,,,Stepping out of your car you take a deep breath, expecting to smell the tangle of (cycling-link: "saltine air", "petrol", "fish guts", "eucalypt") that you so strongly associate with these parts.
(link-replace: "Breathe in." )[Nothing. You smell nothing at all.]
‘Hey!’ Vee’s [[leaning on the bonnet of her car]]. ‘Over here!’ She’s squeezed herself into her old fishing vest and trousers. //She looks ridiculous//, you think. The hem of her pants barely clears her knees now.The river is totally different to what it had been when you’d grown up here. The basin has been replenished under the [[government’s water resource plan]].
Where the grass licking the river’s shores had once been dry and yellow, pretty topiarised hedges now grow. There’s a gravel trail and bicycle path hemming its entire length.
Families like to come here on weekends for a mini break. Escaping the repressive Sydney pollution, they come to breathe clean filtered air and cycle through a bushland that’s an imitation of a distant past.
[[Onwards]]
[[What do we have here? Stop and take a look]]You and Vee park and walk to the shed. The two of you carry out the old rowboat and [[set out along the river]]. 1. You’re 17 and it’s the first time it’s rained since you’ve been this old.
2. Water hits the earth, releasing a heady petrichor scent. Baked hard from the heat, the cracked ground rejects the rain, sending it upwards.
3. Vee’s twirling and twirling, mouth wide open to the sky, arms outstretched as if to say ‘Welcome rain! I’m here. I’m here and I see you.’
4. Watching Vee, you smile and pocket this moment away for [[later->You stop and set up anchor]].
Beneath the (hover-style:(text-color:"green"))[peeling green paint], you can still make out the initials you and Vee carved into the wood as teenagers: [[V + S 4eva!]]
You row. Vee kind of just sits back and orders you around:
‘More to the left!’
==><==
‘Faster! Faster! You’re not going fast enough here…’
=><======
‘Ok stop here. Here’s good…stop!’
[[You stop and set up anchor]]The water’s so clear you can see straight through to the river floor, carpeted with perfectly round stones and neat rows of seagrass peeking through the rocks. (cycling-link: "Murray Darling Cod", "Brown Trout", "Spangled Perch") nudge up against the bow of the boat.
(link-replace: "Piercing shrimp flesh with rusted metal hooks you lower the line into the water.") [Something bites! 🎣]
[[Gotcha!]]A billboard’s been erected over the parking lot. The photo they’ve used looks like it was taken straight from here. A family of four, all racially ambiguous, looking far too happy for a picnic by the Millewa.
The copy reads:
MILLEWA: ESCAPE TO EDEN
You chuckle and think (link-replace: "of that Donna Haraway quote") [“There is no Eden under glass.”]
[[Onwards]]
In 2020 the last of the Murray Darling Cod population died out. As part of the Goodwin government’s regeneration plan, their extinction had been reversed.
==><==
<img src="images/water1.jpg" style="width: 100%; height: auto; max-width: 450px;">
<==
These were bonafide river cod-slick imitations of the real thing. Grown in laboratories, they’d puttered to life in glass-walled tubes, sprouting fins and sporting the same spotted coats of their predecessors. From the lab they were driven en masse to the riverside and dumped into the clear water, itself a phony reproduction of the real thing.
[[Continue]]‘It’s not really the same, is it?’ Vee starts.
‘Hmmm?’ You’re not really listening as you focus on reeling in a particularly heavy trout.
‘To be honest I don’t like coming here anymore. It’s creepy.’ She drags her fingertips through the water and [[continues]]—
<blockquote>(link-replace: "‘Quand les pauvres n'auront plus rien à manger, ils mangeront les riches!’")[‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich!’]</blockquote>
Jean Jacques Rousseau
//And when there are no more rich left to eat?//
[[What then?->let’s get going]]You’re both back at Mum's tonight. You like to come up and keep the house company—warm its chairs, eat off its plates, open and close its doors.
While you cook [[dinner]] Vee slides her bum up onto the counter and starts munching on the green beans that she’s supposed to be stringing for you.
Next to the fridge the fish are bucking their tails and flapping their heads in the pail of water you’ve left them in. Plunging your hand into the slimy school you pick one out at random and place it on the kitchen benchtop. A quick sharp blow to its head, right between the eyes, and it’s out. You take out your paring knife and [[slash its stomach clean open]]. (live: 0.5s)[1. Drain the blood;]
(live: 2s)[2. Skim off the scales;]
(live: 3.5s) [3. Scoop out the roe;]
(live: 5s) [4. Pull out the guts—heart, kidney, stomach, liver;]
(live: 6.5s) [5. Rinse off with cold, fresh water.]
(live: 7.5s) [This time though, something’s different. As you go to take out the kidney your hand brushes up against something hard, unnatural. [[What is that?]] ]
You put down the knife and use your fingers to open up the crevice further, unceremoniously exposing the cod’s insides and the alien object it had failed to digest. Some of its scales flake off and get stuck under your nails. The flesh makes an uncomfortable squelching sound as you dig around its insides a little. You know it’s already long gone but still want to be a little gentle—respect for the dead and whatnot.
(cycling-link:"Rest in peace", "Always say grace before digging in")
[[From now until the end of time may we, abide in you, amen.]]Vee’s peers over your shoulder to observe the autopsy in action.
‘Bloody hell,’ she starts giggling. Realising what it is, you squeal! And then you [[fight back a smirk.]]You pull another fish out of the bucket.
(Vee, on brand as usual, has recovered Barbie’s plaything and set it atop the countertop. ‘High [[Priestess]]…Priestess of Devilish Delight…I pray thee, take me!’ She kneels and surrenders herself before it.)
(live: 3s)[1. Blood;]
(live: 4s)[2. Scales;]
(live: 5s)[3. Roe;]
(live: 6s)[4. Guts;]
(live: 7s)[5. Water.]
(live: 8s)[Thankfully, fish 2.0 didn’t seem to have had the same exotic taste for bright pink latex.]
(live:9s)[After dinner, Vee goes to bed early while you decide to [[stay up]] for a bit.]You’re in the living room watching TV on your relic of a plasma TV. It’s late and there’s not much on except for a rerun of //[[Spongebob Squarepants]]//—an old childhood favourite. It’s the episode where the inhabitants of Bikini Bottom perform David Glen Eisley’s anthemic classic 'Sweet Victory' at the aquatic version of the Superbowl. You and Vee would always belt along, squeezing your eyes shut as you gave the lyrics everything you had: ‘And it’s ours for the taking. It’s ours for the fight!’
The episode finishes and you decide to [[turn in.->The episode finishes and you decide to turn in]]//Spongebob Squarepants// takes place in Bikini Atoll, a fictitious city that grew out of the remnants of a US nuclear testing base. The name Bikini Atoll is an anglicised version of Pikinni Atoll, a group of islands within ex-US colony the Marshall Islands. During the Cold War, the Marshall Islands were used by the US as a testing base for nuclear weapons, [[detonating 67 bombs between 1946 and 1948.]]
Walking past Vee’s room on your to the kitchen, you can hear that she’s watching David Attenborough’s Planet Blue. You pause for a moment outside her door and hear a [[faint buzz]], a slight whimper, a giggle. ‘A single tentacle could kill a fish’—bzzzzzzz—‘or, in rare cases, a [[human]].’
Bzzzzzz.
Once or twice in an eon, there are these moments where two polar visions collide.
==>
(text-style: "fade-in-out")[//A stray talon punctures the starsheet, tearing
flesh wound of light and chaos//]
<==
[[Here’s one of them.]] We’re in post-war Germany. While women in the west twist and jive in their Levis to Elvis, the Stones, the Beatles, their counterparts to the east buy their Levis on the black market, socialising in subterranean hubs of hush. The free spirit of democracy shouldering the cold blanket of socialism to the east.
But within the privacy of the bedroom, [[something strange happens.]] We’re hurtling towards the greatest mass extinction event in human history. I want so badly to be a home for you, to feel your tiny fingers furl around one of mine as all babies instinctively do.
[[But I know you'll never be.]](link-replace: "1. Cultural Preservation") [1. The Murray Darling River was renamed Millewa, after what the Elders called it. A hollow gesture, of course, given what came after…]
(link-replace: "2. Growth") [2. 'We as a nation have been blessed with bountiful lands.' the government loved to say. And so the fracking for coal seam gas began.]
(link-replace: "3. Life") [3. Irrigation pipes bled the basin dry.]
[[Onwards]]On 1 March 1954, ‘Bravo’, a nuclear explosion equivalent to the detonation of 1000 Hiroshima sized bombs, was set off. After the war, the military left, leaving in their wake an ecological deadland.
Where the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands were found to harbour toxic levels of radiation and forced to evacuate, those in Bikini Atoll [[thrived in a technicoloured utopia]]. No longer structured by property, social relations in communist Germany converge around a nucleus of love. Women, supposedly no longer economically betrothed to men under the fist of capitalism, begin to report on freer, more pleasurable sex lives. Socialist society, by its very design, seemed to have accidentally facilitated women's optimum pleasure.
[[Here’s another.]]My insides, so I’ve been told, are ‘inhospitable to life’. A tour of my intestines reveals many marvellous attractions: (cycling-link: "congealed glob of microplastics", "lake of toxins", "nebula of radiation")
==>
(text-style: "fade-in-out")[//And what’s this? Sky sent [[franken-babe]] of meat and steel!
Are you omen or offering?//]
<==
[[And so this is where the trouble starts.]]Mum’s struggle to conceive was hardly uncommon. The government had spun some story about feminism and a drop-in birth rate. ‘Nothing to do with the microplastics that fill our water systems,’ they assured everyone. ‘Women, fortified by the man-hating chants of feminists, simply aren't having children any longer.’
As Mum liked to say, this was nature wielding her own chaotic breed of revenge. We’d poisoned her only for her to poison us in return. A warped kind of justice, since the guilty never had to serve their sentence. The wealthy, of course, could afford to shirk this issue almost entirely. They kept their lungs pink and their uteri fertile with filtered air and flashy bottled water.
[[Eat the rich!]]Two shades of pink stare back at you: Malibu Barbie’s (colour: "#FF1493")[magenta dildo] cradled by (text-style: "fade-in-out")+(colour: "pink")[blushing folds of fish flesh].
==><==
<img src="images/ofwater2.jpg" style="width: 100%; height: auto; max-width: 500px;" >
<==
The visual innuendo was hardly subtle. [[This is heinous]], you think to yourself. Anthropomorphised into wide-eyed, buck-toothed cartoon characters, the citizens of Pikini Atoll ran fast food chains and played jazz clarinet. Aspriring aqua astronaut Sandy ran [[science experiments->The episode finishes and you decide to turn in]] with seemingly limitless funding.‘That is a //beast// of a thing! How’d he even get his mouth around that, let alone into his stomach!?’
‘Honestly I’m impressed,’ Vee continues. ‘Bravo to the little guy and his unhinged jaw.’
You and Vee are silent once more as you [[peer down at the disembowelled specimen.]]
It’s a total aberration; a glitch in the simulation to which you bear witness. Glancing up at Mum’s hanging portrait of The Virgin Mary you have half a mind to turn it around.
If Grandma was here, you think, she’d prescribe three hail Marys. But she’s not, so instead, you push the [mutant] to the side and do as you’ve always done: [[you get on with it]].‘I mean, this water, it’s so //clear//. And the fish…’ she picks up one of your catches and angles it towards her so she’s looking it dead in the eyes so as to address it directly, ‘You barely put up a fight! Swam right into our arms as if you had been expecting us all along!’
Nodding, you reach down and plunge a fist into the water. [[Water has memory]]. This you know to be true. This is what [[Mum]] used to tell you.
<blockquote>‘Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery [[womb->Mum]] to watery world:
//we are bodies of water.//’</blockquote>
Astrida NeimanisThe dildo Vee has prostrated herself before //is// a kind of God really. Unlike it’s flesh-bound creators, it’s immortal. Our bodies, soft and porous, yield to its will. We inhale plastic and in turn it renders us sick, infertile.
And yet, plastic has also birthed new life forms. Bacterial colonies have been found to eat tiny plastic particles, thriving off of it even.
Plastic meddles with our ability to reproduce whilst producing new ways of being: a kind of ‘toxic progeny’, as Heather Davis says.
While plastic is virtually immutuable, our future isn’t. Plastic has changed the trajectory of life on earth in ways that we may not have asked for, let alone even want. But it’s a future that’s [[coming->stay up]] whether we like it or not.
Vee had always been more comfortable with her sexuality than you had been.
She had known from a young age (as you had), that [[she’d never bear a child->human]]. And so we learnt to place our hope in other things (god how we hoped, and loved, and hoped some more).
<blockquote>In light of our increasingly nonreproductive futures, might there be something to be learned from queer theory, and the embodiment of queer subjects that have never assumed biological reproduction to be the ultimate signifier of hope?</blockquote>
Heather Davis
Vee’s altar is still sitting on the kitchen bench. You poke a finger into its swollen womb and then hover a hand over your own, sensing the phantom presence of a child [[who will never be]]. Your geneaology? L o s t. This you know.
But motherhood? [[This is not lost]].How can motherhood act as a model for care? Not motherhood as the ability to bear a child, but motherhood as a kind of radical kinship. Motherhood as a big fat fuck you to a government that has failed its people. Motherhood as having one another’s back, as community. Motherhood as shelter from the storm. Motherhood as love.
Johanna Hedva says, ‘Perhaps then’—and only then, you think—‘finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.’It’s 2046, the year you were born. The year of water shortages (not the first, not the last) and the peak of the housing crisis. Her [[little miracle babe]], Mum was fond of saying. <blockquote>‘The fact of our understanding of sexual difference is not only being challenged by gender and queer theory, but actually by the organisms that we are surrounding ourselves with, and the increasing amount of toxicity and chemicals we are putting into the [[environment.’->And so this is where the trouble starts.]]</blockquote>
Heather Davis
She juts her hip to the side and cocks up her chin. ‘Wouldn’t Mum be proud? [[She made this for me]], remember?’
‘You’re a little old to be wearing that don't you think?’ you tease. ‘Come on, [[let’s get going]] I want to be done before it gets dark.’
↶↷Once or twice in an eon, there are these moments where two polar visions collide.
A stray talon punctures the starsheet, tearing
flesh wound of light and chaos
Here’s one of them.