Never give up. That became the family’s mantra, even after the basement flooded with sewage for the third, fourth, fifth time. By number five, old Grandad Uchytil figured it was going to be an annual visitation, a smelly, inconvenient, unavoidable mess.
“I don’t care!” he’d say. “We’ll fight to keep what’s ours.”
But by the time Josef’s grandchildren were toddlers, the bailing, drying out, bleaching came to an end. Mold had made the house irretrievably sick. As a child, Sandra Uchytil-Amadi had watched helplessly as her parents tried to shore up a way of life rotting from the inside out. She became the first to flee, determined to find a better solution than bleach. Sticking her foot into college through a backdoor, she took a job as a University janitor; when she wasn’t busy scrubbing toilets, she was at BMI: Biochemistry, Microbiology, Immunology. After two years of unofficially educating her, several professors pressured the department into letting her take a B.S.; soon, Sandi went from the streets of Motor City to the halls of the Sorbonne.
Paris was having as much trouble with inundations from the Seine as Detroit was having with its river, so, the City of Light felt like a home away from home. Sandi found a miniscule flat in the eleventh arrondissement and began a career I’d like to think would’ve made Grandpa Josef proud, if he’d lived to see it, which he didn’t. He had lived up to the meaning of the surname Uchytil — ‘a tenacious man’ — but he’d also been an avid cigar smoker, so between the mold and his beloved stogies, old Joe got emphysema, which got him.
It’s possible, though, that he would have reviled what she did. The Uchytil-Amadi clan had splintered over it. But I grew up unaware of this because by the time I was born, her radical invention had become a normal way of life. I didn’t question it, why would I? I’d never even heard a slur, or run into out-and-out hatred, until my cousins and some friends let curiosity get the best of us. Like generations of kids before us, we snuck out after dark, heading for this place not too far from the Lakes and river, although far enough away that we’d never gone there before; we brought plenty of fresh water with us, too, no matter how heavy it was to haul. We were running a risk, sure, but we weren’t going to be foolhardy.
Signs of what looked like a sprawling warren appeared on the horizon long before we got close enough to see people. When we did, they were wearing heavy protective gear, cultivating crops; as we approached, a few “burrowers” (as we called them) dropped their tools and ran off. Others lifted those same tools menacingly. I’d seen my father whack off an eel’s head with a shovel, so I whispered, “Hold up” and stood still. It was a good thing, too, because one of the burrowers shouted through their headpiece a muffled “Go away, moldies!”
I didn’t know what they meant by calling us “moldies,” but the threat was clear enough. We retreated, then got bored and left. That night, while portables warmed through our kelp stew supper, I asked, “What did he mean by calling us moldies?”
“I think,” my cousin said, “it’s their name for us. We call them burrowers, they call us—”
“Moldies?”
“Yeah.”
I stared at him, trying to understand. I gazed down at my hand, the palm a dusky rose, the back of it softly glowing a light ochre. I was baffled, my cousin didn’t explain, and I couldn’t figure it out, so when we got home, I asked Gran-San.
“Ah, dommage!” she exclaimed and then chuckled, taking my hand, and turning it palm up. “They think our skin is covered by a mold that your mad scientist Gran-San let loose upon the world,” and then she crossed her eyes at me, saying, “Bwhahahahaha!”
I laughed. A little nervously, but I laughed.
She turned my hand over in her own. “See how the skin is so bright? Not so, for the burrowers. They don’t see normal; they only see a threat, a difference.”
Which was, I learned, the deliberate result of a long course of trial and error, as Dr. Sandi Almadi-Uchytil had worked to engineer a bacterium that would not only help humans withstand high levels of heat and radiation, but also to thrive in wetlands. Since the microbiome of human skin has always been richly populated by microbes, what Gran-San did was to borrow, revise, rescript, adapt until she’d orchestrated a beneficial, bioluminescent game-changer, a bright organism of difference, which allowed for adaptation; diets changed, architecture changed, trade changed, we changed. Most of humanity stopped fighting the rising waters to live with and in them, just as the bacterium lives with and in us.
In her waning days, as Gran-San aged, her skin dulled to a burnished gold; when the light went out, so did she. But she’d had a good chunk of living, and in that life, she’d gifted us all the chance not to abandon home, but to reclaim it. Whenever I think about her now, I see her in her tiny Parisian flat, her head bowed over a book, her curls pulled back into a knot, with a mug of that awful instant coffee stuff she liked so much, a holdover from her janitorial days, which always reminds me that no matter how far away you may go from home, a part of you never leaves. And I’ve been fortunate. I’ve always lived at home, and I’ll go right on living here, long after the last burrower molders away. I’m proud to live in a community that shines soft and clear, all of us instruments of Gran-San’s bright organism of difference.
Stephanie A. Smith took her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at UF. Her books include literary criticism; creative non-fiction; historical fiction; science fiction, YA fantasy; her short stories have appeared in New Letters, Asimov’s and SF&F; creative non-fiction and scholarly essays in journals such as differences, American Literature, and Genre.
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