by Mathilde Stephanie Ngo Pouhe
Highly Commended entry in the Energy Stories Competition, 2026.
Marie Sivunga knelt by the edge of the stream, but she did not reach for the water. She knew better now. The water didn’t ripple with life; it moved with heavy, metallic sluggishness, coated in an iridescent film that looked like a peacock’s feather but tasted like copper and old coins, not that she had ever tasted old coins. At least, not willingly.
In the distance, the hills of the Katanga region were being flayed. Great yellow machines bit into the earth, hungrily seeking the blue-grey veins of cobalt, the “blood” needed to pulse through the batteries of a world Marie would probably never see or experience. They called it a “clean” transition in the gleaming cities across the ocean. They spoke of “zero emissions”, “environmentally friendly”, “just transition” and “healing the planet”.
Marie felt the “healing” in the constant gnawing fire in her pelvis.
She was only twenty-six, but her body felt like a rusted machine. The doctors at the clinic, when there were doctors, had no name for the way her skin erupted in sores or why the intimate parts of her being felt as though they were being etched by acid. The soil she farmed, the water she drank, the river she swam in, and the dust she breathed had possessed her system. The minerals meant to save the atmosphere had colonised her blood.
That morning, the midwife had left Marie’s hut without meeting her eyes. The news was the same as the year before: the cradle of Marie’s was silent. The poisoning of the land had become the poisoning of her legacy.
“Est-ce le prix à payer ? » Marie whispered to the scarred landscape. “Is this the price?”
She thought of what she watched continuously on her old TV: sleek, silent cars driving through London or Paris, powered by the very stones that had stolen her ability to ever carry a child. She imagined a woman on the other side of the world, feeling proud as she plugged her vehicle into a socket, thinking she was saving the trees, the air, and preserving her children’s future.
Marie pressed her palms against the lower abdomen, where the dull ache pulsed in time with the distant thud of the mining drills.
“You save the world’s lungs,” Marie thought, a bitter tear tracing a path through the dust on her cheek, “but you have poisoned my womb. You want a future without carbon, but you are willing to have a future without my children? Is the ‘clean’ air of the north worth the silent cradles of the south”?
The sun set, turning the dust in the air a brilliant, toxic orange. It was stoop up, beautiful, in the way a fever is beautiful before it breaks a person. Marie was a casualty of a war fought in the name a “green” and “just” revolution that had forgotten that the earth and the woman are made of the same soil.
Energy Stories
Energy Stories is a funded pilot study in association with the University of Strathclyde, the University of Stirling and the University of Glasgow for the Scottish Research Alliance for Energy, Homes and Livelihoods (SRAEHL).