In the Storm, a Fire
a short story about fascism with American characteristics
Some years ago, inspired by an anthology call, I co-wrote a story about survival and resistance under American fascism. Set in a near-future Idaho, the story features a courier of DIY meds from a solarpunk-esque enclave, who finds herself caught between two “twinned bodies of social violence”: an ecofash religious gang and a corrupt and surveillance-empowered police state.
The story, titled “In the Storm, a Fire,” was a collaboration with with my good friend and fellow solarpunk old guard Jay Springett. It was published in the 2020 ebook anthology And Lately, the Sun: Speculative fictions for a climate-thrashed world, where it was long-listed for the BSFA award and was a short story semifinalist in the Chanticleer International Book Awards. It was a great volume to be included in, but for years now the story has not had a place where it lives online.
So this month, because it seems sadly timely, Jay and I are posting the full story to our respective sites/newsletters. I’ve put it here, below the fold — after a few updates and recommendations. It’s a longer story, so you’ll probably have to click through to read the whole thing.
We wrote this during the first Trump administration, and it’s hard to know now how much still maps onto our present, disastrous political landscape. People quibble about whether Trump’s movement is fascist or some other flavor of authoritarian, whether he’s channeling a violently reactionary turn or just happens to be the beneficiary of widespread frustration with prices. But I’ve seen too many big pickups driving around Mesa with huge “Trump Won” flags to write off the fascist impulse entirely. And revisiting this story, much of it still feels all too relevant.
There are a few references in the story that history has passed by — the enclave having downshifted in “the early 20s” now seems hopelessly optimistic, for instance. “Snapchat demagogue” should now probably be “TikTok demagogue.” Etc. We’ve decided to leave these as is, and not attempt to update the story for the particulars of a future as seen from 2024, which are only slightly less likely to be stale by the time a future actually arrives.
But I still hold to the broad sketch of “fascism with American characteristics” at the heart of this story: a politics defined by unrestrained pursuit of a broad array of right wing grievances, synthesizing white supremacy, corpo-state collusion, police militarism, Christian sectarianism, edgelord meme culture, tradwife RETVRNism, and so on. We pay particular attention to green-brown ‘asperity’ ecofascism, a response to climate collapse that turns punitive and exclusionary, that revels in monocultures and exacerbates the suffering of the vulnerable. Today, seeing how much the American right remains captured by climate denial, I’m not sure how big a constituency this set of ideas has. But the tendency is definitely out there.
One last word of reflection: this story is not meant to be “dystopian.” To me dystopia implies a settled and permanent state of affairs. In real life fascist and authoritarian regimes rarely last long, and never last forever. A lot of people get hurt along the way, but still they’re often brittle. In this story we see cracks starting to show. In a conversation I had with fellow futures person Paul Graham Raven (see below), we struck upon the idea that building a better world is just “dystopia in its inevitable process of failure.” However dark this chapter of American history might be, it’s not the end of the story.
Keep reading below, or pop over to Jay’s site, and enjoy “In the Storm, a Fire.”
News, Reviews + Miscellany
About a year ago I did a conversation with Paul Graham Raven, which ended up scuttled by poor sound quality. But PGR has now put a transcript of the discussion up on his Worldbuilding.Agency. You can find part one here (in which we discuss the shifting socio-historical role of science fiction, among other things) and part two here (in which we cover the Lucas Plan, jet packs, and the aforementioned “dystopia in its inevitable process of failure”). Very much worth subscribing to get at this and the rest of PGR’s great content.
I was coauthor in this paper in Climate Policy, “Carbon removal for a just transition.” Most of the credit belongs to my fellow authors, Duncan McLaren, Holly Caggiano, Celina Scott-Buechler, and particularly Sara Nawaz of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal, who led the charge and shepherded us through the peer review process. The paper makes the case that the industrial buildout of carbon removal technology, required to limit planetary heating, should follow a just transition model that uses participatory planning processes, looks beyond private ownership models, and holds historical emitters responsible without putting them in charge.
My friends at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination asked me to write a short piece for their Imaginary Papers quarterly newsletter about the Northern Lights book and project that came out of my 2023 time in Sweden.
My story “Any Percent” has been making some rounds recently, kicked off by this MetaFilter post, which pairs it with the wonderful song “Fixer Upper” by Gracie Petrie. From there it got shared on Andy Baio’s Waxy.org and written up in Web Curios. The latter speculated that it must be optioned for film/tv already as it’s “pure cinema,” but the option, I am excited to say, remains available! 👀
Also my story “Sunshine State” (coauthored with Adam Flynn, and also, imho, pure cinema) was featured in this excellent video and post from Oregon State University about “What is a Protagonist in Cli-Fi?” This is a really nice series of accessible literary teaching materials, and very recommended.
You may recall that my story “The Mammoth Steps” was reprinted a couple years back (in 02022) by the Long Now Foundation (who just recently published another of my stories). Now that mammoth story has been included in the first edition of Long Now’s new annual journal, Pace Layers.
It’s a lovely volume, divided into sections based on, of course, Steward Brand’s famous pace layers graph. You can get your copy here.
Recommendations + Fellow Travelers
Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray’s book Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States comes out this week. Excited to get my copy!
A.E. Marling has released a new solarpunk novel, Missing Mermaid, about a woman who gave up her legs to become a mermaid, surgically, then goes missing. It’s also got cities competing on carbon drawdown with DAC plants, and other crunchy solarpunk stuff. I love how Alan combines two of my favorite things, utopian futurity and detective plots (you may recall his last book was Murder in the Tool Library). His ebooks are just a couple bucks, so please give them a read.
T.K. Rex has a flash piece in The Fabulist, “Everything I Hate About the Ninety-Two Foot Woman Next Door.” Title really says it all there.
Niv Sekar has a story in Joyland, “Split Tongue” that’s also worth a read.
I’ve recently gotten to know fellow Phoenix-based SFWA member Conrad Miszuk, who has a great satirical audio drama podcast, Kakos Industries.
And last but very much not least, over at the Cosmic Mystery Club, CY wrote about one of the trailblazers of the cosmic mystery form: Twin Peaks.
Art Tour: Turner’s Burning Tower
Years ago I saw a marvelous exhibit of J M W Turner paintings at the DeYoung museum in San Francisco. They’ve been favorites of mine ever since, particularly his paintings featuring fire, such as the one I’ve included here at the top. I love the way his fires smear into the atmosphere and landscape to make it all feel like one entangled, churning thing. The fire not as an exception but as simply making visible the disturbance already there.
“In the Storm, a Fire”
by Andrew Dana Hudson and Jay Springett
The fire looked recent. The storm must have doused the flames just too late. Chani pulled her bike to a stop, smelling soggy ash, hanging in the breathless air. She could see charred pews, hymnal pages scattered by the wind. A porcelain-white Jesus looked mournfully out of the wreckage.
The Catholic church—was “Catholic” still right?—stood just outside urban Boise. Chani walked around the blackened beams, interrupting the hazy sky like the ribcage of a giant, burnt beast—then stopped short. On the picket fence, graffiti scrawled red and black: “JEZ LOVER” on one side of the gate, “BABY KILLER” on the other.
“On no...” Chani said.
A croak on the air responded: “Help!”
Her nurse’s training kicked in. She stopped rubbernecking and scanned for survivors. Propped up against a gnarled scarf of a tree, she saw the black-clothed slump of a man.
She rushed to him, taking in the details: bald head, damp black shirt missing its dog collar, two extremely broken legs.
“Father Edward!” Chani cried. She’d expected to meet the old priest today—half the illegal meds in her pack were contraceptives he helped distribute—but not like this.
“Sorry I’m in a state,” he wheezed. “Never should’ve let those Juniper Boys in.”
“Who?” But Chani already knew the answer. “Fash?”
Father Edward nodded. “Jared Pine’s thugs. Enviro-Christian fundamentalists, or so they call themselves. ‘Stewards of holy asperity.’” Father Edward seemed keen to gush his story. “Should’ve guessed those shirts were more brown than green.”
“Who’s Jared Pine?” Chani began to run through the basic first aid checks she’d learned. She wanted to keep him talking. “He named his posse ‘the Juniper Boys’? Yikes.”
“Snapchat demagogue. Before your time.” Father Edward coughed. “I think he was a real player in state politics once, but the AmNats overtook his ambitions. I guess he’s been playing at the edges of the militias and PVP scenes ever since.”
“And he just showed up?”
“Some people called wanting to rent the sanctuary for meetings, asked me to let them in late. When they arrived Pine was with them, and...well, someone had told him about the pills.”
Chani spared a glance at her pack. “That’s very bad,” she said.
“You know, last month Frannie lectured me about op-sec, but I said, ‘It’s a church. Even with the schism, we have to have a little faith in people.’ Serves me right.”
Chani gave him water and considered her options. He was tough to have survived the battering storm. She visualized the coded order sheet for the pharmaceuticals hidden in the jars of fruit preserves in her backpack: drugs for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's. Birth control pills. No pain killers—Frannie, her boss, refused to do opiates.
If she got him home to Greenwood, out in the burbs, folks at Frannie’s lab could probably set his legs right. But moving him herself seemed like a bad idea, even if she could carry him on her bike.
The other option was a hospital in Boise.
“Do you have insurance?” she asked. “We have to call an ambulance.”
“The diocese will pay...I think.” His voice was breaking again. “Would have hailed one myself, but…my arms.”
Along with the legs, both Edward’s shoulders were dislocated. His hands sat rag doll in his lap. Chani could call an ambulance through her own interface, but doing so would leave a record that would put the lab at risk. Instead she delicately felt his pockets, tugged out and unrolled a black wafer of glass. The phone was locked with a gesture print code.
“You have to do it,” she said. “They can’t know I was here. Which means you need to open your phone. Which means, unless you have another way, I’m going to have to pop your arms back in. Okay?”
She used that authoritative nurse’s voice, full of no-nonsense compassion. Edward grimaced, then nodded.
With her dad’s pocket knife, Chani sliced off the priest’s black clergy shirt. No cuts or bruising on the chest. These injuries were meant to be painful, not permanent—the kind of cruelty the gangs inflicted, knowing police would ignore anyone merely ‘roughed up.’
“One thing you should know,” Edward said as Chani rolled a strip of his shirt for him to bite down on. “They asked where I got the pills, my supplier. It’s pretty hazy—I was passing out after the second leg—but...I think I told them.”
“Also very bad,” Chani said. “But one thing at a time.”
She knelt by his right shoulder. She had only done this before on practice dummies. She muttered the instructions she’d memorized.
“On three,” she said. “One. Two—”
She felt the ball of the humerus snap into the shoulder socket. Edward screamed into the gag.
The other arm was harder. After two tries Edward spit out the gag and panted. They were both dripping with sweat. She got it on the third attempt. Edward’s shout rippled through the still air.
#
The adrenaline of doing crash medicine had made time slow down. Now it raced past her. The next few minutes were a blur. Edward wincingly opened his phone and dialed 911. As he pleaded with the glitchy, unsympathetic voice of Alexa, a man appeared—a neighbor, summoned by the priest’s hollering. Chani was suspicious that he chose this moment to investigate, and not while the church was burning, nor while Edward called for help through the night. But he carried a rifle, and his presence, looming and stone-faced, made Chani flinch on her plan to bug out before the ambulance arrived.
Then the medi-cops were there, in their black tactical vests. They loaded Father Edward—his eyes apologetic—into the ambulance, took Chani’s citizen number and statement. She lied through her teeth about why she was there, but her cover seemed to pass. They scanned her bike interface and left.
Chani desperately wanted to flee home, tell Frannie about the hole blown in their operation, but she knew one of the specks in the sky had to be a police drone, floated over to watch her movements. Acting spooked might connect the dots for the cops, if they shared Pine’s intel. And besides, the pills were too precious to waste—at the very least she needed to hand them off to someone they could trust.
So, with no better options, she got back on the bike and pedaled on to her next stop. The sun blazed. She was suddenly exhausted. She blinked on her share bike’s assist motor, paying the nominal fee to use the power she’d stored up with her sweat.
She wound back to the riparian greenway, with its intact bike path. It was cooler there, even as the morning got hot; the dappled sunlight dancing across the bike path, surreally calm after the crisis at the church. Then the interface in her vision informed her that her share bike was logging her onto the city grid, and she was instantly overwhelmed by advertising. Her earbuds blared. The scratched display-skin on her bike crawled with photos of the latest cycling styles. Her contacts clicked over too, and transparent ghost cyclists streamed by on brand new fab designs. The experience was finely tuned to make her feel bad about the corporate clunker she was on.
Chani immediately paid the fee for a few hours of visual respite, and was left with only occasional flickers of propaganda, which she couldn’t opt out of: slogans and memes mapped onto the trees. “Withdrawal: A More Moral Freedom,” one said. “Asperity Preserves America for a New Generation,” said another. Chani gave the ghost-signs the finger.
The lush, old greenbelt blurred into a grid of tree-and-high-grass monoculture: asperity rewilding, or fash-forest as Frannie called it. She lost more time walking her bike around spots where saplings had been ripped from the thin soil of broken urbanite by the previous night’s storm. “I don’t know how you kids just shake those things off,” Frannie had said that morning when Chani had rolled in, sopping from the last of the rain.
She crossed the Boise River, fragrant with stormwater, and took Fairview downtown. The capitol loomed, bedecked with “Our Idaho” banners and the 44-starred flag. At the farmer’s market, young, happy, white people shuffled from shops to restaurants. It was that bubble of normalcy fascism preserved. Construction cranes raised luxury condos, power-hungry vertical farms, and solar arrays to power both. “Everything is pregnant with its opposite,” Chani recalled Frannie saying, and so the ‘harsh conditions’ demanded by asperity of course implied great ease and comfort for a favored class.
She wheeled through the lively crowds, passing perfect stalls selling ‘perfect’ foods, state-curated to the ecological tastes of the upper class: C4-pathway grains and ‘unwasteable’ gene-edited fruit. Chani found her contact at a booth selling cheese and honey.
“Chani! I was worried I wasn’t going to see you today,” Kayla said. She was a middle-aged millennial, but, with dyed black hair and meticulous makeup, she passed for 30. This wasn’t vanity, Chani knew, but self-preservation. Asperity was unkind to the elderly.
“Hectic morning, you know how it is,” Chani said. She opened her pack of jars, pulled out a stack of pickled plums hiding drugs that kept Alzheimer's at bay. Kayla’s face lit up with gratitude.
“Folks are really going to appreciate these,” Kayla said. “My mother especially. I know she’s been running low.”
“Kayla, listen. I have extra today, of some, uh, different varieties,” Chani said carefully. Around them the market bustled. “Would you want to take them off my hands? Free of charge, of course.”
Kayla’s eyes flickered.
“That’s mighty kind of you, but my customers are quite particular.” Kayla could tell something was wrong, Chani saw, and wasn’t going to risk carrying the Schedule 1 contraceptive pills. Kayla scanned the market again. “George at the peanut shop enjoys all sorts of fruit.”
Frannie would kill her for dropping the pills with an unknown, unvetted contact, but Chani didn’t see a better option. She knew the place, a couple of blocks away. She pedalled out of the market, picking up speed.
Rounding a corner, Chani felt her bike shudder. The wheels seized up, and she lurched over the handlebars. Her backpack crunched on the pavement.
Chani groaned. Pedestrians stepped forward to help, and then quickly shrunk back. Her bike’s display skin was flashing red and blue. Then her earbuds blared with sirens. Her vision swirled and went black. All she could see was blinding white text: STAY WHERE YOU ARE.
This was the last thing Chani wanted to do. She clawed the contacts out of her eyes, flicked them into the sweet syrup bleeding from her canvass pack. Protein-printed, they would melt away to nothing. She pulled out her earbuds, flung them away. They were pumping clattering noises designed to dizzy and disorient, still audible from yards away. Chani tried to find her feet, and for a moment confronted the world blissfully unaugmented. But it was too late to run.
The pedestrians she’d seen moments ago had magically disappeared. Instead, three young men in off-green shirts were walking towards her. An older man stood behind her, grinning as he blocked her exit with a stick. Something about his flat face was familiar.
The first jackboot came down on her wrist, and she collapsed on the porous pavement. Several more blows struck her legs and thighs. Unsure where the men were, she curled into a ball, protecting her major organs. She heard shouting, the clink of broken glass, and then the beating stopped. More footsteps and now low voices. She lay still for a while, since that seemed to be working, taking long, painful breaths until she heard the hum of an electric vehicle pulling away. She looked up.
The silhouettes of two men were peering down at her. They wore all black—cops. Chani wondered: had they really arrived just after her beating, or had they simply sat back and watched?
#
In the back of the police cruiser a shitty virtual assistant barked out her rights though speakers in the partition. She was being held under “social questioning,” which meant she had no rights, but, the voice assured her, she wasn’t under arrest. Her detainment would have no effect on her citizenship score—though what she said and did while detained might. The plastic seats burned from baking in the sun. She ached from the kicking, and her wrist was ballooning to the size of a grapefruit. She flexed and rolled her hand inside the handcuffs. Not broken, just extremely messed up. The cuffs sensed her movement and squeezed back.
The booking office ran with fine-tuned bureaucratic efficiency. Everyone wore headsets, the station’s commanding intelligence issuing micro-task after micro-task. Nobody here thought for themselves. She was processed by a young lady with a long hash number tattooed on her arm—a party member as well as a cop. Chani tried to control her breathing, kept her responses short. She focused on the numbers, reflecting on the sheer historical audacity of this memetic co-option. This stupid woman wore her dehumanization on her skin as a point of pride.
“Your shirt, now in police custody, contains fibers that are non-recyclable. Under Green Fund Code 4.29 Subsection C, it will be sent to the municipal plant for secure digestion.”
Chani winced. It was an old shirt, twenty-teens maybe, but its technical fabrics were of the highest quality: anti-odor, anti-rip, fireproof, though she’d never tested it. Even a lifetime guarantee. It had been her father’s, and he’d retailored it for her sixteenth birthday, two months before he’d been camped. But those unfortunate enough to have contact with the police, particularly poor people, were not allowed to have nice things.
Her handcuffs clicked open, and she was directed to strip where she stood in the plastic processing booth. She was given the same standard-issue grey clothes that came in the U.N. Met Needs boxes that USAID spread everywhere to mollify the refugee millions. Then she sat alone waiting for questioning. The room was air conditioned, and goosebumps pickled her forearms. It was refreshing, she had to admit. Maybe the AC was the good cop.
The cop who came to interrogate her had no party tattoos, but wore a party pin on his lapel. ‘Flare,’ Frannie called it.
“Chester isn’t it?” the cop said. Chani scoffed. That wasn’t even her deadname. He just wanted her off balance. Chani waited for the other shoe to drop, and sure enough the cop performatively checked his tablet. “My mistake. Chani. That was decent work you did with the priest. Med team say you relocated both his shoulders very cleanly. That’s an expensive procedure, lot of liability if it goes wrong. Not sure I would’ve had the guts to try that at your age. Or the know-how.”
“I did some nurse’s training after high school,” Chani said. Hiding it seemed pointless. Better to save her lies for when they were absolutely necessary.
“Really...” The cop drew out the word. “You don’t have any certifications. You know, it’s important that the nation know what its citizens can contribute. Are you finding ways to make your training useful up in—where do you live again?”
“Eagle.”
“Right, Eagle. You know I heard you people have a less patriotic nickname for it. What do you call it again?”
“Greenwood.” This patronizing ritual was exhausting. It was probably meant to be.
Greenwood wasn’t like the other suburbs. It had been one of the first communities to downshift in the early 20’s, densifying housing and filling empty lots with open orchards and perennial food production. And when the fash won the Federal, it had retained some autonomy: building infrastructure of resistance, cutting off the infrastructure of control. Chani’s dad had moved them a thousand miles to be there when she was little. Getting out of the country had been dangerous, then—still was. Better to be dug in, he’d decided, and Greenwood was where he’d found to dig.
“Right. That’s a long bike ride to downtown. That church isn’t exactly on your way. Why were you visiting Father Edward?”
“Just saying hi. It’s a good place to stop and cool off on my rides.”
“That’s funny. I just talked to him. He said he didn’t know you.”
Fucking prisoner’s dilemma bullshit. There hadn’t been a chance to get their stories straight. She didn’t say anything.
“Are you sure there wasn’t any other reason you were at the church?”
“I’m sure. Shouldn’t you be after the people who burned the place down?”
She had hoped to distract her interrogator, but instead he looked pleased.
“Mr. Pine already came in himself and cleared up that misunderstanding. Bit of a theological dispute with your Jesuit pal there, which unfortunately got out of hand. Then the big storm, a lightning strike. Unlucky coincidence. Not the kind of thing we usually like to insert ourselves into, especially since they were leveling some pretty serious accusations. Distributing illegal drugs out of a church. Would you know anything about that?”
“Nope,” Chani said. She was boiling inside. The fash and the cops: twin bodies of social violence, orbiting around each other, never touching but always in sync.
“So where are the drugs, Chani?” The cop was mild.
“I don’t know,” Chani said. Technically true, in case they had some kind of polygraph camera in the walls, like in cop shows. Then she wondered if those cameras could pick up on thoughts like ‘technically true’.
The cop set a baggie on the table. Some of the contraceptive pills from her pack, Chani guessed. A little token of evidence from the Juniper Boys to excuse their crimes at the church, while they kept the rest of what they stole for themselves. Jared Pine probably had mistresses he didn’t want getting knocked up. Frannie always said the biggest moralizers were the biggest hypocrites.
“What do you think we’ll find when we examine your bike’s location history?” the cop asked. That stupid piece of rolling malware. She thought of the cops moving on Greenwood, tracing her steps back to Frannie.
The cop sensed her weakness and softened to win her over.
“Look,” he said. “We don’t care about a runner. We want the source. We have to get this DIY junk off the streets. It’s not safe for people and you know it.”
He waited through more of her silence.
“Why don’t we get that hand looked at?” he pressed. “Pro bono. You can see the difference a real hospital makes, maybe think over getting that nursing credential.”
Her wrist throbbed. Chani hated everything about this situation, but she wasn’t going to turn down his offer.
#
The hospital was clean and shiny, of course, with calming murals and luxurious furniture. No wait, since few could afford to be there. A doctor looked over her bruises, wrapped her wrist, gave her a pain killer, which she pocketed. Then she was left to stew.
Chani thought of the first time she ran meds for Frannie. “The stuff we make isn’t what they deserve,” the old woman had said. “They deserve to go to a real hospital, with drugs that work without costing a mortgage payment. Instead they’ll take crap we cook with bike parts and printers because it’s better than getting broke, dead or pregnant.”
Chani remembered going to a ‘real hospital’ when she was little, but not since. Hospitals were for people with insurance, and insurance was for people with corporate jobs, who didn’t mind living in the spotlight of fascist health surveillance. The nursing classes she’d taken after high school had been more concerned with channeling useful people into the military or militias—not an experience of education.
So with morbid interest Chani wandered around the hospital. The halls and rooms had cameras; the exits were controlled by guards. There was no reason to lock her down. Nurses smiled thinly at her as they bustled by. Healthcare was a means by which the state extracted compliance from the disobedient, so the staff was probably used to seeing people in her predicament.
In a room looking out on Military Reserve Park, she found the priest. He reclined on a plastic-wrapped mattress, legs suspended in blocks of grainy gelatin. His black clothes were piled in tatters on the nightstand. His wrists were zip-tied to the bed frame.
It occurred to Chani that they were probably being recorded, that the cops were letting her roam precisely to hear what she or Father Edward might let slip if they talked again. Still, she stepped into the room.
“Legs look set. How are the shoulders?”
“Sore.” Edward took in her gray clothes, the compression webbing on her wrist. “I’m sorry you got caught up in this.”
“Well, I’m sorry Jared Pine burned down your church,” Chani said. She did feel a bit guilty, since she’d been the one bringing him the contraceptive pills. “And about the bills from this, and everything.”
“God works in mysterious ways, probably,” Edward chuckled. Chani wondered what pain killers they’d put him on. “Anyhow, don’t worry about me. The diocese crowdfunds have already started collecting. You should watch out for yourself, being so off the grid. Knowing your neighbors is good, but when you get in trouble away from home it’s better if a big network has your back.”
“Cops said Pine blamed the fire on a lightning strike,” Chani said. “Are they really going to let him off?”
Edward sighed. “I think this is all a game to Pine. He’s of that middle generation that had no sense of progress and no emergency to face, so it’s just culture war all the way down, with no rules and no stakes. Not the worst kind of fascist, but maybe the cruelest. I remember how he postured in front of his young followers. I told him he’d need to find a new bit soon. It wouldn’t work out for him, getting old while preaching about generational vengeance, the coming American youth state. That’s when he had them do this to me.”
Chani remembered the priest’s twisted legs and the black bones of his church, both left out in the rain.
“Seems like more than a ‘theological dispute’ then,” she said. “Didn’t realize Cath politics got so violent.”
“You’d be surprised,” Edward said. “You might be too young to remember, but dozens died after the Boston Edict. It’s never good to have two popes. It always means war. Now we have—what?—four, at least? In Europe, it’s simpler; the divides are old and understood. And the Southern Churches are united in going their own way. But here, it’s messy. For people like Pine, the Jesuit Pope’s dying encyclical on reproductive justice was just an excuse to turn on fellows they’d always considered apostates.” Edward shifted to look at her, winced. “Catholicism is supposed to mean universal, but now it’s just another crux of resentment. The middle class, forever eating self.”
“‘Fascism with American Characteristics,’” Chani quoted, wryly. Then, with no more politics to dissect, she felt the great, dull sorrow, always thumping beneath her survival-cynicism. “On the bright side, I hear the camps are big on uniting families. Collect the whole set, you know? So maybe I’ll see my dad.”
Father Edward flexed out the fingers on his bound hand, and Chani, not knowing what else to do, took it in her own. He looked her dead in the eyes.
“Christ has no body but yours. No hands, no feet on Earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.”
Chani didn’t know what to make of that, but somehow she felt buoyed.
#
She stayed with the priest a while. He prayed, she listened. Eventually a nurse poked in. “You’re wanted in the lobby,” she said. The polite phrasing struck Chani as funny. As if she had a choice in the matter.
Two new cops waited for her, hands resting on holstered tasers. Without a word they gripped her upper arms and marched her to the exit. Chani stumbled along, feeling the full weight of the day’s catastrophe. Was she about to get indentured until she cooperated? If she did cooperate, wouldn’t that just get her friends camped as well? She hated the idea of the brilliant permaculturists of Greenwood spending their days planting fash-forest on some superfund site.
Out the door, into sickening afternoon heat. Chani looked around for the police car but didn’t see one. Then the grips on her arms tightened, and she was shoved forward, towards a big van covered in cheap, scratched solar panels. The van’s back doors opened, and Chani sprawled inside, rolling painfully as the vehicle peeled away from the curb.
“You ever heard of the Church Fire Problem, child?”
Now Chani recognized the grinning man from the street as Jared Pine. Her dad had made her watch documentaries on the culture wars, and Pine’s flat, angry face had appeared more than once. Now he sat on the van’s unpadded bench, thinner, graying, skin leathered, but basically the same young man who’d screamed into his bedroom webcam about “Christ, Land, and Young Blood.” He held his cedar wood stick like a long truncheon and rapped her spine to force her deeper into the van.
Chani glared at him. She’d been beat up, bounced around by a system that gave her no agency. She was scared for Frannie, for Greenwood, for the people who needed the medicine she’d meant to deliver. Maybe they were getting arrested right now. And all of it was Jared Pine’s fault.
“Fuck you!” she exploded. “You fash garbage! What now? Going to have someone beat me up again? Fuck. You.”
Pine smiled with the edges of his mouth. He leaned back and buckled his seatbelt. Then he tapped twice on the driver’s partition with the end of his stick.
The van lurched, and Chani slammed into the bench. The driver cut the wheel the other way, and she crashed hard into the opposite side. Then the van’s brakes locked, and Chani rolled, forehead smacking the plexiglas partition.
She groaned, eyes watering from the pain. Pine tapped the partition again, and the swerving stopped.
“Not very talkative now are you? Just a moment ago you were effing and blinding. I wonder which toxic half you get that from, huh? Sit.”
Chani sullenly took a seat on the bench opposite him.
“The Church Fire Problem,” he repeated, biting out each word. “Once upon a time churches burned down a lot. Not on purpose, mind you, but because they were tall wooden buildings filled with candles, cloth and paper. Flammable as an oil drum, whoosh! But when a church burned down, the community would rally around and rebuild it. And more importantly, they rebuilt to fit the needs of the congregation.”
Pine talked with the broken cadence of someone used to getting recorded and edited. Chani didn’t want to hear the sermon, but letting him talk let her catch her breath, comprehend her surroundings. The back of the van was an empty metal box. Nothing but the benches and the single seatbelt for Pine, guarding the rear doors with his stick.
“Then people stop going to church,” Pine continued. “Decadence and concrete spread over the land. Church people start to ask themselves, what’s causing the decline in attendance? Theory I like is: modern churches had fire suppression systems. They didn’t burn down, and as a result they were never rebuilt, never right-sized to fit the new generation. After decades the buildings would be too big or too small, full of useless rooms that didn’t match the new spirit of the church. They clung to the old and resisted the renewal that nature and fire intended for all things.”
“And you’re the lightning storm, here to correct that arrogance?” Chani said. Fash were so predictable, making the same mistakes every time, like confusing buildings with real human lives.
Pine grinned wider. “Funny, isn’t it? How we get swept up in the narrative of history? Both our communities sit at a crossroads for this place. The current and future history of Our Idaho.”
Chani hated that stupid Our Idaho bullshit. She grimaced. It was sweltering in the metal van. Guess the Juniper boys objected to AC. Pine was sweating too.
“Can we get some air?” she asked.
Pine seemed to enjoy this apparent confirmation of her weakness, and so called to the driver, “Simon! Windows down.” A slight breeze began to brush through the little holes in the partition—still hot, but fresh.
“We both know the decadent generation built the world wrong,” Pine continued, “but seems to me you Greenwood folks lack the conviction to burn it down. ‘Sprawl repair’ —come on! Torch the house yourself, or risk being inside when the torches come.”
Then Chani smelled it: the Boise River, wafting in through the window. She knew it from a hundred bike rides through the greenway. They were getting close.
“You sure your wrinkled body isn’t the old house?” Chani asked, forcing her own malicious grin. “Got enough ‘young blood’ in there to be worth the carbon you exhale? When do you become ‘liability class’?”
“You’ve been talking to that traitor priest,” Pine said, grin gone, face red. “You’re the liability here. Police marched on Greenwood this afternoon, because of you. Thing is, they don’t know what they’re looking for, and I do. So when the cops are done, you and me are gonna go have a chat with my old pal Frannie.”
This made no sense to Chani, but he was getting riled, and that’s what she needed. “Admit it, these boys will get bored of you soon,” she pressed, the scent of rushing water in her nostrils. “They’ll lock you in a nursing home right before they burn it down.” Then she called to the driver: “Won’t you, Simon?”
Pine raised his stick and thumped on the partition. This time, however, Chani was ready for him. She lunged forward and clicked open his seat belt. Then she braced herself as the van swerved. Pine flailed out of his seat, crashing to the floor. The van cut again, and Chani gripped the rear door handle. Just like last time the driver slammed on the breaks, and Pine rolled forward, stick clattering out of his hand. Chani shoved open the doors and leapt.
She stumbled, then fell onto the pavement in a rolling sprawl. They were on a bridge, almost to one side. Chani hopped the railing and flung herself down the embankment, rolling again. She found her feet in the river shallows. New evening bruises layered atop afternoon bruises, but nothing was broken.
She waded across the river and ran west. She heard shouting and the whine of the solar van reversing. She imagined Pine looking out the van, trying to figure out how to get down after her. But it was already too late: she was in the trees. The wild was adversary to both, but now it was between them.
#
The forest scratched and snapped at her. She worried about poison ivy. Bugs flew up her nose. The day’s muggy heat had penetrated the canopy. She imagined the greenhouse firmament far above pressing closer than ever, thick with wasted breath and the ashes of dead monsters. Causing so much trouble. Or else, an excuse for trouble. She’d never know which.
Eventually she trudged out of the greenway and into the suburbs, now a patchwork of rewilding, semi-abandoned lots, sporadic well-kept lawns. Big chunks of stamped-out sprawl had been torn down. Some lots were farmed behind tall, razorwire fences. Not like home.
Federal land reapportionment had once applied eminent domain to environmentally mismanaged private lands. The asperity government used this scalpel, designed to fight wealthy landholders, as a hammer to dispossess anyone local power brokers or dox-mobs wanted out of the way. People still lived among the burnt out suburban bones—just not black or brown people like Chani, nor queer people like Chani, nor anyone else the fashions of right-wing paranoia turned against.
She heard a rumble, and she crouched in the weeds as a dozen black-booted cops passed on quad bikes and tactical scooters, headed back to Boise in a tight line. A show of force, no doubt returning from Greenwood. She wondered if seeing them now was good or bad.
She walked on, to a familiar hill, hiked up. Propaganda signs had been set up on the top, pointedly facing Greenwood: “Pure Soil, Pure Sky, Pure Idaho” and “Resist the Great Replacement.” Rust marked the boundary between sprawlrot and retrosurbubia; the storm had whipped flecks of red metal off the billboard struts, dotting brownfields on one side, fruit bushes and rows of leafy greens on the other.
Just like that, she was home. She marveled at how little she felt at this fact. The streets were empty—not surprising, given the police had recently passed. She trudged down the boardwalk, mechanically picked a plum from a roadside damson tree. Had she eaten anything all day?
The lab was under a repaired big box store that now served as an artisan commons. When she got there Chani found commotion. The place looked trashed: windows shot out, tools and goods strewn outside the entrance. Inside, Frannie’s technicians were performing first aid on half a dozen cop-beaten artisans. Chani walked up to Frannie who was debating with her assistant whether a solar panel, flung from the roof, could be salvaged.
“‘Sun’s not free,’ one of them actually told me. Can you believe those pigs?” Frannie said. Then, seeing Chani, “Holy shit.”
Chani burst into tears then, and old, hefty Frannie took her in a bear hug. She sobbed, understanding nothing but the petting of her hair. Some minutes later someone passed her a burrito. Chani sat in the grass and ate. New contacts were found and Chani’s vision gushed with frantic messages backed up over the day. Then they hustled down to the DIY lab, concealed in a bunker the big box had built for management to hide out during labor unrest. In the white noise privacy of humming centrifuges and grow lights, improvised chemistry sets and pill-packing rigs, Chani spilled her story in one long, tangled sentence.
“Ja-red-fuck-ing-Pine,” Frannie spat. “You know I once had to debate that asshole, when I ran for governor. Back when we were trying to be civil.” She laughed.
“He called you ‘old pal,’ Fran,” Chani said. “Got the feeling this is some kind of grudge for him. And I was what? A bargaining piece?”
“The year I got the dem-soc nomination, Pine tried to run on his side too. Thought his selfie stick was the only campaign he needed. I didn’t win, but I made damn sure he didn’t either. We heckled each other online for years after, until things went to shit.” Frannie sighed. “The Juniper Boys are mean as hell, but they aren’t an army. And Pine, he’s the kind of dumb the establishment likes to keep around, which means the cops do most of his dirty work. They didn’t find shit though, this time, so I expect Pine will be along soon. Suppose we better go talk to him.”
“Talk to him?” Chani was livid. “He kidnapped me! I’d rather, I dunno...eliminate him!”
“You think we can just shoot a minor fash religious celeb dead in the street?” Frannie pointed at the ceiling. “Cop balloons are watching our every move today. That means we can’t make much noise, and we definitely can’t make bodies. The state still finds deaths it didn’t approve bureaucratically inconvenient.”
Chani waved around the lab. “We also can’t keep this going with Pine trying to jump every delivery we send out. So, what, we’re supposed to pay him off? Befriend him? Fuck that!”
Frannie said nothing. Instead she just hobbled towards the stairs, not looking back. Chani followed.
#
A straggle of Greenwood folks gathered atop the hill at the edge of the neighborhood. The low sun still burned, but Chani felt a cooler, ozone-tweaked wind whip up from the river. After everything, was another storm coming?
Lights on the road below. Three vans pulled up. White men in identical haircuts poured out. They brandished torches and gas cans. Chani wondered what corrupt dispensation let the Juniper Boys waste restricted carbon fuels on arson.
Pine got out and hoofed it up the hill. He had his stick but was working hard not to use it.
“Frannie-fran!” Pine called. “When I heard someone was bootlegging slut pills, I just knew! Been enjoying playing doctor with your little nurse there?”
“What do you want, Jared?” Frannie called back. They stood only paces apart, but each was putting on a show for the two crowds.
“You know, it’s a real shame you dropped off the feeds,” Pine said. “I used to enjoy your little commie rants. Bet you never imagined we’d end up here. You a fake pharmacist and me,” he raised his staff like Moses, “a prophet.”
“Yeah, your fanboys down there are real divine-sent mascots of asperity. Those fine, fibershed shirts, fronting like they want to raze our fields,” Frannie said. “Thing is, lot of people in Greenwood already got fucked over by the cops today. Wouldn’t surprise me if some of them were spoiling for a fairer fight.” The crowd of artisans and lab techs murmured agreement. “So what, exactly, do you want?”
“Let’s just say we’re looking to diversify our activities.” Pine grinned. “And seems like you might be needing a new distributor.”
Chani’s blood boiled. The sectarian violence, the incoherent eco-ideology—none of it had meant anything. Everything was still about money.
“Why would you want to work with me, Jared?” Frannie said. “You know I fucking hate you.”
“I got growing boys to feed,” Pine said, his voice not as loud. He was serious, Chani realized. The priest had been right: Pine’s position was precarious. “Plus, I like the idea of spoiling your perfect lefty commune here. You probably think Greenwood is that paradise-built-in-hell nonsense. But at best it’s just another temporary autonomous zone, emphasis on the temporary. And when it falls apart, I want to be there to drop a match on the tinder you leave behind.”
“There you go again, pretending to believe in something other than your own ego,” Frannie said. Then she walked up to Pine and punched him in the nose.
There was a collective gasp as Pine went down. No one had ever seen the old woman move that fast. The Greenwood crowd shifted forward a step. Down the hill torches flared and wavered.
“Just like the good old days,” Frannie said, rubbing her hand. She leaned over Pine. “Listen, you know why we call it ‘Greenwood’? Because green wood is hard to fucking burn. No, don’t get up. I get it. Your coin is slipping from favor, and those party member condos don’t come cheap. Well, tell you what. We can help each other after all. You deliver my meds, and I’ll be generous with your cut. But I decide what we sell and to whom, and your boys report to Chani there. And when they come up here, they’re going to do permaculture work, too. Put their hands in the dirt and learn how to grow something better than fash forest. If you’re lucky, we’ll gracefully dismantle your gang before they kill you, me, and everyone else with a spot of grey. But, last catch, you gotta shake my hand first, from right down there in the dirt.”
Pine’s eyes swelled with hate but, also, calculation. He shook.
#
The sun went down. The propaganda billboards blurred into the twilight. Pine limped away, leaning on his stick, hand covering his bleeding nose. The Juniper boys folded themselves back inside their vans and left.
“The hell was that?” Chani asked, as the whole group followed Frannie back down the hill.
“I dunno, some prison yard bullshit I decided to try,” Frannie said. “Predators don’t do well when you get off their script. Also I promoted you. Hope that’s okay.”
“Sure, put a queer, brown girl in charge of a violent, fascist gang. What could go wrong?”
“Yes, we’re dealing with the devil,” Frannie said, “but the devil is looking for a career change. Stagnant ideology always gives way to crime and grift. Let Pine’s gang become an actual gang-gang. Planting trees and selling drugs is better than planting trees and burning down churches. That’s something we can manage.”
“We’re ‘managing’ fash now?” Chani boiled, even amidst the weird triumph over Pine.
Frannie stopped, took Chani by the shoulders. “Our enemies are in city hall. Our enemies are in the capitol, and the White House, and all in between. The state can always crush us. We only stay safe by keeping them not quite motivated to do so. And that means having allies, and footholds, and a little bit of power. We bought time today, and that’s always what we need.”
Since she’d come upon that blacked church, Chani had been flung from frying pan to frying pan. She wanted desperately to be done, but instead it just kept lurching along. A tower in a storm, burning down over and over.
“Fran, what are we doing? Greenwood is one thing, but this world — how are we supposed to live here?”
Frannie started moving again. “Witness, comprehend, inhabit.”
“Put that on one of those billboards,” Chani said, a last spat of sarcasm. Frannie ignored her, just kept walking.
Chani wasn’t sure she understood the old woman yet. Another day, she would try. She slumped against Frannie and walked home. Clouds moved in and opened. This rain was just a drizzle. It washed off the sweat of the long day.
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