Return to Sender

Return to Sender

Sarena Ulibarri

When Javier was a child, he thought the concrete casks contained a creature only half-alive, that they were caskets for a monster that could kill the whole city with a flash. It was how he made sense of what he’d been told about this cluster of mural-covered cylinders standing before Tempe’s historic Hayden Flour Mills, before he was old enough to understand WasteFest, or the truth of what the casks really held.

A few days before the fiftieth WasteFest, he told Yuli this memory. Now, on the morning of the big event, he looks up at those casks in horror. Painted over each mural is a black gothic-style casket, adorned with an x-eyed skull, bright green ooze seeping from its lid. The style is unmistakably Yuli’s.

In this moment, it isn’t just telling Yuli about his childhood belief that Javier regrets. He regrets ever proposing to her—never mind that she keeps putting off their wedding to some indeterminate date. He regrets striking up a conversation with her seven years ago, when they were teamed together to haul compost buckets during the WasteFest 43 community cleanup. He wants to say he can’t believe she would do something like this, but the problem is he definitely can.

The zero-waste vendor fair is setting up their booths, peddling art built from reclaimed farm equipment and electric motorcycles constructed entirely from e-waste, fresh produce from local farms, and mouth-watering street food. Every snippet of conversation Javier catches from the vendors revolves around the vandalism, some viewing it as a meaningful protest, others as a gaudy publicity stunt—though for what, Javier isn’t sure. Regardless, it’s gotten everyone’s attention, and those conversations will only get louder once the crowd arrives, and louder still when AR participants log on.

Javier finds Yuli leaning against a wall, arms crossed, hat crooked intentionally at a diagonal, flecks of green paint speckled across her hemp pants. A couple of pigeons flutter away as Javier strides toward her.

He throws his arms wide. “What the hell?”

The smirk Yuli gives him sends his blood pressure skyrocketing even higher.

“I know what your inspection found,” she says.

Javier bristles. Part of his job with the Department of Energy was to conduct a ten-year inspection, and he found that the dry casks are starting to show signs of age. No surprise, considering most of them had been transported here fifty years ago, with a few decades already under their belt. The casks are not cages, like he believed as a child, but they are concrete sentinels, watching over the slow swan song of dying ions. And concrete degrades much faster than nuclear waste.

“I wasn’t planning to lie about it.” The tension in his jaw makes each word an effort.

“No, government agencies never lie,” Yuli says with an eyeroll. “But I know you. You’re going to downplay it. Try to convince everyone it’s not a big deal.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

Yuli shrugs. “It’s time to remind people what these are. We can paint portraits and butterflies on them to make them seem friendly and innocuous, but that doesn’t change what’s inside.”

What’s inside is spent nuclear fuel rods, securely encased in steel and then encased again in concrete. Not from nuclear weapons, but from the Palo Verde Generating Station that had provided electricity to the Phoenix metro for many decades. Maybe some people don’t understand that, but it’s no secret. WasteFest always includes a review of the interim storage agreement terms, read out loud like a litany. Anyone with a pair of AR glasses can check the monitors that track potential leaks or contamination, as easily as they check the weather or carbon PPM. Hardly anyone ever does, though, because the casks have kept their contents perfectly contained during their fifty-year tenure. Concerns about cancer risks and radiation sickness from proximity to the casks lessened with each passing season as the storage site became just another part of the cityscape, the murals painted on the casks more notable than their contents. And now Yuli’s vandalism threatens to resurrect all those old fears.

“You know what’s inside doesn’t actually look like green ooze, right?”

Yuli arches an eyebrow. “That’s what you’re mad about?”

There’s a whole list of what Javier’s mad about, and yeah, scientific inaccuracy is part of it. He turns toward the casks again, noticing the edges of the original murals peeking out from behind Yuli’s new monstrosities, and something else shoots to the top of that list.

“You painted over my grandmother’s portrait, you know.” Daring her to defend that. The casks exist here in downtown Tempe, and in similar clusters throughout the Phoenix metro area, because of negotiations Javier’s grandmother spearheaded while she was governor. Set here in the middle of the city so people would remember that nothing can simply be thrown away.

“Your grandmother set this up as an interim storage site,” Yuli says. “So what we want to know is how much longer until they get transported to the permanent repository?”

Javier isn’t sure who she means by “we.” It certainly isn’t him and Yuli, despite the fact they’re supposed to be a couple. Her artist friends, maybe. Some watchdog group she’s organized.

“The permanent…?” Javier stumbles over his words. “Well, Yucca Mountain…”

Yuli shakes her head, and Javier shuts up. They both know Yucca Mountain hasn’t been considered since before either of them was born. A sacred site to the Shoshone and the Paiute, it was finally struck from possibility as a permanent geologic repository following the passage of the Indigenous Land Back Act. In addition to returning sovereign jurisdiction to tribes and ensuring food and energy security, it superseded the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, freeing DOE to investigate alternate repository sites. With most tribes unwilling to even entertain the idea of storing nuclear waste, Javier’s grandmother had argued that the ethical move was for the urban areas that had most benefited from nuclear power to steward its waste. The generous compensation package she’d negotiated with DOE shifted the way people thought about the casks, from burden to opportunity.

“Where’s the new site they’ve been developing?” Yuli demands.

When Javier doesn’t answer, Yuli grabs his arm. He studies her fingers, her familiar chipped nails and sun-browned skin suddenly looking like a stranger’s.

“See, this is why I did it. Without a permanent storage site, we become the permanent site. You think your grandmother would’ve wanted that?”

He has no answer, his normally logical mind a miasma of emotion. He loads all of it into a glare that would burn a hole through anyone else. “You’re infuriating.”

She flashes him a smile. “That’s why you love me.”

In that moment, Javier isn’t sure he does. They’ve been tentatively engaged for nearly five years now, and together two longer than that. They’ve always been opposites in many ways, but never in that time has Javier felt repelled by her like he does right now.

But there’s no time left to hash this out, no time to fix anything. WasteFest 50 is starting, and it will be his job to calm the mob she’s stirring up. He storms away, throwing one more disgusted glance over his shoulder.

Every WasteFest attendee wearing augmented reality glasses is staring at the casks with rapt attention, nudging others to put theirs on. Javier pops on his own AR glasses, disabling facial recognition so the screen won’t crowd with profiles of the thousands of people surrounding him. The chatter scrolling down the side of his screen is just as alarmist as he had feared.

When his eyes focus on the virtual sign for Hayden Flour Mills, the history packet automatically expands, playing a video. Before he can swipe it away, static interrupts and a roiling, animated mushroom cloud fills his screen. Javier yanks the glasses off in disgust. He should have known she wouldn’t stop at paint. He has no intention of watching the rest of this arthouse movie Yuli’s friends spliced into the AR data to scare people. It’s working, too. He can see that on every face around him.

He climbs the platform while the mayor of Tempe gives her opening speech, and puts his glasses back on to jump from city to city throughout the metro, seeing how far Yuli’s protest has stretched. The other crowds he visits superimpose over the Tempe one like a swarm of ghosts. There’s no casket graffiti anywhere else, but small groups of protestors are disrupting WasteFest 50 in one way or another all across the Valley of the Sun.

Maybe Yuli’s right that WasteFest has drifted from its original intention of celebrating new uses for all types of waste. Javier wishes he could forgo his own speech and replay one of his grandmother’s, about the responsibility we owe to the Earth for the many different types of waste human activity creates. Let her inspirational words remind everyone of why Phoenix and its neighbors agreed to be host cities for the spent nuclear fuel.

But most of the people gathered here hadn’t agreed to it; their parents and grandparents had, fifty years ago. The argument that everyone in the Valley had benefited from nuclear energy was much less convincing now that Palo Verde had been decommissioned for a couple of decades, sending out its last watt in 2047. Nuclear was now a pretty small slice of the overall energy graph; nuclear technology was more often associated these days with medicine and food safety than electricity.

Yet what everyone standing in this crowd had benefited from was the DOE compensation package for hosting the casks in the Valley. They’d enjoyed free tuition at ASU and at the Maricopa Community Colleges, and had used the DOE-funded community kitchens, rehab houses, and equipment libraries like they’d always been there. Powered their AR glasses and air conditioners with energy from the solar fields DOE built to replace the nuclear plant at Palo Verde. Danced and celebrated at WasteFest nearly every year of their lives. Even the water they drank, showered, and gardened with was part of that deal: water that used to be devoted to the cooling pools at the generating station was now redirected to help ensure decades of water security in the sunbaked Sonoran Desert.

“Javier?”

He startles out of his thoughts; he’s brooded right through the entire opening speech without paying it a shred of attention. The mayor of Tempe gives him a tight smile, worry lines deep in her dark skin.

“You have the ten-year inspection results?” she repeats.

“Yes, yes, of course.” Javier pats his pockets nervously, as though looking for papers containing his notes, even though everything he has to share is digital. He blinks his glasses back to Tempe and pulls up the data.

The glasses will capture his voice and transmit it to everyone else on the AR network, whether they’re standing in the crowd before him or joining from the other side of the world. His report will be stored as another open file within the Flour Mills’ history packet, assuming the hack hasn’t totally corrupted it. Suppressing a weary sigh, he makes public the graphs and notes from his inspection. At the rest of the storage sites across the metro area, other DOE inspectors are doing the same. Transparency, accountability: those have always been the core values of the storage agreement. There is an element of interpretation, though, and that’s what Yuli apparently doesn’t trust him to convey in good faith.

It’s true that the casks are aging. Gradual, predictable degradation, perhaps hastened slightly by the brutal desert sun. If they’re not fixed, then in a couple of decades, radiation could leak out of their double-walled barriers and cause serious trouble. It won’t come to that, though. Javier already submitted his report, and the repairs will be handled in due time. Yuli apparently can’t fathom having trust in that type of system.

He peers through the transparent graphs, overlaid across the faces awaiting his pronouncement. In the middle of the crowd, Yuli looks him dead in the eye, no AR glasses blocking her sharp gaze. She’s holding a hand-painted sign, and all he can see is the word “Toxic” in large bubble letters.

“The inspection shows—” His voice cracks. He clears his throat and starts over. “The inspection shows a number of concerns regarding the long-term integrity of the storage casks.”

Despite the protests, WasteFest 50 carries on. The casks may be the centerpiece of the festival, but they’re only a small piece of it. Each city within the Valley observes WasteFest in its own way. In Scottsdale, Great Pacific Garbage Patch cleanup companies trek out to the desert to showcase the latest furniture constructed from ocean plastics. Phoenix’s upcycled fashion show is internationally acclaimed. Tempe is all about the music—any excuse for yet another outdoor music festival—with limited-edition merchandise created from materials collected in last year’s junk drive.

But in the days following, Yuli’s protest gains steam, gathering worldwide support after an AR-enabled town hall session devolves into a lot of yelling. Children crying. People calling Javier names he has to look up the meanings for later. Bands threaten to cancel next year’s performances in solidarity. Vendors threaten to sue for lost income because of disruptions to WasteFest.

There’s no empathy from the other cities’ inspectors, either.

“Good job, Tempe.”

“Nice working with you, enjoy living on UBI.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?”

Javier suffers through it all, including meeting after meeting with DOE supervisors back in D.C., whom he hasn’t seen since he was first hired. His job gets redesigned and then redesigned again, but the censuring completes without him being fired.

“We expect public outrage to die down quickly,” they conclude. “PR is already working on damage control.”

Damage to the agency’s reputation, not the damage to the casks, is their priority. Javier isn’t prepared to plead the protestors’ case, but he runs through the numbers anyway, tries to explain the story told by the graphs, the urgency with which they need to make repairs. He reminds them of the leak that happened just next door in New Mexico when damage at Church Rock was ignored, and of the fragility of the public’s trust in DOE.

“We hear you,” the suits say, and Javier is quite sure they don’t. “Potential improvements will be reevaluated at the next decennial inspection.”

Ten years isn’t much in a span of ten thousand, but Javier leaves the meetings thinking, grudgingly, that Yuli has a point.

Normally when his mother asks if he’s coming home for some holiday or nephew’s birthday, Javier comes up with an excuse about why he’s too busy to travel and then joins the family briefly via AR. This time, he gladly accepts the chance to break away, uses the three-hour train ride to decompress. It’s not really home; he grew up in Tempe, a city kid in a ranch family, a child in a college town. But his mother inherited the family ranch in Willcox after retiring from teaching at ASU. Wherever family is, that’s home.

The train that replaced I-10 is still fairly new; the transition away from personal vehicles has been slow, especially in the west. Out here in the rural areas, they’ll always be necessary. His mother picks him up at the station in a mud-splashed truck and they drive another hour to the ranch, the shaking of the vehicle against washboard roads too loud for conversation.

Commercial monoculture farms used to fill this valley, but now corridors of native plants snake between permaculture mounds. Sandhill cranes graze through fields and wade in irrigation ponds, almost ready to start their flight north for the summer. Robotic harvesters trundle through fruit tree orchards, and roadside stands offer produce and jellies and ciders. The stands remind Javier of the WasteFest vendors, except these are here all the time, not only once per year.

A decent cross-section of the family greets him at the house, plus several neighbors and a ranch hand who might as well be family. After Javier chooses his seat at the long table, he realizes that one of Yuli’s paintings hangs on the wall directly across from him: a snake and stars in her signature style. His mother bought it from her when he and Yuli were still both students at ASU, before they were engaged. The art sours his mood. Everyone notices, and won’t let him off the hook until he explains what happened at WasteFest, what he rode four hours to try to escape. It feels like having to deliver the inspection report all over again, everyone breathlessly awaiting his conclusion. He trails off, conclusion unreached.

“So you’re breaking it off with her after this, right?” his mother asks.

“I don’t…” Javier starts.

Her face creases into disapproval. Javier immediately pivots into Yuli’s defense. “I know you don’t like Yuli, but⁠—”

His mother raises a hand, chopping off his words in midair. “No, I love Yuli. Really.” She flaps a hand toward the painting, as if patronage of Yuli’s art should be proof enough of her admiration. “I just…” She sighs. “I don’t think you two are right for each other. I never have.”

Javier sits back in his chair, not sure what to say. One of the neighbors gets real busy ordering the kids around to clear the dishes. Javier doesn’t want to admit to himself that he’s had the same thought, long before Yuli painted the caskets. First, they were supposed to get married “after they graduated.” Then it had been “after Yuli’s MFA,” then “after this next project,” then “once we feel more stable.” Each new next felt further away than the last, and they’d kept growing apart rather than together.

“You remember when we climbed on top of the casks?” his cousin Todd asks, a clear deflection from the awkwardness.

“Who?” Javier asks.

“Me and you! You don’t remember? We were pretty young. You told me there was some evil creature inside them, and if we climbed on top, we’d be able to see down into its cage.”

Javier opens his mouth to protest that he’d never done any such thing, but then the memory unfolds before him, as clear as if he were watching an AR video. The two of them riding bikes around Oidbaḍ Doʼag—the butte near downtown Tempe that some older folks still called A Mountain. Todd skidding his bike to a stop when they were within sight of the casks, teasing and daring Javier to climb them. They’d boosted each other atop the smaller casks, jumping and scrambling to the top of the biggest one. They found, of course, not a window into a creature’s cage, but only more concrete, and more sun-faded paint, a scrawl of graffitied names from others who had managed the climb.

“Huh,” he says. “How did I forget about that?” But he knows how: Because it doesn’t match his sense of who he is. It’s one thing to believe a monster exists; it’s another to go looking for it. That’s something Yuli would do, not him.

One of the kids rushes in from outside, AR glasses on. She dips the glasses lower on the bridge of her nose, looks around until she spots Javier, and then runs up to tug on his sleeve.

“Tío, you gotta see this.”

He takes the glasses, expecting some interactive game or news about a celebrity he’s never heard of. Instead, he finds himself right back in Tempe, in a crowd gathered in front of Hayden Flour Mills. Some horrible sound pulses through the bone conduction speaker. Javier sucks in a breath when he realizes what it is: someone has taken a jackhammer to the base of one of the casks. They’re wearing the particular shade of green that disrupts AR video feeds, makes the wearer look distorted. He watches in astonishment as a masked group frees the smallest cask from its base and loads it onto a flatbed semi with the help of a construction crane. The crowd follows the unmoored cask as the truck rolls slowly through the streets.

“What’s that weird building?” Todd asks, and Javier realizes everyone else at the table has disappeared into AR along with him.

“Tempe City Hall,” Javier says, of the distinctive upside-down pyramid where the waste is being taken. Miraculously, they get it unloaded, across the sidewalk, and up a small set of stairs without disaster, and plant the cask right at the front doors. Someone in a green mask paints something new over the casket. Javier knows just by the way they move that it’s Yuli beneath the green mask, and there’s no denying it once she steps away to reveal the new art: an envelope with “Return to Sender” splashed across it in red lettering.

Javier feels as upside down as that pyramid—righteously angry about the danger of moving the waste that way, frustrated that Yuli took matters into her own hands instead of following due process, scared about the consequences she might face, about what this might mean for the future of the site, for the future of WasteFest. Yet he also feels proud. Each interaction at his job since WasteFest 50 has left him feeling powerless, and he’s never known how to take back his own power the way Yuli does. He wishes he could have been there in the crowd, to witness this historic protest. Even if he would never be bold enough to help.

“There’s been some talk about putting a storage site near here,” Todd says, once everyone has surfaced from the AR immersion.

“Which we’re not going to let happen,” Javier’s mother says.

“They’re offering a lot,” Todd says.

His mother sucks her teeth. “They can’t buy us out.”

“It ain’t even money,” Todd counters. “It’s support. Why’s the city always get that instead of us?”

“Where would they put it?” Javier asks.

“You know the Garcias’ old factory? It’s just sitting there, taking up space.”

He does know it. A former industrial spot, not clean enough to grow anything on, not toxic enough to get superfund status. Honestly, there are a dozen abandoned sites near Willcox that could work perfectly for interim storage. With proper precautions, the dry casks are as innocuous as any other slab of concrete.

Those “proper precautions,” though. He hasn’t even spoken to Yuli since WasteFest, but the way she’s ramped up her protest shows she understands that DOE’s not planning to take action anytime soon. If they won’t repair the casks in the middle of a city, how much will they let them decay if they get shuffled off to the countryside?

“This is exactly what your abuela spent her career fighting against,” his mother says. “Besides, they can’t put it on Indigenous land.”

“Wouldn’t be on their land,” Todd says.

“It’s all their land,” Javier’s mother corrects.

Todd huffs; this is a conflict as old as colonialism itself.

“The Land Back Act doesn’t mean we can’t site anywhere on the continent,” Javier says. “If it was that simple, even the metro area site wouldn’t have been allowed, because like you said: everywhere is Indigenous land.”

“Loopholes.” His mother treats the word like it tastes bad.

“Maybe so,” he says. “But there have to be. Otherwise, we’d be stuck storing it in the ocean or shoving it off on other countries like we used to with plastic.”

“They should just toss it into the sun.”

“And potentially destroy our whole atmosphere,” Todd counters.

Javier shrugs, nods, ceding the point to his cousin. “The Apache and O’odham Nations would have to consent to putting a site nearby, along with all the other surrounding communities.”

“You want those casks out here?” his mother asks pointedly.

Not really. He’d rather they stay in the city, where they fit right in with the rest of the concrete and street art. His gut reaction is the same as his mother’s, but there’s more to a decision like this than emotion. DOE’s compensation package could definitely help revitalize the community, support the farms and vineyards struggling to adapt to the changing climate.

He lifts his hands, leans back in his chair. “I’ve only got a say in what happens in Tempe.”

Nothing’s resolved, but tempers have diminished to embers.

Once the hiss of the air compressor dish cleaner subsides, Javier asks his mother, “How do you think grandmother would have handled all of this?”

“Ask her yourself!” she says. “She’s still with us, as are all the ancestors.”

Javier believes that wholeheartedly, but it’s a frustrating answer. He can’t exactly conjure her up and ask for direct advice. Asking the ancestors for help is about watching for subtle signs, about trusting your intuition. And in the same way Yuli refuses to trust the government, Javier refuses to trust his intuition. Facts, numbers, logic: that was what could make sense of this mess.

Besides, his ancestors were a diverse lot. How could he guarantee the signs he was interpreting came from the woman who had devoted her political career to the proper stewardship of nuclear waste, and not from his father’s family, who had made their living working at the Palo Verde nuclear plant? How could he know they didn’t come from his Nuevomexicano relatives who had been forced out of their homes because of the Trinity tests, or from his Japanese ancestors who carried the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their very souls? The nuclear legacy lived in every cell of Javier’s mixed blood. If all the ancestors were together in this room, they wouldn’t be able to agree any more than his living relatives could.

Through the kitchen window, he watches his youngest cousins feeding the goats, wonders instead how he can be a good ancestor, what signs he might send to their descendants when they need help. But he can’t see that either, dancing on the precipice of too many possible futures. The only thing he knows is that they can’t keep having these fights about the waste every couple of decades, ad infinitum. The waste will continue to exist for longer, perhaps, than humanity does. They can’t keep putting off a permanent solution the way he and Yuli keep putting off their wedding.

Within a few hours, images of the “Return to Sender” cask reflected in the glass windows of the upside-down pyramid have made the rounds through innumerable AR networks. Several members of the watchdog group quickly get slapped with charges of reckless endangerment and misuse of government resources, including the city employee who operated the crane. Mostly the punishment is a warning, to prevent copycats from attempting the same at other sites throughout the Valley.

Yuli gets assigned community service hours, and Javier finds her at the storage site, perched on a scaffold set up over the scar of the missing cask. She’s painting over her casket with a fresh portrait of Javier’s grandmother. Her portrayal is of an older version, a face much more familiar to him than the youthful one that had graced the cask for so long.

“Hardly a punishment, is it?” he shouts up to her.

The smile Yuli gives him reminds him of why he fell for her in the first place. Javier grips the scaffolding with both hands, hesitates, and then starts to climb. His dress shoes are slippery against the metal rungs, his slacks tugging uncomfortably, but he makes it to the top.

“I’m not going to apologize,” Yuli says.

“I’m not going to ask you to.”

She stares down at her paints, spends way too long cleaning a brush. “You… didn’t get fired because of me, did you?”

“No.” The only pushback he’s gotten since the cask removal has been in response to his pressuring DOE for answers about a permanent repository. “I… don’t think most people I work with realize we’re together.”

Yuli lift-drops both eyebrows at that, and turns around to continue her mural.

“Do you really want the casks to be removed?” he asks.

Yuli shrugs. “I don’t know what’s best. But something needs to change.”

Javier is not a two-in-the-morning kind of person. Yuli is, and that’s part of the reason they’d lived together only briefly. He couldn’t stand her clanging around with her art supplies in the middle of the night; she couldn’t stand his hissing espresso machine first thing in the morning. Yet here they are, talking in bed about the announcement of emergency legislation: a special vote in each Phoenix metro area city will decide whether to extend the interim storage agreement or terminate it.

Local companies speculate that removal of the casks will mean the end of WasteFest, calculate and lament the economic and cultural impact if the festival dies. Others wonder how much longer the free tuition and community center subsidies will last, and how that will work if some cities keep their casks and others don’t. Water rights will be up for negotiation again—always a sticky issue in desert states. Without the benefits DOE provided, will Phoenix crumble in on itself, or will it transform and rise from the ashes like its mythical namesake?

Though the deal happened long before his birth, Javier knows the original vote in favor of the storage site was far from unanimous. Plenty of people left the Valley in outrage. Plenty were leaving anyway, because of the heat or the water rationing, or crowded out by the influx of climate refugees from California and Texas. He’s heard her speeches, studied the history, but it’s still rather amazing how his grandmother managed to persuade so many people to accept these casks right in the middle of their communities.

Javier and Yuli walk together to the polling place, but he isn’t sure how he’s going to vote until they’re almost there. Passing by Hayden Flour Mills, he watches a pigeon land on the cask with his grandmother’s portrait. Pigeons, grackles, doves, thrashers, and dozens of other birds are no rare sight in the city. Yet for some reason, he notices this one. Watching it bob around and ruffle its feathers above the image of his ancestor makes him think about the bird’s ancestors. About the extinct carrier pigeons, who used their instincts to return home, messages entrusted with them along for the ride.

“I hear you,” he whispers to his grandmother, and decides he’ll vote for the casks to be taken away.

The whole Valley holds its breath, awaiting the results.

Some cities vote to keep their casks. Most of them, Tempe included, decide they need to be removed. Javier lets out his breath when he sees this, and it’s like he’s been holding that air in for far too long. There’s a relief in this decision, but also a sadness. An end to something special, the acceptance that it was never meant to last.

The casks are removed from Tempe the day before WasteFest 51. Everyone gathers at the Flour Mills in silence to watch them be taken away, the beeps of the construction equipment echoing against nearby high-rises.

Javier watches his grandmother’s eyes as the cask with her mural is lowered onto a flatbed truck. He wonders if she would be happy with the way her legacy has come to a conclusion. A pigeon lands on the side of the cask, as though perched on his grandmother’s shoulder. The bird stays with the cask as the truck pulls away, and Javier knows, finally, that this is right.

He slides on his AR glasses. The overlay shows the casks standing in the place where they’ve just been removed, digital ghosts haunting this site. The packet will be updated soon, information about the casks and the art on them sliding from current to history. The chatter scrolling along the edge of the screen shows nearly as many spectators watching this removal via AR as there were at last year’s WasteFest. WasteFest will continue—there are still so many other types of waste, after all—but now with the casks only in a few of the cities, it will be different. Transformed into something new, like upcycled art.

The “Return to Sender” cask gets loaded last. The waste cannot truly be sent back to where it came from; the former generating stations and uranium mines are undergoing restoration, the same as so many other exploited lands. But the sentiment rings true; DOE is honoring the agreement and taking it back. The casks will be encased within a new protective layer before they arrive at the next site, covering up Yuli’s art forever.

The trucks start a slow parade across town, a funeral procession. Yuli threads her fingers through his while they move along with the crowd, Javier as rigid as concrete, Yuli as fluid as paint. They watch the casks be loaded onto a train to be taken to their next resting place. Not their final resting place; they’re headed to another interim site, not to a permanent repository. Yet.

“I’m going with them, you know,” he tells Yuli. He’s been holding this information close to his heart for months now, his transfer to the new storage site near Willcox. So he can be near his family, and so he can watch over the casks, make sure they’re not neglected and left to fall apart in the desert. He’s also part of the new team tasked with negotiating the permanent repository site, a mission he’ll make sure gets done if it takes him the rest of his life.

Yuli nods, not that she already knew he was leaving, but that she accepts.

He keeps his eyes on the train as he speaks, unable to look at her. “This means we’re not going to get married.”

She touches his chin, forcing him to look at her. “We never really were,” she whispers, and plants a quick, tender kiss on his lips.

Javier closes his eyes, lets out another long breath, more than he knew he had in him. Her words should sting, but they don’t. It’s a sadness, but also a relief. The end of something special that deep down he always knew wasn’t going to last.