The waters had never fully receded from Yazoo County, and all that was left were stagnant puddles—dark pools that had become breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Moira Lopez slapped her forearm, squishing one of the blood-sucking creatures and leaving behind a circle of blood. Her curly bangs stuck to her forehead as the humid air pressed down on her, and her boots skidded across the mud-slick asphalt. The lines of the megachurch parking lot had long since faded, and in their place were oppressive waves of Kuzu vines working hard to swallow the town hall. The west side of the dilapidated church was fighting a losing battle against the vines. Across the road, the floodwaters had swallowed and washed away shopping carts from a store that was once whole. All that was left was a thick mud that, on windy days, coated everything and everyone.
A dragonfly buzzed by. Moira swatted at the pollinator and adjusted her wide-brimmed hat to squat next to a tomato bush. The AI interface on her wrist beeped as she scanned the plant. "Clean leaves. Solid stem," she murmured as she input the plant's log: Jitomate #4 – The plant is thriving in acidic soil. Partial shade. No signs of blight or anthracnose. The dragonfly zoomed past her in defeat and on to the next potential blight carrier.
High-pitched squealing caught her attention from behind. A group of young children pushed out of the wooden church doors and ran out into the parking lot holding glass jars. Moira discerned Spanglish and a distinct Southern drawl as the children talked over each other and released native honey bees into the air. Like clockwork, a former deacon, now lead soil technician, rang the church bell. Before the waters had risen, that bell would call congregants dressed in their Sunday best to fill the pews and the collection basket. But now it was a call for water distribution and shared lunch under the old Southern Oak tree and a much-needed break from the baking sun.
Hot and humid days were nothing new for folks in the South, but since the floods, it seemed the land was punishing them. The days were hotter and longer, and the land was harder. In the South, they had always worshiped the land. Sometimes because of it, other times despite it, like when tornadoes raged across the open plains, ripping everything in their path. Perhaps the land was angry. Angry that, even despite the furious waters, we remained and had started to rebuild. What Moira helped to rebuild across church parking lots wasn't salvation. It was a means to stay rooted when the maps would redraw themselves every season, with the hope that we wouldn't be here.
She knelt, pressed her palm into the warm soil, and uttered a prayer she'd read in a collection of short stories from the old days:
God is Change. And so are we.
At first glance, Moira didn't appear to be a preacher, nor did she call herself one. But she carried herself like one. She knew how to read a room, something she was skilled in from a young age, and held silence long enough for the truth to surface. She didn't wear vestments or have clerical collars. She wore her beat-up boots and a large, wide-brimmed hat that covered her dark hair, always wrapped in cloth. While pastors carried Bibles, Moira carried a laminated quote from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower tucked into her back pocket. "All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, Changes you."
The Great Dixie Flood originated as a Category 6 storm, which had no official name. By that time, there was no need for storms to bear names. FEMA's funding had been slashed to the bone by an administration that said climate change was a hoax. But the joke was on them. It was the Category 6 that destroyed Mississippi, but the coastlines along the Gulf had already been eroded by previous smaller storms that left no time for recovery. The Mississippi levees had last been fully serviced in the 2020s, when funding for that effort also dried up. The result was that, after a couple of weeks of unseasonably heavy rains, the levees gave way. But it wasn't just the levee that broke. The entire system had broken, structurally, bureaucratically, and spiritually.
People were angry, and protests took over the flooded streets, mingling with the wandering displaced. The ensuing chaos was epic. Many lost lives, jobs were cut, and businesses were ransacked. It went on for years, and the aid that trickled in stopped by 2040. What remained of the Federal Government had abandoned recovery efforts in the rural South. They had cited "unstable infrastructure costs" and "climate triage." But just because the aid stopped didn't mean surveillance did. They used drones to keep tabs on communities. The drones buzzed above for days, mapping out water damage and crowd formations, but delivered no warnings when the Category 6 approached. Mississippi was a place to study environmental collapse, not to try and stop it.
When the Category 6 hit, water and storm surge had violently engulfed towns. No amount of sandbags and boarded-up windows could have stopped the catastrophic damage. Bodies were found weeks later, decomposing in trees where the floodwaters had carried them. Thousands of acres of crops and cattle were washed away, leaving barren earth with soil that no longer wanted the roots of corn plants. The first couple of days had been like a fever dream, the air eerily still without the drone of rescue helicopters.
In the wake of the federal abandonment, mutual aid networks flourished. As the waters subsided, churches began to reopen their doors, but not for Sunday services. They were used for storing food and providing first aid. Former librarians ran mesh Wi-Fi systems from the rooftops of gutted post offices to coordinate resources. From the rubble, organizers like Moira, a low-level prison guard back then, emerged, bringing with them new technologies used to track soil regeneration instead of parole violations. A new community was born—one with an abolitionist theology.
Moira's Parish of Seeds had been born from the bones of a megachurch that was once known for its large and loud worship sessions. Inside, Moira and her crew had torn out the pews and converted the sanctuary into a seed-curing room. The baptismal font became a hydroponic lettuce tank, and the stained-glass Jesus now watched over shelves of okra, collards, and marigold seeds. Lining the shelves were labels written in every language spoken by the parishioners. Moira's parish was the first of its kind. Soon after, seed sanctuaries took root across Mississippi as communities banded together. Creating a new liturgy that no longer idealized personal salvation in a distant heaven but venerated collective survival in an unforgiving land.
We called this new religion Earthseed, a religion Southern-grown and imbued with Gullah tradition, Creole healing, Pentecostal song, and Black cooperative farming. While Moira had never claimed to be a prophet, her work in pioneering seed sanctuaries echoed the truth of Butler's work: God is change, and survival is an act of imagination. For those who didn't truly know the Parish, it seemed like a miracle. For Moira, it was a memory of a South that refused to die.
The origins of Moira Lopez fascinated people. The kind that got passed down through generations of folklore. It was believed that Moira had been born during a blackout as energy grids were struggling to cope with the power demand. Her mother, a doula, had delivered her by lantern light in a makeshift clinic above an old bait shop. Her father wasn't in the picture, and her mother never shared the truth about who and where he was. Raised on the back roads of Jackson, Moira had come of age during a time of failing storm shelters and roadblocks. She experienced heatwave-induced famines, catastrophic flooding from broken levees, and families torn apart. She spent a short stint working in the local prison, watching over desperate citizens who had looted groceries or resisted evacuation orders that landed them in the damp prison cells. At first, Moira had told herself she was keeping order. But the longer she worked there, the more doubt had begun to creep in. Survival looked like disobedience in the eyes of the law. When Yazoo County finally and completely collapsed, Moira left her shift, no longer able to tell the difference between keeping people safe and keeping people caged.
For many years, Moira wandered across migration routes, bartering heirloom seeds for oral histories to build databases of Indigenous farmers across the Gulf Coast. Her relationship with seeds had started long before she fully understood their importance. Growing up, Moira's grandmother had taught her how to save okra seeds in a simple handkerchief and spot the difference between a drone and a hawk. As a child, Moira had sometimes grown tired of the lessons. She wanted to be outside, not stuck inside while her grandmother explained why a seed needed to be saved. Seed-keeping had not come naturally to her. But her grandmother was patient and never allowed her to give up.
During her travels, Moira acquired new skills and met new people. She learned how to convert federal surveillance drones into pollinators and began building seed libraries in old prison cells with the help of former prisoners. Agriculture and abolition, Moira came to realize, went hand in hand. Both asked what could be preserved, who deserved to survive, and what kinds of systems were necessary to make survival possible. The same people who were once treated as problems to be contained were now building the knowledge their communities needed to survive.
Moira's path to the Parish of Seeds was not an easy one, and by 2050, when the parish took form, Moira had been called a terrorist by some and a prophet by others. But those closest to her called her what she wanted to hear the most: keeper of the soil.
At first glance, Moira's Parish looked like a survival zone and garden carved between ruins. But a deeper look revealed a thriving ecosystem of resistance. This new community wasn't a rebuilt city. It wasn't a utopia. It didn't resemble what we knew in the past. It was a working future. There was no central power grid. No Big Brother watching over our shoulders. No police or landlords. There were land stewards, storytellers, conflict mediators, and solar engineers. The air buzzed with the chatter of pollinators, both drones and insects. Instead of brick classrooms, children gathered to learn the names of every seed under the canopies of squash vines on hand-carved wooden benches. Teenagers were taught how to interpret cloud formation and code weather forecasts.
Across the county, different churches had their own specialty. In the Pentecostal church that sat at the edge of downtown, refugees from Florida grew coastal crops in old shipping pallets. One converted basement that was once used for Sunday School became a seed library, cataloging the past. Each drawer held seeds gently wrapped in fabric scraps that had been labeled with the names of the plants and, importantly, the names of the people who found or grew them. It was important to remember those before us.
The Parish even had festivals. On the summer solstice, it held the Festival of the Germinant Dead, where names of those lost to the climate wars, prisons, and pandemics were spoken aloud and seeds planted in their honor. Gone were baptisms in Christ, and in their place were rituals of a recommitment to land and community.
The conversion of Christian sanctuaries into seed sanctuaries, or the incorporation of new technology into old traditions, may not have been the most radical aspect of the Parish. It was the Parish's refusal of hierarchy. Decisions were made together with elders sitting beside teenagers. No voice weighed more than another. When conflict arose because humans were human after all, punishment wasn't the answer. Instead, council circles turned to accountability teams. Abolition had rendered punishment obsolete. The people who joined that Parish came, not to escape the world, but to build a new world rooted in land, not law. Decades ago, this would have been inconceivable.
But it's important to note that what makes the Parish possible is not myth or miracle. It's a memory. The Parish of Seeds is a poignant example of what happens when people refuse to accept what the world once was and what it has become. The Parish emerged because people were tired of waiting for permission to live differently from the past. It was not born out of ideology or someone looking for power, but out of necessity from a future that we chose.
This future wasn't inevitable. Society had chosen it. There were warnings. Society didn't listen. Increased hurricanes, growing blackouts, famine, pollution, and spreading floodplains. Still, they let the levees break. The scientists had said this would happen. Elders had warned us. Organizers, activists, and artists drew maps, built the networks, and sowed the seeds. Still, they didn't listen, and instead, they let the levees break. Confronting the future was scary. It required change, and we often choose comfort over change.
The truth was the Parish of Seeds was not a miracle or an escape fantasy. It's a reckoning. The presence of the Parish forced us to answer the question, "What are we truly willing to give up to be free from the system?" But in the process of this abolition, we lost things like comfort, our control, and certainty over the future. It wasn't all a loss. We also gained something: faith in each other over institutions.
While the Parish of Seeds may have been alive in the fictional future of Mississippi, its story was rooted in reality. Every seed library, every tenant union, mutual aid network, and resistance farm already existed in our world. It was there. Fragmented and frail, but still there, waiting. Perhaps the question shouldn't have been whether this future would come, but rather what kind of future we were preparing for.
As Moira knelt beside a new sapling, the sounds of children's laughter floated on the air with the echo of the church bell. Gently, she placed her hand over the soil with another prayer. Maybe this too would take root. Maybe this will be remembered. Because if the Parish had taught her anything, it was that surviving was not about returning to a world lost. Survival was planting what we still had and daring to imagine that, against all odds, it would grow.