Excerpt: Earthrise Stories

If writing is protest, then writing hope is a powerful, reverberating protest amidst the din of doomsday prophesying that we have come to expect. The stories in this book function on the grand stage that is Time itself: past-present-future, looping, stretching, compressing, endless, infinite, yet finite in every living moment. The poetic tone is deeply meditative, turning inwards to access sources of hope as well as excavate what lies beneath, what holds the secrets to resilience and resurgence, to restoration and revival.

After the End

I dream the deluge. Then drought. Then the deluge swells again in my dream, licking its furthest fluttering edges, it laps at its last refuge that curves back into creation. But this only I and the seers see. I dream death. I scent it all around. Silent stars open in my heart signalling it is again time.

A wind begins to blow at random; it forgets which way to blow. I speak to it in my rock voice. I speak to the rock in my human voice. I try other tongues Don’t fear me. I come for the dead. Not the living. None understand. I shudder. Pack my third eye and fourth into the knapsack for these days there’s no need to search. Instinct leads me. I prepare myself for a trance of feeding, for course after course of gorging. I’m never satiated though there is more to feed on: more tsunamis and mining accidents, avalanches, building collapses, fires, crashes, storms, species–crossing viruses, earthquakes. The list is endless. 

I appear in every age, and in every second. I appear in my multitudes after each war, after each disaster, every extinction event in all my fearsome glory to dance, to trance, to fall on bended knees and give thanks to life for the feast. I appear in the quieter moments too. I present myself as the last mourner and the first feeder in the homes of the lonely who die alone in their flats, I’m the first to stroke corpse- creatures in woods and underwater, on spaceships too. No single death is too small for me to visit, be it ant or krill. I seek the dead and the dying; I swarm amidst them, reeking. People fear me more than death. They think I create an end more terrifying than the end. 

Here I see a deluge of carcasses of every type fresh as the birth of thought, of tree, bee, elk and aardvark, rhino, human, snake and shark.  I see a trellised tangle of blood, bone, leaf litter, limbs tails, hair, feelers, sacs and scales that glisten wet and dry. 

I am the slayer of the slain. I flap my robes to release my innards, let loose the clean-up corps that spread in pulsing twitching ripples away from me towards the horizon in all directions — back and front, east and west, above and below. Writhing forms flow from me like frothing lava, I am the emptying epicentre of my hungry beloveds, my carrion eaters that puff and pull bodies apart, making for collapse. 

The process is scientific, elegant, with one group following the other, working hard for themselves and those who follow. They are responsible, each one abiding by high principles. Neither waste nor noxious residue is the motto of my brood. Each one is a saint, small and shunned.

AI weeders and AI feeders are the leaders of this army whose tiny tactile rhodium arms scurry to separate the inorganic from organic matter. My precious load of PreyOn (sx, sy), trashBots SamurAI and a galaxy of others wired into my synapses begin the job of breaking down the manmade stuff from plastic to radioactive waste. These are the newbies, a trifle amateur, adolescent in their outlook, attacking with more gusto than finesse. But in their defence, I state that each year they encounter new products, more thoughtlessly made, harder to dissolve, consume and convert. But they are the loyal and kind — like the white corpuscles in your blood confronting an enemy, a new virus that they can’t as yet recognise.

Then come the older ones, honed by time and nature’s gracious hand. They know their task, the thanatoghapes, saprophages, xylophages, dentritivores, decomposers, putrefies and carrion eaters who come fanged, feathered, finned, furred, husked, lacquered, leafed, whether visible or not, and those who live in glistening rot or smothered in soil or in densest water and yes, they effloresce in you as your eyes dance down this line. I mean not merely the beasts you see on safaris: jackals and hyenas, vultures and patient marabou storks, but also those not seen who swim in the oceans’ blackest rifts — black ghost sharks, cunners, crabs and lobsters that you so enjoy on your plate, you feeder of the dead. And among this cluster of aquatic beings swarm deep sea microbes, the ancient Archaea sisterhood who clean the deepest saline valleys. I could go on. But let me name a few wee ones so you know whom to pay homage to when you next sight them. Slugs, snails, adonis butterflies, woodlice, mushrooms, slime molds, ichneumon wasps, beetles of almost every hue, sea stars, shrimp, springtails, sea cucumbers, dung flies, blow flies, flesh flies, maggots… My little ones! 

When the dead come to me how they come alive. Bloating, stinking, oozing, collapsing.

How I wish I could state, I am Time, destroyer of worlds. But I’m not that splendour of cosmic cause & cessation. Not grand, but humdrum. I am just a processor, a recycler, who keeps the cycles spinning. Nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus avatar through my gorge as fanged, feathered, finned, furred, husked, lacquered, leafed new life. Consuming the corporeal is my dharma. 

But I’m not complaining. I am the great preserver of the dead who makes them live again. Can you see me this way in my stench and slime? 

I am lonely. So lonely. I’ve been lonely through all of my time on Earth, as time drips with even measure through each rotation and revolution; through millennia after millennia on this planet wrapped in holiness. 

Beauty flees before me. No one invites me to share a drop or to a tête-à tête. No deep brain computer signals a last goodbye as its synapses fade; no one invites my occupancy though it’s through me that they will revive.

I long for tenderness and ravishing fragrances. A kind word, even a nodded acknowledgement will do which says, Hey, as I leave I open myself to you. I know there’s no death, only you advancing to make what’s left of me beneficial to some unknown other. But no, I haven’t heard that, not once, not ever.

I thrill to flowers on whose sight my many hands break into butterflies. But wait I must for each petal to loosen, its purpose accomplished with the seed-box’s swelling ripening new green life; for each petal’s sap to withdraw, its colours fading, for each petal’s languid tumble towards dust, for each to stop its wee bounced attempt back at life before I reach to touch. It curls at the scent of my approaching breath, shrivels to soot at my touch. 

Someone touch me, please. Accept this oozy breeder of life that I am. 

Excerpted with permission from Earthrise Stories: Pasts Potentials Prophesies by Priya Sarukkai Chabria Red River 2025