Tina was born in the mountains, so this is her first time down to the coast. Anyone who could leave left for higher, stormless ground a long time ago. The future turned out not to be as futuristic as everyone thought. There are wood-burning stoves to warm our feet by and socks inside-we wear socks in the house, we’re not insane people. We live wet lives but our feet need not stay wet with socks. There’s a saying from Hammon, Oklahoma, the small town where my dad grew up, and it goes, “It’s Hammon, man, no socks.” I’m not sure what sense it made for my dad, or for my Cheyenne relatives in Oklahoma, but here in Oakland, in the year 2040, it makes utter sense. Most people around here don’t wear socks, and not even shoes either but porous rubber clogs. “So what do you do when your feet get cold?” she asked my wife, avoiding my eyes. “I’m sorry, Herold, if we still believe in goodness, and don’t want to let the ethical murkiness that got us into this mess flood our lives with ruin.” Actually too many people call it the end of the world when the world, the earth, would be just fine without us, better off actually, give or take an era or eon or age or whatever amount of time the world might need to get over us.
SPARKNOTES THERE THERE TOMMY ORANGE SERIES
We got used to it, got used to the storms and floods and the heat, got used to knowing the end of the world had finally arrived not with a bang but a whimper, or a series of minor disasters. We’d wanted to leave, but couldn’t afford to just up and go. There’s not always water we have to walk in but it’s there more often than it’s not.
It’s not as if we always walk in water, it’s that the tide has risen, comes higher when it comes. I should clarify about how much water we walk in.
SPARKNOTES THERE THERE TOMMY ORANGE SKIN
Tina’s feet had just gotten too wet, and the cold in Oakland seeps into your bones, the moisture gets through, she’s used to high mountain air, thin against human skin it can’t penetrate, so yes, Tina had maybe caught the beginning of a cold, but wasn’t she emphasizing the sneezes in an unnatural way? This made me distinctly upset, this not knowing if she was leaning into her sneezes or if she really was getting sick. “You don’t need tweezers, you can do it with your fingers, you just have to simulate tweezer-grip by putting your fingernails together and yanking.”ĭolorothie was right, of course. “She wasn’t yanking nose hairs out with tweezers while we weren’t looking to make us feel bad,” Dolorothie said, looking out the kitchen window like there was something wrong out there, but what was wrong was in us, was me. “You can if you yank nose hairs out, that makes me sneeze,” I said. “You can’t make yourself sneeze, Herold,” my wife Dolorothie said to me. The first day she was here her socks got soaked and she sneezed excessively in the evening to the point that I thought she was trying to make us feel bad. It’s not a big deal, but Tina is young and entitled and one of these new mountain elevation people who don’t see eye to eye with us sea-level dwellers, we the coastal flooded. My niece Tina was visiting us from the mountains for the summer and couldn’t understand that we just walk in water now. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.
Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.
Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, won the 2018 PEN/America Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. The following is a story by Tommy Orange, featured in literary journal, McSweeney's 58: 2040 A.D.