In The Storm, A Fire by Andrew Dana Hudson and Jay Springett
She wheeled through the lively crowds, passing perfect stalls selling ‘perfect’ foods, state-curated to the ecological tastes of the upper class: C4-pathway grains and ‘unwasteable’ gene-edited fruit. Chani found her contact at a booth selling cheese and honey.
“Chani! I was worried I wasn’t going to see you today,” Kayla said. She was a middle-aged millennial, but, with dyed black hair and meticulous makeup, she passed for 30. This wasn’t vanity, Chani knew, but self-preservation. Asperity was unkind to the elderly.
“Hectic morning, you know how it is,” Chani said. She opened her pack of jars, pulled out a stack of pickled plums hiding drugs that kept Alzheimer’s at bay. Kayla’s face lit up with gratitude.
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“Folks are really going to appreciate these,” Kayla said. “My mother especially. I know she’s been running low.”
“Kayla, listen. I have extra today, of some, uh, different varieties,” Chani said carefully. Around them the market bustled. “Would you want to take them off my hands? Free of charge, of course.”
Kayla’s eyes flickered.
Andrew Dana Hudson’s fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Vice Terraform, Slate Future Tense, Grist, MIT Technology Review, and more. His work won the 2016 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest and was runner-up in the 2017 Kaleidoscope Writing the Future Contest. He has a master’s degree in sustainability from Arizona State University and is a fellow at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. He is a member of the cursed 2020/2021 class of the Clarion Workshop. He lives in Tempe, Arizona and can be found online at www.andrewdanahudson.com and on Twitter at @andrewdhudson.
Jay Springett is a writer, narrative strategist, and public speaker. His concerns are with culture, technology and the environment.
He hosts a UK top 50 Podcast: Permanently Moved. A podcast 301 seconds in length. written, recorded and edited in one hour. And the ‘gentle webshow’ Come Internet With Me. He is a long time admin on Solarpunks.net. He blogs at www.thejaymo.net and tries and fails to avoid Twitter as @thejaymo.
And Lately, The Sun 