Page 11 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

A HOME FOR THE SEEDS*

Rachel Economy

...to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish

refuge...Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.

It matters how kin generate kin.

Donna Haraway

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The floods were coming in and the steam burning through the windows. We gripped our

spades in our teeth and climbed into the mouth of the mountain to build secret homes for

the seeds.

We did not know each other, or we thought we did not.

We had not been born in the same places. We had never spoken words the others

recognized. In the flood, trying to get out of the city, we had found ourselves in a tangle

of unmatched tongues and car tires spinning wretched against the finally wet, so wet, too

wet soil. Cacophony. An unwieldy din.

But there was a language we held common, a thing that drove us madly into the hills

soaking and coughing, our pockets full of sunflowers and fava beans. Call it the

language of fertility. The rhetoric of rot. Of reimagining. Call it insanity. Call it a failure to

bite down and trudge the proper path and save the proper thing. Call it disease or dis-

ease or dissonance or dismantling, all.

Whatever name, we had it. We were, first and foremost, the ones who got out, some

privilege and a dash of chance. And we were also ones who knew that the story of what-

to-do-in-case-of-disaster was a made thing, a stitched thing, an invisible law book,