--- title: "Future Tense" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/55/futures" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/55/futures" issue: 55 section: "futures" description: "Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today" authors: ["Wren Castellano","David Kern","Yuki Tanabe"] published: 2026-10-26 updated: 2026-10-22 articles: 15 --- # The Docket > The Docket is a weekly publication about the decisions climate change is already putting in front of Americans: whether to buy the generator, whether the flood insurance is enough, whether to stay in the city you love. It follows the people making those choices now. It treats climate anxiety as a reasonable response to real conditions. It won't tell you what to do, but it shows the tradeoffs clearly. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 55 — Future Tense Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today ### Weekly Serial Chapter - [Marked Complete]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-22 · Format: The Underline Series — Weekly Chapter October 2071, Blue Mountains, Washington. A forest planted two decades ago for the hotter climate the models promised has died standing, red as an old barn, while the skinny local trees across the road are fine. Back at the regional seed station in Pullman, Noor Sadeghi finds a single letter in the dead lot's record: a mark left by a curator nobody ever called, given a meaning she made up on a deadline twelve years ago. At one in the morning, a truck from Lapwai pulls up to the gate. ### First Standalone Story - [The Business Line]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-10-22 · Format: First Standalone Story In the summer of 2042, Nora Doyle takes over her mother's catering business and calls the funeral homes to tell them Doyle does weekday office lunches now and won't be doing funerals. Her mother, Marian, built the business on funerals, and she still comes in at six for her coffee. The man who drives the van tells the story. He figures Nora decided last August, when five days of dangerous heat left the bodies waiting and the services all landed in one week. The funeral director still calls the business line. ### Second Standalone Story - [Everyone Inside]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-10-22 · Format: Second Standalone Story January 2046, McKinleyville, California. When the county loses power, Carla's side of the street runs on batteries out past the airport runway, and her floor stays warm. Ben's side goes dark. Tonight the rain hasn't let up, and groundwater is climbing toward the furnace in Ben's crawlspace. His sump pump runs on an orange extension cord strung across a flooded gutter to Carla's bedroom outlet. Every few minutes the pump kicks on and her hallway nightlight dips. Then a text arrives: the batteries her whole side shares are running low. ### Character Interview - [An Interview With Wanda Callaway, Who Would Like Somebody to Tell Her She's Rushing]() — Published 2026-10-22 The Thursday sheet at the Saguaro Social Hall in Mesa, Arizona, began life as a sign-in list, the kind every hall keeps so the treasurer has ammunition when the band disputes the headcount. By the summer of 2043 it had sprouted columns. *Name. Phone. Need a ride?* Sometime after the Fourth of July came a new one, *Indoor temp, last night*. After that came a column with no header at all, where a volunteer named Kenny Pruitt makes a small pencil check once you've answered to his satisfaction. ### Short Surreal Piece - [Breakfast on the Stairs]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-10-22 *Alameda, California, an island city in San Francisco Bay, 2041.* ### Further Reading - **A Douglas-fir seed trial planted in 1912 is still being measured** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 Thornton Munger expected answers in forty years. Some trees grew well for four decades, then a 1955 freeze killed them. - **Federal foresters finished planting 32 test plots this spring for climates still decades away** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 Sites in Washington, Oregon and California test whether seed moved toward expected future climates survives. Answers take decades. - **With the dams gone, Chinook salmon hatched in upper Klamath tributaries for the first time in a century** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 The Klamath Tribes documented the hatch in March. Their chairman says restoration isn't finished until there are fish to harvest. - **Seeds buried in bottles in 1879 will be dug up on schedule until 2100** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 William Beal's Michigan test asks how long seeds stay alive in soil. Today's keepers won't open the last bottle. - **England's Park Grass experiment has run since 1856** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 Started to test fertilizer on hay fields, its plots now show how plant communities respond to swings in weather. - **Near Oslo, a forest is growing the paper for books sealed until 2114** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 An art project rather than research: 1,000 spruce planted in 2014, one sealed manuscript added each year, printed in 2114. ### Favorite Featured Stories - [The Second Floor]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: The Kitchen New Orleans, 2034. A grandmother's house was raised after flooding, so her kitchen is on the second floor now, eighteen steps up from the garden where she grows lemongrass and mint. Her granddaughter comes down for a long weekend to learn the family dishes: a spicy beef noodle soup, fried rolls, a dark caramel sauce for braised fish. The grandmother is exact about all of it. The broth has to stay clear. The wrappers can't split. Some of the ingredients have changed, though neither of them says so. - [The Canister]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: The Underline Series — Weekly Chapter A bag of grain seeds arrives in Lapwai, Idaho, at eleven at night. It has traveled four hundred miles from a storage facility that's losing its cold, carried by a woman who wasn't sure whether to run the heater. The man receiving it has a dead walk-in cooler and the parts to fix it, but no way to know if the seeds are still alive until he sacrifices some of them to find out. Two people on opposite ends of an unauthorized trade wait for an answer that paper towels on a water heater may or may not provide. - [Minutes of the Saguaro Ranch Estates Homeowners Association Regular Monthly Meeting, October 13, 2035]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: The HOA Minutes It's 4:30 in the morning in a Phoenix suburb, October 2035, and the Saguaro Ranch Estates Homeowners Association has a quorum. The backup cooling unit is working. On the agenda: a tree that planted itself and now needs retroactive permission to exist, a noise complaint about a 3:45 a.m. cannonball contest, and shoes coming apart on the walkway. The contract secretary is writing all of it down. She has opinions about all of it. Only one version goes in the official record. - [The Nursery]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-10 · Format: Collective Story It's two in the morning outside Tucson, eighty-four degrees — a good night, the kind where you can work in long sleeves. Kira has just found that twenty percent of the amaranth crop crossed with the wrong pollen. The seed swap opens in four hours. A corporate licensing deal would cover their water-share payments for two years. And one of the five founders of their small seed collective has been carrying corn across the border to growers in Sonora for eight months without telling anyone. They have until dawn to figure out what they're bringing to the swap — which turns out to be the same question as what this place is. ## Other sections in Issue 55 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Climate Past]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()