— the breakin itself and Mrs. Quintanilla being knocked against the kitchen table and chairs.

They killed two of the thieves. The third got away, perhaps wounded. There was a lot of blood. But old Mrs. Quintanilla was dead.

This is the seventh incident since Keith was killed.

More and more people are coming over our wall to take what we have, or what they think we have.

Seven intrusions into house or garden in less than two months— in an 11-household community. If this is what’s happening to us, what must it be like for people who are really rich— although perhaps with their big guns, private armies of security guards, and up to date security equipment, they’re better able to fight back. Maybe that’s why we’re getting so much attention. We have a few stealables and we’re not that well protected. Of the seven intrusions, three were successful. Thieves got in and out with something— a couple of radios, a sack of walnuts, wheat flour, corn meal, pieces of jewelry, an ancient TV, a computer… . If they could carry it, they made off with it. If what Keith told me is true, we’re getting the poorer class of thieves here. No doubt the tougher, smarter, more courageous thieves hit stores and businesses. But our lower-class thugs are killing us slowly.

Next year, I’ll be 18— old enough, according to Dad, to stand a regular night watch. I wish I could do it now. As soon as I can do it, I will. But it won’t be enough.

It’s funny. Cory and Dad have been using some of the money Keith brought us to help the people who’ve been robbed. Stolen money to help victims of theft. Half the money is hidden in our back yard in case of disaster. There has always been some money hidden out there. Now there’s enough to make a difference. The other half has gone into the church fund to help our neighbors in emergencies. It won’t be enough.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2026

Something new is beginning— or perhaps something old and nasty is reviving. A company called Kagimoto, Stamm, Frampton, and Company— KSF-has taken over the running of a small coastal city called Olivar. Olivar, incorporated in the 1980s, is just one more beach/bedroom suburb of Los Angeles, small and well-to-do. It has little industry, much hilly, vacant land and a short, crumbling coastline. Its people, like some here in our Robledo neighborhood, earn salaries that would once have made them prosperous and comfortable. In fact, Olivar is a lot richer than we are, but since it’s a coastal city, its taxes are higher, and since some of its land is unstable, it has extra problems. Parts of it sometimes crumble into the ocean, undercut or deeply saturated by salt water. Sea level keeps rising with the warming climate and there is the occasional earthquake. Olivar’s flat, sandy beach is already just a memory. So are the houses and businesses that used to sit on that beach. Like coastal cities all over the world, Olivar needs special help. It’s an upper middle class, white, literate community of people who once had a lot of weight to throw around. Now, not even the politicians it’s helped to elect will stand by it. The whole state, the country, the world needs help, it’s been told. What the hell is tiny Olivar whining about?

Somewhat richer and less geologically active communities are getting help— dikes, sea walls, evacuation assistance, whatever’s appropriate.

Olivar, located between the sea and Los Angeles, is getting an influx of salt water from one direction and desperate poor people from the other. It has a solar powered desalination plant on some of its flatter, more stable land, and that provides its people with a dependable supply of water.

But it can’t protect itself from the encroaching sea, the crumbling earth, the crumbling economy, or the desperate refugees. Even getting back and forth to work, for those few who can’t work at home, was becoming as dangerous for them as it is for our people— a kind of terrible gauntlet that has to be run over and over again.

Then the people of KSF showed up. After many promises, much haggling, suspicion, fear, hope, and legal wrangling, the voters and the officials of Olivar permitted their town to be taken over, bought out, privatized. KSF will expand the desalination plant to vast size. That plant will be the first of many. The company intends to dominate farming and the selling of water and solar and wind energy over much of the southwest— where for pennies it’s already bought vast tracts of fertile, waterless land. So far, Olivar is one of its smaller coastal holdings, but with Olivar, it gets an eager, educated work force, people a few years older than I am whose options are very limited.

Not as limited as ours, of course, but limited. And there’s all that formerly public land that they now control. They mean to own great water, power, and agricultural industries in an area that most people have given up on. They have long-term plans, and the people of Olivar have decided to become part of them— to accept smaller salaries than their socio-economic group is used to in exchange for security, a guaranteed food supply, jobs, and help in their battle with the Pacific.

There are still people in Olivar who are uncomfortable with the change. They know about early American company towns in which the companies cheated and abused people.

But this is to be different. The people of Olivar aren’t frightened, impoverished victims. They’re able to look after themselves, their rights and their property.

They’re educated people who don’t want to live in the spreading chaos of the rest of Los Angeles County. Some of them said so on the radio documentary we all listened to last night— as they made a public spectacle of selling themselves to KSF.

“Good luck to them,” Dad said. “Not that they’ll have much luck in the long run.”

“What do you mean?” Cory demanded. “I think the whole idea is wonderful. It’s what we need. Now if only some big company would want to do the same thing with Robledo.

“No,” Dad said. “Thank God, no.”

“You don’t know! Why shouldn’t they?”

“Robledo’s too big, too poor, too black, and too Hispanic to be of interest to anyone— and it has no coastline. What it does have is street poor, body dumps, and a memory of once being well-off— of shade trees, big houses, hills, and canyons. Most of those things are still here, but no company will want us.”

At the end of the program it was announced that KSF was looking for registered nurses, credentialed teachers, and a few other skilled professionals who would be willing to move to Olivar and work for room and board. The offer wasn’t put that way, of course, but that’s what it meant. Yet Cory recorded the phone number and called it at once. She and Dad are both teachers, both Ph.D’s. She was desperate to get in ahead of the crowd. Dad just shrugged and let her call.

She made a sharp, wordless sound of disgust. “You know nothing about the world. You think you have all the answers but you know nothing!”

I didn’t argue. There wasn’t much point in my arguing with her.

“I doubt that Olivar is looking for families of blacks and Hispanics, anyway,” Dad said. “The Balters or the Garfields or even some of the Dunns might get in, but I don’t think we would. Even if I were trusting enough to put my family into KSF’s hands, they wouldn’t have us.”

“We could try it,” Cory insisted. “We should! We wouldn’t be any worse off than we are now if they turn us down. And if we got in and we didn’t like it, we could come back here. We could rent the house to one of the big families here— charge them just a little, then— ”

“Then come back here jobless and penniless,” Dad said. “No. I mean it. This business sounds half antebellum revival and half science fiction. I don’t trust it. Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away. You can’t sell it for bread and pottage.”

Cory stared at him— just stared. He refused to look away. Cory got up and went to their bedroom. I saw her there a few minutes later, sitting on the bed, cradling the urn of Keith’s ashes, and crying.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2026

Marcus tells me the Garfields are trying to get into Olivar. He’s been spending a lot of time with Robin Balter and she told him. She hates the idea because she likes her cousin Joanne a lot better than she does her two sisters. She’s afraid that if Joanne goes away to Olivar, she’ll never see her again. I suspect she’s right.

I can’t imagine this place without the Garfields.

Joanne, Jay, Phillida… . We’ve lost individuals before, of course, but we’ve never lost a whole family. I mean… they’ll be alive, but…they’ll be gone.

I hope they’re refused. I know it’s selfish, but I don’t care. Not that it makes any difference what I hope.

Oh hell. I hope they get whatever will be best for their survival. I hope they’ll be all right.

At 13, my brother Marcus has become the only person in the family whom I would call beautiful.

Girls his age stare at him when they think he’s not looking. They giggle a lot around him and chase him like crazy, but he sticks to Robin. She’s not pretty at all— all skin and bones and brains— but she’s funny and sensible. In a year or two, she’ll start to fill out and my brother will get beauty along with all those brains. Then, if the two of them are still together, their lives will get a lot more interesting.

I’ve changed my mind. I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos that would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit. Susan Talcott Bruce and her husband have applied to Olivar.

Other people are talking about applying, thinking about it. There’s a small college in Olivar. There are lethal security devices to keep thugs and the street poor out. There are more jobs opening up… .

Maybe Olivar is the future— one face of it. Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped “the company.” I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it is.

And what should I be doing? What can I do? In less than a year, I’ll be 18, an adult— an adult with no prospects except life in our disintegrating neighborhood. Or Earthseed.

To begin Earthseed, I’ll have to go outside. I’ve known that for a long time, but the idea scares me just as much as it always has.

Next year when I’m 18, I’ll go. That means now I have to begin to plan how I’ll handle it.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2026

I’m going to go north. My grandparents once traveled a lot by car. They left us old road maps of just about every county in the state plus several of other parts of the country. The newest of them is 40

years old, but that doesn’t matter. The roads will still be there. They’ll just be in worse shape than they were back when my grandparents drove a gas-fueled car over them. I’ve put maps of the California counties north of us and the few I could find of Washington and Oregon counties into my pack.

I wonder if there are people outside who will pay me to teach them reading and writing— basic stuff— or people who will pay me to read or write for them.

Keith started me thinking about that. I might even be able to teach some Earthseed verses along with the reading and writing. Given any chance at all, teaching is what I would choose to do. Even if I have to take other kinds of work to get enough to eat, I can teach. If I do it well, it will draw people to me— to Earthseed.

All successful life is

Adaptable,

Opportunistic,

Tenacious,

Interconnected, and

Fecund.

Understand this.

Use it.

Shape God.

I wrote that verse a few months ago. It’s true like all the verses. It seems more true than ever now, more useful to me when I’m afraid.

I’ve finally got a title for my book of Earthseed verses— Earthseed: The Book of the Living. There are the Tibetan and the Egyptian Books of the Dead.

Dad has copies of them. I’ve never heard of anything called a book of the living, but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that there is something. I don’t care. I’m trying to speak— to write— the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them. If it happens that there are other people outside somewhere preaching my truth, I’ll join them. Otherwise, I’ll adapt where I must, take what opportunities I can find or make, hang on, gather students, and teach.

12

We are Earthseed

The life that perceives itself

Changing.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2026

The Garfields have been accepted at Olivar.

They’ll be moving next month. That soon. I’ve known them all my life, and they’ll be gone. Joanne and I have had our differences, but we grew up together. I thought somehow that when I left, she would still be here. Everyone would still be here, frozen in time just as I left them. But no, that’s fantasy. God is Change.

“Do you want to go?” I asked her this morning. We had gotten together to pick a few early lemons and navel oranges and some persimmons, almost ripe and brilliant orange. We picked at my house, and then at hers, enjoying the work. The weather was cool. It was good to be outside.

“I have to go,” she said. “What else is there for me-for anyone. It’s all going to hell here. You know it is.”

I stared at her. I guess discussing such things is all right now that she has a way out. “So you move into another fortress,” I said.

“It’s a better fortress. It won’t have people coming over the walls, killing old ladies.”

“Your mother says all you’ll have is an apartment.

No yard. No garden. You’ll have less money, but you’ll have to use more of it to buy food.”

“We’ll manage!” There was a brittle quality to her voice.

I put down the old rake I was using as a fruit picker.

It worked fine on the lemons and oranges. “Scared?”

I asked.

She put down her own real fruit picker with its awkward extension handle and small fruit-catching basket. It was best for persimmons. She hugged herself. “I’ve lived here, lived with trees and gardens all my life. I… don’t know how it will be to be shut up in an apartment. It does scare me, but we’ll manage. We’ll have to.”

“You can come back here if things aren’t what you hope. Your grandparents and your aunt’s family will still be here.

“Harry will still be here,” she whispered, looking toward her house. I would have to stop thinking of it as the Garfield house. Harry and Joanne were at least as close as Curtis and I. I hadn’t thought about her leaving him— what that must be like. I like Harry Balter. I remember being surprised when he and Joanne first started going together. They’d lived in the same house all their lives. I had thought of Harry almost as her brother. But they were only first cousins, and against the odds, they had managed to fall in love. Or I thought they had. They hadn’t gone with anyone else for years. Everyone assumed they would get around to marrying when they were a little older.

“Marry him and take him with you,” I said.

“He won’t go,” she said in that same whisper. “We’ve talked and talked about it. He wants me to stay here with him, get married soon and go north. Just…go with no prospects. Nothing. It’s crazy.”

“Why won’t he go to Olivar?”

“He thinks the way your father does. He thinks Olivar’s a trap. He’s read about nineteenth and early twentieth century company towns, and he says no matter how great Olivar looks, all we’ll get from it in the end is debt and loss of freedom.”

I knew Harry had sense. “Jo,” I said, “you’ll be of age next year. You could stay here with the Balters until then and marry. Or you could talk your father into letting you marry now.”

“And then what? Go join the street poor? Stay and stuff more babies into that crowded house. Harry doesn’t have a job, and there’s no real chance of his getting one that pays money. Are we supposed to live on what Harry’s parents earn? What kind of future is that? None! None at all!”

Sensible. Conservative and sensible and mature and wrong. Very much in character for Joanne.

Or maybe I was the one who was wrong. Maybe the security Joanne will find in Olivar is the only kind of security to be had for anyone who isn’t rich. To me, though, security in Olivar isn’t much more attractive than the security Keith has finally found in his urn.

I picked a few more lemons and some oranges and wondered what she would do if she knew I was also planning to leave next year. Would she run to her mother again, frightened for me, and eager to have someone protect me from myself? She might. She wants a future she can understand and depend on-a future that looks a lot like her parents’ present. I don’t think that’s possible. Things are changing too much, too fast. Who can fight God?

We put baskets of fruit inside my back door on the porch, then headed for her house.

“What will you do?” she asked me as we walked.

“Are you just going to stay here? I mean…are you going to stay and marry Curtis?”

I shrugged and lied. “I don’t know. If I marry anyone, it will be Curtis. But I don’t know about marrying. I don’t want to have children here any more than you do. I know we’ll be staying here for a while longer, though. Dad won’t let Cory even apply to Olivar. I’m glad of that because I don’t want to go there. But there’ll be other Olivars. Who knows what I might wind up doing?” That last didn’t feel like a lie.

“You think there’ll be more privatized cities?” she asked.

“Bound to be if Olivar succeeds. This country is going to be parceled out as a source of cheap labor and cheap land. When people like those in Olivar beg to sell themselves, our surviving cities are bound to wind up the economic colonies of whoever can afford to buy them.”

“Oh, God, there you go again. You’ve always got a disaster up your sleeve.”

“I see what’s out there. You see it too. You just deny it.”

“Remember when you thought starving hordes were going to come crawling over our walls and we would have to run away to the mountains and eat grass?”