The jar had been on the kitchen table for three years, full of pellets, small, white, round like plastic lentils, every morning I'd add one or two or five depending on how many I found on the shore, the shore always had them, had them the way a beach has sand, nobody saw them but me. I picked them up with my fingers. Not with gloves, not with a scoop, with my fingers, because with your fingers you feel the texture, the texture of plastic, smooth, light, after a while your fingers recognize a pellet before your eyes do, your fingers find it in the sand the way they find a coin in your pocket, without looking. Judge sat on the porch watching me pick them up. Judge didn't understand what I was picking up, didn't care, he was a dog, a mutt with one ear up and one folded down, fur the color of mud, I'd named him Judge because the first time I saw him he looked at me like he was passing judgment, kept looking at me that way every day, the verdict always the same.

I was born in Seadrift. Seadrift had the bay, the bay had the shrimp, the shrimp were the work. My father fished, I fished, the bay was the thing Seadrift talked about, at the bar, at the market, at church. Then the plant came. It didn't come all at once, it came the way big things come, one piece at a time, one permit at a time, one warehouse at a time, by the time you finished counting the warehouses there were four hundred of them, the plant covered forty-eight hundred acres, produced polyethylene, polyester, glycol, things with names I couldn't pronounce that ended up in everything, in cosmetics, in detergents, in paints, in things people bought without knowing they came from there, from Seadrift, from the bay where my father fished. The plant gave work. Two thousand people. Two thousand paychecks. Nobody said anything because nobody says anything when the paycheck comes.

The pellets had started before I noticed them. They were in the discharge canal, the canal carried them into the bay, from the bay they went to the shore, from the shore I picked them up with my fingers, put them in the jar. Thirty-seven days of documented discharge between July 2020 and July 2021, the Texas complaint said, thirty-seven days, I kept thinking about the undocumented days, the days nobody had counted, the pellets that came out of the canal without any document recording them, those pellets were in the bay, in the sand, in the gills, in the stomachs of whoever ate the fish, scientists said every week an adult ingests the equivalent of a credit card in microplastic, I thought about the credit cards, thought about the pellets, nobody wanted to see the connection. Then the plant applied for a permit. Not a permit to stop. A permit to continue. A permit to discharge pellets legally, to change the word on the form from "traces" to something wider, something that contained the pellets without calling them pellets, the form was the form, the word on the form was stronger than the pellets in the bay because the word on the form was law, the pellets in the bay were just pellets.

I started the hunger strike on March 2. Not because it worked. Not because I believed anyone would change their mind. I started it because my body was the last argument I had. I'd filed the lawsuit. I'd talked to the papers. I'd picked up pellets for three years, put them in the jar, the jar sat on the table, nobody looked at it, so I stopped eating. The white sneakers were at the foot of the bed, the same sneakers I wore to the beach, to the market, to court, I never knew why they were always white, always the same, never asked myself. The can of Dr Pepper was on the nightstand, empty, the last one before the strike, I hadn't thrown it out, it just sat there. (I don't throw out things that run out. I keep them where they ran out.) Judge on the porch watched me with his verdict that never changed, the next morning I'd get up, my knees would make that sound knees make when you haven't eaten for six days, I'd go down to the shore, feel through the sand with my fingers, my fingers would find them. The jar was on the table. I felt lighter than the jar.