The Sky Split Open

One moment, the world was still.

The next, the sky split open, the air peeling back wood from several homes' foundations like flesh from bone.

There were no sirens. No warning at all. Just the house's shuddering—a deep, groaning tremble—and my mother screaming for my brother and me. 

We ran downstairs, hearts hammering, as the walls groaned around us.

Through the window, my mother gasped, "Their house. It's gone."

My father, born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, who'd weathered hurricanes in the Carolinas when visiting family, could only mutter, "I can't believe that." 

But it was real: The wind had peeled our neighbor's home from the earth like a scab, and splintered it midair. It was a spectacle of impossible physics, the kind of CGI destruction that defines summer blockbusters, but this was real. It was like a scene from a movie where the director makes a house explode, but without the fireball—just the silent, terrifying unmaking. 

It reminded me of splitting my Barbie Dreamhouse in two as a kid, moving dolls up the staircase in their plastic heels, except this was no game. None of us were in control. 

Then, we heard the scream—a woman coming home to the wreckage. She had left a house. Now, our neighbors scrambled across the ruins of her backyard, shouting for the boy buried under what had once been their life.

The Shape of Not-Knowing

I thought immediately of Palestine—not just Gaza, but Ramallah, the West Bank, and the faces of the diaspora I'd held close. I ached for them, but I cannot share their grief. I have no language for it. 

In the six months since the tornado carved its path through my neighborhood back in May, I've trembled at every storm. In its wake, I have wondered what it means to lose entire bloodlines, entire cities. First while the world watches, and then when the world, placated by headlines of "ceasefire," simply scrolls on to the next thing on its Instagram feeds. What does it mean for empathy itself to be punishable—by firing, arrest, imprisonment, expulsion, disappearance? For it to be not one house but dozens, every hour, for more than two consecutive years, a genocidal violence that continues now, in the fall of 2026, under the hollow label of a "truce"? 

Though I cannot know, after the storm, I know the shape of that not-knowing.

Palestinians are survivors of a genocide that renders the land itself a weapon—turning water to poison, soil to dust, roots to targets. This is the double helix of our oppression: land theft is state violence is land theft. To be made stateless is to be severed from the earth God entrusted us to steward. It is a crime against creation itself.

The same imperial systems that clear-cut Georgia's forests also train its police in the Negev Desert. For decades, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) has flown Atlanta cops to occupied Palestine to drill with the Israeli Occupation Forces. Now, Cop City, a rehearsal ground for urban warfare, has been erected on stolen Muscogee land. These parallels are not metaphors. They are supply chains.

And the supply chains of silence stretch further. The same is true in Sudan, a nation whose flag mirrors Palestine's, where the resulting bloodshed of genocide can be seen from space, yet remains invisible to a world that has already looked away due to the complexion of its victims.

In witnessing this wreckage here in the South, and tracing the lines from our storms to our prisons, I finally understand Octavia Butler's Parables not as prophecy, but as an autopsy. Butler's scalpel laid bare, in her time, the corpse of our present—a South where unceasing disaster is not an exception, but an expectation. 

Collapse is a Business Model

This is collapse. We are no longer living through  the prelude, nor the warning, but the thing itself.  

The South has always been rendered a sacrifice zone. First for cotton, then coal, and now for xAI's cyber-colonial fantasies slurping the Memphis aquifer dry. The tornado that gutted my neighborhood was no "act of God." 

Just weeks earlier, we'd felt the earth shake – likely from fracking drills and server farms boring into the Memphis Sand Aquifer. What the news calls "unprecedented," Butler would've called inevitable.

In Parable of the Sower, the company town, Olivar, sells water at gunpoint. It is a place of last resort for the desperate, but in a collapsed world, where fascism is no longer merely on the rise, it becomes the only choice. Our Olivars are already here.

  • In Georgia's Flint River Basin, Black farmers – descendants of survivors of chattel slavery – watch agribusiness steal their water. The Flint River Farms Resettlement Project once promised land sovereignty, but that dream drowned in manufactured drought.

Butler understood: genocide isn't just mass graves. It's the bulldozer at dawn, the policy that says you cannot root here, the drought engineered by spreadsheet. It is land made weapon—and like all weapons, it's tested first on the disposable.

The South has always been rendered a sacrifice zone. First for cotton, then coal, and now for xAI's cyber-colonial fantasies slurping the Memphis aquifer dry.

The Roots Live Deeper

Palestinians replant olive trees the day after soldiers uproot them. Black Southerners bury their sweat in Georgia's red clay. And now I understand: the land never forgets the hands that tend her. She remembers the hands that blistered picking cotton under a white sun, the hands that press olive oil into Palestinian bread. But she also remembers the hands that exploit her—the developers, the drillers, the soldiers who soak her soil in blood.

We are New Afrikans—a colony inside a colony. Palestine is an open wound. But both of us are proof: you can bomb a people's homes, but you cannot incinerate their belonging. The roots live deeper than the rubble.

Octavia Butler mapped the circuitry of Empire with prophetic clarity. In Parable of the Talents, privatized police forces mirror Cop City's kill-camp trainings. Her "Christian America" cults stockpile AR-15s while preaching rapture, just as our Christofascist politicians bless bombs with one hand and hold Bibles in the other.

The "Global South" is not a place. It is a condition—defined by extraction, abandonment, and the sound of people wailing over bodies not yet cold. The South, globally, is a structural relation of underdevelopment. And the incubator for global revolution. 

But this isn't fiction. There's no back cover, no reading guide, no final page. 

Disaster has a caste system.

  • Who wails? Black grandmothers keen over their grandchildren's asthma-dead from refinery air—the same poison that drifts over Gaza's tent camps, where Palestinian aunties stitch names into shrouds.
  • Who clears? Undocumented and incarcerated crews are sent into toxic floodwaters. Palestinian families dig through concrete with bare hands. Incarcerated firefighters battle wildfires for less than $1/hour. 

Butler's hyperempathy is no metaphor. It is the wound that lets us see: collapse is not a weather event. It is a business model.

It's the way every felled tree feels like a lost finger. Every hole in the ground creates one in my skull, my back, my legs. The earth's wounds are our own, yet we keep planting. We keep digging. We outlive the falling apart.

"God is change," wrote Lauren Oya Olamina. "Shape God."

The Hands That Catch Us

In the wreckage, I met neighbors whose faces I'd seen for years but whose names I'd never learned. Miss Toni Cade Bambara's question echoed in my throat like a swallowed stone: Do you know your neighbors' names?

I didn't. Locked inside for several months by debilitating body dysmorphia, social anxiety and dread, I'd feared the vulnerability of knowing. Yet when the sky tore open, we found ourselves saying the same words without hesitation: "It's because they cut down all those damn trees."

We hadn't shared so much as a greeting before that day—but before the sirens started, we learned the missing boy's name. Together, we shouted it into the wreckage, hoping to hear anything in response.

This is what they fear most: not our rage, but our reciprocity.

The earth whispers: Be seeds. Grow even when they bury you.

That mother's wail still lives in my jaw—her son's breath trapped beneath splintered wood. Now, when the wind snarls or rain lashes too long, my heart becomes a trapped bird. Construction noise tightens my chest until I'm screaming inside: Stop. Stop. Stop.

Yet Butler's words hum beneath the fear: "All that you touch, you change."

Gaza's children write their names on their arms so the world will know them if the bombs come. Georgia's elders remind the youth: "You don't have to get ready when you stay ready."

This is how we touch back—how we prove memory outlives metal.

What the Land Remembers

There used to be woods I passed every morning, ironically bordering a church. Butler would appreciate that.

When I first moved here, that thicket made me feel safe as I relearned to drive after years in New York City. Those trees steadied me as I navigated narrow backroads in my tiny Civic, shielding me from trucks that roared past like predators. Then one day, they were gone. Clear-cut. A sudden bald spot like in that "Earth Song" video, a stupid comparison that stuck anyway.

After that, I stopped driving. Stopped leaving the house. Let the ideation currents drag me under.

But months later, elbow propped against a car window as I sat in school traffic, I saw it: green tendrils forcing through the scarred earth. The land was healing itself despite us. The Earth fights so relentlessly to live. What's my excuse? If she's my mother, shaped by the Divine, then I owe her the same stubbornness.

Now I stare at the tornado's rubble across the street—the splintered remains of a home no one's bothered to clear. I hope weeds split the foundation of whatever condos they try to build here. 

I hope the roots remember what we so often forget. 

No one told them they were supposed to die.

So they keep reaching.

And so must we.

We are the earth's wail.

We are the hands digging seeds from its throat.

Sol Elias is a Black Muslim feminist lawyer, writer and full-spectrum birth worker based in the Greater Atlanta Metro area. Sol’s legal and policy background is primarily in eliminating patriarchal violence, family policing abolition, international human rights, and bodily autonomy.