Algae Day
Happy Algae Day! says the banner hung from a hotel building in Tuscon. A red-headed, heavyset woman named Claire snaps a picture of it in the early morning while her dog pees on the hot sidewalk.
Inside her air-conditioned building again, Claire starts on her world-famous three bean green dip. She picks out a green dress for the watch party, and tapes green streamers to her popcorn ceiling. Months ago, Claire thought about making the drive to the launch field in Phoenix, but tickets cost four thousand dollars by then. She’ll be able to see from the doorstep of her apartment, she knows, dense balls of carbon skipping through the sky with their long, red tails, expelled from the earth system for good, meteors falling in reverse.
Phoenix is the first inland city to host Algae Day. The mayor added its name to the list instead of building another solar farm, and the city outcompeted plans from Port-au-Prince and Brussels. At first, the mayor’s experts tried to trap carbon dioxide in the tissues of algae in big wide ponds, like Taipei and Baltimore did when they hosted. But after twenty-two days, thirsty Sonoran air sucked the ponds dry faster than they could fill them back up; the wet sand left over spat the carbon back out. No city had failed to meet an Algae Day quota before, and the mayor of Phoenix wouldn’t let his be the first. In the lab, they experimented with drier options.
While her bean dip sets in the fridge, Claire goes to see the parade. The sky seems to sink down over Tuscon, a pale blue haze below high, yellowed clouds. She’s alone, but she doesn’t mind. The kids on the floats throw carbonate candies to the crowd. Claire tastes one, thinks it might be a repackaged Tum. The parade ends with thousands of flatbed trucks weighed down with lab-grown carbonate rock roll through town. It goes on for an hour, truck after truck, until people on the streets smell like sunscreen and sweat. Claire stands beside her upstairs neighbor, Phil, and their dogs sniff each other’s noses. They’d seen it on TV before, the long, long, long caravan of flatbed trucks loaded with giant vats of water from the growing ponds, different algae depending on the host city. When Taipei hosted: tubs of neon green snot bright against the gray sky. Baltimore: several million tons of mustard-yellow diatoms labeled biohazard. Melbourne featured piles and piles of giant kelp.
The rocks were controversial, at first. The Algae Day traditionalists lambasted the choice on NBC--This isn’t algae at all!—but the results were as good an argument as any: it could be more carbon than had ever been launched out of the earth system on Algae Day. The mayor of Phoenix said with a sparkle of hysteria in his voice: “It’s still Algae Day, folks! Algae helped us build these rocks,” and his science advisor nodded her head. Big flat ships and oversized-load trucks carried the slingshots in from Taipei, back in June.
At 12:30, Claire fills green balloons with coffee breath. Square-headed Craig from work shows up first, apologetically early and toting a special green-labeled six-pack of Miller Lite.
Craig helps Claire blow balloons. “What’s your guess this year?” he asks.
“Forty-five gigatons.”
“I guessed forty-two!” Craig squats to pet the fluffy white dog, laying in a kidney bean shape on the rug. “Terrell said thirteen. Wouldn’t that be a shame? I think the algae caravan alone puts more carbon dioxide out than that.” Craig laughs into another balloon, and another, until he’s out of breath. “He thinks we’re all overestimating, since the rocks hold less carbon. I said how do you know how much carbon’s in a rock, Terrell? You majored in business!”
Claire laughs because she thinks Craig might be a good man to marry. She has no interest in marrying a man, but Craig is uninteresting and unobtrusive. They could split the rent, and she could tuck his square head and his yellow toenails away at the bottom of her mind and continue life as-is, hiking with her dog, online classes, bicycling, gardening, knitting, cooking—all with no more pressure from her floral-skirted mother in Provo about when she’s getting married. She touches Craig’s arm. Craig smiles at her.
It’s a dark apartment with low ceilings, but Claire’s done her best to make it feel bright. Where the half windows point out into window wells she’s placed ferns and orchids and a particularly tall snake plant. The coffee table boasts a bouquet of lilies, and lamps wearing teal and yellow lampshades sit in every corner.
The other guests arrive, Maura and Danielle and Terrel and his wife, Jean. They bring tortilla chips and dips and boxes of Buffalo chicken and another six-pack of green-labeled Miller Lite. Claire squats in front of her TV—she lost the remote months ago—and presses the channel up button until she finds the broadcast. They all climb on to the L-shaped couch and dip chips. Claire’s little white dog vacuums up dropped snacks.
The TV shows college-aged kids in commemorative green t-shirts loading massive carbonate rocks into the slingshots. They watch the first gigaton fire off into space, off to sit forever in a crater with piles of frozen algae and biohazard diatoms and kelp, rendered inert by the sterility of the moon. A scoreboard on the launching field lights up with the number 1. A high school marching band plays while they load the next slingshot, and the next. Once five gigatons of carbonate rocks are off hurtling toward the moon, Maura asks for Claire’s bean dip recipe for the third year in a row.
At eleven fifteen, the broadcast flickers once, twice, and then goes out. A minute later, the power shutters off, too.
“Sorry,” says Claire. “This happens when Phil upstairs uses his blow-dryer at the same time as his AC.”
The sunlight streaming in from the window wells helps Claire find the circuit breaker, flip the switch. Nothing. Craig comes over and flips the switch, too. In the cover of darkness, the fluffy white dog snags a mouthful of tortilla chips.
On the street, an explosion. The ground shutters, and the guests fall quiet, watching chips of paint fall from the ceilings. Then another shuttering of the ground, and another, another. Maura says something frantic; Jean says something too low to hear. The building shakes and rattles and soundwaves boom inside Claire’s chest bones and climb up her throat, followed by high-pitched ear-ringing silence, then another boom. Claire’s dog hides under the coffee table. She should comfort him, she knows, but she can feel her heart squeezing and spasming in her throat, arms frozen at her sides. Then Craig stands up, puffs his chest and waves Terrell toward the door.
Jean grabs Terrell’s hand and shakes her head.
So Craig goes out alone, and Claire watches on her tippy toes from the window well as a carbonate rock the size of a flatbed truck squashes him to dirt. In her last second alive she feels a little sad about that, too stuck in processing her maybe-sadness to make a sound. (That doesn’t top Maura, who she hears in the background of her death like a scream underwater.) The building collapses and the party is over.
Inside her air-conditioned building again, Claire starts on her world-famous three bean green dip. She picks out a green dress for the watch party, and tapes green streamers to her popcorn ceiling. Months ago, Claire thought about making the drive to the launch field in Phoenix, but tickets cost four thousand dollars by then. She’ll be able to see from the doorstep of her apartment, she knows, dense balls of carbon skipping through the sky with their long, red tails, expelled from the earth system for good, meteors falling in reverse.
Phoenix is the first inland city to host Algae Day. The mayor added its name to the list instead of building another solar farm, and the city outcompeted plans from Port-au-Prince and Brussels. At first, the mayor’s experts tried to trap carbon dioxide in the tissues of algae in big wide ponds, like Taipei and Baltimore did when they hosted. But after twenty-two days, thirsty Sonoran air sucked the ponds dry faster than they could fill them back up; the wet sand left over spat the carbon back out. No city had failed to meet an Algae Day quota before, and the mayor of Phoenix wouldn’t let his be the first. In the lab, they experimented with drier options.
While her bean dip sets in the fridge, Claire goes to see the parade. The sky seems to sink down over Tuscon, a pale blue haze below high, yellowed clouds. She’s alone, but she doesn’t mind. The kids on the floats throw carbonate candies to the crowd. Claire tastes one, thinks it might be a repackaged Tum. The parade ends with thousands of flatbed trucks weighed down with lab-grown carbonate rock roll through town. It goes on for an hour, truck after truck, until people on the streets smell like sunscreen and sweat. Claire stands beside her upstairs neighbor, Phil, and their dogs sniff each other’s noses. They’d seen it on TV before, the long, long, long caravan of flatbed trucks loaded with giant vats of water from the growing ponds, different algae depending on the host city. When Taipei hosted: tubs of neon green snot bright against the gray sky. Baltimore: several million tons of mustard-yellow diatoms labeled biohazard. Melbourne featured piles and piles of giant kelp.
The rocks were controversial, at first. The Algae Day traditionalists lambasted the choice on NBC--This isn’t algae at all!—but the results were as good an argument as any: it could be more carbon than had ever been launched out of the earth system on Algae Day. The mayor of Phoenix said with a sparkle of hysteria in his voice: “It’s still Algae Day, folks! Algae helped us build these rocks,” and his science advisor nodded her head. Big flat ships and oversized-load trucks carried the slingshots in from Taipei, back in June.
At 12:30, Claire fills green balloons with coffee breath. Square-headed Craig from work shows up first, apologetically early and toting a special green-labeled six-pack of Miller Lite.
Craig helps Claire blow balloons. “What’s your guess this year?” he asks.
“Forty-five gigatons.”
“I guessed forty-two!” Craig squats to pet the fluffy white dog, laying in a kidney bean shape on the rug. “Terrell said thirteen. Wouldn’t that be a shame? I think the algae caravan alone puts more carbon dioxide out than that.” Craig laughs into another balloon, and another, until he’s out of breath. “He thinks we’re all overestimating, since the rocks hold less carbon. I said how do you know how much carbon’s in a rock, Terrell? You majored in business!”
Claire laughs because she thinks Craig might be a good man to marry. She has no interest in marrying a man, but Craig is uninteresting and unobtrusive. They could split the rent, and she could tuck his square head and his yellow toenails away at the bottom of her mind and continue life as-is, hiking with her dog, online classes, bicycling, gardening, knitting, cooking—all with no more pressure from her floral-skirted mother in Provo about when she’s getting married. She touches Craig’s arm. Craig smiles at her.
It’s a dark apartment with low ceilings, but Claire’s done her best to make it feel bright. Where the half windows point out into window wells she’s placed ferns and orchids and a particularly tall snake plant. The coffee table boasts a bouquet of lilies, and lamps wearing teal and yellow lampshades sit in every corner.
The other guests arrive, Maura and Danielle and Terrel and his wife, Jean. They bring tortilla chips and dips and boxes of Buffalo chicken and another six-pack of green-labeled Miller Lite. Claire squats in front of her TV—she lost the remote months ago—and presses the channel up button until she finds the broadcast. They all climb on to the L-shaped couch and dip chips. Claire’s little white dog vacuums up dropped snacks.
The TV shows college-aged kids in commemorative green t-shirts loading massive carbonate rocks into the slingshots. They watch the first gigaton fire off into space, off to sit forever in a crater with piles of frozen algae and biohazard diatoms and kelp, rendered inert by the sterility of the moon. A scoreboard on the launching field lights up with the number 1. A high school marching band plays while they load the next slingshot, and the next. Once five gigatons of carbonate rocks are off hurtling toward the moon, Maura asks for Claire’s bean dip recipe for the third year in a row.
At eleven fifteen, the broadcast flickers once, twice, and then goes out. A minute later, the power shutters off, too.
“Sorry,” says Claire. “This happens when Phil upstairs uses his blow-dryer at the same time as his AC.”
The sunlight streaming in from the window wells helps Claire find the circuit breaker, flip the switch. Nothing. Craig comes over and flips the switch, too. In the cover of darkness, the fluffy white dog snags a mouthful of tortilla chips.
On the street, an explosion. The ground shutters, and the guests fall quiet, watching chips of paint fall from the ceilings. Then another shuttering of the ground, and another, another. Maura says something frantic; Jean says something too low to hear. The building shakes and rattles and soundwaves boom inside Claire’s chest bones and climb up her throat, followed by high-pitched ear-ringing silence, then another boom. Claire’s dog hides under the coffee table. She should comfort him, she knows, but she can feel her heart squeezing and spasming in her throat, arms frozen at her sides. Then Craig stands up, puffs his chest and waves Terrell toward the door.
Jean grabs Terrell’s hand and shakes her head.
So Craig goes out alone, and Claire watches on her tippy toes from the window well as a carbonate rock the size of a flatbed truck squashes him to dirt. In her last second alive she feels a little sad about that, too stuck in processing her maybe-sadness to make a sound. (That doesn’t top Maura, who she hears in the background of her death like a scream underwater.) The building collapses and the party is over.
Kay Vaindal is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, studying marine biology. She uses creative writing to understand the world around her and enjoys writing and reading projects with political and environmental themes. She’s an avid backpacker, SCUBA diver, and admirer of the natural world.