Fiction River: How to Save the World

by Fiction River

  With both of them working, they finished in time for a late lunch. Paula took a shower first, and by the time she went to the kitchen to forage, Abuelo was fiddling with one of his baskets, out in his chair in deference to decency.

  “Workroom is yours again, ‘Buelo.”

  He nodded and hauled his things back to the other room. Paula found leftover beans, squash, cheese, and tortillas, and rolled up a couple of quick burritos. She made herself sit to eat them, since indigestion later wouldn’t help anything, then headed back to see what Abuelo was doing.

  Hunched over a half-finished basket, he was fiddling with wood and glue. Paula peered over his shoulder and saw he was fitting a deck into the bottom of the basket.

  “Air space,” said Abuelo. “A sealed chamber for air would give it the buoyancy it needs.”

  “Yes, but...” She frowned and tried to think of how it would scale up.

  “Aye, but. You’re right—I could make it airtight on a model, but never on something full size. A factory could do it, but it would be too expensive for the size we need.”

  Air space. Buoyancy. Soil density.

  It was a good idea, but didn’t have to be all in one chamber. Maybe small balloons?

  Or not even balloons. They didn’t need actual air pockets; pockets of lower density, greater than air but significantly less than water—that would do.

  Paula remembered José’s project, adding amendments to the soil to lighten it. That was exactly what they needed. But it didn’t have to be anything fancy or special-made; anything light, non-toxic, breakable into small bits, and not easily crushed in the soil—even when wet—would work.

  “Junk—I need to look through your junk!” Paula dashed out of the room, heading for the junk heap behind the house.

  Abuelo always had a junk heap—piles of stuff he saved for some day when it might come in handy. Leftovers, scraps, things he collected, things that were broken, all sorts of things lived in a good junk heap. A mature junk heap could produce parts for a water pump or a wheelbarrow or a sink or a computer. What she needed was simpler than that.

  Paula dug through it, tossing things right and left, digging through the refuse, looking for something she just knew Abuelo had to have....

  “If you told me what you needed—”

  “Aye! Here!” Paula pulled up a chunk of dirty white Styrofoam. It looked like it’d come packed in a box, as protection for whatever had been shipped in it. Once you unpacked your new whatever, the Styrofoam was useless; there was tons of it in junk heaps all over the world, and considering how light the stuff was, that was a lot.

  “Packing foam?” Abuelo frowned, then nodded. “We could put a layer of the stuff on the bottom of the basket. That might work.”

  Paula took her chunk of foam and dashed past him, toward the garden. “Better!” she called. She grabbed a bucket and knelt in the dirt, scooping soil up with a trowel, filling the bucket about two-thirds. “The basket, one of your finished baskets! We’re going to float a plant!”

  Abuelo grunted but headed inside. By the time he got back with a basket, she had the Styrofoam chopped into nut-sized chunks. “It should be smaller,” she said. “We’ll have to think of a way to get it smaller, about the size of lemon seeds, or even a bit smaller than that. But this will work for now.”

  She mixed the foam bits into the soil, using the trowel like a spatula, folding the bits into the soil like nuts into cake batter.

  A layer of the foam-studded soil went into the basket, about three fingers deep, then she carefully transplanted a young comino, filling the space around it with more foam-dotted soil.

  “There. Shall we launch it?” She beamed up at her abuelo, and got a lined smile in return.

  “Aye, let’s try it. To the lake.”

  They went down to the lakeshore, a quiet arm of a larger body that bordered his land. Ridges and markings in the soil, rock, and foliage showed where the lake had risen in the recent past. It was also probably higher than usual because of the previous night’s rain. It was quiet now, but when it stormed, the little lake could turn into a monster, devouring land and anything else in its path.

  If Paula had accounted for all the variables, it would never devour this tiny “field.”

  Crouching on the lakeshore, she set the small basket into the water. She held it for a few moments, testing its buoyancy, waiting to see whether the water soaking in would change anything. It shouldn’t, but “shouldn’t” wasn’t always so; that was what experimentation was for.

  “Well, let it go. Let’s see what it does.”

  Paula nodded and released the basket. She stood up to watch.

  It floated.

  The basket itself, the willow or whatever Abuelo had used for this one, was darkening as it absorbed water. The soil was surely absorbing water as well. It shouldn’t matter, though; the soil was light and loose, and the foam bits should take the average density down well below that of the water, even after water seeped in wherever it could.

  They watched it for a few minutes, then Abuelo said, “It would be easier to just put a chunk of Styrofoam in the bottom.”

  “Easier, yes,” said Paula. “But it’s more stable with the buoyancy spread over the entire soil depth. It would be more likely to flip with all the foam at the bottom.”

  Abuelo grunted assent.

  They watched for a while longer, then he said, “Mixing small pellets of foam into the soil also gives the soil more depth, for the roots. It doesn’t matter with maize, a few others, but some plants want to send their roots deeper. Mixing the foam in lets us get deeper soil without having to weave a deeper basket.”

  “Another good point,” Paula said.

  Still, weaving a basket the size of a field? Even a small one? The chinampas weren’t exactly forty acres, but still…

  “How were you planning to weave a field-size basket, once you were done with your models?”

  “I thought I would weave the basket on land, then launch it like a boat. Fill it with soil once it was in the water.” He frowned down at the little basket, still floating. “Our ancestors dredged dirt off the bottom of the lake. Very rich and fertile, but also heavy, and difficult to bring up. More difficult than just shoveling in dry dirt.”

  “Maybe use dirt from landslides to begin? Dirt will probably sift slowly out of the basket—you’ll have to top up each year anyway, yes? Use lake dirt for that.”

  “Could work,” said Abuelo.

  “It looks like it’s soaked through,” said Paula. “It’s still floating.” She couldn’t stop smiling, and although her abuelo was not a demonstrative man, she gave him a big hug and a kiss on the cheek anyway. “This is it, the principle works. If it scales up, if the farmers can do it, if it’s cheap enough? I think we have an answer.”

  “Not immediately, even if it works. This is a long-term answer.”

  “Large problems always have large answers. You taught me that.”

  “I’m glad you were listening.” He gave a grunt that was as close as she’d ever heard to a laugh out of him. “So, the work gets harder, yes? Now we have to build one full size.”

  ***

  Paula came back the next five weekends. On the first weekend, she found that Abuelo had built a frame out of reclaimed beams. They spent two days trying to weave willow wands among the beams, but it didn’t work well, even with adding more support structure. And there weren’t enough willow trees in the area anyway.

  The second weekend she brought José and his girlfriend Martina, who was an anthropology major. Martina seemed to be more excited than any of them, even when Paula hauled five rolls of bright orange plastic from the trunk of her car.

  “Strong, light, and cheap!” she declared to Abuelo. He grunted, and they wove with the plastic. After the first hour, they gave up on trying to keep it flat, and just let it crinkle up however it wanted. By Sunday afternoon, they had an ugly, orange basket, twelve meters wide by fifty meters long and three meters deep.

>   After that, they spent their weekends filling it. On the third weekend they launched the basket. It didn’t float very well by itself, but they pushed on and Paula, Martina and José dumped dirt into it bucket by bucket, while Abuelo chopped up the Styrofoam he’d scrounged during the week. The basket sank to the bottom by mid-afternoon; luckily the water was shallow and the top half stuck up into the air, making it look like a tiny, fenced-off swimming area.

  The fourth week they had plenty of Styrofoam bits, and all four of them mixed and hauled and heaved dirt. By mid-afternoon Sunday, even Martina was less enthusiastic, but just before they quit for the evening, Abuelo stared at the basket, then gave it a shove. “It’s floating,” he said.

  And he was right.

  The fifth week Paula’s department head, Profesor Nuñez, came along. He gaped at the basket, the size of a home vegetable garden, floating serenely in the lake.

  “It rained on Wednesday,” said Abuelo. “Very hard. I had to swim out with a rope long enough to go around the whole thing, then tow it back to shore with my truck. But it’s still floating.”

  Profesor Nuñez stared at him for a moment, then back at the basket, the chinampa, then nodded. “How long did it take you to make it?”

  Paula had already told him, but she let Abuelo repeat it. While she and Abuelo and the two students got to work hauling dirt, Profesor Nuñez got out his phone. He took video and sent it around, with excited messages Paula didn’t hear clearly because she was working. But the next day, Profesor Nuñez came back with the Minister of Agriculture and the smiling, blond Tufflon spokesman in his expensive, casual suit. He took a video of his own, smiling even wider.

  “They’ll come out with special ‘extra buoyant’ plastic and raise the price, you just watch,” muttered José.

  “We had rolls of plastic before they came,” Abuelo said with a shrug. “We’ll use the old stuff again if theirs gets too expensive.

  Paula nodded and filled another bucket. She had no doubt that someone would market special Styrofoam pellets, too. Some people would probably use them, but the thrifty farmers would get theirs from trash barrels and junk heaps, chop it up themselves, and have it for free. Poor people were fiercely practical that way.

  They finished filling the chinampa, leaving about half a meter empty to form a barrier against the lake. It wasn’t watertight, but it would prevent rough waves from rolling across the crops during storms.

  Paula came alone the next weekend. Abuelo already had the whole chinampa planted—she recognized the scattered sprouts as maize—and a group of farmers come by to stare at it. Older people, mostly, Abuelo’s friends. They were all talking, arguing, gesturing.

  One silver-haired woman was trying to figure out how to build them on dry land to protect against flooding, but not need a lake to float on. That was an interesting problem too—keeping roots from anchoring the thing to the soil it sat on would be the key issue, Paula thought.

  They’d go away still talking, and the chinampas would spread. Not next week or next month or even next year, but more and more there’d be crops that lasted through the storms and floods.

  She wondered what the people in countries where farming was huge and industrialized would do. She and Abuelo had talked of that, and she still couldn’t see someone used to driving a combine around thousands of acres, with radio and air conditioning, building a chinampa.

  That wasn’t their worry, however. The small farmers in the poor countries would grow more and prosper, and their people would eat.

  Introduction to “The Shape of a Name”

  Annie Reed is an award-winning writer of mysteries, science fiction, and fantasy. Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds. Annie loves writing near-future, character-driven science fiction, and she’s thrilled to be a part of Fiction River: How to Save the World.

  Well, after a biography like that—particularly with such a wonderful mention of this anthology, what more needs to be said? Plenty, actually. Annie’s story illustrates the plight of a huge swath of women in the Middle East who are suffering what her heroine goes through on a daily basis. And yes, there are non-governmental organizations to help them, but they are often underfunded and ill equipped, necessitating bootstrap measures just to exist in a harsh land where a significant portion of the population doesn’t even want them there.

  Annie wrote about this story: “A friend of mine works for an NGO that frequently sends her to the war-torn areas of the Middle East. People in her profession burn out fast, and especially when you work with children, it’s easy to focus on the overwhelming number you couldn’t help instead of the few you did. Saving the world is a big job, but what if it starts with the one orphaned child you did help? That’s the story I wanted to tell—the story of this one child’s life.”

  And she does so brilliantly, as you’re about to discover.

  The Shape of a Name

  Annie Reed

  2007

  Anoosheh never knew why the woman chose her.

  The woman was beautiful and smelled clean like soap. One day she came to the tent where Anoosheh lived with the rest of the orphans who had lost arms or feet or legs. She wore strange clothes, and her hijab only covered part of her hair. No one in the refugee camp had hair the color of the setting sun like this woman did, and Anoosheh couldn’t stop looking at it. Her own hair was dull and brown and dirty.

  The woman spoke to all the children in the tent in a language Anoosheh didn’t understand. When she came to the blanket where Anoosheh sat, the nurse told her Anoosheh’s name. The woman sat down on the blanket next to Anoosheh and said something to her.

  “She says your name means ‘lucky,’ and she asks if you know that,” the nurse said.

  Was she lucky? Outside her tent, men and women and older boys who still had their legs crowded around one of the trucks that brought supplies to the camp from Kabul. They pushed and shoved each other, trying to get food to feed themselves and their families. Those who didn’t get a bag fought with the ones who did, grabbing the heavy bags from those too weak to protect what they had been given. Anoosheh had no parents, but men from the trucks always brought a bag of rice to the nurse along with new bandages, and another man stood guard over the tent so no one could take the children’s food. She had never thought of herself as lucky, but she ate every day and had a blanket to sleep on at night, and the guard always crushed the scorpions he found in the tent under the heel of his boot, so maybe that meant her name was true.

  When Anoosheh nodded, the woman smiled at her. Anoosheh started to smile back, but when the woman glanced at the bandage-covered stump where Anoosheh’s hand used to be, the little girl blushed with shame and tried to hide her arm beneath the blanket.

  She was older than her friend Hasti, who had lost both her arms when she tried to pick up a shiny toy in the street. Hasti still laughed and smiled when someone fed her or told her stories, or even when someone looked at the ragged stumps where her arms had been. Anoosheh couldn’t smile like Hasti when people looked at her arm with its missing hand. She always wondered if people thought she was a thief. Anoosheh never stole, not even after her father left home to find work and didn’t come back, and her family went hungry because her mother had to stay home to care for her new baby sister. Anoosheh had never tried to pick up a shiny toy in the street, but her hand was still gone.

  She felt it sometimes, and she missed it always. It had been the hand she’d used to hold things and to write her name. Her mother had taught Anoosheh to write her name. You must be able to tell people who you are, her mother said. Your name is all people have to remember you by after you are gone.

  Anoosheh had taught herself to write her mother’s name. Setara, not Madar Anoosheh, as Anoosheh’s father had called her mother. The shape of her mother’s name was beautiful. After she lost her hand, Anoosheh had practiced writing with her other hand, but the words always came out ugly.

  “The nurse tel
ls me you can write your name,” the woman with hair the color of the sunset said. “Can you show me?”

  The nurse told Anoosheh what the woman said, nodding at Anoosheh to let her know it was all right to do what the woman asked.

  Anoosheh leaned forward and smoothed a spot on the dusty ground next to the blanket. Using a finger, she wrote her name and then her mother’s in the dirt.

  The words were still ugly. Anoosheh wanted her mother’s name to be as beautiful as her mother had been, before the angry men beat her because her ankles were uncovered.

  The woman leaned forward and smoothed the dirt, then wrote another word with her finger next to the ones Anoosheh had written. “Do you know this word?” she asked, speaking words that Anoosheh could understand.

  Anoosheh had seen that word on a building in the city before her mother took Anoosheh and her baby sister and left their house to find a better place to live. Children had gone inside that building every day. Anoosheh had asked if she could go, but her mother always said Anoosheh wasn’t old enough.

  “School,” Anoosheh said.

  The woman didn’t smile this time. Instead she asked Anoosheh, “How old are you?”

  “Six,” Anoosheh said.

  The woman looked at the nurse and said something in the language Anoosheh didn’t understand. Both women looked back at Anoosheh, and she felt her cheeks burn under the intensity of their stares.

  When the woman left camp that afternoon, she took Anoosheh with her.

  Anoosheh only had time to say a brief goodbye to Hasti. Anoosheh helped the nurse feed Hasti sometimes, and she always told Hasti the same stories Anoosheh’s mother had told her.

  Hasti didn’t want Anoosheh to go, she wanted another story, but Anoosheh had to say no, she didn’t have time. The supply truck would be leaving soon, and Anoosheh and the sunset-haired woman would be on it when it left. No one had asked Anoosheh if she wanted to go, and she didn’t want to leave Hasti behind.