Assistant Editor Maggie Su: As millions of young people protest climate change and fight for environmental regulations, Matt Greene’s microfictions take up the generation-defining question: how do we make sense of our place within an eroding world? In “Dates,” destruction and consumption are inextricably intertwined. The piece begins with the collective “we” knocking out walls in an abandoned motel and reflecting on the sea’s desalinization, yet ends with that same “we” compulsively devouring dates. “Salvation” references the late Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain—a painted mound in the Imperial Valley desert. Told through patient details, Greene elevates the mundane into the holy, and through nature finds the sublime.
To hear Matt Greene read “Dates,” click below:
Dates
We went east until it was palm groves and a shack with a sign that said dateshakes. Then the trees dissolved into an inland sea and the smell of death.
At an abandoned motel, we walked among the many rooms, taking turns with a sledgehammer. At the beach, a slide up to its neck in sand, only the sand was not sand but bones. The sea was drying from overconsumption. We couldn’t see a desalinization plant but it was there. Maybe it was under the surface. Once, it was all resorts, and now it was just their skeletons. Atop the bones were the fresh carcasses of fish and birds. Somehow the water both harbored life, still, and was lethally saline.
In town we bought chips and a cassette of Mexican gospels, and on the way back we stopped for shakes. There was a table with a dozen date varieties and no employee in sight. We walked in a circle, grabbing them first one at a time, then by the fistful, cackling in the air conditioning.
To hear Matt Greene read “Salvation,” click below:
Salvation
for Leonard Knight
The man said what he did was take the plaster and punch it into shapes. Once he got it how he liked it, then he got to painting. He said he used to have to drive around and collect junk to scaffold his mountain, used to beg for donations to buy the paint and plaster, but now people brought all that for him. Only, he never saw the deliveries. He’d wake, and there it was, tires and wood planks and sticks and rebar and buckets of primary colors. He said he got out of the army and he didn’t know what to do, so he built a hot-air balloon. He said it crashed in this very spot and he asked God what to do and God told him. He said he made his mountain for twenty years, and then God struck it down in a flood so he could build it new and better, and that this mountain had stood already another twenty.
The man took a drink of beer and said he’d like to rest and that we should take a look around, so we wandered passageways into atriums that blossomed into tire trees of many colors. We climbed to the top of his mountain on a trail cutting between verse. It was hot enough to make a person impressionable. From up top we could see the brush stretch into foothills and an old man drinking beer in the stare of the vacuum. And even though we were atheists and anarchists and socialists, that didn’t mean we didn’t also believe in the desert.
Matt Greene teaches writing in Appalachia. “Dates” and “Salvation” are from a linked series of prose pieces, some of which have appeared in or are forthcoming from Cleaver, Spillway, and Wigleaf. Other recent work has appeared in Moss and Santa Monica Review.
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