CZM Book Club: St. Juju, by Rivers Solomon

Juju by the Powerhouse Rivers. Solomon Rivers is most known for their haunting and beautiful fantasy horror novels, but today we have a far future, utopian short story for you, packed full of queer yearning dog girls and a heaping portion of fungus and characters coming to terms with the reality that violence and impression room much more difficult to eradicate than it seems. But also and it's much more

hopeful than that makes it sound. This story, Saint Juju, was originally published in twenty nineteen by The Verge as part of their series Better Worlds, which was a science fiction series about hope, and it was released with some abs of frutally stunning animation of the characters by Alan Leaster that I highly recommend checking out. All right, are you ready? You'd better be ready. If you're not ready, then you're gonna have to pause and do something else

and come back when you're ready. Are you ready for Saint Juju? By River Solomon? The trash garden is stunning in the pre dawn morn lit up beneath a bulbous ivory moon. Two hundred acres of fungus hills stand between us and the edge of the enclave, and the smoky fragrance of pink toadstools waits the air with sweet earthiness. Enid sniffs, knows, twitching buried inside of mushrooming quiskea comidente. There are still several decades worth of trash, and though

I can't smell it, Enid can. Six foot deep fungus covers the rotting bottles, cans, cartons, clothes, wrappers, and broken toys. But Enid's a hound mutant. She can smell it all. The fungus has been feasting on the refuse of the former landfill for over one hundred years, and the scent of the old world trash lingers for those with her genetic mutation. Do you mind it much? I asked Enid. The odor the fungus from the trash gardens is enough to feed most of the world, but they seemed a

bitter sweet phenomenon for the hound mutants. I mean, I know it doesn't stink to you, I say, but does it remind you of the past? Enid shakes her head, the matted bowl cut coils sweeping back and forth over her forehead. There's a scar on her left temple, spanning down to her left eye and across her cheek, where she got swiped by a mountain lion that she was trying to spring from a trap. It's the sort of story that sounds like a tall tale, a hay geography,

a myth, the beginning of a heroine's journey. I've been reading about the lives of various saints over the last year in preparation for my oration to the Enclave, and in another time, I think my Enid could have been Saint Enid. To avoid the shackles of marriage to a horrible noble, she'd commit herself to God and become a nun. The noble would demand her chastity anyway, but she'd run into a den of lions to escape his horseback riding soldiers. The lions would claw her face to forming her, and

then finally the noble might give up his claims. She'd be the patron saint of women with scars. I bite the collar of my flannel as Enid and I walk the fungus capped ground. Although the focus of my upcoming oration revolves around the less savory aspects of traditional belief systems, the parts about people like me and Enid and how we are sin incarnate, I can see the beauty in it too, why people did and still do devote their lives to these religions. Enid's nose twitches again, and she

bites her bottom lip. We shouldn't have taken this route. The other ways out of the enclave were longer, but they didn't have the same baggage. You sure you are right going this way? I ask? That makes Enid stop sniffing. I'm fine, She says, yeah. I say. She nods yeah. I know it must be hard on these grounds. I tell her it's not. She says, must be a little bit. I press unable to be a normal fucking person for

once in my life and let it go. Growing up, my older brother always called me a pestering little shit, and he's right. Ever needy I poke and poke and poke until I poke so hard it's more of a push. Suddenly I'm shoving folks out of my life under the pretense of having a nice conversation. Not that Enid will give into my prodding. I mostly talk to keep myself company. If I'm silent, the void of half light will gobble me up. Silence likes to feast on folks like me,

a heady, hot stew of discontent. I can't settle my mind when left to my own devices, left alone to think wonder, despair, I get feverish and wild. You can talk to me about it if you want feelings and shit. I mean, I say, I'm good, says Enid. You sure don't ask again, She says. Maybe it should sting, but it doesn't. Maybe I like to poke to see where the end of things are, and life becomes so much

easier when I do. And do you know what will make your life a lot easier, dear listener, that's right, it's the products and the services that support this show. And we're back skipping shoes tonight was a good idea. My feet sink into the flesh of the Kisa Kia Commandente mushrooms The feedback is strange but nice, and it gives me something to focus on other than Enid. I can't tell if she's lying or not if she means it when she says it doesn't hurt her to be

in this place. But maybe I can't let it go, because how could it not. This history of the hound mutants isn't kind, even that goddamn name. It feels wrong to call Enid after a dog, but it's her preferred term for folks born with pivicave pathologia. Enid eats metal, She eats paper, she eats plastic, she eats trash. She has since she was an infant. She came out the womb, craving non food stuff. Her body processes it and turns

it into usable waste. In the old days, before garbage eating fungus, pound mutants were rounded up to clear the landfills. They sniffed and sought out trash like mutts and the names stuck. Being here has to dredge up memories, even if they're not her own, even if it all happened in a time before she was born. Sometimes I feel like that's what must be wrong with me. I'm always seeing ghosts hearing things. I call them my figments, but maybe they're things from long ago returning from the dead.

Creeping in Enid's face is indecipherable in the dark, but every few moments her eyes blink for too long, or she swallows heavily, causing her lips to move and her throat to rise and fall. The trash garden is my favorite place in the enclave. I offer whenever Enid's near and uneasy. Energy springs up in my chest and I've just got to talk and talk to get it out of me, or it might build up pressure inside explode. I've always been a chatterbox, but it's worse around here.

You wouldn't believe all the hollows I've dug into, the fungus, perfect hiding spots to nappen. I know, she says, And yeah, I guess I've told her before I was born out here, I say, I know, Juju, says Enid. My papa was harvesting mushroom for supper when he felt his waters come loose. I continue, why. It's like I'm trying to salvage something out of this exchange, make this story worth it. But all I'm doing is making Enid feel worse and digging my hole deeper. He leant up against one of the

fungus hills, squatted and rested until I came. My other Papa wasn't there. He was just waiting and waiting and waiting at home for Pops to come home with the mushrooms, because he was ready to cook supper. She nods but doesn't speak when she leaves. Is this all she'll remember of me? The girl whose mouth was a fucking geyser, The girl who fidgets, the girl who talks and talks and talks to silence the voices, the images, The girl

who's turned her birth into a fairy tale. Even though Enid knows the truth that my papa died out there in the field and I almost did too, Born two months early and with no hope of medical intervention. Enid grabs my hand and squeezes tight enough to hurt, but the pressure reins me in. It reminds me that my body exists. I don't know why she bothers with a thing as untogether as me. I'll visit you whenever I can, she says. I nod my head and smile, and it

hurts my cheeks. For how disingenuous it is. My offer to come with still stands, she says, But she knows I'm set on staying. The invitation is away. For her to be nice without any threat, she'll have to suffer the consequences of my co There's a lot I want to show you, says Enid, stuff I think you'll love. I've lived my whole life on the enclave, I say, I'm not as brave as you. Enid's never spent more than a few years off and on in the enclaves,

preferring to travel in packs with others like her. She's going back out there tonight. We'll say our goodbyes, then walk to the edge of the enclave, and she'll step forth into the unpredictable frontier of life outside the enclave. Can't pretend it doesn't muck me up inside thinking about her leaving me. But what right have I got to be angry? The world out there scares me. Open road, open field, open forest, the ruins of cities and suburbs,

wild animals, the same world of the old Saints. The past is still out there, waiting for us to make what we will of the future. In the Enclave, we feed entirely off the fungus and foraged plants and fruit out there. They hunt meat. They're vagabonds, chasing good weather, good game, good land, never sitting camp for more than four or six weeks at a time. Let's just do this, then, says Enid. Together, Enid and I climb up our hill, the tallest mushroom in the trash garden. This is where

we'll be together for the last time. We lay on its flattened apex. She asks me again if I'm sure I won't go with her, and I tell her the same thing I did before. I have a life here, I have certainty, I have kindness. After my oration, I can complete the coming of age. Rites twenty years old, I'll be a full fledged adult, able to take on more projects, more responsibility, more ways to undo the quietness of my mind that sometimes undoes me. It's not fair

to ask me to leave Paradise. I know, I know, she says, sitting next to me. I have a role here. I know, she says. It's important. I know. Juju, she says, and places her lips to mine so soft. I should go with her, just for that, the way she touches me, and I dissolve, legs parting unconsciously. They used to think it's sin us doing what we're doing now. Putting our mouths and our chests and our stomachs together, we writhe shameless as dogs, tenderest, wondrous, small, aching, and needy. We

are this flesh, this pliable, weak flesh. We revel in it. I press my growing up into Enids, and we rub and rub. She draws her callous thumb along my left cheek, nail grazing the freshly buzzed sideburned skin still raw and inflamed. My head is bald, too, black from ink to designs, but for where my brown skin peeks through. God, you feel so good, says Enid. I wish you'd come with me. I don't understand it, but I know she means it. Please. Yes. Her voice rasps and splinters, and to hear it makes

my whole body despair. How is it in the moments preceding the final throes of fucking, one's body feels so bereft, so gluttonous for contact and heat. Someone watching would think I'd never been touched at all, for how desperately I'd jerk my body to Enid's until we are both spent mad with feeling. The bet of fungus we lay on is taller than two houses put together, and there's a blanket beneath and above us. I can see venus, I can see every star. My breath seven slows yet, but

I don't want them to. Soon as they do, that's when I'll remember Enid is leaving me. But do you know what, dear listener, will never leave you. The dedicated insteadfast deals on this sweet sweet products and services much like now, crap, who's that country singer who I really like? Uh, I'll be there in the morning. Oh no, this is terribly embarrassing. I listen to this man all the time. Towns van ZANDT. Much like towns van ZANDT. They will

be there in the morning, these products and services. There's ads, and we're back, Juju. Enid asks. Her voice is gentler that I'm used to hearing it. She scratches her head, fingers catching in the mass of short, tight curls. The sun's coming up and her face is beautiful in the light. She's always got a scowl on, like she's thinking deeply, and it makes her thick eyebrows furrow. Juju come back to me. She grabs my shoulder and jostles me a little. Sorry.

I say, don't be sorry. She says, you're thinking about all that stuff you've been reading again. I know it's how you do things here, but I think it's stupid that oration everything. What's your topic again? What'd they call it? Call us homosexual? I say, And you're still having nightmares about everything you've read? Shrugged my shoulders. Enid doesn't know what it's like to live in a place where you are responsible to other people. I get the coming of

age rights, I really do. It's tradition to present a moral argument to the enclave so that they can decide if you're ready to handle the intense questioning of the tribunal. They're the ones to ultimately determine if your moral reasoning and sense of compassion is developed enough to undergo the rights. Usually the topic isn't something particularly relevant to our lives now, but was of note at a moment in history. The past year, I've composed of triestis deconstructing several arguments that

called women like me sinners, degenerates. And Enid's not wrong. It is weighed on me, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Sun's pretty much up, says Enid. She slips her old leather jacket back on and buttons up her jeans, looking even cooler now than she had when she first come to Milkwood enclave. A gun on her back, a crow on her shoulder, a limping coyote at her side, Saint Enid. I start to get ready too, buttoning my flannel up, but Enid holds out her hand. You don't

have to walk me to the edge. I can get there on my own. This was our goodbye, wasn't it. She's already walking down the mushroom hill before I can properly respond. Wait, I say, I slip and slide, chasing after her, feet unsteady against the dew wet fungus. I want to go with her so bad, more than anything. Tell me it's good out there, I call after her. I don't even have a bag. She doesn't either, she doesn't need one. How can I live like that without certainty?

Tell me it's as good or better than Milkwood? I demand? It. Makes her stop, and I catch up to her at the bottom of the hill, about five hundred miles from here. There's an enclave called the Sacred Grounds. Sometimes they hire out howl mutants to clear out forest and make new farms in exchange for food and other items. Bored, that's wrong, I say, sounding more scandalized than I mean too. I always worry Enid will think I sound too innocent, too unscathed.

She's right, isn't she. That's why I want to stay here. I'm just hearing about all this shit now. Since Enid came to Milkwood half a year ago, I've never left the six hundred acres that make up my enclave. Had Enid never come here, I might think the world perfect outside what I read in history books. They're not supposed to do that. Did you try and stop them, I asked Enid. Hiring hound mutants for eating scrap is degrading, but clearing forest land to make farms that could get

someone in real trouble. The United Federations of Indigenous Nations manages land use, and the enclaves who leased the territories from them are expected to abide by the stipulations. No money changes hands, but it's understood who rules. It wasn't a great time for me, says Enid. I was lonely. There were about five hundred other hound mutantes. They are doing the same work, and it felt good to be close to so many of my kind. Anyway, there was

this girl I was fooling around with. One night, these two women from the enclave discovered us, Margaret May and Jessa I think it was they threw bleach on our naked bodies, on our genitals. I tried not to gasp, as Enid speaks. Now. That got me properly vexed, and I punched Margaret May, who seemed to be the ringleader, and broke her nose. Blood spurted out her nostrils like

a red fire cracker. I back handed that woman Jessa too. Afterward, I hoisted up the girl I was with, I can't remember her name, and took her into the creek and we washed off until we were clean and no longer a flame. I dig my hands into the pockets my old Jens. I don't know how I could ever reason with people who do the kinds of things those women did to my Enid and to her lover. What you do next? I ask? I left all us dog girls, left, every single one of them, and when we left, there

were places to go to. Enid says, I can't stop shaking my head. I slapped my forehead with the heel of my hand over and over. But the enclaves are no guarantee of safety, Enid says, doesn't she know? I know that. Of course I fucking do. But at least here there was a system that tried to address it. You don't think they had folks at the sacred ground stand up and make fancy arguments. It sounded like the truth, Enid goes on. She grabs my wrist, but I tear

it from her hands. Part of the reason I even told you that story is because it stood out. It's not common. She insists. Most places I've been to are better than that. There's some places better than here. Perfection isn't a reasonable demand of living things. Once upon a time, I could imagine evil as something theoretical. I didn't like to think of it as real and breathing and near. They shouldn't have assigned you this topic, says Enid. Your

life isn't some goddamn thesis. I understand the impulse to award adulthood based on an intellectualized notion of moral rigor, but it is flawed to believe it is a proper shield against wrongdoing, wrong thinking, And what is nothing? Nothing is? I shake all over admitting it to myself. The ghosts of other times shouldn't haunt me like they do. But what does it say about humankind that for generations and generations tyranny reigned? Who am I to think we can

gird against it? Bigotry is taught. I know that, but I wish it weren't so easily learned. I wish humans had to fail safe against it. All this time, I've been thinking I was afraid of life outside the enclaves with Enid, But maybe I'm afraid of life here too, life everywhere. Afraid of people on what we're capable of. Maybe not in this time, but if it happened in another. I want to go back in time and deliver my oration to them. But something makes me think that make

no difference at all. My heart beats and beats lead in my chest. It's an exhilarating thought to know that nothing I say could matter. If such a thing were possible, I'd be sorely tempted to build a time machine, to go before people of the past and say, let us Dike's fucking rut. We're all part god born raging. Let us who wish to be soothed by this intimacy be

soothed by it. I don't know why I'm so raw, so goddamn afraid you'd think my life is a tragedy to hear me talk about my loving home, my loving community of kinfolk. The world as I understand it is in a state of healing. Maybe I'm too much of the sort who loves to pick a scab. I tear a wat of fungus from the ground and smell it, seeing if I can get a whiff of stink from the world before the world of garbage. There's nothing left

of it. It just smells like food. Like in no time at all, it will be soup simmering on the stove with butter and milk. I'm coming with you, I tell Enid. Her smile in that moment is all the assurance that there is more good than bad in the world I need. I follow her through the trash garden, out the enclave, into the world the end. Welcome back,

dear listener. Okay, this feels like I know we say that there's a lot of stories this is a quintessential book club story because we love running stories about climate adaptation and finding hope in a fucked up world. Hazel, who helps behind the scenes, has to say about this story. Rivers has never been an author who pulls their punches, and I love their commitment to pulling on the frayed edges of the utopia they've crafted to see what I furls.

There are no easy answers or politics of convenience in this story, but Rivers really manages to sell me on how that might be a source of hope. If violence and bigotry will always exist despite our better angels, where do our responsibilities lie? What does it mean to still embrace joy and desire? Okay? And then what I have to say about it? What do I have to say

about it? Well, the way that I chose to live my life in my twenties and early thirties is the kind of person who's usually not the main character but instead Enid right. That was much more how I chose

to live for a very long time. So it's always interesting to read stories that are from the perspective of talking to the vagabond, the wanderer, the In some ways, it kind of the Manipixie dream girl, but not really, and I actually think queerness kind of undermines that trope anyway, in a good way, and so it's just always interesting to me yet to read, especially like a loving portrayal

of that. Like I don't know if you've seen the movie or read the book Foxfire, particularly like the Angelina Julie version of this movie very influential to me in the nineties, and even know the more recent one from the mid odds or the early twenty tens whatever is much more accurate to the original book Foxfire, which I

haven't read to be honest. Okay, anyway, this idea of the hitchhiking vagabond who comes through especially kind of a queer one who kind of like shows everyone in the world and is like cool and has a leather jacket and stuff like that, Right, I like that character, and I specifically like the character in this sense where the world that the protagonist is being asked to leave isn't

a terrible one, it's actually a perfectly nice one. And yet like dangerous, freedom will always have an appeal even in the kindest, nicest, nicest whatever utopia, there's always the allure of dangerous freedom, and I really like that. I also really like Enid's critique of you know, this idea that like you have to have a college degree in order to be an adult. I found that really compelling as a college dropout. And the other thing I have to remember, Okay, so when I was living in my van,

I was traveling around. I was in New Orleans and there's a bunch of street kids and we were talking to them. We weren't the furthest thing from street kids, but you know, I had a band, so I was fancy. And at one point I was like, wait, y'all don't have packs, because that was like the one thing like

every street kid always as a pack. It's actually kind of dangerous to have a pack, especially in New Orleans like places where you can get like really targeted by cops for being a travel kid or like being perceived as homeless. A big travel pack is like a big part of being perceived as like the wrong kind of punk by the police. But it's so really essential to

have a pack with you. And so the fact that Enid doesn't carry a pack, it reminds me of when I was asking this, you know, train hopper woman in New Orleans. I was like, why don't you have a pack? And she looks at me. She's day drunk, and she goes gearless and fearless, and everyone around her starts chanting gearless and fearless. And that's what Saint Enid is. Okay. The other thing about the Saints thing that I find really compelling about this story the fact that it's called

Saint Juju. It's saying all of us can become amazing people. All of us can choose to become these like iconic and brave and interesting individuals. You know. At the beginning of it, she's like, oh, Enid, Saint Enid, Like, ain't it's the one who's like special and cool, right, But so is Juju. So is this person who doesn't know how to shut up, who's socially anxious, who has lived a very protected life. She's Saint Juju too. Like you

too can put on a leather jacket. You know, you don't even have to put on all the jacket, but I'm using this as a symbol in this particular case. Anyway. That's one of the things that really appealed to me about this story. As for the author, here's their bio River Solomon is a writer, a lecturer, and a refugee of the Transatlantic slave trade. Their home is in the realm of the imaginary, where blackness, queerness, and disability become

sites of insurgency. In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honor List and winning a Firecracker Award, Solomon's debut novel and Unkindness of Ghosts, was a finalist for a Lambda, a Hearst Right, and a Locus Award. Solomon's The Deep was the winner of the twenty twenty Lambda Award and was on the short list for a Nebula, Locus, World

Fantasy and Hugo Award. Emerging out of a collaboration with experimental hip hop group Clipping, fronted by David Diggs, The Deep investigates Tony Morrison's incantation in the novel Beloved, This is Not a Story to pass On. Solomon's third novel, Sorrowland, the story of a young woman's godlike metamorphosis, when the Stonewall and Otherwise Award, and was shortlisted for an Ignite

Award and Model Home. Solomon's latest novel has recently released a critical acclaim and I'm Margaret Kiljoy and you can find me on the internet. And Hazel writes with scripts and scheduling and you cannot find them. And Eva does our audio. And that's it for today. We will be back next week with another short story. Until then, land back pre Palestine, fuck ice, and towards a complicated utopia. It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources where it Could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening, Just