May 16, 2075

Orchard St and S 19th/Highway 16 on-ramp, Tacoma, WA

Ellie Mathieu

Ellie Mathieu can tell when the Big Easy arrives by the smell of its engine. A full bouquet of other smells blooms at the train station: there’s the solid green smell of the Douglas firs that overlook the building and the electric-spark smell of the power lines on the tracks. The seagulls fighting over food wrappers they stole from the compost cans, they don’t smell like roses. Neither do the greased wheels of busy commuter trains or the crates of anything and everything coming off the commercial trains. This morning there was at least one large shipment of fish coming in on the train from Aberdeen way, headed for grocery stores around the Sound. You can pack fish up in watertight, insulated boxes of ice, but you can’t get that deep-ocean fish smell out of the air.

The Big Easy is a food truck, and it smells like fish too—cooked fish, fish cooked the right way, the way all Ellie’s uncles and aunts and her dad and stepdad cook it, with plenty of red pepper and white pepper and garlic—but when it first pulls up she can ID it from the smell of the exhaust. The Sams, Samuel and his partner Samantha, converted it from an old truck, like way old, combustion engine old, although of course it would be foolishly expensive to try to run it on gasoline, and there’s no way they could’ve gotten a permit. The closest place to buy gasoline is at the docks, way out on the other side of the city, at the antique boat mechanic. Nope, the Big Easy runs on old cooking oil, which the Sams pick up from the backs of other restaurants at the end of every day.

Ellie finishes running through the sale of a cup of coffee and her last copy of The Wind, an art comic that’s been jumping off her shelves. People can get any kind of info they want on their various electronic devices, of course, but everyone likes being able to hold a paper comic in their hands, especially the bright, pretty ones. She turns and waves as the Big Easy pulls up beside her kiosk. Samuel is driving, and he waves back, just like always.

Ellie smiles to herself. This is their routine, four days a week, and then on Saturdays she finds the Sams and their mutual friend Bianca, who is also a climate dispers—displaced person, because it’s rude to say “refugee”—from Puerto Rico. They all take a walk around the neighborhood and down around Allenmore Links, with a stop at the Climate Resilience shed at the entrance to pick up seedlings. Bianca is teaching them how to rewild the old golf course, how to turn the dirt over in their fingers and pick spots where the seedlings will be sheltered and nurtured.

There’s so much in this world that is just not predictable: the heat waves, the storms, the way the ocean rises up and takes you sometimes. The routine of it matters as much to Ellie as the walking, as the volunteering they all were connected with as part of their integration into the fabric of Tacoma. She likes the signs at the station clearly telling people where to go, where to be, likes the way the Sams roll up every morning, same time, same place.

“Good morning, Ellie!” Samantha calls as she exits the back of the food truck. “Lookin’ bright-eyed!” Which is the same thing she says every morning.

“Buenas, beautiful!” is what Ellie always calls back to her.

A loud clattering crash, followed by raucous honking from the trucks in line to pick up pallets of goods, grabs her attention. Her two customers, who just stepped off buses at the station’s roundabout without coffee or breakfast, also turn to look. Most of her sales are to bus riders; the rush of commercial trucks peaks earlier. Moves quicker, too, usually. Usually the computer that sorts pallets and trucks and moves everything into the right place keeps the trucks moving like a stream of water, but today no one is moving and everyone is honking.

Luckily for the drivers, Ellie’s kiosk is bulky but mobile. She tips it into motion and starts her way up the line of trucks. When she turns into view of the loading deck she sees the holdup. Somebody messed up, big time. There are long poles jumbled on the ground like a burn pile of invasive bamboo cut out of the park by volunteers. Metal poles—no, pipes. Some plumber is going to have a day off today while this gets reloaded.

Ellie stops beside the truck second back from the mess. The driver wants coffee. She can help with that. “What’s that about?” She nods at the pipes.

“Dumbass didn’t secure the load before driving off,” the driver says, his vowels short and Pacific Northwestern. He must be a local, or been here long enough to sound like one. “They oughta be fired. It’s dangerous.”

Ellie just smiles. The locals don’t know how good they have it, with their unions who get in the middle of every little mess. Back home, the driver would’ve been fired, pretty much instantly, and probably not got their last paycheck at all. Here, the union would come in and start talking about how the company didn’t train its drivers well, and didn’t have the right tie-down equipment in the truck bed, and the automated loader put the pipes in the truck all wrong, and so whose fault is it really? The driver might still be an asshole and might still get fired, or at least moved to a job that didn’t involve securing things to other things, but at least they’d have plenty of time to figure out how their kids were going to eat.

The third truck buys a can of juice instead of coffee. The fourth truck back, the driver doesn’t want anything, but before Ellie can move on, the driver points up into the trees. “Hear that? Yellow warbler.”

There isn’t much truck noise now that everyone’s calmed down with the horns, since everything is electric, and Ellie is far enough away from the mess at the loading deck that the arguing voices are distant. She pauses, listening, not sure which bird call she’s listening for.

“There it goes.”

Ellie follows the driver’s pointing finger and sees a small yellow bird land on a bird feeder built into the train station’s roof.

By the time the trucks start moving again, pedestrian traffic is picking up. The Big Easy has been joined by Pancake Cult and La Isla, and folks looking for breakfast are lining up. Ellie navigates her kiosk back up the truck ramp and parks strategically in the middle of the station floor, where a line of coffee buyers won’t get in the way of people who are just trying to get on the train and she can also snag the attention of folks stepping on and off the rapid transit buses.

The train goes much faster than the buses, but it doesn’t go down every street, obviously. It crosses the city express west to east, and another express track goes south to north on part of the old interstate highway property. Those two lines are integrated into the state’s high-speed transit system, and then there’s the route along the waterfront, and the Pearl route up to Point Defiance, and the Lakewood line, and the route on Old Highway 7. There are, actually, a lot of trains. But the buses take you from the train stations into neighborhoods. Streets that used to be clogged with private cars—in motion and parked—have been converted for efficient buses, electric trucks for delivering goods, and along the sides micro-businesses like the kiosk.

The rush of pedestrians lasts a little over three hours. By the time it starts to even out, the pipes situation has been dealt with and the long line of trucks has dispersed to do their deliveries. Ellie sits on the step at the back of the Big Easy and lists what needs replenishing at the kiosk: coffee grounds, filters, and raspberry syrup, the ultra-sour blackberry candies made by a local vendor that are popular right now, single-dose packets of antihistamines for allergy sufferers.

She hesitates over The Wind. It’s a memoir, written by a dispers like Ellie, like the Sams and Bianca. The author lived through Florida and made her way north, but Ellie doesn’t know any more than that. She’s been reluctant to read it, even though the glossy beautiful covers draw her eyes every time a new issue comes out, and she sells more copies of it than anything else she has right now.

Ellie might not want to feel those feelings again, but she’s glad that other dispers in the city feel helped by the story. And maybe locals, too, not just dispers, feel the Terror. The Terror—that’s how Ellie thinks of it, the feeling you get when you think about the way the world can loom over you. The feeling she gets when she thinks of the heat, the heavy sweltering stink of the sun-cooked sidewalks, the stair railing so hot she still has a scar on her arm from where she touched the iron. The power went out after the hurricane and it was so humid. Mama’s heart failed her and there was nowhere to take her body to be buried, the water still all over the roads. Ellie couldn’t stay there, after, couldn’t face the Terror, and the roof was half gone and the walls were rotting. There was nowhere to stay.

The Terror—but then Samantha sits on the step beside her with a napkin full of green beans fresh from the deep fryer. Ellie eats a piece. Samantha leans into her shoulder, sweaty and friendly. Comforting.

Ellie puts The Wind on the restock list and eats another green bean.

Inside the food truck, just a few feet away, Sam is cooking battered fish, gumbo on the big burner: sausage and peppers and celery and shrimp. The Sams own the Big Easy so they can decide to work longer hours than most people; they’ll be staying for the lunch bump. Ellie, closing her eyes to better smell the yellow onions sweating in hot butter, is just about done with her six-hour shift.

It isn’t easy to learn to stop working, not when she’s felt so desperate, like she’d fight a wild pig with her bare hands, claw her way out of quicksand, to survive. But part of living in the north is accepting that everyone deserves a job, and so the work needs to be divided fairly, and so she’s paid enough for rent and food and bills and even sending some back to her cousins in Louisiana, for just four six-hour shifts a week.

The kiosk manages itself, mostly—everything can be automated, it just doesn’t have to be. People like to buy coffee from a fellow human. Ellie is there just to be there, so people have someone to say good morning to. It’s been hard to learn that simply existing is enough.

Kevin, her coworker, steps off a bus with the boxes of restock on a little wheeled cart. He spots her, waves. He likes the spot by the entrance to the station floor because he likes to patter at everyone coming and going, so she flips off the brakes so the kiosk is mobile again, and points it in that direction.

“Ellie-Ell! How’s it passing?” Kev is a local, younger than her, fresh out of high school and trying to decide on what kind of training he wants to do next.

“It’s passin’,” she says, then decides that she can be a little happier than that today. She’s here with friends, after all. “It’s passin’ like the orcas in the channel. Slippin’ easy.”

He grins at her, wide and naive, like he’s never felt the Terror, not once, and she smiles back.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Rachel Ayers

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors