I was telling my students about the drought that was coming. The floods. Climate change and refugees. Storms. Famines. The droughts and the deaths.
We were at Northern Michigan University. It was a Good Books Class. We were reading Octavia Butler and my students were from the suburbs of Minneapolis, the rural farmlands of Wisconsin, the half-empty mine cities of the Upper Peninsula. They were the sons and daughters of construction workers and nurses. Through the window we could see Lake Superior stretch out like a blue cornfield. My students didn’t believe me. They didn’t think the droughts were coming.
They said the weather is different everyday.
I said there’s a difference between weather and climate.
They said the earth is so big, how is it possible that we could change it, after millions of years? If it’s so powerful, so big, so complicated like you say it is, how could we change it?
I said, It’s science! It’s ppm. Parts per million. I said think of the exhaust running all the time. It’s not any one person. It’s systemic! A system of us.
They said okay well people should be able to figure things out for themselves. Look at us. We have all of the water. Those wildfires. Those droughts you keep talking about. They’re not here. We’re safe.
I said but what about empathy. What about critical thinking being about thinking about more than just ourselves. What moral obligation do we have to the rest of humanity?
They blinked.
They had to get a good grade so they could get a good job and they realized they were now arguing with the person in charge of their grade.
I blinked, too. The building was brutalist architecture. All efficient and normcore. Just the one window.
A student, let’s call him Pinkie, spoke up and said, What about God? God would let all of these people die?
I said—
No, I didn’t say anything yet. I had to be careful, because if I made a wrong move, said something outrageous about their God, I might lose the money I was getting to give them the grades that they needed to get the jobs that would eventually give them their money.
I said, Well, it’s interesting. Some might say, those who’ve read the Old Testament, that God has a long history of challenging people here on earth.
Maybe this is a test? a student said.
Do you believe in God? said another.
I, I’m not sure what to believe. I believe the drought is coming. I believe in the theme of our Good Books course, that of Climate Change, I said.
That’s when the green pocket book came out of nowhere and hit me in the face.
I said, What the fuck was that!
The room was a blur of beige faces. Brown squares in their laps. I heard snickering. I smelled tears. I tasted salt. I rubbed my eyes and I looked again at my classroom.
I said, That was out of line! What kind of self-respecting young adult throws books at their Graduate Instructor?
I said, I’m in charge of your grades, you know!
They gasped in unison.
I felt entitled and I lost myself in myself. I forgot my flesh body there in that space. I was my mind in anger and righteousness.
I said, I’ll tell you what. I don’t believe in your bullshit god or your bullshit heaven. I think it’s all a made-up fucking lie used to oppress poor people. I think you’ve all been fucking conned. Welcome to college now, assholes. Welcome to reality.
At this they were shocked. Mouths open like garbage disposals. I was a champion! But not for long, it turned out. When those holes closed, they flattened into smiles.
That’s when I knew I’d gone too far. What I said could and would be used against me, here in the rural boondocks of Northern Michigan University, here in the northern-middle-west.
My eyes turned back towards the window. That blue cornfield of a lake. The largest in the world by coastal circumference. The water could cover the contiguous United States ten feet deep, and North and South America in two. Both continents, two-feet deep in water like a flood in a basement. Water everywhere. And then not. Everything drying up. Lake Mead gone. Nothing to drink. Nothing to feed the plants. Starvation, death. Water and then not water.
BOOM.
The windows shattered. Glass flew into the faces of the kids. Into their Chromebooks. Into the plain wall.
We screamed and the wind rolled. Everything was one big heap of things and it was all in the air. A whirlwind. A fire. A chariot of fire. A door swung open.
Pinkie said Go, Eli. Go. There’s nothing here for you anymore.
Another said, You have to see what we know.
And so I went.
I worried that I couldn’t sit down on a seat made of fire.
My body being made of flesh.
I went anyways. I was not immune. My leg hairs burned. My back roasted. My ass blistered. I went up in that chariot of fire and entered heaven alive.
As I flew away, the clouds blobbed all around me. Through a break in their crowding, I could see the classroom. There was Pinkie, blood on his face, directing the class as they made a big pile of the glass. He set the little green book atop it, open. The students formed a line and evacuated the building through the window. A rope of bodies like Repunzal’s hair. Little black sneaker shoe and the first toe touched down. My students were alive, and everything was changing.
I put my hand on my chest and felt my clothes.
And then my skin.
And then my heart beat.
The sun was made of gas. The closer I got, the less and less it looked like a circle, and more like lava, puzzling and unpuzzling, strings of red threaded through their orange beams.
Elijah Sparkman is a writer based in Detroit. His writing has appeared in Sleepingfish, X-R-A-Y, and Bending Genres. He is the Program and Volunteer Coordinator for 826michigan, a youth creative writing organization. He is a member-owner of the co-op bookstore Book Suey in Hamtramck, MI. Website: elijahsparkman.com. Instagram: @elijahsparkman20.
Image: reddit.com
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Heavy Feather Review 