A SHORT STORY
They said the seas were rising, but we didn’t believe them. Or we kind of did, but we had other things to do. Like pick up sourdough bread for dinner. And play pickleball with Amy T. from across the street. And sell photos of our feet online to pay for the bread and pickleball court membership. We were very busy.
They said we should move out of the floodplain, but our whole city sat on a floodplain, less than an hour from the watery gulp of the Gulf. Marshlands, wetlands, and a whole bayou watershed had been studded with skyscrapers, blinkered with neon, lassoed by thickly coiling highways. So really they were saying we should move out of the city. But moving is very expensive these days. Even if we had a place to go, how would we get the money? We only had six feet and thirty toes between us.
They said that the flooding, when it happened, would be partly our fault. This had to do with our use of plastic bags and our contribution to the atmospheric accumulation of hydrofluorocarbons. We weren’t totally sure what this latter term meant. Also, we weren’t sure we cared. People were always saying our choices contributed to the downfall of civilization.
Or at least, that’s what Mother said before she left.
We decided not to care.
The city had flooded before and the water always receded. Sure, rain sometimes poured from the sky, and oil-sheened lagoons accumulated around intersections, and the bayou’s slow meander turned into a too-fast faucet—gushing silt-brown through the city, splashing at bridges and swallowing the loamy banks of parks—but eventually, the sun flashed. Sidewalks steamed and palm trees dripped dry. The bayou calmed to a smooth slither. A flood came and went: like a bad
