Chapter One

Chapter One


Fatama, Alabama, June 2044

Working on fence posts was my grandfather's work, my father's work for some time, until the winds and sand came in from the coast, and the sky opened up a wound over southern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, a blinding eye swirling, burning until everything in the Deep South became too dry. No crops would take, and then my father became a clay miner who told me, "Clay rocks are good for nothing but the money. And there's not much of that, Mathew, except for the government, what they're willing to give to keep us here." But money or no money, my father would have stayed and died just as he did.

When I think of him, I see him standing, the stance of an old dancer, his chubby hands positioned as if ready to go into step—one, two, swirl and swirl. My Uncle Wayne called him a graceful pig because my father was not so tall, though he learned the routines perfect. When I think of him, he spins me across a field he's talked about—green with a ceiling of blue and thick-shouldered clouds I've never known. All I've held is this desert Alabama wasteland. My father takes me round and round, lets me go, lets me fly.

Working on fence posts was my grandfather's work. He put up fences for anybody in Coffee County and counties around. "Ten dollars for every six feet of post," my father told me, some still hanging on, the barbed wire torn and twisted on itself, snapping in the wind like lion tamer whips that come howling. It was my father's work, my uncle's work for some time.

But then the earth turned crazy, and the ozone opened up like a wound, giving the sun permission to burn off every field, d