Asphalt and Ashes

"Remember, little one, the Earth will be angry.” Grandmother said, the wrinkles on her face like furrows in a farmer’s field, timeless eyes like the sea and the sky and the stars. “Maybe a hundred years from now, maybe ten or twenty. But it won’t put up with us for much longer.”

“Uh–huh,” I said with boredom. Little toddler me never had the patience for Grandmother’s ramblings.

She smiled sadly, the expression crinkling the corners of her eyes and passed me a freshly baked oatmeal raisin cookie. She knew they were my favorite. “You’ll remember this one day, I promise. I’m just sorry that we gave you this future.”

…

The subway shudders over another shitty patching job, a thin layer of rail over gaping oblivion. I grab on to a hanging strap dangling from the ceiling, the seats already taken. We abruptly stop, and a few people get off. I look out the window, the cold, foggy glass reflecting my own face more than it shows me the station beyond. Sadie appears next to me, and we exchange tired smiles. The loud engine starts again. We creak on.

The digital clock mounted above the door to the next compartment ticks on, 04:45, 05:15, 05:30. At the second-to-last stop, everyone left in the dingy car spills out onto the old, crumbling platform, then up the cracked concrete stairs. After a few moments, Sadie and I are the only people left. The subway lurches ahead.

05:32. The subway is no longer underground, of course, but we are in a wide, deep sinkhole, clogged by debris. Shafts of light stream down from cracks in the cloudy sky. A slow drizzle wets the rubble from Hurricane Liana, the color turning from fog to ash. The whirring from the drills and the hum-tsk-whirr of the old, rusty crane scooping up debris quiets as the workers check their watches and notice the rest of our team descending the lift from their cars. Ignoring the workers coming in to their shift, they shove their way to the lift to get back to their cars and drive home.

I can’t blame them. Our shifts are long and our work is grueling and our pay is low. Why do we do it? Corra does it to forget. To lose herself in the routine: wake up, subway, clear debris, lunch break, patch sinkholes, sleep, repeat. Harvey does it for the money. The paycheck is little more than minimum wage, but he can’t keep any other job. Sadie does it to get away. The long hours leave little time or energy for arguments with her mother. Little time for getting chased out of the house, because you can’t fight with someone dead asleep. Camille does it for the release. The demolitions like drugs, sweet and destructive. Michael is probably the purest one on our team, doing it day after day just because it’s right. Me? I do it for Grandmother.

…

“Take care of our Earth, dearest. Feed it in your time and your bones and the callouses on your hands. We are the last thing standing between the Earth and destruction, and yet we are also the last thing standing between the Earth and prosperity.” Grandmother was watching me again, my mother and father both at work. “Here, hold the raisins.”

I smiled and took the jar. My small five-year-old hands, still covered in honey from the herbal tea we brewed, stuck to the glass. I carefully set it down, lifting the lid and sneaking a raisin.

“May!” Grandmother reprimanded. “The raisins are for the cookies.”

My smile remained, a little sheepish at being caught. Grandmother sighed. She took the jar and turned away, but held something behind her back, she was holding a handful of…raisins?

Her hand opened, and my greedy fingers shoveled the sweets into my mouth. “Thank you!”

Her mouth formed a fake-innocent smile. “Thank me for what?”

…

“Lunch break,” an unenthusiastic voice calls. Workboots stomp-stomp to the lift, tools, cranes, and demolition materials left spread across the concrete blocks. As I watch, a jackhammer falls off of the block it was resting against, crashing to the ground. I sigh and pick it up, dusting my hands off and heading for the crowded lift.

There’s a taco truck that drives out to the worksite sometimes, and its spicy carnitas are unmatched. The line is always long, and thanks to jackhammer, I’m the final worker to line up. A seagull flies overhead, waiting for the scraps. The line moves up a bit. What feels like hours later, I hand the chef a crinkled, ruddy twenty. He hands me my creased, greasy change. I dig into my taco.

All too soon, we’re called back to work. The crane creaks to life, the jackhammer starts. I pick up my drill.

…

“Where are we going?” We pulled out of the middle school’s parking lot. I was twelve then. I tapped on her shoulder from the backseat. “Grandmother?”

“You’ll see.” She moved her hand back, offering it to me to hold, small but strong. I took it, smiling.

The drive was another hour, and I leapt out of the backseat, happy to finally be…somewhere. And when I got out, we were, well, nowhere.

Desert surrounded us. At least, a wasteland. An old rusted car lay a few yards away, raccoons skittering around it. The horizon was bare, no, there was the cinematic skyline of Albany, barely blobs on the horizon. Desert? This makes no sense.

“This is the wreckage of Hurricane Heath and Cyclone Arabella, and their subsequent flood, and then the following year’s earthquake.”

My eyes widened. The Heath Disaster. Hurricane Heath flattened the town, then Cyclone Arabella forced the survivors to flee to Albany. And good thing, too, because the flood and the earthquakes came next, clearing the town to a wasteland. Nothing but a desert. It was as if the Earth had swallowed it whole.

…

A whistle blows. I wipe the dust and sweat off of my forehead with an even dustier and sweatier sleeve. That didn’t work. The sun is lower, our shadows growing longer. But the work day isn’t over yet.

The shuttle between the Liana wreckage and our next site smells of onions. The whole team is crowded into the back of a small van, sweaty and gross and hot. Sadie nudges me and points to Harvey, who is already drifting off. I lose track of time in the small, cramped space, not counting seconds but counting the times I wish to be someone else. The van stops. Harvey jolts awake.

We file out, and find ourselves in the middle of a bustling city. The director of our crew leads us around a corner and down an alley to what I would guess is the next sinkhole site. We’re instructed to find the bottom. I almost laugh. Camille actually does, the harsh sound like sandpaper and sadness. There’s no bottom to the sinkholes. It’s as much a mystery to us as to them. We peer down into the darkness, imagining horrors down there. Horrors like bats the size of humans and spiders that can kill you just from touching you. And, of course, other horrors. Like being trapped alone. Down there. With nothing but darkness and silence. The sound of your breathing echoing in the void, pressing in on you. I take a step back.

“Very well, then,” our director says. “A patch job will do.”

…

“May, look closer.” Grandmother implored. I grudgingly followed her request. Peering down at the dusty, gray, ground, I saw what she did.

A whole little world filled my eyes and my heart. This place was so much more than just desert. Little sprouts of hardy plants were everywhere. I ran over to the car. There are plants growing in the engine. Maybe Hurricane Heath was what this town needed to start over. To learn to live with nature instead of beat it back. With a creaking sound, the car lurched backward and then it was…gone. The desert around it fell into a sinkhole.

“Sinkhole!” I scrambled away from the rapidly crumbling desert. “Grandmother, get back!”

…

The work day is over. Corra gives me a ride back to my apartment, and I collapse into my bedsheets.

The sinkholes started slowly, only five or six a year, but lately, they scatter the news, almost one a day. The first one was in China, and the rest started popping up everywhere. Canada, Hawaii, Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, Italy, Iceland. The list goes on. I think one was even reported in Antarctica. They’re everywhere. Including New York.

The one I witnessed with my grandmother, somewhere around ten years ago, was the fifth one.

I get up from my bed, taking an aspirin for the migraine I’ve had all day. Sitting down at my desk, I pull out my journal from that year. Grandmother was upset when the workers arrived, that day’s entry reads. I almost shut it. I need to make myself dinner, after all, but the next sentence grabs my attention. She told them that this is what’s meant to happen. What? The Earth resetting, swallowing the last of the remnants of humanity. There’s been a major drop in worldwide population due to natural disasters, hasn’t there? Maybe there’s something to that.

Or maybe she’s just crazy.

In hindsight, I’ve never really thought of my beloved grandmother as a crazy doomsday cultist, but it’s plausible, I suppose. She’s always wanted the Earth to bury civilization in its green and blue blanket. (Her words, not mine.)

I wonder if she wouldn’t have wanted me to keep fixing the sinkholes. After she died, I always believed she would want me to be the hero, save humanity from the hurricanes and floods and sickness and sinkholes. Now, I think I might be wrong. She sided with nature.

So I may be doing the opposite of what she wanted.

…

Crooked lampshades and silk scarves are what I remember most about my grandmother’s house, a tiny apartment in a high rise. Walking in, you enter another world. Scents of stew and spices filled my nose as I stepped through the door. Vibrant blankets that Grandmother knitted herself, tapestries on the painted walls. There was no TV in my grandmother’s house. She would never have allowed it in all her years. But books and board games were piled up on shelves, books of recipes and memoir and fiction, her shelves housing both an escape from reality and a pull back to it.

Grandmother was in her bed. She was in her bed most of the time, those days. I dropped into the kitchen, taking two bowls of stew from my mother to the bedroom. The room was as vibrant as the rest of the house, Grandmother’s possessions strewn over the many rickety wooden tables, jewelry displayed, flashing gold and copper. Curtains that don’t quite block out the outside cast a dull red-violet light on the orange and gold quilted blanket.

“Help me sit up, dearest,” Grandmother’s feeble voice called from the bed. I set down the stew and propped her up against the soft green pillows. “How old are you?”

“I’m fifteen now, Grandmother.”

“Ah,” she tutted. “Grown up so fast. Pass me the stew, will you?”

I handed her the warm ceramic bowl, its warm tangerine matching the bedspread. She sipped the red-orange broth, simmering with spices. “Not hot enough,” she said, though the stew would have easily hurt my mouth.

I smiled. “Oh, Grandmother.” I sat down on the bed, and she put a cold, wizened hand on my face.

“I’m not going to be here for much longer, love.” She said sadly.

I shot up. “What do you mean?”

“The Earth remembers what we forget, May, dearest. Long after I am gone, you will still hear my voice. I will still be here with you, in the sinkholes and the cyclones and in everyone who believes in the Earth as I do. I will wake with you in the morning dew and sleep with the sunset and the seagulls. Do not worry.” She kissed my forehead. “Go. Seek your future, and know I can be found where the waves lick the shore.”

I fled the apartment, the silks suddenly suffocating, the warmth of the kitchen stove too hot.

That night, Grandmother died.

…

What she told me that day, I never forgot. I carry her words with me through the world, even if it is nothing more than asphalt and ashes. Nothing left but humanity’s last attempts to stay alive, to hang on to a sickened, failing planet.