The Vanguardists

Three short stories of life
at the forefront of the climate crisis,
in temporal order:

One: a welcome to my new home—
a category three hurricane,
complete with the green light of tornadoes
that colors my nightmares,
and the eye, watchful of our doubts
about our new life in this new city
in place of homelessness elsewhere.
An authentic experience, we said.
We stayed.

Two: eight months pregnant,
a category five hurricane that lasts over 12 hours
and stills all other powers and hospitals.
I burn up in the heat in the wake
of the collapse of all eight of our transmission towers,
the bastions of hope charged in every overpriced bill
crumbled at the altar of Tezcatlipoca.
We had to leave.

Three: a new city,
an unpredicted category one hurricane
that leaves my young son screaming at night
and now he screams with every thunderclap,
every storm, every night.
The tree blocking my way to work
less than 48 hours later is a metaphor so obvious
that I laugh my way around it.
We can’t leave.

Will they coin new terms,
like collective or generational extreme-weather trauma,
to explain the flinching and panic we feel
at the sound of raindrops and the sight of lightning
from weathering all the wind and water power
that will eventually consume us all
at the edges of disaster?

Will they praise or blame us
for being the cutting edge, the frontlines,
borrowing our present misery
for an imaginary future in a different place?

We are the frontierspeople,
the pathbreakers,
the vanguardists.
The calls for fiction about our planetary calamity
are answered through our lives:
the nigh-fantasy nature of our everyday narratives,
the fantastic settings of our stories,
the depth of the characters chronicling their existence.

They will tell tales of our hurricane tallies,
our debris-filled dreams
to represent productive inaction,
to imagine a future otherwise,
while we become carrion as the water encroaches,
surrounds us from beneath and above—
a dystopia in the third person.

GABRIELA MAYES

Gabriela Mayes is a Brazilian essayist and poet. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Southern Humanities Review, and others. Beyond writing, Gabriela directs graduate initiatives that bridge the academic and public humanities at Rice University. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Northwestern University.