Is / Will Be
Climate fiction written during the Speculative Policy Project, a Capstone Project for the Spring 2024 Climatebase Fellowship.
Egret followed the footprints of her peers down the narrow, but well-worn path. The grass on either side nearly dwarfed her, coming up like tall walls of a parted green sea. Today’s classroom was set at the edge of the water, a frequent swimming spot for Egret and her friends. She sniffed the air, her eyes noticing the high swollen clouds with gray sun diffusing through. She picked up on the cool, humid gusts hitting her cheeks and, without much thought, understood the possibility of rain blowing off the sea in the next couple of hours. Her young mind had been practicing this noticing since birth; eleven years of sensing her world in every possible way.
“Hey, Egret, welcome!” The Teacher, Estrella, greeted her in both English and Lushootseed, an indigenous language of the Tacoma, Washington area, which carried thousands of years of meaning.
The day was spent exploring, talking, learning, listening. Egret bent down to gaze closely at the edge of the water, allowing her eyes to unfocus slightly to observe the movement of hundreds of insects flitting about through the eelgrass. Brushing her hands through the stringy plants, she gently disturbed a small crab and watched it skitter a short distance away. Stilling herself so as not to disturb it again, she opened her notebook and began to draw its shape. As she drew, her pen started to wander, imagining the crab as it might have developed from an egg, then, with overlapping lines, sketching forward through the crab’s adult stages.
Suddenly, she heard a shout from down the beach. She turned to see her classmates moving swiftly toward the kid who shouted, most still stepping with practiced care over the living systems beneath their feet.
The kid who shouted pointed to a nook under a large rock. “There’s Trash in there!” The excitement was palpable. The Teacher, Estrella, approached and reached into the edge of the nook, withdrawing a weathered squishy object with a faded pink color.
“What do you think this was?” Estrella asked her group of wide-eyed students. She punctuated the word “was,” and it hung in the air for a moment. In the lives of the students, the word “was” could almost always be heard adjacent to “is” and “will be.” Everything went from cradle to cradle; their understanding was in lifecycles. In their eleventh years of life, they experienced time swirling around them as they bounced in and out of its eddies. This object represented a linearity that felt old, foreign, and uncanny.
Staring at the object, Egret blinked and her class disappeared. Confused, she turned and saw a family running into the water, a woman wearing a pair of the pink shoes. The woman ran back out of the water and noticed that she was missing one of the shoes. Oh, I lost a crock, Egret heard the woman say, disappointed. Squinting, Egret could see a pink dot floating off into the distance.
“That’s right, a shoe. I believe it’s named after an animal.” Estrella’s voice brought Egret back to the present, 2074.
Egret felt unsteady on her feet. What just happened? She struggled to find the words for a question that was building like a crescendo in her mind, and instead heard herself ask, “Is it a crock?”
Estrella looked surprised. “I think it is indeed called a Croc. I’m impressed you knew that, Egret. These were well before your time.”
The group agreed that it felt a bit like the mushroom and kelp-based shoes they were each wearing, but they understood that their own shoes would go from cradle to cradle, eventually breaking down to fertilize the next crop of mushrooms or kelp. This shoe from the past was different. Eventually, the child who found the Trash was given it as a prize to take home for the day, to figure out its next life. Egret, though still preoccupied with her vision during the lull moments of the day, had no trouble distracting herself with her peers and all they were finding at the water’s edge.
Stepping off the school bus in the late afternoon, Egret walked two blocks through tree-lined car-free greenways to her building. Birds sang and twittered overhead as the road noise faded. Inhaling as she stepped down the stone pathways, the scents of plants whose roots had known these soils for thousands of years welcomed her home, grounding her in place while unmooring her in time. The air abruptly changed on her skin, and her world shifted. The buildings were gone.
Startled, she turned back toward the greenway to see it filled in with trees and a blanket of salal plants, sword ferns, and mossy logs, the bike lanes and garden spaces gone. With her heart rate quickening, Egret turned back to where her building normally stood and spotted a faint footpath in its place. She took a step and tripped over a root.
“Are you okay?” The voice of Egret’s younger sister, Evening, came from nearby.
Still on all fours on the ground, Egret looked up to see her building had reappeared, and her sister was looking at her from just down the walkway, concerned.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said with more confidence than she felt. With her right knee and palms smarting from the fall, Egret walked up to Evening and together they took the stairs to their apartment on the second level of the eight-unit building. The building and walkway were cool under the high crowns of trees so large that Egret, Evening, and three other children from the building had to stretch to their fingertips to collectively encircle the largest one.
Egret found the door already unlocked and her father, Jaime, sitting in the light of the garden bay window at the kitchen table. Egret could tell from his nods and intent expression that he was listening to someone on the display in front of him. As she walked in, Jaime said to the display, “Oh, Egret and Evening just got home, want me to put you on the wall?” With a swipe of his finger, he tossed the interface from the display onto the wall next to him, which lit up with the image of Egret’s mother, Maple.
“Hey Egret! Hi Evening!” Maple said, smiling. “I have to go in a minute, but I’m so happy to see you! I miss you both.”
Forgetting her injuries, Egret rushed to the table with Evening, delighted to see her mom. “We miss you too, Mom,” Egret said, while Evening asked, “How much longer will you be up at X̌aX̌čuʔ Lake Union?” Reflecting common practice, she shared its name in both English and Lushootseed.
Though X̌aX̌čuʔ Lake Union in Seattle was just under 40 miles from their home in Tacoma, Maple had been stationed there for two weeks supporting the final steps of Seattle’s largest restoration and reparations project in the history of the city. In just three days, the small lake would be separated from the larger X̌ačʔu Lake Washington; for the first time in over 150 years, the water level in the larger lake would begin to rise. While not predicted to attain the full nine feet of depth it had lost when the shipping channel had been excavated, the three to four feet of rise would yield enormous benefits to the salmon populations over the next hundred years, continuing to restore balance to the ecosystem.
“Just a couple more days. Why don’t I pick each of you up from school on Thursday?” Maple said, drawing up a calendar that displayed for Egret on the wall, overlaying the bottom left corner of the screen. Maple pointed to the date two days into the future, the end of the standard four-day work week.
Egret and Evening grinned and hugged each other. “Yeah,” they chorused simply. “Thursday.”
Maple sighed after her phone screen went black. Gazing out at the eastern skyline over the larger lake, she could not deny the awe that seeped into the sad nostalgia she sometimes felt; ever-growing skyscrapers now obscured what used to be distinctive views of snow-capped peaks. Only the top of the region’s iconic Takhoma volcano now peeked over buildings that glinted through patches of green vegetated walls. The mountain’s resilience had always been a beacon of hope for Maple, and she sent another prayer of gratitude and strength to the stubborn glaciers persisting through each summer’s heat wave. Hang in there, she thought. We are going to save you.
She held out her hand and the buzzing propellers of the phone case in its drone mode descended delicately onto her palm, then folded neatly back into the round body of the case. She tucked it into a deep pocket of her jumpsuit and turned from the lake’s edge to head back to her work site.
The area was healing. In the past twenty years, reparations and concerted land back efforts to present generations of the ancient Duwamish peoples had seen the reestablishment of their villages around the lake. The beauty and health of the area had increased with each restoration. Elk, banished to the Cascade foothills for the past hundred years, had even been spotted on the lake’s quieting shores, strolling through rewilding neighborhoods as children paused their play to gape at the tall creatures. This project represented a continuation of the reparations efforts: reparations to the salmon, the lake, and the rivers that had been impacted by the hubris of the 20th century. The Rights of Bioregions Act of 2037 was slowly being implemented: a gradual healing prayer disguised in legal jargon.
This project felt like the culmination of a career spent rebuilding a past that well predated Maple’s own existence. She could not entirely put into words the conviction and thrill she felt about her work, but her words were fortunately not needed in this project. There were others leading the way: elders and children together, ancestors of the land’s original inhabitants, and other groups for whom these restoration efforts were a form of justice. Maple had been managing the project (she thought of it as facilitating) for five of the ten years since it began.
At the work site, Maple found Cam, the project’s co-manager, speaking with a pair of people she did not recognize. Cam looked a little strained, their normally calm demeanor altered with shifting eyes and waving hands. The people with whom Cam was speaking looked further stressed — tight faces and stiff arms indicating tenuously held decorum.
“You’re saying we have three days,” one of the people said flatly.
Cam, noticing Maple’s arrival, looked relieved. “Would you give us one moment?” Cam asked the people. A stiff nod was barely given when Cam stepped around the pair and whisked Maple to the side.
“I thought we talked to everyone,” Cam muttered to Maple.
“We did talk to everyone. Who are those people?”
“They’re saying that their block isn’t listed in the flood zone, but an independent surveyor found that it’s actually in the three foot sweep.”
Maple swore quietly, casting a glance over her shoulder at the objectors. They appeared to be a middle-aged couple, both feminine with graying hair and nice clothes of likely-imported natural fibers. She had no qualms with them raising their concern, but her cortisol levels were certainly rising thinking about how this could complicate the events planned for Friday, the historic action of finally resealing the passage between the two lakes.
“Well we’ll have to verify the findings from the surveyor. When was the house built? Could we offer to have it moved or elevated? We still have funds to pull from the loss and damages budget.”
Cam shook their head. “They’re living in a house from the late 2020s, and apparently the other homes on the block are plus or minus about seven years, so deconstruction for transport is largely off the table. Maybe elevation, we can check. We’re talking about ten multigen families spread across six buildings. But that doesn’t even seem to be the biggest pain point.”
“Okay… what then?”
“There is a tree in their yard that is special to them. She says,” Cam gestured to one of the women in the couple, “she has a mother and daughter who were recomposed into the soil of that tree. If the tree dies, it would be devastating to them.”
Maple looked again at the couple and made eye contact with the woman Cam had identified. Behind a veil of elegance and the faint patterns of face tattoos on her dark skin, Maple could see clues to the woman’s loss and grief.
Cam’s shoulders, at Maple’s eye level, hunched forward. She looked higher to see a defeated expression on her coworker’s face. Maple held up her hands toward Cam and Cam responsively pressed theirs against hers. The two coworkers interlocked fingers. They had worked on this project together since its inception.
“We’re just so close,” Cam muttered, looking away again. “Everyone is on our side with this. I thought.”
“There are no sides, Cam,” Maple reminded. “We are working in service of our communities, our bioregion. Our past, present, and future. We’ve figured out everything else so far. I’ll go talk to them and see if we can collectively come up with some next steps.”
Egret and Evening were out in the garden after spending the long afternoon hours playing and tending to the plants while Jaime prepared dinner. Now they rested, fingers interlaced as they lay side-by-side in a low hammock, just off the ground.
“I wish I could find some Trash,” Evening said wistfully upon hearing about the Croc. “I’ve never found any.”
“Trash is bad, Eve. It’s good that there’s not a lot of it around anymore,” Egret reminded her younger sister. “There used to be tons and tons of it. I think there’s a reason we cleaned it all up.”
“What do you think happened to all of it?”
Egret thought for a moment, brow furrowed. “We found all of it already?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t just disappear, silly,” Eve laughed. “Everything is, was, and will be.” She sang the song taught to nearly every kindergartner America:
Is, was, will be.
Let’s take care of you and me.
Is, was, will be.
Love the earth and sky and sea.
For nothing truly goes away.
Stories go beyond today.
And those who are not here still say:
Is, was, will be.
Let’s take care of you and me.
“I know that,” Egret responded with light annoyance. Evening had just been taught the adage in class and, like most six-year-olds, would not stop repeating it every chance she got.
“I think something weird happened to me today,” Egret heard the words come out of her mouth without thinking. She had not yet told anyone about the world shifting during her walk home, of seeing the family at the beach, but the story tumbled out while she stared at the tree canopy high above her. When she finished, Evening was silent, and Egret realized she was now gripping her sister’s hand tightly.
“That’s weird, E,” Evening said. “Did you tell Dad?”
As if summoned, Jaime popped his head out from the door just up the stairs. “Bueno, niñas, la cena está lista. Remember, we’re eating with Señora Raquel tonight. Can you help me bring the food downstairs?”
Señora Raquel was a quiet older woman who lived alone in a downstairs apartment, but seemed to like their family and the company. That was, after all, a primary benefit of the county’s mixed-income and multi-generational housing. Raquel was a climate refugee who, along with hundreds of others, had found asylum in the Seattle area when the region had been declared a climate sanctuary in 2060. Tonight, Raquel seemed tired, with a soft smile affixed to her face. Jaime asked if she had been Healing at the refugee center all day and she gave a small nod before her eyes drifted into a corner of the room. She was a member of the Healer’s Guild and often filled in as doula and Healer at the refugee center that she had come through herself.
The dinner conversation was mostly about Maple’s restoration project — Jaime doing his best to explain to his daughters the status of the project, and the three of them sharing everything they could with Raquel, who nodded silently and continued gazing off. The family almost missed when she spoke.
“Are you moving in time?”
Everyone paused and looked at their neighbor, her soft curves pushed forward as she leaned in, eyes locked on Egret.
“Ohhhh! That’s what happened to you!” Evening shouted gleefully.
“You are moving in time,” Raquel said, this time with certainty.
“What happened?” Jaime asked. His expression held concern.
“Egret was in a different time today!” Evening shouted excitedly. “Two times!”
“Evening, stop, I don’t know what those were!” Egret shouted back. But she did. A montage of her increasing unmooring over the past days and weeks ran through her mind. The is, was, and will be of everything swirling in her cells.
“Okay, okay, niñas, calmense,” Jaime gestured with his hands for his daughters to lower their voices.
Raquel sat back. “Lo siento,” she said, then looked at Egret. “Many of us who Heal get pulled from time to time.” Egret’s eyes widened with surprise. “Tell your family, and then maybe you can tell me.” Turning her attention to Jaime, she added, “This kelp salad is excellent, by the way. Gracias, Jaime.”
Later that evening, Egret put her covers over her face and cried as she told her dad everything that had been happening. Egret, Evening, and Jaime were together in Jaime and Maple’s bed, the two girls taking up Maple’s spot. She told her dad about the Croc, and their building disappearing in the woods. Evening stroked Egret’s dark hair and Jaime rubbed her back and asked what about it was making her cry. This paused her crying for a moment.
“I — I don’t know. It’s scary. I think.” Egret snuffled. The tears came again as she shared, “Today I didn’t know how to get back.”
“That does sound scary,” Jaime said, troubled. He paused, thinking. “You have grown up so much more in la circularidad de todas las cosas, the circularity of all things, and you have grown up in this place. Time is different for you.” He trailed off, lost himself in thinking about how to protect his daughter. After a time, Egret’s sniffs softened and turned into deeper breathing. Eve had already nodded off, her hand still on Egret’s hair. Jaime turned off the light, but sat awake for a while longer.
On Wednesday, Egret found herself pulled through time in several different moments, though none quite as scary as when she felt lost in the forest the day before. This time, Evening accompanied her to and from school, the normally goofy six-year-old oddly somber as she held her older sister’s hand and watched her intently throughout their walks. When Egret and Evening arrived home, Raquel was sitting at their kitchen table while Jaime paced. A cup of tea in front of Raquel had long since cooled.
“Egret,” Jaime motioned with a hand for her to sit at the table. Egret dropped her bag and sat nervously.
“Can I go play with the cousins?” Evening asked. She was nearly out the door by the time Jaime said, “Be back before sundown!” The family was fortunate to have many relatives in the neighborhood, and it was easy for the six-year-old to travel there on her own.
At the kitchen table, Raquel looked kindly at Egret and offered a hand, which Egret took. She quickly felt soothed by the older woman’s warmth and gentle strength.
“Mom needs to be onsite for a Healing Circle tomorrow and can’t come home as soon as she would like,” Jaime began explaining. Seeing Egret’s crushed expression, he quickly went on, “There is a neighborhood block that will be in the flood zone that the planning committee missed. Your mom is pretty upset about it, as I’m sure you can imagine. This project has been her bab — ,” he caught himself as his eyes met Egret’s. “She’s been coordinating this for years, as you know.”
“So she’s not coming home? When is she coming home?” Egret asked.
“I’m not exactly sure… she might need to stay out an extra night. But she’s coordinating this Healing Circle tomorrow in the neighborhood. Apparently there is an important tree where some members of a family are recomposed. You know what that means, right?” Egret nodded. “So your mom called in the Healer’s Guild and suggested that Raquel take you to be part of the Healing Circle. It might be a little… intense. But we thought this might be a good experience for you. What do you think?”
Raquel smiled at her. “I would love if you would join me.”
Egret nodded slowly. Healing Circles were serious undertakings in the Seattle area. She had never been invited to one before.
“And we can talk about your time travel,” Raquel added.
“Thank you, Raquel,” Jaime said, words full of gratitude. “So Egret, if it’s okay with you, we’ll message you out of school tomorrow and you can go with Raquel to the Circle. And Mom will meet you there.” At this, Egret brightened. She missed her mom.
Egret rose early the next day after tossing and turning for several hours. She walked quietly into the kitchen and spent nearly an hour watching the display, projecting three-dimensional videos of Healing Circles onto the center of the kitchen table. Evening padded out of the bedroom early as well, wiping sleep from her round face. Egret switched the display to three-dimensional cartoons and the sisters sat, leaning together on the kitchen bench. Evening pouted when she learned that Egret was getting to skip school to attend the Healing Circle (“I want to see Mom too,” she protested) but was quickly assuaged when Egret told her it looked really slow and boring, based on the videos she had watched earlier. Besides, Mom would probably be home tomorrow.
It was still early in the morning when it was time to go. It would be a long commute to the neighborhood. Egret grabbed her backpack and went downstairs to meet Raquel.
They first took two public buses to the edge of the neighborhood and could have switched to the autonomous microtransit carrier, but Raquel suggested they walk. “About a mile,” she said. “If we want to help this neighborhood heal and understand its loss, we need to know how it feels.”
“How it feels… and what we are losing, I guess, right?” Egret asked. Raquel nodded.
They began walking down a verdant block lined by tall, multi-unit dwellings. The noise of the main road quickly fell away. Most impacted areas had already been addressed, with homes moved or elevated and areas restored in preparation for flooding.
“Raquel, are we healing the family’s tree?” Egret asked as they walked.
“No, we are not healing the tree. The tree is going to be flooded. It will likely die,” Raquel responded neutrally. “Though often we can take a piece of it to live on in a new place.”
Egret considered this for a moment. “So why are we doing a Healing Circle?”
Raquel spoke slowly, taking her time with each word. “We are healing the family and helping them through their grief. They are losing, but we are also all collectively gaining. Their loved ones have nourished the tree and will in turn nourish the ecosystem to come. The tree will continue to provide life for the salmon and many beings in the new-old lake. As we heal, we move into the will be.”
The Healing Circle was already in progress. They started to hear a murmur of voices, just down the hill and around the corner. Beginning to descend the slope, Egret stepped and felt her foot plunge into ankle deep water. She looked down to find that she had stepped into a creek she could have sworn hadn’t been there a moment ago. She looked up to find herself alone. The houses were gone, replaced with birch trees and tall grassy shrubs. Raquel was gone.
A flash of silver in the creek caught her eye; the fin of a salmon wriggling downstream, over rocks and through eddies. Without wondering why, Egret turned and began following the salmon. The salmon knew where to go.
Maple’s eyes were closed as she kneeled next to Cam and the couple beside their tree. Sixteen members of the Healer’s Guild had joined with the forty three people who lived on the block. Maple felt more broken than she could have imagined. All others in the flood zone had been granted two years, in addition to heavy loss and damage subsidies and robust relocation services, to find other housing or make flood-proof modifications. She was not sure how this particular block had been missed. The families here would likely have about two months before the water levels crept up and into the homes. Enough time to move, but not enough time to say goodbye, she thought. Extensive community work had ensured that communities impacted by this project resoundingly supported it. Even the families on this street professed to supporting the project. People knew the salmon needed this effort, which in turn meant that the land needed this and the people of the land and sea needed this. This was another important step in the broader fight to restore the Cascade snowpack that this area needed to survive.
This restoration effort, to Maple, was change. Now she was experiencing it as loss. Here, with this couple and their tree, she suddenly felt like she was experiencing all of it — just one day before her team would seal off the lake for good. Her daughter’s impending arrival was gone from her mind as she bent her face into the roots of the tree and allowed her tears to drip into the earth. She felt the hands of Cam and a Healer gently rest on her back as she cried. The Guild was composed of Healers representing a diverse assortment of cultures and practices, from scientific to spiritual. They shared some common methods, but allowed each Healer to bring unique skills to each situation. Together, their goal was to facilitate loss and grief — and hopefully find healing on the other side.
She felt a tug on her arm. Her puffy eyes opened and found Raquel kneeling beside her, with undeniable fear on her face. Maple was up in a single motion, guiding the older woman off to the side.
“What happened? Where is my daughter?” Maple demanded.
“I think she is being called by the salmon,” Raquel stumbled through her words. “She was with me and then she was gone.”
“Raquel, I don’t know what that means,” Maple said, trying to keep her voice from rising.
Cam was beside her. “Where should we look?” they asked.
Raquel closed her eyes for a moment and inhaled through her nose. “It was just minutes ago. I believe she is heading into the water,” she answered.
Maple turned and began sprinting down the street, three blocks to the present day edge of X̌ačʔu Lake Washington.
Egret was on the edge of X̌ačʔu Lake Washington. She watched as her salmon struggled through one last shallow spot in the creek’s delta and found its way into the lake. The only sounds were the soft rush of the creek and the splashing of — she quickly realized — hundreds of other salmon gathered at the base of the delta. Egret felt delighted to see the fish, and so many of them, in a place where they had not been for so many years. Welcome back, she wanted to say.
She stepped out on a log that formed a narrow peninsula into the school of frolicking fish. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a dark shadow just before it struck: an enormous eagle descending to grab a fish so close to her that she recoiled, stepping back — off the log, and into water roiling with salmon. She reached back up to grab the log, but couldn’t find it. Gasping for air amongst the fish, Egret found herself admiring their gills. She dropped beneath the surface of the lake.
When she felt something grab her arms, Egret thought of the eagle. Then she sank into darkness.
Maple pulled her daughter up on the shore and began resuscitation efforts. Rapidly, she was joined by Cam and replaced by members of the Healer’s Guild who descended upon Egret with everything in their power. Not a single member of the Guild was surprised when the small girl suddenly began coughing and gasping for air. This was not their first time returning people from the edge.
As Egret continued finding her breath, Maple knelt over her daughter, between the Healers, kissing her daughter’s hands and pressing them to her face. Finally, she heard her daughter say, “The salmon came back.”
“The salmon came back?” Maple responded, laying an ear on her daughter’s stomach and rejoicing in the rise and fall of her chest, the beating of her heart.
“Yes, Mom. The water came back and the salmon came back. Will we come back, too?”
Maple turned her head to gaze across the water to the far shore where the work was already in motion to restore the lake. Her daughter’s words brought solace that transcended space and meaning. Maple could feel relief coursing through her veins, releasing every muscle, exhaling from every pore.
This restoration effort would work. The water would remember. The salmon would remember. Evidently, her daughter would remember, too.
