Oil had intelligence, it had purpose…and it also had its agents. 

—Fritz Leiber, “The Black Gondolier” 

It was a howl in which pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of Nature all blended into one hideous shriek. For a full minute it lasted, a thousand sirens in one, paralysing all the great multitude with its fierce insistence. 

—Arthur Conan Doyle, “When the World Screamed” 

Fishing on dry land? What kind of fish story is this? Yet it happens all the time wherever oil wells are drilled. 

—Progress Parade 

the derricks were a place of heaven. 

orchid watched the pumpjacks pump in the smog. sweet lolly strands of bits stuck to the back of her hands. a pumping school line of derricks upright like gross children waiting to enter the classroom. there they were: on the edge of town eating their liquorice. there they were: looking feminine too—those poor exhausted girls of oil. the air was sugar. the dirt was sugar. the atmosphere tasted spicy. and the pumpjacks pumped. they pumped and a third-person gender clung to the pumps like honey. the vista was very domestic orchid thought. the vista was sick and skittish. orchid always saw the girls before she heard their toneless music. 

it was astonishing then to hear the oil screech, although orchid could not find the right verb to describe the clamant sounds yowling from the wells. maybe it was a hateful howl. maybe it was a vociferous scream toward the bodies above the ground. the oil was loudmouth and vulgar. the oil quaked with ruthless irradiated irritation, with sticky slander that squeezed the horse head hum of the pumps as they drummed like the scorn of a hateful daughter. if orchid could hear the oil’s slurs hurled toward the town, they drowned the drone of her angry tinnitus. the townspeople slurred the oil back. fish shuckers. gasholes. the oil’s vituperation clung to her skin like floss. 

are you going to the protest? jan had asked on the phone that morning. 

not sure orchid had replied ambivalently. as always, pathetic in her indecision. but if her hesitation stung, it was always because jan insisted on bringing her camera to document every protest. orchid had an aversion to such plastic images; the feeling of being framestuck. she was adverse to rigid observation. and thus: she rehearsed her anticipated objection. 

you have a duty to object and protect jan had charitably said at the time. you have an obligation to raise the difficult questions. 

as do others orchid reminded her. not every body demands an announcement. the surveillance of their dispute fell silent between them. their gazes were gendered public. every one had to privatise their minds these days thought orchid. every one has a right to their secrets. anyway she had to be more careful. cold weathers may be watching. 

still jan insisted that orchid join the protest. and if she were there, then she was. if there were trouble, it would be two miles straight down. many townies had already gathered near the elephantine fence that bordered the sugarloaf of derricks by the time orchid arrived. among them, college students crusty with excited dissent although she could not recognise any familiar faces. the mess of emboldened mouldflesh cautiously huddled together to avoid the reverse twist of the barbed wire. that wire: spiky with a masculine memory. that wire: rusty burrs in the property of airs. and in the crowd, there: a spun of cameras flittered. there: activated carbon of heads and hands. there: all of them, each one a filter. with jan and orchid, there: a wash of sugar in the latter’s hesitations. 

even the air had air at the perimeter. the dirt had dirt. the smog had its smog. the harmonised shouts of protestors had lured in a mass of dissenters, who clustered gendered north of the river that ran some distance from the bitter perimeter. despite the stretch of their separation, the two encampments appeared to face each other between the threshold of the slow river. from her middle position between the two, orchid surveyed both lobbies, who clutched their placards ferociously. colourful slogans scrawled upon the signs like artificial sweeteners. together their clamorous chants barely deformed the oil’s noisy castigations and orchid struggled to hear the protestors. 

equal rights for oil. 

responsible drilling is the solution. 

if it screams it lives. 

if oil weren’t oily why is it not oil? 

love me. don’t use me. 

save the oil. 

support humane methods of extraction. 

we love local oil drillers. 

hate oil? go naked. 

if it thinks it is human. 

speech is not proof of life.

if she were handed a placard from either group, orchid did not bother to read it. instead she listened to the long tenor, rising from the wells, that scandalised the townies with slander. sickness and spice. slights and smites. all things nice. what was the oil yelling? orchid was unsure. perhaps something about its hatred. 

orchid was unsure, unlike the fisherman who appeared on the other side of the fence. if he stood at the perimeter, then the perimeter stood on him. hands on the wire between the burrs like a stern librarian. reddish bibs shining with reddish oil like a charming library. callous hands snapped dainty with dirty fingers. a familiar with a public gender lubricated from its wearing. if orchid pushed through the crowd to reach him, the crowd also pushed through her. like the fisherman, she clasped the wires between their barbs to resist the mass of bodies swaying in pace with their muffled chants. 

what is the oil saying? she yelled at him. the din of bodies vibrated through her derelict voice. the fisherman stared at the derricks for a momentary hour. then he stared at her for an hourly minute. fish things he eventually announced with a quick snap of his voice. orchid squinted through the noise to hear him. 

he paused again for a civic while as his lips listened and fingers twilighted his ears facing the school girls. time chaos sprees. clinker char rebels. yarrow bomb-burst process. 

none of it makes any sense he admitted. but he was not a linguist nor had he any interest in becoming one. all animals make some kind of sound at the moment of their dying. he just knew that it hated the publicity of every one. and anyway if the oil were the memory of phytoplankton and plant drifters, zooplankton and animal adventurers, it doesn’t mean it has sentience. 

they both quietened as another ricochet of intonation twirled from the wells into the sugar. a mesmerising solitary sound like extinction. 

it vibrates like red drum the fisherman disclosed to orchid’s body. like a bladder. 

and you fish it out? she bellowed. 

if he responded, his words had leaked onto the ground, for orchid was suddenly vaulted into a democratic republic. the crowdlung lurched urgently against the wire fence as a tenebrous body shaped like a human crawled along their heads. that body jumped towards the barrier and scrambled up each wire, its naked legs catching on the barbs. if the body felt pain, that pain did not crumble its face. that body climbed frenetically and upon reaching its goal, flung itself over the razor topper and landed on the hard dirt like meat. then it ran. there: that meaty body ran towards the wells. there: its organs sprinted. there: its head galloped like open tidings. its blood weaved through the sugar cane of derricks. if there were guards, they had dissolved into their waters. if there were drillers, they, too, had evaporated into their gas. the fisherman stared at the running body with silent indifference. orchid watched with wonder. the protesters observed with outrage. the girls of oil scanned with angry surprise. that meaty body streaked across the oil field before hurling itself head first into the first narrow well it encountered. 

if it were possible, then pretty speculation had widened that well. and if it did, then that body of organs fell gracefully into the well’s opening. orchid, however, could not see the body fall from her position but she could hear the slander of the oil quieten momentarily when the human meat met its slickness. for several days of a minute, a stillness seeped throughout the row of tired derricks and between both protesting encampments. the girls were swift in their kindness as the pumpjacks ceased their pumping. the mouthcrowd was unsettled and speechless. orchid’s shock was silenced. even the air of the air was awkwardly suspended. 

but not the fisherman. he excitedly drummed the substrate of the wire. 

time to go fishing he said. 

the classroom could be a waiting room for the oil of gendering bodies. if orchid were speaking, the students were reading an article she had placed upon their tables. the article was intimate. the article was atmospheres. the article was Fish Theory in a Time of Extinctions. if there were a discussion, orchid could not remember it. she had stood at the window for an hour and inhaled the slight sight of the derricks as they pumped at the furthest edge of the campus. while they appeared in their subtle slender, nonetheless she could see the stickiness of their methane. she could hear the rotten eggs of the hydrogen sulphide as they struck the hairs in her nose, her gaseous hands, and the soft sheaf covering her brown irises. she could taste the formaldehyde of the girls as they preserved a more secretive gender. the atmosphere was sweet and tangy at the touch. and still she could feel the pump of the pumps as they pumped the yowling from the wells. 

the class was facing its own extinction. the students often ended with such endings. usually she was delighted at the demise of each session when the bodies left in their scented apathy. the prospect of surveying the girls up close was sometimes exciting. for now, she was contractually obliged to wait. but as she continued to stare outside the window, she heard a body crack. orchid turned to find that one had stayed behind while the room was emptied of its senses. 

orchid’s head turned enough from the window and enough to watch the pumpjacks pump in the lazy fragment of her eye. if this young body spoke, then her voice burrowed into the noise of the oil. this body would inhale the air’s weird egginess before declaring that the assigned article was offensive. if she were angry, then her anger was a bullet to the word fish and to orchid as the worker. if she were enraged, then her rage was lodged in the subtlety of her ignorance. for her part, orchid was wedged into bewilderment. 

fish was a slur this young body exhaled. this young body was offended. she repeated: offended. the fusion of confusion still confused orchid, and her voice stumbled with astonishment. orchid never liked to announce a body, but in this instance the privacy of her response was one of public annoyance. if orchid retorted, then she hoped her speech was not coated matte with pickled radiation. but if she did so, then she so did. 

orchid inhaled her extinction. she exhaled her evolution. she let out a breathless stream of words like a deflating bladder. i can share history of fish orchid said to the young body. the politics of the fish. the blubberiness of fishy erasure. she paused in her indecision before gently offering do you want to learn more? 

no that young body would say with impenetrable conviction. no. 

afterwards in her office, orchid would reflect on this strange exchange as a stasis of the imagination. as she stared at the girls through her inoperable window, she realized it was not the young body’s refusal that had confused her but the lack of curiosity would always be surprising. 

the oil kept fishing. the fisherman kept fishing. orchid visited the perimeter each day as the protesting crowds grew smaller and the oil’s groans grew softer and softer as it welcomed each new body that threw itself into its wells. the two encampments of the consenters and dissenters were shrinking each time a runner broke from the mass and launched from the fence into the wells. sometimes the fisherman was able to reel in the lost bits, a dazed body clinging to the hook and glistening with gorgeous oil. if he yanked his line, then the line also yanked him. when the fish’s head was pulled from the hole, it always tilted in surprise as if unsure what just had happened. the fish, slick with syrupy oil, would then flop on the dirt before a pair of guards quickly distilled and rushed that drenched body away. other times, the fisherman pulled nothing from the wells. then, the private emptiness of the hook was beguiling. even the crowd would hush. even jan, with empty hands, was spongy in that silence. the quiet agency of refusal, a clandestine interiority. to ignore the line was strange treasure. 

and yet every body, it seemed, was sinking into the oil, throwing themselves into the smooth slicked opening of a well where it was whispered they would bobble on sunstar before the globsterous oil quickly absorbed them. if it were said the oil needed to consume a body, then it was argued that oil was, in fact, predator and not prey as the protestors had assumed. the sweet oil clearly had intelligence and desire, but whether it were sentient still rippled throughout the town. 

not everything that is intelligent has sentience orchid thought when jan breathlessly relayed the rumour. just look at college professors. 

after the disturbance with the young body, orchid returned to the wells at sunset. she walked down the hill of the hill to the perimeter where she listened to the slow bladdery chatter of the oil, as if the sounds were a stretch of syrup that progressively billowed sweeter as she came closer to the derricks. the drillers had now abandoned their drilling and those who remained were plugging the wells to prevent more runners from jumping in. the diatomic whispers of the oil were preventing its extraction, according to the workers. whatever the oil was saying was clearly gentle and pleasant. even the drillers were unhappy, orchid noted, because you cannot bludgeon an animal if it compliments its killer. from the fenceline, orchid watched those coveted moments—the plugging, the jumping, the hushed rushness of the workers—like a spy. but the oil’s intrigue was clearly confidential information. 

the remaining pumps were pumping irregularly now, as if straining against the pressurised difference. the vibrations of the oil were sonified by her organs. by the time orchid reached the derricks that evening, twilight already had announced its gender with a reddish dim. there: she found the crowd of protestors had shrunk to a few handfuls of bodies. at some point, the two encampments had blended into each other: their tents, utensils, billies, and bottles strewn without boundary across the merged camp. orchid found jan’s discarded camera on a rock by an extinguished campfire. 

even the protestors had become confused by their fusion, by the slow extinguishment of their respective genres. those who protested against the extraction now held signs demanding oil to slaughter while those who campaigned for extraction now held placards insisting upon the salvation of oily life. the oil was thoughtful they yelled. the oil was loving and kind. orchid was perplexed by who was who and by which side was a side, by the dissipations of original desires. all spatial markers had disappeared from the dirt and only the river proposed a defined border. even the river, however, ebbed with the cold weathers. even so, the protestors shared her anxiety. their chants now merged into one long tone, a melodious undercurrent mixing with the gentle whirr of the oil. equal rights for extraction and human oil the uniform voice chanted. it thinks to use life and go naked. 

orchid was unsure with any precision of the words that they were welling. but she soon realised that not every one was yelling. there: she saw a cluster of bodies perching ungainly upon the fence. there: bodies jammed between the wires. as she slid between the crystalised bodies of the protesters to reach the fence, she found jan had wedged herself at the edge of this group, her head squished through two strands of wire. in that uneasy position, a barb had etched a number 1 on the nape of her naked neck. jan stretched out her hands as if reaching for the oil, her body delicately seesawing between the bulging in and the dissipating out. like the bodies in this cluster, orchid’s friend was neither trying to free herself from the wire nor wiggle through it to run to a partially open well. it was almost as if she and they were stuck between a private death and public dying while the perimeter wore itself on her back. the atmosphere of this arrangement was crustacean, like a theory of air with the sweetness of animal. but when orchid tried to talk to jan, the latter made no attempt to reply. orchid’s friend would not acknowledge her astonished presence. jan was clearly stuck in that space, between the in and the out, between the into and the out of, between the private and the public, between the owner and the thing. it was an odd thing to see orchid thought, the strength of this border; but she supposed that for jan, the perimeter made life more bearable. 

oil, it seemed, made everything possible, including its kelpish squibs. the slander and slurs had shifted into compliments and cordial quips in the hourness of the late week. orchid began to notice that even her class was shrinking as more of her students joined the promise of the wells’ kindness. sometimes they would walk with her down the hill to the derricks. on occasion they would email with a note of regret. mosttimes, however, they abandoned the class altogether. in the weeks following the disturbance with the young body, orchid would enter her class with one fewer scent until that day when she was greeted in anger by a young scowl. this student was, by now, the only one left. she leaned back into her chair, arms crossed, and demanding. when orchid asked her to turn to page one of Stonefish, that day’s assigned reading, the young body sighed with disinterest and reached into her bag, pulling a used copy and chucked it onto the table. throughout the lesson, she refused to look at the book and spent the hour scribbling spirals into her notebook. orchid was now sure she would receive a negative evaluation. 

still, after each lesson, orchid would return to the wells. alone, but social in isolation. while orchid could still not understand the oil’s banter, she sensed its tone was full of big jelly wit. by now the fisherman had stopped reeling in the fallen bodies from the wells. but if he did, then no one would snare his line. he and his fingers patrolled the perimeter instead with a sternness that matched his terrestrial march. he made no attempt to arrest a runner should they climb over the fence, should they sprint for the remaining open wells. once, orchid whispered what is the oil saying when he passed her on his rounds. but to her he said nothing at all. 

by the end of that month, a quiet had fallen upon the last open well, an absence far louder than orchid’s tinnitus. for once, the silence divulged nothing with no retort from the townies. they, too, held their silence. whether they were still there, orchid had no idea. she assumed that they all had jumped into the wells. only the cluster of bodies–jan’s too–remained stuck on the fence. the guards, the drillers, the protesters, the dissenters: those bodies had disappeared. even the fisherman was gone. orchid assumed that he had also moved on. 

the oil refused its disclosure. even the pumpjacks were no longer pumping. in this quite quiet: orchid renounced her announcement. she followed the fence. she found a break, an opening where a stream of runners had clearly broken the wires. she slipped through easily and walked to the opening of a well. 

the well was shoddily plugged, and orchid easily removed its lid. as she peered in, she expected to hear the oil, its slurs or wit, but she heard absolutely nothing at all. orchid sensed that the oil did not want to share its thoughts. 

she renounced her announcement. if orchid fell, she perhaps did not so willingly. but if she jumped, she perhaps did so on purpose. what did happen: she moved closer to the rim. by force of wind or dirt,  accident of the air, or by her volition, she tumbled into the well. 

orchid fell into the thickness of the oil. it was luminous, thick, and rich. she rose to the surface, felt its tension, and read its darling body. the girliness of the oil was masculine. the masculinity of the oil was neither dainty nor soft but held the porosity of a bulging polyps. she churned with the mysticism of the apocalypse for which gender had no name. she was aware of her organs as she grew foggy with fumes. belched ghosts of aged bodies. she became both petrified and plastic. she ate the blackness and drank the sugar. she welcomed the oil into her mouth. it seemed delighted by her presence. the moment was private. the moment was hers. it belonged to her. she had no need to share it. she held her private gender and refused to announce it. thank god she thought as she began to sink, holding onto her secrets. thank god she choked aloud through the oil. she felt through it all. feeling the treasure. feeling the am in her private I am.